An almost ancient play-by-email game I made back in BBS days. Yes, it predates the World Wide Web.
In SpellMaster, every player was a wizard and they were organized into councils. Players would roleplay their travels and adventures during which they could gain new spells and new mana sources. When meeting others, there was a duel mechanic to resolve the conflict.
The game had a number of interesting ideas, such as using hashes to identify spells, which meant each spell had a code that players could trade with each other, while the hashes were too complex to be guessed. The website had a collection of commonly known spells.
The game was great fun and was played by a small group of people for several years. After some time, I decided to add a small strategy element to it, so that things in the background - kings going to war, cities besieged, villages saved or razed - could be played out as a separate strategy game. That game eventually became much bigger than its origin. That game was BattleMaster.
SpellMaster eventually tappered off.
SpellMaster II #
Years later, I tried to revive the game as SpellMaster II. I wrote about half the rules, but it didn’t find much interest.
SpellMaster III #
Even more years later, I tried again with SpellMaster III. The website is now disfunctional, but was actually developed further than SM2.
Who knows, maybe one day I’ll revisit the concept of the game.