Phantasy Conclave • Page 2 • Collecting Appraisal • The Acaeum

The Acaeum Forums • Collecting Appraisal

Phantasy Conclave
	Page 2 of 3 • 1, 2, 3

Author

copycat
Sage Collector

Posts: 2736
Joined: May 31, 2007
Last Visit: Mar 22, 2021

Posted: Tue May 11, 2010 6:59 pm

I'm only talking about the right now -- I want one, but I wouldn't throw a bid at something (because I'm effectively strapped out,) and certainly not $300 for an unknown product. I dunno, it could get there, but my guess is not unless more was actually known about it. Or, we could rely on The Acaeum Effect.

Those who can, don't. Those who should not, do.

Gnat the Beggar
Grandstanding Collector
JG Valuation Board
Acaeum Donor

Posts: 5029
Joined: Oct 11, 2004
Last Visit: Jan 16, 2017
Location: Texas

Posted: Tue May 11, 2010 7:00 pm

I would rather have the ten Angus burgers and sodas.
Only One or maybe Two at a time though.
Thanks...

"Guys, I am starting to think Tegel Manor might be haunted..."
Stated by me as a PC during a run of Tegel Manor DMed by killjoy at NTRPGCon 2010

Charter Member of the ATM

JasonZavoda
Long-Winded Collector
JG Valuation Board

Posts: 3823
Joined: Jul 12, 2007
Last Visit: Dec 17, 2021

Posted: Tue May 11, 2010 7:02 pm

Gnat the Beggar wrote:I would rather have the ten Angus burgers and sodas.
Only One or maybe Two at a time though.
Thanks...

\

You only get the soda with the Big Macs (and you only get one soda).

Mars
Grandstanding Collector

Posts: 6161
Joined: May 03, 2003
Last Visit: Apr 09, 2024
Location: Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

Posted: Tue May 11, 2010 10:35 pm

Equating tanks of gas or cost in burgers may make a higher price sound reasonable but really the list of people willing to pay $100+ for such an item is a very short list. I think I am generally one of the more top end buyers (or at least one of the more frequent buyers anyway) of small press RPGs and $100 is usually pretty close to my top end bids - maybe $112.27 if I want to outbid those people with the $100 max bids.

TheShield has some more historically significant items priced at about $130 that I haven't bought because they are $30 more than I would pay for them - chances are it could be a decade before those items ever show up again.

Your real competition though is if the author decides he has half a dozen copies he wants to sell. Then it becomes a sliding scale where the price would probably be down to about $50. A lot of the people who used to push prices way up (lofenloc, TFM, etc) are not bidding on these items anymore.

JasonZavoda
Long-Winded Collector
JG Valuation Board

Posts: 3823
Joined: Jul 12, 2007
Last Visit: Dec 17, 2021

Posted: Tue May 11, 2010 11:04 pm

Mars wrote:Equating tanks of gas or cost in burgers may make a higher price sound reasonable but really the list of people willing to pay $100+ for such an item is a very short list. I think I am generally one of the more top end buyers (or at least one of the more frequent buyers anyway) of small press RPGs and $100 is usually pretty close to my top end bids - maybe $112.27 if I want to outbid those people with the $100 max bids.

TheShield has some more historically significant items priced at about $130 that I haven't bought because they are $30 more than I would pay for them - chances are it could be a decade before those items ever show up again.

Your real competition though is if the author decides he has half a dozen copies he wants to sell. Then it becomes a sliding scale where the price would probably be down to about $50. A lot of the people who used to push prices way up (lofenloc, TFM, etc) are not bidding on these items anymore.

Mars, $50 is a ridiculous price for this set. If people are able to snag these for $50 a pop from the publisher from his remaining stock they are getting a hell of a bargain.

While you might not have bought TheShield you at least have had the opportunity to buy it. These sets just haven't been there.

What the author needs to do is set a high minimum bid, find out top dollar for one set, then price the other sets at that and have patience. If it doesn't sell the first time, wait and he will get top dollar eventually. Other than his copies, there are three others, yours, mine and someone mentioned another. I'd have thought TFM had a copy since it is up on Tome, which might make 4.

As for who would want one, jeez, just click on the phantasy conclave thread from last winter when the author posted. There are more than 12, more than 24 collectors world wide, I do not doubt, who would want copies and pay much more than the tank of gas price you're quoting.

But whether the authors copies sell dirt cheap or not they are going to get swallowed by collectors and the price is going to shoot up.

This is different from castle zagyg but still the same kind of thing. If the author is foolish enough to let these go at $50 or $100 buy as many as you can. This set is moving from obscure to legendary.

Mars
Grandstanding Collector

Posts: 6161
Joined: May 03, 2003
Last Visit: Apr 09, 2024
Location: Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

Posted: Tue May 11, 2010 11:59 pm

JasonZavoda wrote:I'd have thought TFM had a copy since it is up on Tome, which might make 4.

The copy on the Tome is my copy (I listed it) and the other one mentioned I think was Brett making a reference to your auction win so 2 in known circulation. Rare - definitely. Chances are if the author is interested in selling his copies, he would not be interested in trying to absolutely maximize his profits by spending years to sell them by a process where it starts at a price of $150 then drops down. You can look at NK's catalog and see that lots of high priced small press RPGs linger around for years. You can look at my webpage for that too

I can list probably a dozen or more similar small press items that I have found and can tell you there are very few people who would be willing to spend $100+ on this item. Of the 12 people listed in the previous thread who are interested you would probably get 6-8 sales if the price was $50 and maybe 3 if it was $100. After the initial purchase spike, expect to drop the price and sell 1 copy a year.

Heroic Worlds is a good place to start for some but far from any kind of holy grail. I put more worth in items not found in it than items listed in it. I think most people who use the book are D&D collectors who occassionally buy 3rd party D&D related modules. A small press collector quickly finds out that Heroic Worlds is a good start but is largely inadequate - with incomplete info on printings, errors on products produced, and really only scratching the surface of small press items.

You can't compare this to CZ. CZ appeals to a lot of different audiences: Castle & Crusades collectors, Gygax collectors, Greyhawk collectors, old school collectors, etc probably 1000+ people. Phantasy Conclave's audience is about 20.

Anyone who buys a copy for $100 shouldn't expect to be able to resell it at a profit.

lokiwookie
Sage Collector

Posts: 2503
Joined: Feb 07, 2006
Last Visit: Apr 15, 2024
Location: France / CitÃ© des Papes

Posted: Wed May 12, 2010 11:24 am

I think similarly. Collecting non-TSR, small press and obscure RPGs for years, I am pretty sure that a high maximum would be 150$ in an open auction, but ONLY if tfm and lofenloc bid on it. Otherwise, as Mars, me, and some others, we would never bid more than $100

Mars wrote:
TheShield has some more historically significant items priced at about $130 that I haven't bought because they are $30 more than I would pay for them - chances are it could be a decade before those items ever show up again.

As instance, Christophe (TheShield) listed a rarer RPG than Phantasy Conclave, which is Sphinx, and it gone for less than $150. It is pretty optimistic to expect more than $100 for a game that only 2-3 people would be interested in for a price over than $50-60 I guess. Only T&T or Titan Games would expect some prices like this (and they will be sit on their products for years and will never sell them).

JasonZavoda wrote:
I think that more than 15 RPG collectors would want a copy. How many tanks of gas they would be willing to pay for it I'm not sure. 6 tanks of gas is my guess for a starting figure, but some collectors and resellers could probably trade more gas for this set than just 6 tanks. I would love to see what a set goes for in an open auction with a few announcements posted around the collecting community.

In this thread, most would pay 20-25$ for it, a few ones would pay $50 and perhaps 1-2 would pay more.

I remember that $350 is the ending price of the Greg Stafford 1st print, 1st ed, CoC boxed set, in Shrink.

I guess that only CoC or TSR products could go for this kind of prices, just because of the number of bidders involved.

The last point is that everyone here know that the author have a lot of copies left and everyone here expect to get one copy from him, for a decent price (i.e. $30-50). BTW, I am not sure someone from Acaeum would bid more than that on ebay...

The easy way to know what it worth is to list it on ebay, wait and see

With a reserve price set to the price you want for it... I am perhaps totally wrong :?:

Adventures in Austerion : a fantasy RPG, with boardgame mechanisms and modular battlemap. By Guillaume Tavernier and GÃ©raud G.

Mars
Grandstanding Collector

Posts: 6161
Joined: May 03, 2003
Last Visit: Apr 09, 2024
Location: Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

Posted: Wed May 12, 2010 12:55 pm

lokiwookie wrote:As instance, Christophe (TheShield) listed a rarer RPG than Phantasy Conclave, which is Sphinx, and it gone for less than $150.

Sphinx actually sold at $193 but I think (or at least hope) it holds more substance than Phantasy Conclave:

http://offer.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll? ... 0617810751

All it takes is 2 bidders with a couple of crazy bids - in this case I was one of them. Most of the regular small press collectors you will find in the 45-55 Euro range. In comparison, here is another ultra rare small press RPG (its the only copy I have ever seen ... so far) that sold for significantly less:

** expired/removed eBay auction **

The Egypt theme of Sphinx enticed me into a higher than normal bid (probably in my top 5 of highest priced items won). Maybe Phantasy Conclave would do the same for someone else.

faro
Long-Winded Collector

Posts: 3155
Joined: Nov 21, 2005
Last Visit: Feb 05, 2016
Location: UK

Posted: Wed May 12, 2010 2:15 pm

lokiwookie wrote:I remember that $350 is the ending price of the Greg Stafford 1st print, 1st ed, CoC boxed set, in Shrink.

$810 per http://www.yog-sothoth.com/modules.php? ... pic&t=6538 . Probably would've gone higher if we hadn't pushed so hard at the start.

lokiwookie wrote:It is pretty optimistic to expect more than $100 for a game that only 2-3 people would be interested in for a price over than $50-60 I guess.

If it's known the author still has a reasonable stash, yes, that sounds fair enough to me unless there are exceptional circumstances/content.

"7.3 ORGANIZING THE PARTY: Always have a keg, even if it's BYOB...
7.4 TAKING THE GAME SERIOUSLY: Don't"

stratochamp
Verbose Collector

Posts: 1903
Joined: Feb 12, 2005
Last Visit: Apr 11, 2024

Posted: Wed May 12, 2010 2:41 pm

$810 per http://www.yog-sothoth.com/modules.php? ... topic&t=65 38 . Probably would've gone higher if we hadn't pushed so hard at the start.
might have gone a lot higher if i had bid. i decided at the last second not to. not long before that i had won the "first" copy of runequest, so i thought it would be cool to have them both, but i made my hoarding saving throw...

stratochamp
Verbose Collector

Posts: 1903
Joined: Feb 12, 2005
Last Visit: Apr 11, 2024

Posted: Wed May 12, 2010 3:09 pm

as regards heroic worlds, mars wrote that it is far from a holy grail. even though lawrence schick was not very gracious to me, i will take a moment to defend his book. his goal what to list every role-playing item that had received major distribution. now we all know he missed things, but he didn't miss many with his criteria in mind. On the scale of 1) homebrew with 6 copies made in the basement 2) 12 copies run off on a photocopier in leeds in 1982 with 6 of them making it to the local game store 3) 200 copies made in austin, texas in 1986 with 50 copies making it around to one game store chain 4) same as three, but the guy made it to origins or gencon and sold 20 copies there 5) made 500 copies and 50 of them got sold via armory or gamescience or games workshop, i think he hit 99.8% of the fives and 95% of the fours. below that the question is where exactly is the line between product that should be included in an encyclopedic reference book and that which should not be? i think we all draw it in a slightly different place, but i think schick used sound judgement.

faro
Long-Winded Collector

Posts: 3155
Joined: Nov 21, 2005
Last Visit: Feb 05, 2016
Location: UK

Posted: Wed May 12, 2010 4:26 pm

(OT)

stratochamp wrote:i think we all draw it in a slightly different place, but i think schick used sound judgement.

Sound judgment and back-issues of the prozines?

Agreed; but that it would probably be more difficult to produce such an "encyclopedic reference book" nowadays as the boundaries of privileged (and even general) knowledge have been pushed back quite some way since then. Also, that online references do somewhat undermine even the possibility of a further dead tree publication... More's the pity IMHO as Heroic Worlds is still a good read (inspirational, even), regardless of the inevitable glitches.

"7.3 ORGANIZING THE PARTY: Always have a keg, even if it's BYOB...
7.4 TAKING THE GAME SERIOUSLY: Don't"

Mars
Grandstanding Collector

Posts: 6161
Joined: May 03, 2003
Last Visit: Apr 09, 2024
Location: Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

Posted: Wed May 12, 2010 4:31 pm

Fair enough. Yes, probably most that made it into some kind of distribution are listed. Not sure about the percentage estimate for items that made it to GenCon or Origins (the percentage might be a bit lower there). I can think of a few such as Kalifax that had the Gencon appearance but didn't make it into the book.

Schick's line is fine for what it is but categories 1)-3) which are basically not covered make up a large number of items that the small press collector would find relevant. For a small press collector such as myself, HW lists probably less than 50% of the items I am interested in. Also, most people collect items past the cut off year of the book so its tough to use to get complete info. Don't get me wrong, it has a lot of good stuff it in but for me, it was more a launching pad.

stratochamp
Verbose Collector

Posts: 1903
Joined: Feb 12, 2005
Last Visit: Apr 11, 2024

Posted: Wed May 12, 2010 4:54 pm

to extend the discussion further, the question is where should the line be drawn? should anything that looks even semi-professionally produced, even if there are only a handful of copies, make it in to our theoretical electronic database? i have something called one step beyond made by a guy calling himself aggressor games made back in 1987. i have copy 17 out of 50. the game store i visited in massachusetts had bought two from the guy to sell on their shelves. should this be listed as a legitimate product that should be sought after like we do with the Heroic Worlds listings? that having been said, i nonetheless bid mars up to $193 (and wish i had just put in 300) on sphinx because it looked really cool. it looks professionally produced and yet i have no idea how many other copies were ever made.

stratochamp
Verbose Collector

Posts: 1903
Joined: Feb 12, 2005
Last Visit: Apr 11, 2024

Posted: Wed May 12, 2010 5:08 pm

needless to say i was just coming up with those categories off the top of my head. i'm sure they could be refined further to foster superior categorization. in many cases the category four apperance at a convention is what lead to an item having been distributed after they would be noticed by armory, chessex etc. i bought my copy of kalifax at gencon (& bracton bought one too) but i never saw it listed anyplace else (and i was working for a distributor at that time & i would order EVERYTHING new that would come out). it is of course photocopied white pages with a couple of cardstock sheets. should it be included? i can certainly see why spider mother should be included (four color cover & professionally produced). i guess what i'm trying to ask is where should the line be between small press and homebrew?

Mars
Grandstanding Collector

Posts: 6161
Joined: May 03, 2003
Last Visit: Apr 09, 2024
Location: Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

Posted: Wed May 12, 2010 6:15 pm

stratochamp wrote: i have something called one step beyond made by a guy calling himself aggressor games made back in 1987. i have copy 17 out of 50. the game store i visited in massachusetts had bought two from the guy to sell on their shelves. should this be listed as a legitimate product that should be sought after like we do with the Heroic Worlds listings?

Maybe it shouldn't be listed in Heroic Worlds if their goal was list things on the distribution chains. But I think it should be included in a list of all RPG products.

stratochamp wrote: i guess what i'm trying to ask is where should the line be between small press and homebrew?

The line I usually draw is what was the intent and how was it put together. Most of us have homebrew but have never thought to really edit it or put it together as a complete product and attempt to sell it. For some cases this does mean put together at home by whatever means affordable or possible.

Homebrew to me is just a pile of sheets that someone wrote their notes / adventure on - generally a jumble of everything. I would probably consider it an item if he photocopied them, stapled them together, and put a price on the cover (even if it was just to sell to a buddy). I wouldn't put much value on it - would need to at least type it up for a basic amount of value. But if it was composed to be a potentially viable product, then list it.

beasterbrook
Sage Collector
Acaeum Donor

Posts: 2472
Joined: Nov 06, 2002
Last Visit: Dec 31, 2023
Location: Queensland, Australia

Posted: Wed May 12, 2010 6:44 pm

If it was sold then its counted;)

Brette:)

Being healthy is merely the slowest possible rate at which one can die.

Posted: Wed May 12, 2010 6:54 pm

Another problem with Heroic worlds is that it listed only RPG written in English. For example, there is a several French RPGs which are not listed in HW and which were produced professionnally. Some have been highly popular (and even translated in English, like In nomine). The same in other language (for example Miekka Ja Maggia, Ruf der Warlock, Midgard, Magira, and so on)
Even if most collectors are English-speakers, it is a huge gap in a RPG listing.

faro wrote:$810 per http://www.yog-sothoth.com/modules.php? ... topic&t=65 38 . Probably would've gone higher if we hadn't pushed so hard at the start.

Thanks for the link. I had 350 in mind, don't know why

perhaps I remember 500$ so 350â‚¬ (which became 350$). As for Sphinx (I remembered 150, but it was â‚¬, not $). Perhaps it was another auction he ran that went for that.
But I am not sure it would have gone for more. Just a guess.

Do you remember who won it?

Adventures in Austerion : a fantasy RPG, with boardgame mechanisms and modular battlemap. By Guillaume Tavernier and GÃ©raud G.

The Acaeum Forums • Collecting Appraisal

Page 2 of 3 • 1, 2, 3