Crasimoff's World
The first fantasy role-playing play-by-mail game.
Crasimoff's World is a play-by-mail (PBM) game first developed by Kevin Cropper in 1980. It is regarded as the first fantasy role-playing PBM game.
Quick Facts
- Developer
- Kevin Cropper
- Year first developed
- 1980
- Parent company
- KJC Games
- Original turn cost
- £1.25
- Original rulebook cost
- £2.50
Facts from the source article.
Publication history
By the late 1970s, sending moves through the mail for games like chess and Diplomacy had caught on in the UK. Kevin Cropper took his own long-running Dungeons & Dragons campaign, which he called Crasimoff's World, and turned it into a postal game in 1980. His plan was to run it by writing back to each player by hand. After placing an ad in White Dwarf, the flood of responses was so overwhelming that he quit his day job to manage the game full-time, setting up KJC Games as its parent company. Scholar Michelle Nephew later noted in her dissertation that Crasimoff's World was the first fantasy role-playing game of its kind played through the mail. By 1984, Cropper had 450 regular players, more than he could handle alone. Wanting to focus on running a game store in Cleveleys, he brought on two full-time gamemasters, Nigel Mitchell and Andy Smith. As the player base kept growing, a third gamemaster, Andy Hume, joined in June 1985. Besides sending out handwritten replies, the three put together a regular newsletter for the community. The game got so big that Cropper even hired someone part-time just to handle new player setups. KJC Games also organized Crasimeets, in-person conventions where players could sit down with Mitchell, Smith, and Hume for old-fashioned tabletop sessions. At the very first Crasimeet, the gamemasters picked up godlike nicknames: Mitchell became L'Denon, Smith became F'Nor, and Hume became T'Gellen. The U.S. rights went to Jack Everitt of Adventures by Mail, who built an American version. In 1987, KJC Games handed the license to Andy Smith, who formed Crasiworld. Not long after, Crasiworld shifted the game to computer moderation using the Quest PBM engine. Supported by a lineup of other postal games, Crasiworld kept Crasimoff's World alive until 2004.
Reception
In the January 1983 edition of White Dwarf (Issue #37), Trevor Graver said the effort the gamemaster puts into each turn never ceased to amaze him, noting that most players find themselves offered a different scenario each turn or a new twist to an existing adventure. He recommended giving it a try, commenting that it is easy to play and reflects the amount of effort a player puts into their moves. Brian Creese reviewed Crasimoff's World for Imagine magazine, stating that one nice feature is that he had already made contact with another player after only a few moves. In the September 1984 edition of Imagine (Issue 18), Creese called it a highly worthy game and mentioned the hand-written responses as an indicator of the immense effort put in by the GM. He also thought that with its regular newsletter, Crasimoff's World is a friendly, efficient, and relatively cheap game to play. Although Creese did not find a PBM fantasy game as engaging as its face-to-face counterpart, he concluded that if one wishes to try a commercial PBM game with a distinctly D&D game-ish flavour, he would unhesitatingly recommend it. Wayne Bootleg reviewed the game for Adventurer magazine, stating that Crasimoff's World was the first PBM he ever played and that he had considerable sentimental ties with it, but that the standard it set many years ago had slipped and in its present form the game was sadly lacking in many departments.
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