How We Grade — The Reliquary Condition Scale

Five grades, no fine print

We sell second-hand RPG books, some pushing fifty years old, printed on technology older still, loved hard at a thousand tables. A scale built for shrink-wrapped collectibles doesn't describe those books honestly. Ours does. Every item is inspected in hand, graded on the scale below, photographed (the photos are of the actual copy you receive, not a stock image), and bagged for protection.

🏆 Trophy Room

Collector grade: shop-new or near-untouched. The copy you buy to own, not just to play. Trophy Room items get fuller provenance notes: printing, identifiers, anything that matters to a collector.

✨ Great

Light use, presents beautifully. You'd hand it across the table without a word of apology.

📖 Good

An honest used copy, complete, solid, fully table-worthy. The workhorse grade of a second-hand shop.

🎲 Table

A well-loved veteran. Expect wear, creases, maybe marks; this book has rolled initiative a few hundred times and earned every scar. Priced accordingly.

⚔️ Rough

A reading and playing copy with real flaws, listed plainly, priced honestly. Sometimes Rough is how a rare book becomes affordable, and a Rough rarity on your shelf beats a perfect one you'll never find.

The plain-sentence promise

Every listing carries one plain physical sentence (spine, pages, marks) alongside its grade, so whether you think in our scale or in Near Mint terms, you know exactly what arrives. If you grade in traditional collector terms: Trophy Room sits around NM or better, Great around EX, Good around VG, Table around Good, Rough at Fair and below, but read the sentence; it outranks any code.

House conventions

  • Boxed sets are graded twice: box and contents ("box Good, contents Great"). One grade means both match.
  • Missing or damaged components are always named in the listing, never hidden in a grade.
  • Print-on-demand copies are identified as such; we never pass PoD off as original print stock.
  • Remainder marks (a publisher's pen stroke on the page edges) are noted where present; they're a publishing artefact, not damage.
  • Pre-1985 books often carry no barcode and occasionally share ISBNs across titles, so we identify by publisher stock number and copyright page, the collector's way.

Question about a specific copy? Ask us, and we'll photograph any detail you want to see before you buy.