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 miraculous was that most of us didn’t know what we were doing,…