After/Over/Under
Much has been written about Over/Under, what it was and how it worked, what happened and who was there. So I’ll spare you a repeat. This retrospective is about what it meant to me.
Someone smarter than me called Over/Under “RPG Woodstock” and I think that’s right.
It was a month long festival of improvised free Live Text Roleplaying backed by the ever present (occasionally realised) threat of a wargame; it was mass delusion, hysteria, dogs and cats living together, the fruitful clash and collaboration of distinct cultures of play - OSR, LARP, storygames, MUD, and “what the hell even is this?” - and it was a great leveller where a nobody gamer like me could suddenly find themselves roleplaying a high stakes scene with a luminary of indie tabletop RPGs, with no idea where we’d go next.
The one way I’ll disagree with some of the other takes on O/U out there is that it can’t happen twice. A big part of what made the game so incredible was that most of us didn’t know what we were doing, even as we did it, for most of the month we played (to say nothing of its unprecedented scale). Incredible games like Baseline Drift and Arbour Point Antiquity can be worthy successors and inheritors to O/U but we as a community can’t go back to not knowing; we will, by necessity, play differently.
Without anyone knowing what it would become beforehand, it was a miracle that O/U worked out the way it did.
This hobby is magic; through talking, writing, art and play we breathe life into worlds and people which are both ephemeral and real. When Sam Sorensen and Sean McCoy pressed GO on Over/Under they unleashed a spell upon us, with effects that will continue to ripple outward across roleplaying game communities for years to come.
(For readability, I’ll save all my thank you’s for the end.)
Before/Over/Under
When Mothership Month 2025 arrived I was at a very low ebb of my activity in the roleplaying games hobby. Life was good... but my hobby time had degraded down to a single 5e campaign (online, and with increasingly irregular scheduling) in which I was a player, and a solo journaling campaign of Mythic Bastionland that I’d been tinkering with.
Life was good! New parenthood, kiddo learning to crawl and play with her toys, but I’d given up on running games (concluding my Mothership and Heart: the City Beneath campaigns well ahead of kiddo’s birth) and with no prospect of renewing either group. People moved on, I was (rightfully) too busy with my family, and I wasn’t in touch with anyone with similar tastes in indie RPGs.
Then Mothership Month 2025 hit, and I happened to be in the RTFM podcast Discord server where several game soon-to-be faction leaders were talking about this Over/Under thing...
So I joined...
And then...
Over/In It/Under
I was Junie Briccs. CHC Cowboy.
I don’t say “I played as...” because by the end of that month I was living it. The bleed between character and player was beyond anything I’ve experienced, and likely will ever experience. I was not playing safe, and I don’t regret that. Each day I dived ever deeper. For a whole month.
By the time I was lying in bed, I’d be so wired from play that I took to listening to extremely dry and technical academic podcasts about the Byzantine Empire at a low volume just so I could slow down my thoughts enough that I could sleep.
The tears first started to flow when ZeroFlee agreed to draw a commission as a favour, so that I could gift another player (and myself, let’s be real) with a memento. The fact that someone I didn’t really know would make something so lovely from half a world away, entirely because we were players on the same team, so that other people in the game could have celebrate their play, rocked me to my core.
Before that moment... Junie Briccs got up to all kinds of shit:
- Played a shitload of Set to “mine tokens” for CHC.
- Fed disinformation to the various diegetic in-world newspapers that players had started.
- Ran a stall to get new players started on earning credits through token mining.
- Photoshopped “Cyber Pets” and sold them at Arachnia’s “Black Market”.
- Spent a lot of time hanging out (sometimes serving breakfast) Marlowe’s Rest, the “Cowboy Bar” run by the legendary Hans Blix.
- Recruited a few spies on the inside other factions. Most notably: Miss Monet Grey, an O/U star.
- Worked my way up to middle management “Capo” rank in CHC; forever indebted to my old boss Denk Fontaine, a great leader in the game and an even better person out of game.
- Collaborated with Tech Support Ludwig to run the most fucked up drinking game of all time at Marlowe’s. Fucked up drinks (Crème di m’Ant) by Ludwig, the Set derived in-game resolution mechanic by me.
- Became wholesome pen pals with the owner of my “Cyber Kitty”.
- Schemed, strategised, contingency planned with the CHC management...
...aaand that’s about when things went REALLY crazy for Junie. I wont replay the whole story - if you know, you know.
After/Over/Under
As a direct consequence of Over/Under, I have:
- set up and run a regular, ongoing online OSR-ish RPG table (currently playing a Mothership: Wages of Sin sandbox) with a lovely group of people who I feel have become real friends over the last 10-12 months.
- been running a play-by-post campaign of Mythic Bastionland for 11 months, taking that Realm I played solo and sharing it with 7 or 8 players at a time.
- started this blog... which I should work on more frequently.
- become a player in THREE weekly lunch-hour campaigns;
- Troika
- “Hot Snack Island”
- “Dolmenwolves”
- been a player in Vanitera 450 for almost a year. Here’s hoping my girl ‘Echoes in the Valley’ makes it to the end alongside her beloved ‘Saga’.
- got to play as a faction leader in Baseline Drift; ‘Vox Veritas’.
- contributed dungeon rooms/keys to a rad community zine.
- been in community with loads of wonderful creatives and players, across too many Discord servers.
- played games and interacted with the creators of work I am a huge fan of, and would never have thought to even attempt to contact before O/U.
- developed a clear and obvious addiction to my phone and Discord that I didn’t have before, and should work harder to kick...
- realised that I am a classic undiagnosed ADHD adult (and it’s a shame the UK’s process for care and treatment is seriously bullshit about it).
- added a “they” to my pronouns. Many such cases.
What’s remarkable isn’t my story, not in and of itself. The TRULY WILD thing is that this is one example of how a hobbyist’s life was changed by Over/Under, among hundreds and hundreds of others - and so many of those stories are far more profound than mine.
Shout out and thank you
to Evangeline, Kaylee, Jack, Zuzanna, Markus, Christian, Hawk, Mark W, Toby, Kris, to all the Knights of Canterly in my Mythic Bastionland Play-by-Post campaign (past and present), all the CanyonHeavy Cowboys, the Seafolk of Vanitera, the entertainers of Vox Omnia Rex, the Baying Hogs, the referees who make the mega-games happen, the moderators of the servers, Sam and the whole team behind Over/Under, and to everyone I’ve played games and connected with over the last 12 months.
The time we give each other is a very special thing. It always passes... but that which we give away so freely makes us richer than we can know.
D/AE forever
Best fucking game ever. Bar none.
