Matthew Sprange is one of the co-founders of the British roleplaying company Mongoose Publishing. He’s written and edited a whole host of books, most recently the much anticipated and one time worst-kept-secret in gaming the Babylon 5 Roleplaying Game and Fact Book. GameWyrd’s questions appear in strange blue, Matthew’s answers are in typical black.
1) So many games under the Mongoose banner…. which is your favourite? Is your favourite always the one you most recently worked on?
Not always, no, as you tend to have projects that (for whatever reason) stick in your mind. For a long, long time, EA Demonology was my favourite. However, it has now been well and truly replaced by Babylon 5 in my affections!
2) Some people say that there are too many Mongoose games, and that the market place is flooded or will flood and yet very few professional stockists and distributors have whined about it. What’s your take on the issue? There’s no risk of a d20 flood? Survival of the professional?
There is a lot of this going around the industry at the moment but you have to consider the source – if several very well known companies do not fail this year, they will be limping along in a very sick state, as they have completely failed to adapt to changes in the market post-d20. Competing in this industry is never easy (despite the impression that may be given!) but there is still plenty of life left in RPGs in general and d20 in particular. It will slow down a little over the next 12 months and no longer be the Next Big Thing, but there are too many people playing d20 for it to disappear. As for overcrowding, the market (any market) has it own mechanisms for dealing with that problem. . .
3) Are British roleplayers the Luddites of the hobby? So many UK gamers seem unwilling to try anything new, or successful and especially d20. Why do you think that is?
I would say there are far more d20 players in the UK than any other system – they just don’t talk about it! I certainly do not believe they are luddites – look at how many top RPG designers and writers have come from the UK in the past twenty-odd years. And then, of course, there is Games Workshop. Nope, I think the UK still rides high in the fantasy gaming market – it is in our blood :)
4) Do you think it’s worth the effort for any small to medium scale RPG publisher to distribute in UK or mainland Europe?
There are 60 million people in the UK alone – that is an awful lot of potential customers to ignore! In truth, I would even recommend spending effort in trying to sell books to countries such as India – if someone wants to pay for a book, we’ll find a way to sell it to them!
5) What happened to Mongoose and Amazon? You used to have the lead there; Mongoose products would appear in the Amazon database even before Wizards of the Coast products but now you don’t seem to make it at all.
This is something we are currently looking into – Amazon has had some. . . odd ways of working in the past.
6) You’ve your own magazine. Was that an easy decision to make? Was it the natural evolution of your product lines?
It is an easy decision – finding the excess revenue is the hard part! However, we felt we needed something as a face or front for the company as a whole, especially as we now have several full blown RPGs on the market. Basically, we needed something to link them all together.
7) When Slaine first came out I thought it would do amazingly well in the US. It would appeal to those gamers who wanted to bask in their Celtic roots. That doesn’t seem to have happened. Is that right? Why do you think that’s the case?
Slaine has done very well in the US, but we were never expecting it to be a ‘killer’ game – it is simply too niche in nature. However, you are correct – there is a great deal of interest in Celtic fantasy in the US, and it is on that basis (rather than the comic strip) that we have always marketed across the Atlantic.
8) What do you think d20 publishers tend to do wrong? Why aren’t other companies as prolific as Mongoose?
There are many, many reasons for this – I recently rewrote our business plan that lays out, in 20-odd pages, the answer to this! In a nutshell, however, I sincerely believe that few companies work as hard as we do. We are a full-time company (rather than trying to fit it around a day job), work 7 days a week, 16-18 hours a day and have not had a holiday since we started the business. That alone counts for a great deal. Actually having a business plan (and updating it) also provides us with a tremendous advantage.
9) What’s Mongoose done wrong? If you could go back and do something again what would it be?
Again, many things here, though fortunately none have proved fatal. We should have gone with our instincts and printed many more Quintessential Fighters – if we had, it would easily have been the best selling non-WotC d20 supplement of all time. We should have moved into the book trade earlier. There are a few artists we used early on that we should have avoided. Little things, overall :)
10) Why are Mongoose products better than others in the marketplace?
Well, that really is not for me to say :) We produce the best books we can, and try to aim for different types of gamers with different lines. What people think of the books when they buy them is their prerogative, not mine!
(GameWyrd notes – We’re in the Out of the Box section now. A couple of unusual questions for which we expect unusual answers!)
11) You’re trapped in a dimension similar to ours expect that there’s no concept of roleplaying games at all. By magical means you’ve an unlimited supply of core rules and they come to you entirely free. Can you think of a way to use them to make a living? If so, how?
Ah, easy. I would go into the construction business (probably hospitals and schools), using the books as bricks. Either that, or open a power station and use them for fuel – this is where the money is, not in roleplaying :)
12) A wild-eyed fan ambushes you in a convention and insists that everything you write is coming true in an alternative dimension, a dimension’s he’s only just escaped from in order to convince you to write about flowers, puppies and peace from now on. What would you do?
I have actually had something very similar happen. The trick here is to make sure you never walk around a convention on your own – in this case, I would call my business partner, Alex, over and explain that he just has to listen to this story. Then walk away very quickly!
