Badmike wrote:Zocchi (anyone remember him?) had a gigantic warehouse full of JG stock that he doled out during the late 80's/early 90's at ridiculous prices.

Lou Zocchi founded the first rpg distribution business, as well as Gamescience.  He's still around---Tadashi and I visited with him several times at GenCon this year

I have spoken extensively with Bob Bledsaw about the last days of Judges Guild, and it is an interesting and very sad story, a fair bit of which I do not feel at liberty to divulge second-hand. Bob should be at either Gen Con and/or Origins this year, though, so you could certainly get the story first hand from him.

I can guarantee you, the shrinkwrapped Judges Guild materials bought and sold in the last couple of years were not directly from Bob, who is all that is left from the original Judges Guild (and is essentially the only "employee" of Judges Guild currently, though Necromancer Games is publishing new editions of JG products).

According to Bob, when JG finally went under, it was fairly sudden and ended up being a very chaotic time. A lot of smaller and medium-sized distributors were going down at the same time or shortly thereafter. It was the period of the early '80s, around the same time TSR had its first real setbacks, and it reverberated throughout the entire industry. There were TONS of JG products out there in the chain that were simply locked away in storage units when distributors went under - and JG never got paid for any of it. JG never went through bankruptcy, so there was never an accounting with even the surviving distributors who owed JG money.

There was at least one major storage unit that JG had, as well, which Bob apparently lost track of over the years, as well as many of distributor storage areas that disappeared into the mists of time, and then, as now, when company dies, generally the product line dies with it (if it wasn't of course the other way around). With the amount of JG product that a distributor would have had at the time (some JG print runs were in the hundreds of thousands) there would have been whole storage units filled with nothing but JG goods. These are, I figure, what were discovered over the years, opened by owners (new or old), and sold off for non-payment of storage fees. Remember, these were before the days of the local storage "village" where storage was organized. A lot of these boxes of JG stuff would have sat in huge old warehouses and vast storage barns for a decade or more before being looked into and sold...

From what I have been able to gather second-hand, there have been at least two to four major JG "troves" discovered over the years. The one in California (which might have been actually Canada and sold through California, I'm not sure), one on the east coast in or near Pennsylvania, maybe another in Texas, and another in the Midwest... the stuff found in that last one apparently re-packaged about six to ten years ago and sold through a secondary company, and actually solicited by distributors in "value packs"! That *might* have been a Zocchi stash, or maybe even the original JG "last, lost storage" stash, I'm not sure. I know Lou had a very extensive stash for many years, and Bob confirmed once that he was perhaps the very last distributor to buy JG stuff, by the truckload, when it was just Bob left alone in the old converted school building, before the foreclosure.

Ironically, that school building that was JG HQ is today a church!

So there are several JG product sources out there, of various origins, none of which was directly through Bob in any great numbers since late '84 or thereabouts, though he apparently had a small private stash for a while from which he sold piecemeal until the early '90s.

Oh, and BTW, Pegasus #12 was indeed the last ever published, and may have been the last thing ever published by JG. #13 (JG 1220) was done and ready to go, but then everything fell apart... and as speculated elsewhere, Lurid Lairs (JG1000), Inns and Taverns (JG1070), and The Book of Amulets and Talismans (JG1230) were never published, nor was Supra Sentinels, JG's announced super-hero role-playing game.

jamesmishler wrote:That *might* have been a Zocchi stash, or maybe even the original JG "last, lost storage" stash, I'm not sure. I know Lou had a very extensive stash for many years, and Bob confirmed once that he was perhaps the very last distributor to buy JG stuff, by the truckload, when it was just Bob left alone in the old converted school building, before the foreclosure.
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I can confirm the Zocchi stash...this is where I bought all my JG items from in the mid 90's, whoever purchased the stash from Zocchi.  I want to say the location of the seller was somewhere in Mississippi or Alabama, I know it was in the deep south, but he apparantly bought all Zocchi's JG stock when Zocchi sold out (and these were actual JG products, not the cheap ass Zocchi reprints he sold at one time).  I bought a bunch of original stuff from him online at the time, for a very reasonable price (because he had bought so much from Zocchi), and at the time I know he had a very good crop of stuff except for perhaps the 4-5 most valuable JG items.  So it did exist, I don't know what the disposition of the stash was after that.  
  BTW, great information, thanks!

Mike B.

brvheart wrote:#2 culprit here. I would not call it an enormous amount. When we relaunched in 1999 Bob had quite a few boxes of old product in his garage. No, none of these were reprints. I have about all that is left of it. Most of it went to RPG Realms in 2000-2001. Bob managed to find a supplier that had a lot of old product (Ousmay on Ebay he is still selling a lot of it). The only reprint was done in 1999 of CSIO. I scanned and edited it myself. They are indistinguishable because it was original product. I am still the official repository of the Judges Guild library, my only involvement in the guild at present. If you have any other questions, feel free to email me or ask.

Greg,

My understanding from Bob was that *all* the material he sold through the web site in 1999, and the material he sold to RPG Realms, was originally bought from Ousmay. Did Bob actually still have some of his own product remaining from his personal stash at that time? I was under the impression all that was sold by the '90s... From what Bob told me, the only things he had remaining otherwise were his personal office copies, all of which also went to RPG Realms for reference (and he never got them back after the deal fell through).

Hmmm... Bob didn't mention that some of the stuff he had sold was his own originally, he'd only mentioned the stuff from Ousmay. Wonder how much Bob actually had left, then... do you know what the mix of it was?

As to the web site, I'm not sure. Jean posted the other night that she was going to upgrade the software or some such tech thing, I think it was on Sunday, and then the forums went down with a note saying they were down for upgrade, and then the whole site went offline. My understanding is that it should still be running, os maybe it is simply a technical problem. The site registry is still in Bob's name, at least...

Update 6/2 12:51 AM: Looks like the web site is back up, but the forums are still gone...

MShipley88 wrote:Hello:

 I am a first-timer here. (Interesting to see all of the names I recognize from Ebay...)

 My main interest is collecting copies of the old stuff. Dates and original editions concern me less than just getting ahold of one each of the material.

 Is there a seller and a marketplace outside of Ebay? Do some of you trade and sell outside of Ebay?

I would imagine that there is a lot of trading and buying that goes on outside of eBay, and if you are looking for something specific you could place an ad' in the classified section.

If you're looking for JG stuff, then the big dealers are all on eBay, although Killjoy32 is an active member here.

If its the older or rarer JG items you're looking for (CSIO, First Fantasy, Tegel Manor, Dark Tower, Inferno, Tarantis) they all crop up on eBay but if you place a classified ad' you may find a collector that is willing to let a copy go. Things will be great when we have a price guide up for the JG stuff.

If you're new to this, the best thing you can do is hang around the board, take part, ask questions and get to know everyone. You'll get a feel for the collector community, the dealers and big players soon enough.

It just takes Stormber to tell us he's got more stuff to sell for all the bigwigs to crawl out of the woodwork.

I have bought a lot of stuff on Ebay lately (as some of you know, because you sold it to me).  I am running out of JG things to buy from the available Ebay stock.

    I have really been interested in some of the JG history I have read on this discussion forum.

    I live on the west coast, and the large conventions are usually too far and too expensive to attend.  That is especially true of the Northwest.  I met Gary Gygax at GenCon a few years ago...but I was working a booth and did not have a lot of time for conversations with other industry people.

    I am mostly collecting JG because they were the innovative company in the early days of AD&D.  I was too young and too penniless to buy most of the JG stuff back then.   Now I want to own and read some of the old stuff.

    Anyway, hello to everyone here.  I look forward to reading more.  Any tips on meeting people and finding JG items would be appreciated.

MShipley88            

i've just come back from a few days in wales with the kids - had a real nice time.

i have er well lots of JG things i guess more than one should prb have. if you are interested in anything specific, lemme know and i will tell you what i have and how much you can have it for....but i live in the UK, so , so long as the item(s) aint real heavy, the shipping aint too bad....

hello btw

Al

mbassoc2003 wrote:

killjoy32 wrote:i've just come back from a few days in wales with the kids - had a real nice time.

Port Merion?

actually not far from there. mum n dad have a caravan about 6-7 miles past caenarfon. its a lovely remote place and was pretty cool....weather was fantastic so made for a real nice lil break for a few days

Al