How to find an ending in Over/Under

For the past month, I have been playing as High Gardener Otso, the spiritual leader of the Solarian Church, in the Discord-based Mothership game, Over/Under. This began as a promotion for Mothership Month, and was based on designer Sam Sorensen’s 50-person play-by-post megagame Cataphracts. Over/Under takes place about fifty years before the events described in the Mothership supplement A Pound of Flesh, and is set in a canon location, the massive space station Prospero’s Dream. 

While this game was originally pitched to me as a megagame that, according to Sorensen when he slid into my DMs, would take “thirty minutes to an hour” daily, O/U became something much more intense and emergent than anyone had originally planned. O/U ended its month-long experimental tenure not as a tactical Cataphracts-like game, but rather as an Discord-based, play-by-post live action roleplaying game where the meta of wargame itself and the faction’s win conditions relied heavily on pure roleplaying arcs that developed organically across the Dream. 

While I have a full write up planned — I kept a diary of the day-to-day of the game — right now I want to talk specifically about the way that O/U ended, while it’s still raw and I keep picking at the scab. Sorensen had let us all know that the game would officially end at 9 AM, EST (also called “station time,”) and that he would be closing down megagame game orders at 7 AM. So for just about two hours, there would be no possibility that anyone could engage in the larger mechanical wargame aspect of O/U, which meant it was a roleplay free-for-all until The All-Seeing Eye (Reese Carter, author of the Dead in the Water module) began to remove permissions from the server. 

In order to leverage the reigning meta of the station (Gay Romance, more on this later) to achieve our faction’s win condition (convert over half the station to the Solarian faith), Otso officiated a Quaker-inspired wedding ceremony between his son, Sampsa (Caleb Zane Huett, Triangle Agency), the machiavellian peace-broker prince of the Solarian Church, and the game-breaking, player-favorite Canyonheavy hacker Big_Dog Beefstink (Luke Gearing, A Pound of Flesh) in a part of the server only accessible when one uses the in-game bot, zhenya, to convert. (This bot was still on during this 2-hour story-only lull.) It was an exceptionally sweet moment that ended with Sampsa unexpectedly marrying the entire Canyonheavy Collective hacker group due to some aggressive last-minute faction referenda helped along by Demiurge Seraphin (Chris Bisette, Wretched & Alone), driven by a dedication to both discretion and the bit. 

With less than twenty minutes left until O/U shut down, the wedding ended in chaos as the cowboys rushed the grooms, dramatically revealing the white wedding outfits some of them had on underneath disguises. The whole wedding party, invitees, and those put in the “chatter” thread for audience members, then went to the Canyonheavy cowboy bar, Marlowe’s Rest, to party, the fiction transposing elegantly over the New Years-style countdown clock everyone could see as they continued to post and play; a reminder that any single message might be the last they send on the Dream.