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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tav_Behemoth" data-source="post: 4773234" data-attributes="member: 18017">That's a good start, but the site link should still be in your .sig file. A Google search for a professional GM (assuming there are people out there searching for one, which isn't likely to be the case; part of why this business plan is difficult is that you have to create a demand, not just tap an existing one) is much more likely to turn up this thread than that ad.I live in NYC - I visited South Korea in '04 when Behemoth3 was invited to an international game development conference, free airfare & all. This was weird enough that I checked with the State Department to make sure it wasn't a scam! In all probability, they'd mistaken us for a publisher of computer RPGs; certainly every other company we met there was in the video game sector. As part of the trip I tried to learn as much as I could about the Korean hobby gaming scene. At the time, pen and paper RPGs had very little presence despite the huge popularity of MMORPGs. I talked to a publisher who'd done a licensed translation of GURPS, who said they were trying to create a market for Korean-language RPGs where basically none had existed before; there might have been a translation of 2nd ed. D&D IIRC but nothing since then. Certainly none of the Korean MMORPG developers I met with had any understanding that RPGs had ever or could exist without computers, except for my translator who'd played D&D (maybe even OD&D) at a US military base! This was in sharp contrast to the Germans, who definitely had roleplaying backgrounds and were interested in developing a new pen and paper ruleset to be the backbone for a prehistoric cRPG they were working on, and even to the American developers (Cryptic Studios) that were being published by Korean giant NCSoft & hiring PnP talent like Zeb Cook and Shane Hensley to write for City of Heroes. Board games, on the other hand, had recently undergone a craze similar to the original karaoke bar craze; the first game store had been extremely successful selling eurogames like Settlers of Cataan near Seoul University, to the point where it was staying open 24 hours so fans could play games. The game cafes are like PC bangs in that having a space to play is part of what you pay for, but they're a separate thing - much more like a Barnes & Noble Starbucks cafe than like an internet cafe. There were some native Korean board game developers - one company had produced a licensed Lineage board game, and the owner of the game cafe I met with was also working on self-publishing a family game he'd invented.</blockquote>

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