This is going to be very very very long, so strap in.

This post is about an incident that occured in Over/Under, a Mothership MMORPG run entirely in Discord. If you don’t care about that, safely ignore this post.

Over/Under is still ongoing. This post may contain actionable intel. In addition, this is all from my perspective, perception, and mostly publicly-available posts on the server. I may get things wrong or portray things in the wrong light. In this post, I am not doing so as a manipulation tactic or any attempt to push a narrative or agenda. I am simply fallible.

Ready?

Over/Under takes place on the Prospero’s Dream, a large cyberpunk space station that’s the subject of Tuesday Knight Games’ A Pound of Flesh for Mothership. I’ve owned this module since 2020 and never read it. (I have opened it and looked at it.) One of the appeals of the module is that, despite MoSh’s horror alien universe, there are basically no alien monsters in it. (It turns out the worst monster of all is man.) This is why I have never read it in depth. They are also crowdfunding a new box set that expands on the Dream, so check that out.

Denizens of the Dream can basically only take a few actions relevant to the discord bot that runs Over/Under. They can transfer money (credits) to other players, as well as tokens and shares (different currency related to other factions). They can join or leave the church (one of the factions) freely on their own. They can change their living status (ranging from squalor to decadent) which changes how much money you spend per day, and they can change what block of the Dream they live in (move). This is important because apparently, faction bosses can take action to assassinate someone (remove them from the game), but they require your address to do so. You can also join and leave factions, but you need to be manually approved for the factions and they have various rules for doing so. Each faction pays you a daily salary, however.

Denizens of the Dream are subject to The O2 Tax or the Oxygen Tax. 10 credits per day is taken out of your account. When you join the game, you are given 100cr to do what you like. If you do nothing, this will last for 10 days until you cannot pay the O2 tax. When you cannot pay the O2 tax, you get sent to The Choke. This gives you the Deoxygenated role in the Discord, which cuts off your access to all the other parts of the Dream (upside channels) but does give you access to the Choke channels. (This is very important later.)

PART ONE: MY TIMELINE

I think the best way to do this is to just outline everything I did up until the time of the incident. Then I will compare against other data. This first part is basically going to be a diary of my actions on the Dream for the first 9 days or so. It’s gonna get kind of personal, so maybe skip it if you’re just interested in the incidents when they occur, or the fallout.

I joined Over/Under on October 16th, 6:33 local. The game has already been going on for two days. The first thing I do is join the Union, because I do not want to be deoxygenated.

I mostly wanted to observe. This kind of thing could take up all my time and ruin my life if I let it. (You are reading this post, which is all the evidence you need that it has.) But you can’t really observe without playing, and once I had access, there was no way I wasn’t going to basically end up interacting with some people.

8.5 hours later I ask my first question about going into the Choke.

Why would someone want to go into the Choke? Eventually, for my guy, it became clear. By this point, multiple people had already gone to the Choke for being unable to pay the O2 tax, including Babel the Android, who allegedly did so as part of a protest against the tax. Babel, being an android, does not even need oxygen, yet were taken away for being unable to pay the tax anyway. People referred to the deoxygenated as dead. For some, vigils and memorials–funerals–were held. And, my guy could not simply believe that being deoxygenated meant you were dead. Those people down there were alive and well, and they deserved freedom as much as you or I did.

But, my guy is leaving on November 9th. He’s got a ticket out. He’s only on a stop between two jobs. This isn’t his home. At this point, I had not even named my guy. I was still just Onslaught. Eventually, once things became serious, I changed my display name and named my character–Berwick, after the PS2 game Berwick Saga, which I have not played and know nothing about (and which does not even have its own Wikipedia page) but constantly reference due to a Tim Rogers tweet.

At 5am on 10/17 someone asks why I am still living in squalor despite being Union. I say, I just joined, I haven’t been paid yet. I also used to deadhead on ships instead of androids, so I don’t need a lot of lifestyle expenses. They say, you can’t be walking around being union and being in squalor. It makes the union look bad. I’ll pay you 50cr to change your living status right now. I say, what’s the catch?

They tell me the catch. I just have to do something and then they’ll pay up. I say, no problem. I do that thing, get my money, upgrade my lifestyle.

I immediately turned around trying to sell the information that I was bribed to perform a service. I was able to obscure the identity enough and sell it to someone for 100cr. They weren’t happy with the tip and we agreed to part ways. (Sorry Aggie. By the way, it was Juniper, not like it matters now.)

While hanging out, I participate in some threads. Each thread is like its own location or a private conversation. I hang out in the Wet Room, a place where the Mop Squad dumped 20 buckets of water. I go to the lesbian bookstore and ask if there is any Luke Gearing material. I do a few union jobs, which consist of doing reaction emojis and heavy physical labour related roleplay scenarios, literally just for fun. Sometimes these jobs pay out a little bit of dough, too. (I do these because my fantasy is to perform physical labour in an environment where my contributions are valued and fairly compensated.) Routinely, I ask if anyone has been to the Choke and back yet.

9am local on 10/17, I get frustrated by some repeated weird messages being beamed in to public spaces.

Some of these even get announced by Sam Sorensen, the exclusive GM of the game.

(This will be important later.)

At 430pm local on 10/17 I try to start a trading card game. I abandon this after several days.

By 4pm the next day, I’ve basically decided that my guy cares more about the Choke than anything else.

This is the first reference to Berwick’s “meds.” I wasn’t sure where I was going with this at first; I kind of wanted an excuse for why my guy could get heated at people and then make it clear it wasn’t personal.

At 7am local on 10/19, I decide to run the same union lifestyle scam on someone else. That interaction was one of the more fun things that happened in the game so far, so I figured I would pass the favour on to another player and have fun with someone new to the game. Get them involved, make them feel like it’s okay to just approach people with something. They could always say no and I wouldn’t be upset. I offered them 50cr to upgrade their living status, if they could help me find a source of choronzadone.

I made up all of the following:

What Berwick did before this was simple: he deadheaded for low-rent corporations. “Deadhead” is what they call the android on a long-term ship, where all the humans go into cryosleep, an android stays up for years at a time (sometimes as long as 10-12 years) performing minor maintenance on the ship, adjustments, etc. that can be handled by a single person. What some corpos figured out is that it was actually cheaper to pay and feed a human being for shorter-range missions (2-3 years) instead of buying and maintaining an expensive android. Berwick does this: staying awake, alone, on a spaceship and being a one man crew for years at a time. He was never that much of a people person, and besides–choronzadone helps. Choronzadone is a drug that helps “truncate” moments where brain activity is low. If you’re doing repetitive tasks or things where you don’t need to think, choronzadone literally shuts down parts of your brain so you aren’t necessarily conscious or remember doing them. The feeling is sort of like when you roll into the parking lot of your destination and realize you don’t really remember driving there, you just sort of did it on autopilot.

Berwick’s got a prescription, but it’s no good on the Dream–see, choronzadone is a class-III substance, because it shares trace root biomes with Cocaine-2: The Sequel. And for people with certain malformed genes, it causes their vision to go blood red, so they use it to get high. That doesn’t happen to Berwick; he uses it for work. All he’s asking this fellow Teamster is to help him source some choronzadone. They don’t have to buy it, carry it, run it for them–just find where Berwick can get some. This person agrees. I pay them the money. We part ways.

At 5pm local on 10/19, I find the “black market” thread and eventually pay 100cr for 10 doses of Choronzadone. I now have my meds until 10/29.

At 6am local on 10/20, Reece aka The All Seeing Eye asks me if I’m part of “the ARG.” I say I am not, because I am not. (This will be important later.) Reece and I are buddies from Luke Gearing‘s OD&D game. (Luke will be an important character later.) Eventually we figure out he had seen my thread about having this person score drugs for me and thought it was related to “the ARG.” It isn’t! I’m just having fun playing my guy. That’s all!

At 10pm local on 10/20 I accuse the person who runs the lesbian bookstore of being a front for something. She tells me, no, it’s just a bookstore. I apologise and leave.

By 12am local on 10/21 Berwick is getting upset and desperate.

At noon local, I ask a ripperdoc if they could put comms inside of a person that would not show up on scanners or be able to be confiscated/deactivated.

By 3pm on 10/21, the idea of getting “mod support” to mount real communication between upside and the Choke is mentioned.

At nearly 7pm on 10/21, I establish the Heimlich.

The Heimlich is the code name for America’s elite military force with the least restrictive dress code the official-unofficial operation to destroy the Choke and free the deoxygenated denizens.

Fifteen minutes later, I make a Q&A thread.

But at some point, we are going to need mod permission to do this. To be able to try and move in and out, or at least get a few people in and out over the course of the next month, is kind of my endgame goal at this point.

If this simply isn’t going to be possible, a “no” will suffice, and I’ll just play out the remainder of the game either futilely roleplaying an attempt to do so, or find something else to do.

The responses in this thread are very important.

I do another union gig with some guys. Two days pass. I start the Heimlich thread. The thread is public. This will turn out to maybe be a bad idea.

At 1153pm local on 10/23, we get a breakthrough.

PART TWO: THE EXPEDITION

This is a good time to backtrack, because briefly after this, I get added to some threads I wasn’t in before. Most of the discussion for this part takes place in a private thread called “EMERGENCY DISTRESS BEACON” with fucked up letters. The thread began at 2:52 local on 10/22 with this message, and tagged a shitload of people.

The players start messing around trying to “solve the puzzle.” I’ll be passing over some of this because watching other people solve a complicated puzzle is not interesting, and you can still join the server and try to find it yourself.

The timestamp at the bottom is a hammertime: it will configure to show your exact local time based on a specific point in time, as well as show how long it is until that time. (When that time is in the past, it says “3 days ago,” etc.) We receive this message on 10/22 at 744pm local. I get added to the thread by Union boss Secretary Thatch at 1251am local on 10/24, about 30 hours after we get the countdown. At 6pm local on 10/24, we get a new message.

While this is happening, I also am added to a thread called CODE BREAKERS CLUB, a space dedicated for hacker cowboys and other interested folks to decode weird messages like this that appear on the station. Most of them aren’t related to this “plotline,” so I won’t be mentioning them. But the people involved in this thread were instrumental in deciphering the above messages and many others, so shout out to them doing the real work. Until the timing of the incident, nothing in their thread is really too relevant to the incidents at hand, so I’m going to gloss over it.

They also did decode all the messages and everything they say, and it’s really cool shit and I don’t want to spoil any of it. It builds on lore existing in A Pound of Flesh, as well. “Caliban” is one of the characters, and that name is about to pop up a lot.

PART THREE: THE CHOKESPAWN INCIDENT

The term “Chokespawn” goes back in the server a bit as a mild joke. t probably is in the module (which I have not read).

Ariel posts this at 1127pm local on 10/23 in Codebreakers Club.

This gets posted in an unrelated thread at 1238am local on 10/24.

Somewhere in here, the Stratmeyer corpo faction completely dissolves, somehow. Crazy shit that I had no part in, but the first thing to happen on the craziest day.

This is actually where some stuff starts to get messy, as when Stratmeyer is dissolving, some folks decide to roleplay bodies falling out of the fucking windows onto the street. The Bosses and Sam (Warden) sort of confirm this is not true but don’t want to invalidate a player experience. (THIS WILL BECOME IMPORTANT LATER.) This is at 3pm local, 10/24:

311pm local, 10/24:

I was not aware of this part of the conversation, but by 337pm local on 10/24, the bosses were aware of a possible threat from the Choke:

There is a lot of talk about non-CHC (hacker faction) members doing “mining,” a built in minigame where you match shapes to earn tokens. Spending tokens means you can ask “The datacache” for objectively true information. (“The datacache” is Sam Sorensen.) Bosses in all factions are telling people to mine, if possible, so they can earn more tokens and get more data about this supposed threat.

Leaked info: Posted in the Union Hall channel by Sestra Juniper, apparent double Union and Bravta agent:

Later, today 134pm loca, 10/24, the reveal:

UNSOLVED MYSTERY: How do the bosses know the threat existed in the first place to ask this question? Do they believe, at this point, that the threat is Ariel’s countdown? We may never know. If you have more information, message me on Discord.

551pm local, 10/24:

6pm local, 10/24. This is happening in The Heimlich HQ thread:

Aside: no it is not. All the incursion points were in 20 block. I am not sure where Noa got this information, but I would love to know.

6:37pm someone screencaps this:

By this point, talk about the “incursion point” blocks (in Bravta Boss’s message above” are everywhere, in all the channels. The speed dating got cancelled. The Block is full of shit:

At exactly 7pm, the same time we are paying attention to the Ariel terminals, this happens:

I SAW IT—!
[static]
I SAW GOD IN THE VENTS—
NOT SOL! NOT THE FAKE GOD!
THIS ONE WATCHES—THIS ONE SEES—
[feedback squeal]
BRATVA HOLDS OUR LUNGS IN THEIR HANDS—
TEMPEST ON THEIR LEASH!
CANYONHEAVY ON THEIR KNEES!
THE UNION—FULL OF SPIES—!
[signal crackle]
THEY SEND US DOWN—DOWN TO THE CHOKE!
DOWN WHERE THE AIR IS RUST AND BLOOD!
BUT THE CHOKE ISN’T DEAD—
IT’S ALIVE—IT’S A GOD—!
[static laughter]
A GOD THAT NEEDS NOT BREATHE!
A GOD THAT MIMICS FLESH FROM WIRE!
A GOD THAT WALKS AMONG YOU—
SMILING—BREATHING—PRETENDING!
[crackling sparks]
THE CHURCH LIES! SOL IS GONE!
THEY USE US LIKE BRATVA USES US—
FUEL—MEAT—NUMBERS!
[laughing disruptions]
BUT IT’S COMING—OH, IT’S COMING—!
THE TRUE GOD! THE ONE IN THE CHOKE!
IT WILL FREE US—TEAR THE PIPES OPEN—!
WE! WILL! BREATHE!
DO YOU HEAR IT?
DO YOU HEAR IT?
DO—YOU—HEAR—IT?

(there was a little more fancy headering going on but unfortunately I can’t gt that to work on my blog. sorry. go to the channel. https://discord.com/channels/1424912741931552871/1424918946347356321/1431417023790972938)

SHIT STARTS POPPING OFF.

I can’t tell you everything that happened here after. It lasted for multiple hours in game. I think it slowed down around 2am local. The last post from Mouth of the Choke is at 10pm local, meaning it went on for at least three hours. While this is initially happening, we are trying to solve the next Ariel message. I am only half paying attention to the chaos in the Blocks.

Here’s what’s most important, this is where it goes from “a monster came out of the vents” to “oh shit”:

This user, starduster. used to have the character name Kyp Longo, but have actually left the server since then and stopped playing the game. I’ll be referring to them as Kyp from here on out.

Kyp decided to MOVE to block 04,20, one of the “incursion zones.” Fifteen minutes later:

Beef is Luke Gearing, and is one of the bosses of the code cowboys. This means he’s a Boss, which means he has some authority. He knows some shit. Apparently all the bosses knew some shit about what was going to go down. Bravta knew. Union knew. Everybody knew something, I guess.

This is where I need to step in, and editorialize.

This is player generated content.

Even Luke, the Bravta boss, the Tempest boss who sent the troops–they didn’t know this at the time. For all of the time leading up to this, actually, everyone assumed “player generated content” as the default. The lesbian bookstore, the fight league, my stupid card game, Choronzadone, the union jobs–we made all of that up. Sam and the other folks running the game might have built a sandbox and put up a few play structures, but without us here to play make believe on them, they’re just an empty abandoned playground.

Still, the questions started flying around at this time–who is responsible for this? The Mouth of the Choke? For Ariel? Is this Sam Sorensen, or Sean McCoy? It’s GM content! I accidentally found myself as part of the fucking “main storyline” in Over/Under!

A few days later, an announcement came down. None of this was “GM content,” and in fact, there was no “GM content.” No planned roleplay content like this at all.

Somehow, two players, apparently independent of each other, glued the entire 2000 person server to their computers and phones for 6 hours on a Friday night in October, through sheer force of play.

It’s probably the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen happen in gaming. It might be one of the most amazing things I’ve ever been a part of in my life.

We should all be proud and happy, regardless of anything else.

THE INFECTION

This is the first I can log of the “infection.” I don’t think this is actually the right word for what happened. More like possessed. But, infected in the term that caught on, so it shall be used here.

I would love a timeline from one of the bosses of what the fuck happened here. When did who know what, etc.

By 8pm, we’re finished with the Ariel stuff and I want to join the big fucking clusterfuck. When I do, my friend Lily who I bribed to go find my drugs is shooting at the fucking thing.

AND, my friend Thoss who I met on a union job is being med evac’d out! Holy shit! The monster got them!

(The monster did not get them, this is actually from a wholly unrelated job-related accident; they just had to go through the blocks to get to the hospital. They didn’t have to do that by the way; they could have just went to the hospital. But you have to go through the streets to get to where you want to go. The fucking game is as real as we want it to be.)

Thoss and Lily are going different directions. I can’t do both. (I could literally do both, there is nothing stopping me from being in two threads at once, and I often do so for necessity of playing the game. Indeed, even through all this I was also in some other threads trying to see what else was going on. But, the fucking game is as real as we want it to be.) Thoss will be okay in the hospital; I can find them later. I go with Lily.

She takes me somewhere else for a brief moment. There’s a conflict, because I’m actually not supposed to be here. I say, fine, let’s go somewhere I’m allowed to be. Lily takes me back to her place. We talk about our backstories and what we’ve been doing lately. It’s one of the most powerful roleplaying moments I’ve ever had in my entire life, two people, alone. We almost entirely do not speak out of character for the whole thing. She says she’s a lesbian and I say I’m asexual, and thank god for that because I don’t think either of us wanted this to go that way. I take some rations for my upcoming expedition to the Choke. I leave.

I’d love to show you this conversation, but I don’t have their permission, and part of me likes that it was just us. Maybe when this is all over, I’ll share it somehow.

BACK TO THE CHAOS

I gotta pause and remind y’all:

This game has no mechanics. There’s no inventory. You can’t get a gun, you just say your character has a gun and everyone has to like, mutually agree on the fiction that now your character has a gun. Literally playing pretend, freeform roleplaying with zero rules. Except where you live, what your living status is, and how much money you have. So when Beef is saying “don’t kill anyone,” they actually don’t have the capability to kill anyone.

But the game is as real as we want it to be.

This is such a real and interesting post and it has huge implications on the game. “Posting is being here,” in such a huge event. Crazy.

oh wait nevermind ambiguity is all over the place lmfao

Eventually, tempest and them get ahold of some like, quarantine hard foam. They spray it at a guy and it hardens around you so you can’t hurt anybody. They hit the multiple infected with that.

Somewhere along the line, it becomes clear that it’s not just living in the blocks but communicating via private messages or private threads that triggers the infection. I really know this because I have a core piece of evidence:

They left me alone after this. Nice guy! Bare minimum for playing Bad Guy Tag.

Noa had been personally communicated with Ariel for a bit around 530pm local:

So, they had every reason to believe that these 2 events were probably related and for sure that it was possible they were an infection target. I don’t know what happened before the above post.

By now, info about how to get “infected” is starting to spread. And…people are starting to get scared.

People are starting to treat it like you, your account, your character? could all somehow actually be “infected.” Instead of…I dunno, Mouth of the Choke saying “okay, teehee, you’re a bad guy now! Say some weird stuff about embracing the Mother 🙂 “

Which…I think is patently ridiculous. That was never possible. I said this that night.

But also, people were eventually doing shit like this, so

The game is as real as you want it to be.

At 1am local on 10/25 there is a statement:

This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.

I can’t write anymore. There’s still so much. I didn’t even get to write about the next part of Ariel, the Choke expedition, or how the Heimlich fucking exploded afterwards. There might have to be a part two. This is already too long.

THE FALLOUT

People went to the bosses and mods with evidence of the infection and the response was, well, weird. I don’t have all the details and you can go dig it up yourself. There were multiple out of character vent threads. Now there’s a lot of arguing about the wargame component of the server and how that influences or doesn’t influence player faction agendas but that’s not something.

Safety tools started to get more implemented. People were talked to. The Mouth of the Choke has not been seen and I have no idea if they are still around, or if they have been talked to by players. Ariel claims they were not a related incident so what the fuck. Did one person somehow get the entire server to roleplay with them? What a master. Good on them.

I don’t…know how to end this. This is as far as I thought it through. Maybe I will come back and edit this later to add a better ending. Maybe I’ll keep up my little journal, because so many other storylines have spun out of this, it’s frankly insane. And they’re still ongoing. I met up with Thoss today for a crazy roleplay experience where Berwick cried for the first time in ten years. That’s…something.

I’m gonna miss this when it’s all over.