Mothership Month 2025 Part 1: Thoughts on a Prologue and Conclusions
When I first started playing on the OVER/UNDER server, it was in celebration of Mothership Month 20251. Everything was new to me. I had never played on Discord, never LARPed, and never actually played a full game of Mothership. It wasn’t of interest to the groups I would GM at the time. I never expected the depth of the narrative everyone would craft together. This was informed by their growing understanding of the Mothership/Pound of Flesh universe, while they respected the self-developed canon everyone contributed to.
Around halfway through the month, I began to get a bit self-conscious over the quality of my character's actions. Paired with some IRL business, I had lost touch with what I wanted to bring to the table. With this came the ARG panic, which upended the days of planning that other cardinals and I had worked on for Flare. (The first of multiple "Holy Days" we had designed to garner more converts to the church).
After this, I took a break as an opportunity to play through some solo content to develop some backstory, and to get more comfortable in the skin of this character I would be roleplaying for the rest of the game's duration (subtle foreshadowing?... maybe). I had settled upon The Long Haul by Ok, Robot2. It seemed to take a spirit of Mothership and simplify some of its more complicated systems for ease of play and time efficiency. I had established in my prior search for solo-play options that I thought pairing this hauling adventure with some of the tables from Dead Planet and Gradient Descent would flesh out any derelict ships or stations my character might encounter along the way. (Have to give credit to YouTuber Scutifer_Mike's video on Mothership solo, where I borrowed this idea from3.)
While I plan to keep this series of posts detailing "Porovio"/Cardinal Circinus' prologue to his time on The Dream short, I hope this will serve as a small introduction point to his adventure. It informed a lot of how I felt he should act in the latter half of his time as Cardinal. Paranoid and fake. Prospero's Dream is no place for those with a kind heart. It is latent with betrayal. It may be disappointing to hear the church was relatively free of drama, sans Cardinal Gemini's embezzlement of our inner circle's funding (It's all love, seriously. Check out Sam D's stuff!4). In reality, it was actually a uniquely touching experience to be surrounded by such creative and empathetic people in a server of 1,700+ people with clashing goals. I wouldn't ask for a better conclave, honestly.
I'll be posting the next part of my thoughts on the OVER/UNDER experience meshed with Porovio's prologue to his arrival at Prospero's Dream soon. It will be unreadable and a total headache to get through. I promise!