Starting on October 14th, as a part of Mothership Month 2025—the annual group-crowdfunding campaign and general season of celebration for Mothership,everyone’s favorite sci-fi horror indie darling—I will be running another large-scale real-time play-by-post wargame, a take on my existing wargame Cataphracts. This new game will run for four weeks, the entire duration of Mothership Month, open to anyone who wants to join. It’s called OVER/UNDER.

Join the game right now, by clicking here.

On Prospero’s Dream, the 40km-circumference circular space station from A Pound of Flesh, six factions tussle for control. They are:

Each of these factions starts out with three Bosses—what in Cataphracts we’d call commanders—who work together to achieve their faction’s objectives. Factions maintain territorial holdings, raise soldiers and send them into battle, operate factories and docks, and so on. The game plays out in real time over the course of one month: if a squad of soldiers needs to get to a station block a dozen kliks away, that takes a full three hours, during which time other commanders can react and respond. (Yes, I will be glued to my computer for the entire month.) In this sense, OVER/UNDER plays quite a bit like ordinary Cataphracts, except in a sci-fi setting and at a smaller scale.

Here’s how OVER/UNDER isn’t like Cataphracts, though: beneath these twenty-odd faction Bosses are hundreds or even thousands of Denizens, all of whom are also players.

When he reached out to me a few months ago to discuss running a Cataphracts-like game for Mothership Month, this was the big constraint that Sean McCoy had for me. The Mothership community is huge (its Discord server lists some 15,000 users), and so in order for the game to function as the big old eyeball-grabbing event required, more players needed to be able to play beyond the one or two dozen in an ordinary Cataphracts game. This is a big challenge! Running for even thirty or forty commanders stretched me nearly to capacity—the amount of time and effort required to run for hundreds or potentially thousands of them is completely untenable. As we kicked ideas around, I started to realize that the game would need a different structure, something quite different from the patterns I’ve used thus far.

While the Bosses move troops, tax their blocks, and spend their faction’s vast resources, Denizens are significantly more constrained. A Denizen does not have territory or soldiers, can’t orders intelligence operations or assassinations, and in general cannot take actions in the conventional sense. Denizens, for the most part, do not interact with me, Sam, as referee. But! Denizens can join one of the six factions above, granting them certain rights and privileges. The more Denizens join a faction, the more powerful that faction becomes, able to tax more territory, operate more industry, and raise more soldiers. Faction Bosses, most of the time, want to do anything they can to recruit additional Denizens to their particular faction.

As a member of a faction—a droog of the Bratva, say, or a teamster of the Local—a Denizen earns a daily wage (more on money in a minute), gains access to the faction’s channels, and can participate in faction votes. These votes come in three flavors: the referendum, the vote of no confidence, and the election. Referenda are required for certain actions undertaken by a faction, the ones that are so big and impactful that the entire faction gets to weigh in. Faction Bosses get to decide when to call for a referendum, but, naturally, different factions have different requirements for referenda—what constitutes a huge shift for the Solarian faithful might be day-to-day business for the Stratemeyer Syndicate. If not enough of the faction votes in favor, the action fails; accordingly, it’s incumbent upon Bosses to keep their Denizens at least somewhat happy and well-informed.

Where Bosses call for referenda as their plans dictate, votes of no confidence come directly from below. If enough members of a faction disagree with a Boss’s behavior, they can call for the vote, force the Boss out of command, and hold elections to install a new Boss in their place. As you might imagine, such votes bring more or less bloody consequences for the losers, again depending on the faction. Thus, it behooves faction Bosses to take a vested interest not only in keeping their own Denizens happy, but in the internal politics of another faction—if, say, the Treasurer of the Local 32819L is hellbent against the Sysadmin of the Canyonheavy Collective, a well-timed (and well-funded) vote of no confidence could force that Treasurer out, and potentially even install a more hacker-friendly replacement. While Denizens generally cannot leave factions once joined, they remain free to make their own decisions with regards to elections, voting one way or the other.

On top of this, Denizens also have credits. Everybody on the Dream must pay ten credits per day for the oxygen tax, with those unable to pay being sent to die in the Choke, the hellish deoxygenated underbelly of the station. Each faction pays its members different amounts (and that amount can change over the course of the game), but no matter which they choose, Denizens will likely need to join a faction quickly to stave off state-enforced asphyxiation.

But, of course, a Denizen doesn’t need to join a faction (and factions are not obligated to recruit a given Denizen). Credits can be transferred from one player to another whenever they please, so if a Denizen figures out a way to make themselves useful—perhaps some method where not having a public membership proves beneficial—they could potentially pay their taxes and bills simply off the funds they receive from other players. Of course, if whatever service such a factionless Denizen provides ends up being useless (or fraudulent), they run the risk of other Denizens complaining to their Bosses, asking for retributive justice.

This brings us to lifestyle and leaderboards, the “default” win-condition of OVER/UNDER: in addition to the O2 tax, every player (both Denizens and Bosses) must pay a daily lifestyle fee, ranging from squalor (1cr/day) to luxury (1kcr/day), or even higher. As players increase their lifestyles, they get fancier roles on the Discord server, and access to elite, exclusive channels. The ten players who live the most lavish and luxurious lifestyles are entered onto a public leaderboard, the Top Ten. At the end of the game, the players who spent the most time in the Top Ten will receive special Mothership Month 25 swag—a patch and a shirt.

And, to make all of this just that little bit more spicy, there are two other currencies in play, which, as with credits, both Bosses and Denizens can hold and transfer: tokens and shares.

Tokens are the currency of the Canyonheavy Collective, a group of hackers. Any player who holds at least one token gets access to the Datacache, the central supercomputer of Canyonheavy and the source of their tremendous intelligence capacity. At the Datacache, players can play a little in-Discord minigame (a variation on Set, the classic card game) to “mine” tokens. As tokens are mined, the Datacache gains power, allowing the Canyonheavy Bosses to run extra intelligence protocols. While theoretically valueless on paper, anyone who holds a token can participate in the Canyonheavy elections, one vote per token—or, naturally, sell them on the open market. Cryptocurrency, basically, ripe for speculation and unscrupulous dealings.

Shares, likewise, are the currency of the Stratemeyer Syndicate, the erstwhile evil megacorporation. The Bosses of Stratemeyer hold all shares to start with, which they can sell for credits on the open market: as with tokens, holding a share earns you one vote in Stratemeyer’s elections, or that share can be hung onto for a later sale. As Stratemeyer gains wealth, power, and influence, each of those shares will become more and more valuable—assuming, of course, that the Syndicate doesn’t decide to issue more stock, thus devaluing all existing shares.

There are even more things going on in OVER/UNDER than I’ve mentioned here—the multi-faction drug pipeline, secret faction memberships, the unusual ecclesiastic hierarchy of the Solarians, assassinations, and more. All of this will be happening at once! Bosses need Denizens to tax their holdings, run their productions, and fight their battles; Denizens need bosses to pay them wages and protect them from other factions. Players will fight, politick, and backstab each other, Bosses bidding for power while simultaneously keeping their Denizens happy enough to avoid a vote of no confidence. With hundreds or thousands of players, communications will grow extremely busy, with secrets flying back and forth from player to player and faction to faction. And, of course, with tokens and shares, Denizens can bet on the outcomes as factions fight for control over Prospero’s Dream. At its heart, OVER/UNDER is a game about managing competing forms of power: military might, economic wealth, raw trade resources, political popularity, dangerous secrets, and—as in Cataphracts—a kind of blunt diplomatic-managerial prowess, the sheer ability to keep numerous individual persons and parties together, all operating in unison.

Maybe we’ll spin up the server, get five hundred players in, and everything will immediately crash and burn. Maybe we get the game started and some faction rapidly takes the lead, crushes their opponents, and this becomes a single-party game for the next three weeks. Maybe I’ve done my math wrong, the economics won’t work out, and everyone will asphyxiate from lack of oxygen and die. All possible! As far as I’m aware, this is the sort of scale of open-ended roleplaying game that only a few projects approach—some of the longterm IKS Kriegsspiel games, certain unusual Minecraft servers, and EVEOnline. But, I’m confident. I adore these kinds of huge games (despite how taxing they can be), and I’m tremendously excited to see what it looks like when there aren’t just dozens of players running around causing chaos, but hundreds.

OVER/UNDER starts next week, on Tuesday, October 14th, the same day that Mothership Month begins. The Discord will open and the rules will be posted a day before, on Monday the 13th. This blogpost will update, and there’ll be posts on the Mothership channels and socials.

See you on the Dream!