Angry August Ryan
Player: Barry Robertson


Big Bad Black Bob
Player: Indie Spin
Born into a life of slavery in Jackson, Mississippi, Big Bad Black Bob learned at an early age to despise authority, but it also instilled within him a cold patience and a calculating mind. Escaping his Southern master following one of many severe beatings over the course of his life, Big Bad Black Bob tried escaping North, but circumstances and slave patrols conspired to cause him to head West, where he's been ever since. Collectively, his harsh life experiences have warped him, leaving him an emotionless shell, and his searing blue eyes make him a marked man by many in the Wild West era. He also loves his chewing tobacco, and leaves a real mess, wherever he goes.


Makes Widows Smile
Player: Teddy Tedstone
A Comanche chief with a hankering for firewater and a taste for saloon girls, Makes Widows Smiles is as tough as nails, but he has bad teeth - and his sore teeth ain't afraid to remind him. He thinks nothing of just up and leaving his tribe for weeks, or even months, on end. They always end up taking him back in, when he returns home to his tribe, out of a deep and abiding respect that they have for his father, a great warchief of the Comanche people. While Makes Widows Smile speaks broken English, he definitely speaks fluent firewater.


Deputy Winslow Kinkaid
Player: NPC
NOTE: Deputies get one order slot per turn.
Deputy Winslow Kinkaid is a good man, a family man. He and his wife have three kids, two of which are his. Winslow has been a deputy in PBMville for just about two years, now, originally hailing from Akron, Ohio.


Ringo "Fifty Two" Fry
Player: Bryan Ciesielski
Ringo "Fifty Two" Fry is a hateful son of a bitch. His whole life has been nothing but trouble. He has more bad habits than most ranchers have cattle. Not one you should turn your back on.


Dan "The Loner" Hughes
Player: Stefan Graf
He's a loner for a reason. Or should I say for just about a thousand reasons. The only thing that he hates more than people is taking a bath. Believed to be a horse thief in some parts, Dan "The Loner" Hughes is one sorry devil that you would be better off avoiding.


Fastdraw Kid Sammy Hill
Player: Alex Sahm
Born a bastard child to a saloon girl in Dodge City, Kansas, Sammy Hill was abandoned and placed in a violent orphanage at a very young age. He bears a scar on his face from a knife fight that he started, back in his teenage days. He claims to be a fast draw with that big iron on his hip, but whether he has the raw courage to kill in cold blood remains to be seen.


Mississippi Jane Deadshot
Player: Richard Lockwood
The daughter of a mining town whore, Mississippi Jane Deadshot is as handy with a gun as she is with a man. But she's got a mouth on her that just won't stop, though many a man has tried. A real spiteful little bitch, you had best cross to the other side of the street, if you see her coming. You won't have a wallet, if you don't.


Wild Willey Gunn
DEAD - Killed in PBM Chaos Issue #15
Player: Rich Deluca
They say that every man has a soft spot in his heart for someone. Well, whoever said that had clearly never crossed paths with Wild Willey Gunn. He has a bounty on his head for thirty-five dollars in Abilene, Texas, but it's been quite some time since he last darkened that area with his moody presence.


Rowdy Slim McGraw
Casey Link
In the Wild West, they don't get any wilder than Rowdy Slim McGraw. They don't get any dumber, either. A crossbreed between sinister and clumsy, McGraw scrambles when the situation calls for it. A decent shot, but not a decent man, Rowdy Slim McGraw is itching to give his trigger finger some exercise.


Brendan "The Dirge" Weir
Player: Brendan Weir
Holy hell, where does one even begin? Rumor has it that he killed a fellow in Carson City, Nevada during a card game. This son of a bitch brought his own deck of cards to a card game that was already underway. Brendan "The Dirge" Weir lost the hand, when he got caught red-handed in a real bad cheating situation that either cost another man his life, or got "The Dirge" run out of town on a rail, tar and feathered, whichever you choose to believe.

The town saloon is open for business!

Talk away. Jabber your jaw off. It don't matter if you're new to town, or if you've been here a while.

You need to come up with a character name, preferably a colorful one. Your character needs a first name, a last name, and a descriptor of some kind - examples might be Dangerous Joe Jenkins, Wild-eyed Bill Hoffman, Henry "Silver Dollar" Cassidy.

Then, send me your character info via e-mail to: grimfinger@playbymail.net

You don't have to subscribe to PBM Chaos, in order to play, but you will need to read/browse each new issue of PBM Chaos, because that's where all turn results for all players get posted. If you don't, you won't where to move or not move your character, nor where to shoot.

If you haven't subscribed to PBM Chaos, then you can do that at this link:
https://stats.sender.net/forms/bo4xAd/view

If you ever need to look at old issues of PBM Chaos, you can find links to those at this link:
https://forums.playbymail.dev/

Your character can either MOVE or Shoot in any given turn. Your character CANNOT move to a location where another character who is alive is at. If you try to do that, your move order will fail. 

Your character CAN move into a location where a character lies dead. We haven't had this situation, yet, but if two or more characters try to move into the same location, only one of them will get that location. The others will be shit out of luck.

You don't have to worry about loading/reloading your gun, and you don't have to worry about running out of ammunition. You aim by Shooting at a location. You may hit your target, or you may miss your target.

When you move, you can only move one location distance from your character's current location. If you aren't sure if you can move or shoot to/at a particular location, then you can always e-mail me and ask me.

Life isn't fair, so the game isn't fair. Life in the Wild West isn't fair. It's downright rough, at times. It's easy to get wounded. It's easy to die. The more characters that pour out into the streets of PBMville, the more crowded the streets become, and the more dangerous they become.

KnightGuild is launching in July 2022!  Check out our web site at https://knightguild.com or our discord server at  https://discord.gg/knightguild for more information.

Here's a link to list of Magic Spells for Hyborian War that I recently compiled into a PDF file. Enjoy!

https://grimfinger.net/List-of-Hybgorian...Spells.pdf

I am looking for players to help test and give feedback on Wraith, a new turn-based strategy game that is inspired by Empyrean Challenge, The Campaign for North Africa, and my experience with Far Horizons.

If you're not familiar with Empyrean Challenge or Far Horizons, they are 4X games (eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate) with a focus on managing the supply and production lines to support all of those X's. EC was an actively evolving game, and the Wraith engine is based on the original 1978 game, early errata, and newsletters. This includes

* A star cluster with limited resources that players have to find and manage
* Skilled and unskilled labor pools that can be tapped to build factories and farms, staff labs, deploy as soldiers and spies, and (if they become unhappy) rebel
* Create colonies to extend the reach of the player's nation
* Direct research to learn new tech and build advanced ships and weaponry

The game will start in June. Game turns are on a two-week cycle. Players will upload their orders to Wraith's web site. Turn reports can be downloaded from the same web site. Initial turns will be hand moderated, but I will eventually have the engine process orders automatically. 


Feel free to ask questions or DM me if you're interested in playtesting.

I'd like to invite everyone here to join Flock Games and become a player in a new, yet-to-be-created play-by-email game that is collaboratively designed by the players.

Flock Games hosts collaboratively-created, free, play-by-email games where the rules are defined by the players. Each turn, players are allowed to submit new or revised game rules for inclusion into the rulebook. All proposed changes to the game are reviewed and voted on by the players and may or not be approved for inclusion.

A Flock Game begins with a basic set of concepts and rules around a theme. Each turn, players submit new and revised rules and the games evolve every turn, hopefully into an immersive experience that is fun to play. All Flock Games include an evolving ruleset. Each game is a journey.

The plan is to launch a series of game concepts under the Flock Games name over the course of the coming years. We host one game at a time.

How it works:

1) The players collaboratively pick a theme for the new game. All players at the start of a new game submit one noun (any noun: a person, place, or thing, this can any proper noun or common noun) via email to the gamemaster for voting. All nouns are posted in the voting channel on the Flock Games Discord. Players vote on these nouns. Any noun that has a majority of votes based on the current player count is included into the game concept.

2) The gamemaster then creates a basic outline of the game using the approved nouns and posts the initial rulebook with a single order command - the ability to name something in the game (this could be characters, units, items, whatever the game is focused on). Once posted, a majority of players need to approve the rulebook or the game won’t start until it has been revised to the majority approval of the players.

3) The gamemaster sends out the first turn results to players. This is the setup turn. At this point, all players can do is name things in the game.

4) Each turn, players submit orders via email to the gamemaster. With these orders, each player is allowed to submit one new rule or revised rule for voting with their orders. This could be a new order type, a change to an existing rule, or some other aspect of the game that they believe will improve the experience in some way. Anything goes. Players can even propose a meta-rule such as the turnaround time, game deadlines, the format of how orders are submitted, or even who is the gamemaster of the current game!

5) The gamemaster will post all revised rule changes to the Flock Games Discord for voting. By the end of voting, any rules with a majority of votes will be included into the new rulebook for use on the following turn.

6) Turns continue until a majority of players vote to end the game and start a new one. Any player is allowed to propose a vote to end the game, but the vote requires majority approval of the motion before the actual vote to end the game is approved.

Interested? Join us on our Discord server:

https://discord.gg/QWE9t42XbE

Players can still participate without Discord (email playflockgames@gmail.com), but they won't be allowed to vote on new or revised rules without the use of Discord.

Since I get a few questions about the design, I thought I would share several of the components -

Core - This is a group of C# programs using Entity Framework and connecting to a SQL Server database.  Core does the setup work for the turns, cycle processing, validation, processing, senior turns, market updates, combat and the emailing of completed turns. 

Maps - This uses an off the shelf free editor - Tiled (https://www.mapeditor.org/). To make this work with our system, we built a C# Windows application (MapSync) that uses the output file from Tiled (in JSON format) and displays it.  You can then save the map into our SQL database.  MapSync allows us to pull the map back from the database, and display it.  You can also change the map Icon set.  We also integrated the map logic into the Core to allow construction projects to update the map in the database as players complete projects.  Next step is to generate the map automatically and update the stored version.

Data Entry - We currently have two methods:
1.  Through the Web site.  We use a WordPress site with a purchased set of tools to allow a fill in the blank form for players to input their turns.  
2.  Through an Excel spreadsheet.  We provide a template you can download from the Web or Discord server.  You create your actions, type them into the Excel spreadsheet (which error checks them) and then you upload the Excel file using the web site.

Reports - are generated through SSRS (a sub-system of SQL Server Database).  I created another C# program that generates the PDF file containing the turn and emails it to the player's email on file through an SMTP service.

Money - is collected through the web site through a PayPal application; but we are looking at other options, such as Stripe.

KnightGuild now has its own forum here:

https://playbymail.net/mybb/forumdisplay.php?fid=48