Living the Dream
Life Within Prospero Station; A Summary of the Over/Under Game Experiment
Background: Tam Ziyi, crew aboard a multitude of ships, a general dumbass, prone to violence and all sorts of substance abuse, generally wants to be held. Fluttered from station to station as long as they’ve been able to, new denizen aboard The Dream that’s gonna be on the grind to pay their O2 tax. That’s the sum of what I was working with when I plopped them into the massive ongoing experiment known as Over/Under; every moment since then has been a surprise and a pleasure.
For those unaware: Over/Under. Massive play by post in the Mothership setting of Prospero. Roll up a character (or don’t, no character creation rules here) and strap in.
Some background on myself: been playing tabletop rpgs my whole adult life and started roleplaying in adolescence (cards on the table, I cut my teeth on a map game roleplay on a forum), it’s been a pretty major hobby of mine for a long long while. Along with this: Dwarf Fortress. Big fan. This last bit isn’t a total non sequitur as it might seem: Dwarf Fortress’ appeal, at least for myself, is the interplay between the player and the Dwarfs under their control. The dwarves have an extensive simulated personality, capable of not just having wants and needs and desires, but even forming memories and associations that essentially project PTSD upon their little digital minds. They have preferred professions, accommodations, and are more than capable of desiring relations; they’ll form stories of their own without the player so much as lifting a muscle.
The Cataphract system that underlies the whole Over/Under experiment is very much a wargame and resource management affair at its core, with only bosses having access to the macro mechanical levers that decide assassinations and the fate of factions. However, beneath all of that, there are hundreds of scrambling players with their own wants needs and desires out of the experience; some wish to rise in the ranks and seize the reins of power for peace upon Prospero (or to subject it to their own whims), others are content running hustles and scams and rugpulls, you may find a whole lot in various fighting pits betting away some of the currency, a few artists may be hidden away drawing real life commissions for honest-to-god monopoly money, and a plethora are in the pits of romance and desire.
In short: Over/Under’s managed to capture a very specific and unique manner of play wherein there’s multiple layers of play that just occasionally intermingle with one-another; and even within this, there’s various degrees to which several concurrent forms of play interact with one another, encompassing the full spectrum from storygamers to OSR diehards to wargamers and everything else under the spectrum. I, for instance, have gotten my character in an honest-to-god dungeon crawl, the setting being the ruins of a corporate office (the previous ownership being a faction that’s since been utterly eviscerated); all the while, someone has effectively commandeered a bar for herself and convinced all the other faction bosses of this, a church member is running and sponsoring digital horse races, fighting pits are forming and are using anything from spreadsheets to an esoteric math based off of the Set card game to determine winners, men are kissing and fucking in a ramen booth, a mime is coming and going into the various businesses and shops and bars, the mercenary squads are sequestered away and continuing to train (Tam continues to receive apology texts for missed obligations from one of them), and the station as a whole is reeling from a catastrophe that occurred entirely because of a singular person’s timing for roleplay that spiraled into a several hundred person unofficial event that even involved several of the leading faction bosses.
What makes this all so unique, I believe, is the fact that all of these being piled onto-and-alongside-one-another means that you can shift from layer to layer and along any given layer as you see fit; there are essentially no rules for player characters, remember, so one day you can be deep in the fighting pits and the next you’re at a private ball wing manning for a guy that’s gonna become one of the richest and most powerful men on station; in the process, forming a rivalry with the faction boss the guy’s chasing to begin with, all because you dared to love the same girl. Or you can ignore that- anything that happens on the station, you reckon, can be something you learn of after the fact. You don’t need the inside gossip, you don’t need the finer details and inside scoops, you just want to go ahead and be a random goon who hangs around petty criminals and goes to bars where you proceed to smoke “the strongest, nastiest weed you’ve ever seen,” passing around “a toke from the darkest depths” that “makes you uncomfortable and yet in awe”; you feel that “it burns and soothes and it’s also pretty mid.”
If the way I’m describing it comes across as more of a fever dream than a coherent statement and analysis of the events and circumstances of play that’re present within Over/Under, that’s because, baby, those are the conditions of play; you’re subjected to a constant stream of information at every waking hour of every waking day as people move and groove and go about everything I’ve said, you’ll be roped into situations that you didn’t even realize the game was accommodating, there’ll be a hundred hundred plotlines which you’ll have no idea ever happened, there’ll be constantly a new stream of people you’ll realize you’ve literally never talked to, you are in essence living in the modern age of social media but simultaneously shrunken down and inflated beyond any reasonable sense of comprehensibility, you’ll just need to go with the flow and hope that you can find a place in the never-ending torrent.
Two weeks later and two to go: I’ve had my third cigarette for the night and I’ve sipped the last of a bottle of homemade mead (tart cherry, homemade vanilla extract); Tam Ziyi has a girlfriend and is still harboring strong feelings for another. At their core they remain a dumbass who’s prone to violence and mixing up metaphors horrifically, they’ve managed to claw up a few creds to their name, and can call themselves a friend of several faction bosses (none of whom are the bosses of their own faction); they’re seeking the infinitely bad cigarette in the depths of the abandoned corporate offices, they’ve become a champion fighter and are going in for yet another go in the pits, and they frankly don’t give a shit about the wider politics and games that’re hovering right over their head.
At least, not until someone they love, someone they care about, someone they hold dear and dear to their heart is hurt; death comes for all, no different within The Dream than anywhere else.