"Silverdawn" Play-By-Mail game, Entertainment Concepts, Inc.

Sorry about the muddy quality of the scan! I think that at the time I rated these as low-priority and didn't make the effort to get clean, clear takes on the subjects. (Granted, I waited nearly a decade to do anything with the scans, so argably I was right.)

SILVERDAWN*
* by Entertainment Concepts, Inc.

SILVERDAWN is a brilliant excursion into fantasy fuelled by the healthy fire of the moderator's imagination ... Recommended for everyone! (PBM Universal gave SILVERDAWN a Four Star Rating!!!)
Bob McLain
PBM Universal

SILVERDAWN is the best game I have EVER PLAYED, Play by Mail or otherwise. Let me congratulate you on having created a fantastic game!
Roger Leroux

I have heard only good things about this game!
Michael Gray, Dragon Magazine

SILVERDAWN is probably the best of the narrative games! W.G. Armintrout, The Fantasy Gamer

I just wanted to tell you what a good job you are doing with SILVERDAWN... I am really impressed with it!
Mike Kimba

I prefer: Fighter ____ Mage ____ Thief ____
Spy ____ Merchant ____ Minstrel ____
Cleric ____ Ranger ____ Engineer ____
Name: __________ Age __
Address: ____________
State: __ Zip: __

I would like to run ____ characters in the land of SILVERDAWN. Enclosed is $7 for the first and $3 for each additional character.
__ In addition, please enter me in the $5,000 SILVERDAWN Quest Tournament. An additional $3 is enclosed to cover the cost of this entry.
Mail to: ENTERTAINMENT CONCEPTS, 6923 Pleasant Drive, Charlotte, NC 28211

Now you can enter the richest tournament in the history of Correspondence Gaming!! The SILVERDAWN Quest Tournament will offer a $5,000 first prize, a $500 second prize, a $50 third prize. A fabulously interesting and exciting adventure has been prepared ... replete with all the dangers, challenges, and puzzles that you could wish for. And the first player to complete this Quest will win FIVE THOUSAND DOLLARS!
SILVERDAWN is the ultimate play by mail fantasy campaign. Having already received an enthusiastic response from players who enjoy having total freedom of creative decision, SILVERDAWN lets you guide heroic characters thru[sic] fantastic adventures.
Each move allows you to detail up to 3 pages of actions and contingencies. Every move will be promptly responded to. Every month you will receive a copy of SILVERQUEST, the newsletter that tells the stories of the greatest heroes in SILVERDAWN. Each issue will also contain contest announcements, with the winners receiving cash prizes!
Entry is $7 for the rules and first move. Each move thereafter is $3.

So this was a natural successor to the previous post, seeing as the game is made by the same company, Entertainment Concepts, Inc. (which means likely the same individual -- who has an account on RPGGeek, if I really wanted to know the answer to questions I had, I suppose I could just look him up and fire away, but in a sense the asking out loud is more fun than the "settling the matter"), as the last PBM game whose ad was featured here. If I had processed these scans in a scholarly fashion and retained context, I'd have more information about the sequence in which these games elapsed -- but let's assume that Silverdawn (pardon me, SILVERDAWN) was the foundation on which the AD&D PBM game was built rather than the other way around.

It's an interesting ad, blasting out of the gate with a series of testimonials which might hold more weight if we recognized the names. (I know, you think "W.G. Armintrout" is an alias? Think again!) I especially like how Michael Gray comes across as not actually having ever played the game (but he's heard only good things), while WG spikes his endorsement with what Wikipedia likes to call "weasel words" -- probably the best of the narrative games. Except for the better ones that I haven't played yet, or can't remember at this moment.

The list of possible player classes is pretty standard, but mixes it up Nethack-style with a few unorthodox "prestige class" offerings -- presumably Minstrel glosses to Bard, Spy to ... Assassin? I've never played an RPG in which engineers were a class before, but when the party needs to build a bridge with which to cross a gap or calculate where the weak spot in the door to aim the battering ram at is, who else are you going to call?

It's conspicuous how little this ad dwells on the actual content of the SILVERDAWN game, and what makes it different and unique from the othre PBM games out there. Certainly the illustration is consummately generic, in a workmanlike way. Based on the picture, I don't see a lot of work for the engineer in this scenario. The tail wagging the dog is, instead, the contest. I know, I was too young at the time (only a few months old!), but I read Quest for the Golden Hare and know all about Kit Williams' Masquerade, so I am aware of the frenzy to burden games with contests that was plaguing the ludic zeitgeist at the time, from Eureka! to Swordquest, to Pimania... etc., there's a list of them here. While the idea of a payout was compelling to players, I don't know if the competition ever actually enhanced the gameplay in any way. Here where you can see players are shelling out real money for the privilege of playing at all (555 player-turns need to be bought in order to cover the value of all the prizes), the prospect of a grand prize rings a little more like a gambler pumping coins into the one-armed bandit, hoping for a chance to win back some of the money they have already spent on the pastime. Especially with the absence of weight on the game's content, the ad rings a little like a sideshow carnival barker: step right up, step right up and try your luck! Another sucker's born every minute!

Apparently there was quite a bit of lore cooked up for this game, however, enough to fill several independently-published Silverdawn sourcebooks, refigured from PBM origin and intended for use in pen & paper group tabletop role-playing, all published around 1982 -- which gives us a ballpark for when the PBM game may have been happening. Perhaps the contest failed to recoup its costs (even after the prizes, now it has to generate enough revenue to also cover the cost of a print ad in Dragon Magazine!) and retooling the material for a new market helped to make it pay for itself. (Or perhaps the contest was unimaginably lucrative, and ECI was just greedily double-dipping, who knows.)

That's all I can glean from just an ad, folks! I'll post another one down the line, I have a pile of them lined up.

"Advanced Dungeons & Dragons" Play-By-Mail game, Entertainment Concepts, Inc., 1985.

I said that I had several advertisements for PBM games in my archives, mostly sourced from scanning old copies of Dragon Magazine, and I wasn't lying -- Monster Island was only the beginning! This one appears first in the directory for alphabetical reasons, but since I have no easy way of assessnig the importance of each of these games so many years after the fact, that sequence seems as valid as any other to visit these topics!

Advanced Dungeons & Dragons
PLAY BY MAIL GAME
a product of Entertainment Concepts, Inc.

Do you dream of adventure and glory? Do you thirst for dangers to thwart? Do you love the challenges of a mystery? Do you hunger to explore the unknown, and prove to the world that you have the stuff heroes are made of? Yes??

Then an exciting world of quests, myths, treasures, villains, mysteries, and magic is waiting just for you!! You can go beyond mere reading of adventure, you can now Create it! Experience it! Master it! Your skill, your wits, your wisdom, can make your hero the stuff of legend! You'll experience the full mystery and excitement of the fabulous ADVANCED DUNGEONS & DRAGONS adventure game by taking the role of a Hero, or of a Fellowship of four young adventurers!

ENTER TODAY!! Tomorrow you'll be creating your own legends!!!

Send AD&D Play by Mail Game entries to: ECI, 6923 Pleasant Dr., Charlotte, NC 28211

Name___
Address___
City___
State___
Zip___

Enclosed is $10 for the first position and $5 for each additional Position. Each move is $4 of adventure, mystery, and ancient lore'

Please send me _ Hero Positions and _ Fellowship Positions.

ADVANCED DUNGEONS & DRAGONS is a trademark owned by and used under license from TSR, Inc. © 1985 TSR, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

There it is, a dragon in the illustration, resting in some treasure-filled cavern or ... dungeon. The bland copy doesn't give much to work with, but the whole arrangement does raise the question of why bothering to go and cook up your own campaign setting when you can just license one -- which yields further questions: ECI gives money to Dragon Magazine to run the ad, which raises money from players, which yields money to send home to the mother ship. Did ECI just devise a system allowing them to work pro bono for TSR? Was getting advertising in the house organ a perk of purchasing use of the license? One imagines they must have had some prior success in the PBM genre for TSR to allow the licensing deal to take place, but what? (And, of course -- why not simply run a PBM branch in-house, as Flying Buffalo did?)

Ok, some cursory Googling addresses some of these questions and, I'm sure, raises new ones. It wasn't a setting ECI was licensing, but (presumably) the system and rules and of course the valuable, lucrative brand. Indeed, this game was run in ECI president Jim Dutton's homebrewed game world "Talaran, Land of Challenge", which, in a sense, puts this setting on a par with Greyhawk, Blackmoor and Mystara -- an individual's labour of love, enshrined in some weird way by a company. (The informational packet sent out to new players makes it look a lot like an official TSR product.) As for how internally-integrated the licensing-promoting of this fellow traveller venture was... it's pointed out that Dutton wrote three articles about it published in Dragon Magazine -- "Blueprint for a big game" (issue 97), "Detailing a Campaign World" (issue 98), and "Creating a cast of NPCs" (issue 102) -- seemingly in keeping with that august and earnest publication's strong bent toward the advertorial.

How prestigious Jim Dutton was remains to be determined -- he had a few various and sundry worldbooks up for sale via TSR and through other publishers. ECI turns up as having offered a few other PBM games, eg "Power" and "Power+" ... were they even RPGs, comparable in any way or is this an apples to oranges comparison? Hard to determine from here. Finally, it's interesting (certainly streamlines some elements, but presumably removes all interactive and social aspects with other players) that this game allows players to guide entire parties full of Heroes and Fellows. The mental picture I get from this is just a kind of neverending Gold Box-style tactical combat session, with party members gradually crawling down an endless hallway and making strategic combat decisions to overcome whichever opponents arrive to menace them in a given turn. Would parties of up to 4 fellows have an advantage over a Hero playing solo, or was difficulty scaled to the size of the party? Many boring questions, no boring answers, yielding: a boring permanent state of lack of resolution. Ah well.