From mid-October to mid-November, I played a very large, play by post, discord based, Mothership-themed political/war game. Most of this newsletter will be about that. First, the not Over/Under part.

The Train Heist

I posted a free, ashcan version of The Sierra Express, an adventure for Knights of the Road (an Into the Odd-like game) about a heist on a train. There are also several factions with their own agendas on that train, and a lot of chaos for players to either contend with or get involved in.

I’m considering developing this game further, maybe doing some crowdfunding or something, at the very least paying an editor. Let me know if this is something that interests you (I guess in the comments on itch or something).

I also wrote a blog post about my personal Appendix N as part of an Appendix N blog thing. It was fun to reflect on - a lot of my inspiration comes not from media but from like this cool tree I saw as a kid. Maybe less useful to other people than other Appendix Ns, but sometimes blog posts are just fun exercises for yourself that you happen to share with the world.

Over/Under

I spent most of a month, from early October to early November, playing Over/Under, as Alcyone. I have a lot I still have to write about it; I still haven’t written the blog post that describes what I did in that game. I started out as one of the about 1000 regular players (called denizens), joined one of the factions (the Union), got very involved in the politics of the game, plotted against the Union leadership, ran for office, got elected President of the Union, solved a murder mystery, and then alongside every other remaining faction, won the game.

I wrote up some small parts of it here:

• First of all, a list of everything I could find that was written or made for this game.

• Over/Under as a Cold War Game: Not quite a war game, but a politics game about teetering on the edge of war. Also a discussion of what it means to play in character, and the role of violence in a game where violence is possible but mostly doesn’t happen.

• The Death of Sanyang part 1, part 2 and part 3, the climactic last act of the story of my character Alcyone, focusing on the mysterious death of my predecessor and investigating what happened. This tells you something about what it was like playing as a boss, but was a tiny part of my experience i the game a a whole.

• A collection of rough photoshops and occasionally higher effort art I did for this game. This and a transcript of some of the discord logs near the end gives you a small taste of what it was like being a denizen in this game.

I still have a lot more I want to write. I want to write the complete story of my character, and a timeline from the Union perspective, for one. That will take a lot more time though.

In progress

• Going to revisit the train game, above.

• I’m running an extremely abbreviated game of Cataphracts, mostly as a tutorial for a full game of Cataphracts that I’m in, but which might be interesting in its own right and which I might do more of later.

• I have a very last minute idea for the Onegeon jam where you make a single room, we’ll see if I get it done in time.

• I’m making a digital version of Procedures to Discover the Path Ahead. It’s not a direct one to one translation, and it’s going very slowly, but I think it’ll be cool when it’s done (and free).