Last week, Wizards of the Coast and OneBookShelf launched D&D Classics. The site opens the archive of old editions of Dungeons and Dragons to let gamers buy old favourites, complete collections or even try old school gaming for the first time.
A round 80 games are already live on the site. They are a mixture of 3e, 2e, Basic and 1e games. Based on a snapshot taken exactly a week after DnDClassics opened; here’s the best sellers.
- D&D Basic Set Rulebook (Basic)
- T1-4 Temple of Elemental Evil (1e)
- B2 The Keep on the Borderlands (Basic)
- G1-3 Against the Giants (1e)
- D3 Vault of the Drow (1e)
- D1-2 Descent into the Depths of the Earth (1e)
- Q1 Queen of the Demonweb Pits (1e)
- B4 The Lost City (Basic)
- Deities & Demigods (1e)
- U1 The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh (1e)
- U2 Danger at Dunwater (1e)
- B3 Palace of the Silver Princess (Basic)
- N1 Against the Cult of the Reptile God (1e)
- U3 The Final Enemy (1e)
- C1 The Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan (1e)
- T1 The Village of Hommlet (1e)
- Fiend Folio (1e)
- B5 Horror on the Hill (Basic)
- Manual of the Planes (1e)
- N4 Treasure Hunt (1e)
- Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil (3e)
- C2 The Ghost Tower of Inverness (1e)
- Greyhawk Adventures (1e/2e)
- B6 The Veiled Society (Basic)
- Tales from the Infinite Staircase (2e)
This list is made possible by the standard OBS featured Top 100 Products function of their store. Its is active on DnD Classics too. However, the Top 100 feature is a listing of all time popular products. The only time you could use this list to see which RPGs sold best in a week is the first week of the site and that’s the unique oppertunity DnD Classic’s launch gives us.
Even then there are some factors that skew the numbers. Books bought in bundles do not appear in this list. The B1 Basic module In Search of the Unknown was offered for free at launch too. It does not make the “sellers” list.
The launch favours the earliest editions too. Today, some hours after this top 25 was put together, there are 23 1e PDFs available to download and only 19 3e.
However, out of interest, we can see how popular the various editions were at launch. The 1st edition of Dungeons & Dragons took most of the sales, with Basic coming in a far off second and 2e and 3e only scraping in any results at all.
What were the best selling Dungeons & Dragons of all time? I think it would be great if Wizards would release that data. It would be part of the marketing campaign around DnD Next.
Leave your own remarks on this in the comment area at the bottom of this page.