Over/Under Diary: Day 01

Over/Under was a Discord-based megagame that began on October 14, 2025, organized by Sean McCoy and Sam Sorensen in support of the multi-creator crowdfunding campaign Mothership Month. The modules and games crowdfunded during this time were all connected to the official Mothership module A Pound of Flesh, and creators were able to use settings and details from the module in their own work.

When users joined Over/Under they became a player-denizen of Prospero's Dream – the giant 40km space station that is the canon setting of A Pound of Flesh. Players are assigned a random living block, given 100 credits, and told that every day 10 credits will be deducted for an oxygen tax. Denizens must find a way to earn money or perish in the choke. 

There are six factions on the Dream, each with separate (secret) goals for the game; the Golyanovo II Bratva (the mob, a secret and clandestine organization that taps you for entry), the Local 32819L (teamsters who aim for equality among all its members), the Solarian Church (polytheistic peacekeepers who worship truth and light), the Tempest Company (mercenaries, heavies, and spies), the Canyonheavy Collective (hackers and coders who use tokens as leverage, colloquially known as Cowboys), and the Stratemeyer Syndicate (evil megacorp hoping to take over the Dream). Denizens can apply for faction membership in order to earn an income or they can hustle in the Dream to make the O2 tax. 

Each faction has a hierarchical structure that consists of two or three bosses and various under-bosses. While it was conceived of as a boardwork-focused wargame, many the bosses acted more like Game Masters, helping lead their faction in big picture and large scale mechanical movements like factory production, product movement, troop assignations, and colluding with other bosses. Bosses also worked within the game to present members of their faction with things to do in the Dream, creating initiatives, roleplay scenarios, and dispensing resources. This was not in the mission brief, but seemed a natural effect of acting as authority figures on the Dream.

Two days before the game began, Sorensen approached me and asked if I’d like to be a Boss. I accepted, and was assigned to be a leader of the Solarian Church. I chose to be the High Gardener Otso, and was joined by Caleb Zane Huett (Triangle Agency) as Metropolitan Sampsa, and Benjamin as Pontiff Kuutar. Our goals were simple, and, all things considered, rather benevolent. Hold onto the Farm. Convert over half of the denizens to the Solarian faith. Avoid the deaths of our cardinals. 

And then the game began. With over 600 players joining in just the first few days, Over/Under was a firehose of playfulness. I recognized immediately that it would be impossible to create an accurate record of the game or to fully describe the wonder, wild, weirdness that was immediately occurring. I began to keep an above-the-table diary, and for the next four weeks, Rascal will be publishing one entry a day. 

Because of the nature of Over/Under I know that I can't cover everything that happened. I know I'll repeat myself, and I hope you'll forgive me. Despite that, what I can do is give people an idea of the scope and scale as a boss-level player and a peek into the storylines that I played out, followed, and encouraged. Everyone who played O/U will have different stories, and the plural perspective of the game encouraged a constant reshaping of the canon. Otso got into shit regularly, and because I'm a storygame player at heart, you'll definitely get some play-by-plays of his escapades.

Thank you all for coming along with me on this journey.

Long live the Dream.

DAY ONE : UNRESTRAINED, UNMITIGATED, UNFETTERED

October 14, 2025: The first day was a blur. Nearly 600 people joined in the first twenty-four hours, each one scrambling for footing as they tried to figure out... what the fuck was going on. Characters occurred naturally and immediately, encouraged by the fact that the bosses were all "in-character" and conversation was the most reliable roleplaying lever for everyone to pull.

The rules, what few of them applied to the denizens, became secondary. For many people, their only limit was Discord itself. The medium became the greatest mechanic in the game. The other mechanic that denizens had access to was a credit system that was automated through the O/U bot, Zhenya. This meant that the first thing players did was establish economics and get more money. And, at the beginning at least, the most straightforward way to get money was by joining a faction.

The Solarian Church is unique among factions in that you could be a member of the faithful and still be associated with another faction. The Church did not have automatic income for members, so while the gratis 100cr would last people 10 days in the Dream, many immediately sought employment elsewhere. 

(However, within hours mutual aid associations popped up to keep players away from the Choke. The O2 Kitchen and the De-Oxegenated Solidarity Network were immediately established to help collect funds and disseminate them to the squalid among the Dream.) 

Despite the lack of incentive, those who chose to “/convert” (type the command that triggered conversion via discord bot) began creating art in the Sanctuary — literal, physical art of the church’s nascent doctrine, (called the Solarian Amalgest) which was developed by players in real time. 

The church bosses were allowed to elevate faithful to Cardinal status — voting members of the church who also receive a wage. As our ranks grew we decided to create a mini-game out of the mechanics of Cardinalship. We established a forum where would-be cardinals would campaign for votes – 9 votes made them eligible for elevation. 

Other factions saw this as a way to gain a foothold in the church. They mobilized their own members to convert, support a candidate, and gain cardinalship. We didn’t see this as a problem; it increased our faithful, and it was fairly obvious when someone was getting inflated votes. Speculation was social currency, and mysteriously rich mystic sanctuary was an excellent draw. This was a game, and people were playing. We did have to be careful; information is one of the greatest currencies in the Dream, and when we selected someone to be a cardinal they received access to gameplay documents that exposed our goals, weaknesses, and income. All information that could be used to destroy the Church, assassinate the bosses and cardinals, and take over our money making source, the Tree. 

The Tree, it needs to be said, is the only source of drugs in the Dream. For every five cardinals assigned to the Tree, we received one container of drugs. This container, should we get it to the (Local-controlled) docks through Bratva-controlled territory, would net the Church an eye-watering three million credits. So, despite the fears of infiltration, we selected eight cardinals. We assigned five cardinals to work the Tree, the other three to security. This required nothing of the players; they were resources for the Bosses to use to pull levers.

And then, within the first few hours of playing the game I found myself answering questions from a reporter with the Dreamcatcher — an in-world, independent publication — who had gotten word that the Syndicate was using our voting based system to infiltrate our upper ranks. After collaborating with my other two bosses, we settled on a pair of answers that can best be summarized as “the lion does not concern himself with the fucking corpos.” I then asked about ad space and because I am in the business of supporting local news, I paid for a full page ad and design services. 

It’s worth noting that the people yearn for journalism. There are multiple sources of news — and gossip — in the Dream. The Dispatch came out a few hours before the Dreamcatcher. FINTECH reports on finances. There are private investigators and membership reports. The information economy is booming on the Dream. 

We also quickly realized that as the only source of drugs, our passive income — 50kcr/day — was one of the highest in the Dream. As money was not one of our win conditions, we immediately set out to spend it as fast as possible and told the cardinals that their job was to create minigames for the denizens of the dream through which we could funnel money. Pontiff Kuutar developed a public arts fund. This resulted in incredible proposals including one for an interstellar mind freak for Invictus Sol, pictured above.

This was when the three bosses really put our heads together. If we played our cards right, we would be able to put the church on the path to doing “good”: giving away money, funding the arts, and creating a space for culture and peace to flourish. We had an opportunity to change the game, moving it away from capital and violence and towards something more like community and care. Our goals were such that this wasn’t just a lofty ideal, but a realistic strategy. 

We wouldn’t be crusaders. We were going to be hippies. And everyone was going to know it.

And… maybe… we were going to use that reputation as bumbling goofballs who are just happy to be here to our advantage. The Church didn’t come to roleplay, we came to win.