in an infamous PBM game which was subsequently wound up following the investigation over the Hungerford Massacre.
OK, you can't just leave that one hanging, Geronimo! Details, man, details!
I guess not
I was involved, initially as a player and later as an illustrator and GM, for the PBM game Further Into Fantasy. The central tenet of the game was that you played, essentially, yourself, transposed to a parallel world where magic and psionics and the like were quite normal. So each turn you wrote/sent to your GM would typically be in the form of "I'll try to do this, I'll attempt that," etc.
In return the GM would respond with something along the lines of "You do this, your spell does that," etc - thereby continuing to reinforce the sense of immersion on the narrative.
Okay, so: each month there'd be a list published of the top ten players as scored by GMs across the various campaigns. People were encourage to interact with one another in the real world too, by way of letters, postcards, etc (obviously this was before this newfangled internerd stuff). All of this served to make the game intensely involving. Players would publish public insults and challenges in the game newsletters and raise armies to fight one another in game. So far so good.
My character ascended to become head of an order of avenging knights for Horus; each knight took the name of a mythological or legendary hound to signify their sworn intentions to hunt down the enemies of Horus. My chosen name was Fenris. One of the regular top ten players was a character called Phodius Tei. Played by a guy called Michael Ryan. He/his character allied himself with the game's evil factions (Temple of Set) - and so was directly on the hunting list for my character and guild. I've still got some of the letters Ryan sent me saying how he was going to hunt me down, blow my head off, stake me out for the crows, etc.
Suddenly the Hungerford Massacre's in the news
Wiki link and CID are investigating the offices of the company who run the Further into Fantasy game. Everyone involved in running the game, and every player whose address is in their database, is questioned and/or checked out by the police. Turns out that the last turn sent to Ryan by his GM finished with the words (and I'm paraphrasing here as I can't remember exactly) "You stand on the hilltop, looking down at the village as the sun starts to set. Your rifle is loaded and ready in your hand. You know what to do...."
Needless to say, in the glare of publicity, FiF collapsed. All their computers and paperwork were seized. The guys who owned the company lost their house as they couldn't pay the mortgage without the game to bring in money. I lost half a dozen pieces of original A3 artwork. And 16 people lost their lives.
Nevertheless I'd made a lot of good friends and contacts within the PBM and games industry and wasn't about to completely disassociate myself from it. So when we came up with our own first PBM later that summer, Fenris Games seemed a logical choice. It's been my business trading name for 21 years now, and I do tend to forget that not everyone knows the background story, after so many years of explaining it in the past
