• 15 Nov, 2025 *

On Halloween, I concluded one of the greatest roleplaying experiences of my life. In Sam Sorenson’s OVER/UNDER, based on Tuesday Knight Games’ A Pound of Flesh for the Mothership RPG, and his own Cataphracts game, my character, the space-mafia-King-Lear Vor Veljko Tanumafili died, strangled at the hands of his surrogate son.

That this was a purely freeform RP scene that impacted the very real tactical wargame is a feature, and something I found particularly wondrous.

OVER/UNDER was a kind of Massively Multiplayer Tabletop Roleplaying Game, but also a LARP, but also Diplomacy, but also what if you were playing a 4X but all of your little meeples were alive. I think by its very nature - a nature that its creators didn’t fully grasp until a series of player-driven ARG events created a server-wide hysteria - it blended In-Character and Out-of-Character interactions in a wild, heady mix that is hard to describe.

As a Boss, I was playing an entirely different game than the average player. I had an excel spreadsheet wargame going on, a personnel management game (though my counterpart in our faction handled almost all of the nitty-gritty there), plus backroom deals with other bosses. This made getting out and engaging in the freeform RP aspect a bit difficult, especially considering my character was ostensibly a space mob Godfather, why would he be hanging out at the local bar?

I came up on Star Wars Galaxies, a late 2000s MMO that had some serious issues being a game, but was fantastic for roleplaying. That kind of freeform roleplay spirit is what I really clicked back into with O/U, and what was the most amazing about it to me was how much the freeform RP began to AFFECT the wargame.

My very presence in the public spaces on the Dream (threads and channels) caused a stir in the other factions! Why was the head of the space mafia hanging out at a bar? Was he going to start trouble? Was there going to be a war? Every time I stepped out in public, it became an event.

Over the course of the game, the Vor bought a fancy crown, successfully destroyed the Stratemeyer Syndicate (with some help from within and without), bought a 2mcr horse made of worms, found a surrogate son, found love with an old friend (what if the pope was Pablo Escobar?), was undermined by his own viziers, and then sacrificed himself to stop a massive war from breaking out. This old King Lear had a bit of redemption at the end, after all.

I think what excites me the most about the aftermath of Over/Under is all of the connections and friendships that have sprung from it. The community is already planning all kinds of fan zines and projects and the sheer amount of games that have spun up out of this are mind boggling! I said it on Bluesky and I’ll say it again: the world is fucked, but play endures.

Go make something!