Almost every D&D* game player wants to play in a limitless campaign game of great adventure. Unfortunately, it is very difficult to find a gamemaster who can devote the time to create a complete fantasy world. Fantasy gamers now have an alternative to the years of hard work needed to create a campaign. The game is Crasimoff's World and it has taken several years to design, develop, and test. It is completely original and contains over a thousand detailed descriptions of everything you can see, encounter, and acquire -- from detailed descriptions of every town to the workings of a spell. Our staff has created a world of 160,000 [hexes?] for your band of adventurers to explore and conquer. Why so large? To allow over a thousand parties of adventurers to play the game all at the same time!
Such a game could only have been created in a play-by-mail format and moderated by an experienced play-by-mail moderator. Play-by-mail allows tremendous flexability, interactiveness, and that most important sense of wonder and mystery that you demand in your fantasy campaign.
Explore the fantastically detailed world that comes alive!
CRASIMOFF'S WORLD
Lead your band of daring adventurers into the wilderness filled with magic and danger. Mounted on trusty steeds and armed with razor sharp swords, your band of young and eager adventurers will venture forth into the unknown. Perhaps you will cross the Creeping Mountains, exploring the strange caves. Or maybe ride a river boat to the edge of the Deaf Forest. Your fighters will handle hostile encounters with enthusiasm, with your mages and priests casting spells at opportune moments. Treasures and artifacts lie secreted, to be unearthed only by those with the skill to find them. Mysterious wanderers may offer to teach your mage or priest a spell, or possibly you will encounter the remains of the legendary Astoffs?
Some Featurers of Crasimoff's World include:
-- Choose your own destiny! Perhaps you will be a brigand when you begin play and ambush the first travelers you encounter. Later on you may decide that being a river merchant is more your style. Eventually a town may ask you to be the Town Protector, or perhaps you will find the courage to lead a great caravan across the plains of Azoose.
-- Naming not only your band of adventurers. but each individual character. Each character has his or her own equipment, characteristics, and growth potential.
-- Over a thousand "blurbs" of information can be obtained, including ones detailing artifacts. magic. creatures, songs, drugs, herbs, spells. legends, towns, treasures, cults, towers, temples, dungeons and mysterious buildings.
-- The game is human-moderated to allow greater flexibility.
-- The game is forever expanding and improving, moderated in the Beyond the Stellar Empire style (with lots of heart and soul) -- recognized by many as the best style around.
-- If you have played correspondence fantasy campaigns that were structured as chapters of a novel and found that your instructions only occasionally had any effect on the outcome of your turn you probably weren't too happy with the game. Crasimoffs World is different! In Crasimoff's World all of your instructions are considered before your own individual turn results are created. Plus you can interact with hundreds of players and your actions not only affect other players but the very world itself!
-- You receive a hex map each turn depicting the area your party explored.
Adventures By Mail has processed over 50.000 play-by-mail game turns since our start in July 1981. The readers of the Space Gamer magazine chose us as the top play-by-mail game publisher in both 1982 and 1983. In the same surveys, Beyond the Stellar Empire, our science-fiction PBM game, was chosen as the top role-playing PBM game. Additionally. it was the only PBM game chosen as one of the top 100 games of the year by the editors of GAMES magazine. Our reputation for fast turnaround and professionalism are second to none.
A game such as this doesn't come around very often. Crasimoffs World is just beginning -- first turns will be processed in August of 1984. Enter now to get in at the beginning. Participate in the Adventures By Mail Gaming Experience.
The international game for the modern thinking mind.
*D&D is a registered trademark of TSR, Inc.
ADVENTURES BY MAIL, PO Box 436, Cohoes NY 12047
* Enclosed is $3.00 for the Crasimoff's World Rules Package.
* Enclosed is $15.00 for the Crasimoff's World Starter Package.
* Send me information on your other PBM games.
Please make checks and money orders payable to Adventures By Mail.
MONEY BACK GUARANTEE
If you are dissatisfied with the Rules Package you may return it for a complete refund.
Just what kind of name is Crasimoff, anyway? Google thinks: one that the creators of this game made up. This ad is interesting because it's hyping you up for a service that doesn't exist yet -- it's a pre-launch ad, imviting players to be in on the ground floor. This promotional schedule would soon become standard for the gaming industry, but this early, there's always a hint of concern that the promoters may simply be testing the waters and determining if there is sufficient interest to build a real product out of their vaporware promotion. The situation in this case is a little more nuanced than I suggest -- not only had Kevin Cropper's worldbuilding already been done, for the benefit of his regular pen and paper gaming group, but Crasimoff's World (documented pretty well there at Wikipedia) had already been running for years at this point -- in the UK. What this ad is launching is the American syndication of it through Adventures By Mail, because overseas postage just put too big a drag factor on the already costly hobby of PBM gaming.
I really enjoy the way that the fifth line item keeps on building on itself : "The game is forever expanding and improving," (well, that's good!), "moderated in the Beyond the Stellar Empire style" (yes, but what does that mean?) "(with lots of heart and soul)" (ah, fairly appraised by a neutral third party!)" -- recognized by many as the best style around." (Well, we don't want to settle for anything less than the best now, do we?
Apparently by the end of the '80s it had transitioned over to a computer-moderated incarnation, "Crasiworld", which kept on keeping on for another decade and a half, before finally wrapping it up in 2004... meaning that it's now been off the scene as long as it was here. It seems that the company formed by Crasimoff's World's founder is still with us in some kind of nominal presence, but I suspect that's one industry pivot that there may be no recovery from. (Putting me in mind of Simutronics, who started making MUDs for GEnie and were last seen making tower defense and endless runner games for mobile devices... slowly and gradually winding down. But I digress.)
