Thanks for the link, Thanael!
Here's an update on B3 and its members:
Our business plan for the Horde Books was based on estimates of d20 sales that were probably accurate as of 2002, but in 2004 we were victims of the d20 glut. We made a number of other mistakes as well, to be sure. One piece of advice I wish we'd taken was to have a year's worth of products ready to print by the time you announce the first of them. I don't think that would have made a difference to the bottom line, but at least we'd have a finished Remorhaz book! As it was, in the rush to get ready for a Gen Con release, Nat got pulled away from writing his book to do layout on the other two, and by the time we got back to editing it we were already starting to be disappointed by our sales (less than 600 copies each, IIRC). We did accept a request to do a fourth Horde Book on the bulette from a freelancer, Chris Field; that MS is even less edited & developed than the Remorhaz one, and we eventually decided that it wasn't going to be worth publishing it and paid Chris a kill fee (making him the only author to actually make money from a Horde Book)!
In retrospect we shouldn't have let that slow us down. It was fun to do, we'd heard going into it that the way to make a small fortune in RPGs was to start with a large one, and Sang knew the economics of small-press publishing first hand from experience with our mutual friend
Gil Roth's Voyant Publishing. But making a living, or trying to, writing RPG books is a dream job, which for me at least entails a certain amount of unreal thinking & the possibility of being disappointed when you wake up!
Certainly, even if turning a profit wasn't a realistic goal, we did achieve all the things we could have hoped - the major exception being that Nat didn't get to see his remorhaz book on a game store shelf, which I still feel bad about given how much work he put into the company. But when Gary Gygax died, one of the things that helped me deal with my sadness & regret was knowing that we had sent him a copy of the Stirge and Minotaur books as a way of saying thanks for his inspiration throughout our lives. Through the experience of running Behemoth3, we had a great time, made friends, and influenced people - I persist in believing that the reason there's a stirge swarm in the 4E MM is because we pressed a copy of _A Swarm of Stirges_ on Jonathan Tweet (a culture hero of mine) when he visited the Forge booth at Gen Con in '04.
The next thing Behemoth3 did was to explore the idea of RPGs as a service, since there didn't seem to be a way for us to sell them as goods. We launched Otherworld Excursions, a brand dedicated to packaging RPG experiences, at Indy in '05. I'd learned as much as I could about other examples where that had been successful. At Gen Con So Cal in '05, we shared a booth with Becky Thomas, whose Roleplay Workshop supports her as a full-time professional GM. The Kill Monsters, Win Money tournament was a similar experiment in making GMing profitable, based on the D&D for Cash event at Indy. Perhaps because So Cal was a smaller event, we wound up losing a little money on the deal (not enough promotion = too few players = too little money in the pot to cover the prize). The thing that was successful both commercially and artistically (not to use too high-faluting a word, but I do think it's interesting to consider RPGs as a performance art & examine why or why not it couldn't support paid performances) was the Excursion that Ken Hite did. This was a walking tour of Chicago's occult architecture, followed by dinner and a Call of Cthulu game, both of which took place in one of the sites on the tour (the Hotel Intercontinental, a former Masonic temple). The folks who did this said that the real-world experience of seeing these buildings made it easier & more compelling to then imagine their characters confronting eldrich horrors in that setting. I still get emails from people interested in doing this Excursion; the problem that kept me from organizing it more than a couple of times was the difficulty of getting a critical mass of people together at one time.
Eventually we let the website fall dormant (esp. after bots festooned the forums with spam) and dissolved the company - one of the mistakes we made was to incorporate as an S-corp, so filing corporate taxes each year was a major source of ongoing damage. I wish I'd been more decisive about pulling the plug, among other reasons because it would have let us make an announcement to that effect instead of trailing off in a lingering death, but in retrospect I had a hard time admitting that the dream wasn't going to pan out & was ashamed not to have succeeded in everything I'd wanted to do.
Here's what's up these days with each of the Behemoths:
I've been doing a bunch of writing for 4E; although much of it hasn't been announced yet, I've co-authored six books for Goodman Games and one for a first-party publisher, and we'll be playtesting another Goodman project (my first adventure; everything else has been mechanics) at Gen Con this year. I'm still interested in professional GMing, but for now I'm happy to observe the scene & developments like Capt. Commando's Guild of Blades attempt & Yax's Hawaiian vacation. Being a stay-at-home dad takes up less of my time these days now that my son's in first grade, so I'm looking to expand the medical & scientific grant writing I've been doing as a freelancer into a full time job in the NY/NJ/CT area.
Brian Stith moved from North Carolina to Stratford, CT last year, which is awesome because we get to see one another more often (including getting together with some of our other high school friends to game once a month, although I've missed the last few). He's got a much better job than he did back in '04, but it requires him to travel just about non-stop so I don't know that we'll see anything more from him in a while, although he did show me some notes on a necromancer class for 3E that I thought were pretty awesome.
Nat Sims became a father last year, and if that wasn't keeping him busy enough, he's also the head of
Night and Day Studios. They recently started doing iPhone games, so that's one step closer to reclaiming Nat from museum design! I'll call his attention to this thread; I know he'll be pleased that so many people are interested in seeing his Remorhaz Horde. Since he did all B3's layout and graphic design, his time is a major bottleneck in turning that MS into a polished product but I agree that sure would be cool!
Sang Lee is, I hope, still drawing and illustrating. Although we recently re-connected via Facebook I'm not as in touch with him as I'd like, but I do have his original stirge sketch framed & hung proudly over my desk.
