I know this has to come up in every forum now and then, but if you hit the lotto (like, one of the BIG jackpots, PowerBall-style), and could pretty much piss away money annually for the rest of your life, and you formed a game publishing company, what would you like to publish/create? What setting rights would you go after? What lines would you attempt to resurrect? Anything special you'd do with you fundage?
Me, I'd have a few things I'd like to do:
-First off, try to get the rights to Greyhawk and/or Birthright. Get a writer who knows the hell out of 'em, and go from there (hey, I don't care if WoTC has 'em. It's my fantasy). I'd also have a Traveller license, ideally.
-Second, get the license for a line pre-painted plastic Rifts minis. With over 4 million OCCs, RCCs, and races, I could make them forever (if even solely for my own gratification).
-Third, have a "small press" section that would highlight a lot of the cool and unsung niche titles out there. Screw it, it's my money to burn, right?
-Fourth, develop a "R&D" department to make generally whup-ass gaming accessories that people always needed needed, but just never knew it.
-Fifth, pimp in comics and other media, old-school. Have prizes gamers can send away for with a proof of purchase (allow 4-6 weeks for delivery). Make crazy fanboy stuff that's insanely cost-prohibitive. Develop a cheap-arse edition of a fully-functional and complete RPG (following in the footsteps of SavWo) to distribute free or for low cost to a crapload of FLGSs (again, quiet. It's my fantasy).
-Hire some bad-ass writers and game publishers. Tell them they can quit their day job and just make games. And play them. Do continual talent searches to add more staff and/or freelancers.
-Figure out a way to get as many gamers to Gen Con as possible. Set up "scholarships" for folks to get to go. Throw a frickin' feast for gamers opening night.
-Support a FLGS, located just down the road from the company HQ. Stock it right.
-Fund Lou Zocchi of GameScience to continue making crazy new dice.
-Get an RPG gaming tournament at Gen Con televised somewhere, somehow. $50k grand prize for the last group standing. Cheer for your favorites!
I'm sure there's more, but I'll stop for now. Doing all this, I figure I'd net about -$5 million a year, so once I hit that record lotto amount, I should be able to do it for at least a good couple of decades before completely running out of funds. But, man, what fun it would be. :D
Hey Zach,
You took a fair amount of my ideas but here's my two cents anyway.
1. I would buy the RPG rights for Heroes on NBC.
2. Make a kick-ass game meet website and provide various utilities for it that no one else had.
3. Provide funding for various organizations to promote RPGs and change their image (make us cool like those stamp collectors and model airplane guys:rolleyes: )
4. Gencon support, perhaps set it up to where another event of its size goes to the same location (spring break?)
5. Re-do my own stuff, hire people to work on game with the licenses I bought.
6. Actually hand out gold and silver pieces when people find treasure (I take that one back...I would never do that even if I won an obsence amount of money. Either that or hire brutes to force players to return said coinage before they leave the mansion:P)
7. Stop list at this point as the wife puts her foot down.:haw:
Buy land to build a campsite with a replica medieval/fantasy village with a castle along with outlying sites for caves, and lairs and evil strongholds, and hold kick ass LARP events every month.
Note that these sites would have feature built into to make them larp friendly in terms of running events, safety, and hygenie. For example a dungeon lair may be just a 50' by 50' building that buried under sod. It would look like a low hill. Inside there would be tracks for removable walls, holes to put in posts for multilayer tunnel style layouts. The back end may be on a different level with a stairway going up (or down as the case may be.)
Good one! A "gamer retreat" down by the Hoosier National Forest...situated near IU...only 90 minutes (or so) from Gen Con...man, that would be AWESOME.
Quote from: estarBuy land to build a campsite with a replica medieval/fantasy village with a castle along with outlying sites for caves, and lairs and evil strongholds, and hold kick ass LARP events every month.
And when I, too, win the Lotto I will buy an out-of-business self-storage building (maybe five stories tall) and set up the urban counter-part. It will have drinks, snacks and socializing downstairs, and short dungeon-parties in the vast, reconfigurable tunnel-and-room space upstairs. The goal will be to have people bring a group of their friends, hang out for a while, dungeon-crawl for a while, hang out and tell war stories, lather, rinse, repeat ... get really drunk and stagger home happy.
Sort of the urban lazer-tag-center to your rural paintball park.
Oh, I've known the answer to this for years...
I'd buy Star Frontiers and Tunnels & Trolls (the T&T name only, really).
With these two games being totally rewritten by myself and a crew of the best designers/writers out there I would rule the RPG world.
If I had the money...I would hire my friends and I to develop the killer rpg ideas we have into a full fledged product, and take down WOTC!
Or maybe just have another killer game on the market :)
Hmmm...that might be enough to get the rights to Skyrealms of Jorune...
- Buy the rights to all Jack Vance's Planet of Adventure/ Big Planet/ Demon Princess books.
- Throw ridiculous amounts of money at Paul Jaquays to entice him to leave the videogame industry and come back to RPGs to work on the setting with me.
- Hire Jonathan Tweet to co-write the rules.
- Hire private investigators to track down Dave Trampier, and assign the illustration to him and Erol Otus.
- Print the final product in glossy, full-colour format and sell it for $20.
- Bribe my buddies' wives to let them come out and play once week.
1) Bribe Games Workshop into releasing a complete range of prepainted plastic minis for WFRP and 40K. The same goes for White Wolf and Exalted.
2) Snap up the rights to Dark Sun and release a brand spanking new boxed set, full colour throughout with cloth maps. The timeline would be reset to that of the original boxed set, and the system would be True20.
3) Similar to (2), but with the Fighting Fantasy World of Allansia. A Savage Worlds variant would work nicely for this, I think.
4) Secure the film rights for all my favourite RPG settings, then sit on them until I had writers, cast and production crews who could do each one of them justice.
5) Set up an MMA-style cage match league where internet blowhards can physically fight over their theoretical differences. The grand prize would be a real life +1 sword.
Birthright with its own custom RPG system? :D I'm for that.
What I'd do? I'm not sure. Probably pay more artists for artwork for my FRPG.
Make sure I make it a solid leather bound corebook in a wooden slipcase with dice box/pencil box on one edge and leather straps to hold the books in.
Buy the rights to Providence, and publish it with a simpler variation of its current system. As one hardback rule/world book.
Pay Chris Avellone whatever he wanted to finally write the FELL'S POINT sourcebook for Dark Champions.
Lord Hobie