Victory

[Victory]

Thanks for the kind words.

This web site was just a walk down memory lane for me. I can remember all the crazy times and then the boom years followed by the convention when I picked up a bunch of Magic (alpha) cards. That was a turning point for PBM when Adventures By Mail decided to get into the Magic card craze and their PBM games suffered a bit as they found the collectible card game bubble and discovered that the niche of PBM was so small compared to the CCG wave. I think quite a few other PBM companies saw that same light and had to look hard within themselves to decide if the love of the hobby was worth skipping out on financial rewards.

And after that slowed down a little the internet took off and the big companies with large art departments were able to get their subscription based games with huge advertising budgets and economies of scale that the little shops had difficulty competing with.

Your website has me wondering where my box in the basement is that contains all my StarMaster, etc materials. I wrote so many newsletters for SuperNova and I think I still have a bunch of the old Schubel and Son newsletters too somewhere down there. That was such a long time ago...

Ironically enough, I've never played a game of Magic. It looks intriguing, as many CCG card games do, but I never took the bait.

I also never played a Schubel and Son PBM game. I still recall being aware of them, as a PBM company, back when play by mail was still a relatively new thing to me.

Schubel and Son were the big thing along with Flying Buffalo way back when. FBI ran their games well and priced them fairly while Schubel seemed to run the megagames that had hundreds of people in them (Tribes of Crane, StarMaster, etc) and started the price gouging that scarred the industry. They found that they could charge customers an arm and a leg and did not hesitate to do so. Playing in a game with 200 people per galaxy and alliances declaring war against other 30 person alliances that spanned the universe were so epic that people were willing to pay for a while.

S&S finally crossed the line when they charged the defender in a battle a fee to receive their battle report (ostensibly to cover their costs of printing and mailing) and started a brief flurry of players teaming up on someone with multiple tiny scout ship attacks just to generate a fee twenty times that would break the real life budget of a player and force them to drop from the game. Looking over some of those old game advertisements that refer to 'hidden fees' and such refer directly to this S&S practice (movement orders cost extra, production sheets cost extra, etc).

The Magic craze was so big for a time. It carried the company to the heights that they could buy TSR and take over Dungeons and Dragons. At that point every PBM company was just stunned that what was such a small company at the prior convention had taken off like a rocket and in a manner of a few years had eclipsed and acquired the company that probably every founder of a PBM company had idolized and started their RPG hobby with.

Adventures By Mail jumped onto that craze as a distribution dealer and rode it while shedding some of their games (like Beyond the Stellar Empire which ended up being taken over by Rolling Thunder Games for quite a few years) that required manpower and did not return anywhere near their investment compared to the CCG craze. That is how RTG started running BSE and how Thad Catone joined Rolling Thunder for a while. BSE had such a history and following, but it was doomed due to the sheer amount of manpower it required to process a turn -- you just can't charge that much anymore. Thad was a major player in BSE who agreed to come run BSE as a moderator at Rolling Thunder Games in an attempt to save the game. Another of the people that had the passion for PBM games.

Wow. It has been so long since I talked PBM to anyone. It feels strange.