Where to buy in Ontario

[Evo Plurion]

Anyone know of any retailers in the Greater Toronto Area who carry Gateway to Destiny?

 

[Ben W Bell]

I believe the Hairy Tarantula on Yonge Street is likely to be your best bet. I cannot recall the address but a quick web search can turn it up. There is another RPG shop in Toronto itself just down the road but I cannot remember the name or address of it as it is also a convenience store.

The Hairy Tarantula would be your best bet though.

 

[Evo Plurion]

Thanks for the suggestion. I've tried Hairy Tarantula, 401 Convenience (the one to which you're referring), Silver Snail, Sci-Fi World, and Planet X - all supplied by QLI's Canadian distributor, Lion Rampant. Not only does none of them carry Gateway to Destiny, I found only one copy of the T20 corebook!

As I was just lamenting in an email to Hunter Gordon, the gretaer Toronto Area needs more Traveller than this!

 

[Ben W Bell]

401 Convenience, thank you I have been trying to remember that for ages now to tell Kafka47 about.

Sorry you can't find it, can none of them order it in for you?

 

[Evo Plurion]

Yeah they can order it. I'll have one of them do that. I'm just discouraged by the dearth of new Traveller material on Canadian nerd-store shelves. Do any Torontonians remember Mr. Gameway's Ark on Yonge just south of Bloor? That was nerd Mecca! An entire floor devoted to games (including RPGs), an entire floor devoted to models, and another floor, I think, but I forget what was on it. I used to get a lot of my LBBs there.

 

[hunter]

Well it's up to you the fans to create the demand for the books to a certain degree. Let your local stores know that the books are available from their local distributors and that YOU WANT THEM! If the stores have folks coming in and asking if they have the newest GT or T20 releases, they might get the idea.

Right now the Traveller's Handbook, Personal Weapons of Charted Space, Gateway to Destiny, the T20 Referee's Screen, and the Classic Traveller Reprint Books 1-3 are all in-stock and available. The EPIC Adventures 1 book should be hitting the printer next week and in-stock around the end of August.

Hunter

 

[Evo Plurion]

Actually most of the stores stock plenty of GT. It's T20 that I'm interested in at the moment. The last time I played Traveller was MT, so I've skipped over T4 and GT entirely.

 

[Antares Administration]

If you're willing to make the effort, Fandom II in Ottawa carries the full range of T20 and reprints. There's a big Traveller following up here, so you have to be quick. Gateway to Destiny is sold out right now (10 copies disappeared in a week), but I think they still have a couple of the rulebooks on the shelf.

Paul Nemeth
AA

 

[Malenfant]

Hunter - if I might say this, it's usually not quite that easy. Sometimes the shops can't get the T20 books because they aren't supplied by the right distributor (this is the case with my FLGS). It's usually not worth their while to open up a new account with a distributor just to get a few copies of a book from one line that their main distributor doesn't have.

It's actually very difficult for fans to spontaneously generate a large enough demand for a book for a store to think it's worth ordering. Sometimes I think publishers believe that fans can just rally 10-20 people one day to go in and ask for a book

. I have never seen that sort of thing happen - usually it's the customer and maybeone or two friends and that's it - unless it's by one of the top 3 companies, it's likely that only a handful of regular people are actually interested in a given game at a particular store anyway.

If you want to make it easier for us to buy books from stores, I'd suggest that it may be worthwhile you hunting down the distributors that serve the most stores - that way QLI products can be sold via the distributors that stores are likely to use. Though for a country as large as Canada I suspect that many distributors are local in scale (serving provinces) rather than national. And that may of course not be a particularly practical option for you, in which case never mind

.

 

[hunter]

Originally posted by Malenfant:
Hunter - if I might say this, it's usually not quite that easy. Sometimes the shops can't get the T20 books because they aren't supplied by the right distributor (this is the case with my FLGS). It's usually not worth their while to open up a new account with a distributor just to get a few copies of a book from one line that their main distributor doesn't have.

Get me the name and # of their distributor and I'll do what I can to get the books into that distributor's hands.

It's actually very difficult for fans to spontaneously generate a large enough demand for a book for a store to think it's worth ordering. Sometimes I think publishers believe that fans can just rally 10-20 people one day to go in and ask for a book

. I have never seen that sort of thing happen - usually it's the customer and maybeone or two friends and that's it - unless it's by one of the top 3 companies, it's likely that only a handful of regular people are actually interested in a given game at a particular store anyway.

Heh no I don't think a spontaneous rally for Traveller will occur, but reminding your FLGS that the products are available and that you want to buy them sure helps. If you know a new product is coming out, ask them to order you a copy. This lets the distributors get their own preorders together and helps us gage print runs better.

If you want to make it easier for us to buy books from stores, I'd suggest that it may be worthwhile you hunting down the distributors that serve the most stores - that way QLI products can be sold via the distributors that stores are likely to use. Though for a country as large as Canada I suspect that many distributors are local in scale (serving provinces) rather than national. And that may of course not be a particularly practical option for you, in which case never mind

.

Lion Rampant as far as I can tell is a fairly well used distributor. They buy enough from us that is sure seems that way They don't begin to match say Alliance, but they do a pretty good bit with each new release.

I have no problem soliciting new distributors, but locating them and getting accurate contact information on distributors not here in the US is a bit more problematic. That's why I suggested seeing if your FLGS can give you the contact info for the distributor they use most and pass it along to me.

Hunter

 

[Malenfant]

Bearing in mind that I'm not in Ontario (I'm on Vancouver Island off the west coast), so this is a little offtopic... (sorry for the hijack, Evo!)

Last time I asked them, my lot (Curious Comics) were using New Century Distribution as their main distributor. They had Lion Rampant as a backup but didn't like ordering from them unless it was absolutely vital and they had enough orders to make it worthwhile because the postage costs from Ontario were quite large.

Oddly enough, I think New Century Distribution are actually American - they're based in Washington State in the US (according to this page at least), but they seem to serve British Columbia at least. Most of the actual Canadian distributors are based in the east, so postage costs to the west coast are presumably high enough to eat into store profits.

 

[kafka47]

Ack, Ontario is a Traveller deadzone since the demise of ... (fill in any gaming store) I am in Toronto and I order from the Sentry Box in Calgary to beat the PST.

But, in all seriousness, in the GTA there is nothing...Hairy Tarantula is only good for GT and even then they have a lousy track record when it comes to reordering. If you are a near a Chapters try to special order stuff but again you are dealing with the Pegsus Wholesale Network...

 

[etherflyer]

Fandom II in Ottawa has good prices, and they will ship. They are much cheaper than anywhere in Toronto ($36 for gateway, $32 for Toxic Memes).