Chilidog Garand

designers who release projects on itch, please include the credits on your main project page!! not only is it virtuous to emphasize that nearly all projects are team efforts, but also I want to know who worked on something without needing to squint at some screenshot

Hey, remember I was writing a paper on #Over/Under? I cleaned it up and its ready for public consumption! (Well, as ready as I'll get; I'm not used to sharing academic writing)

Huge thank you again to everyone who helped with this project, and HUGE thank you to Sam, Sean, and the mod team ✨

Just do what I do and say "This is a living document and is subject to change" but then never actually change it.

You will never believe it, but this project is experiencing significant scope creep

#OVER/UNDER is the biggest W for System Doesn’t Matter since some guy in Wisconsin picked up a miniature Dragoon and gave it a funny voice.

i’m jokin around don’t kill me pls

But I was wrong, all you need to do to make a city that feels like a city in a ttrpg is have over a thousand players

I've often complained TTRPGs don't get cities right and I don't know if they can, because the key feature of a city is being unable to truly understand it, overlapping but distinct worlds layered on top of each other which are barely aware of each other and only tangentially touch #over/under

50 Reasons Why Everyone Should Want More Walkable Streets From making you live longer to making cities more resilient: If you want a reason to make your city more walkable, it's in here.

“Someone with a 1-hr car commute needs to earn 40% more to be as happy as someone with a short walk to work. On the other hand, if someone shifts from a long commute to a walk, their happiness increases as much as if they’d fallen in love.” #CityMakingMath

50 reasons to want more walkable cities.

SCANDALOUS INFO: (1996) You guys, it turns out Bill Clinton really loves to nut!

SCANDALOUS INFO: (2025) Guys, you are not going to believe this update...

I think a lot about “default” expectations in our time — how often they are of very recent construction. (We have dates for when umpires were introduced to kriegsspiel)

If I do my job right, my students don’t assume roleplaying games have a “master” — any more than that games have a win condition.

(oh and please feel free to provide your own guidelines/things you wish you had known here. i am genuinely trying to manifest Over/Under 2 by preparing the next generation of O/Uers while it's fresh in my mind.)

An astronaut floating in space with coming soon over it

Null space Freelancing in the solar system of the 24th century Basic rules

NULL_SPACE IS COMING

ZINE MONTH 2026

MORE DETAILS TO FOLLOW SOON

- Finally, for the love of god, if there's an Over/Under 2 and you're reading this to prepare: go figure out what yuri is if you don't already know. You will thank me later.

Piggybacking on that:

- Give yourself permission to be cringe because you're probably not really being cringe at all, and even if you are, someone is going to meet you at your level either way. You will find your people, just be your character.

- If you think your character is a 'gimmick character', do it anyway and defy what a 'gimmick character' is. One of the most popular players on the server was a mime who communicated entirely in emoji and emotes. I have reall player's remorse for not spending any time with a man named 'Dookie'.

- Remember a character arc is just the things that happened to you over time. Don't have an ending in mind, just work from the last thing and into the next.

- Never say no. Say 'yes, and' or 'no, but' and that alone will take you places.

- Make stuff, and again, don't ask permission to do it. Just do it. Trust me, even if you make stuff that doesn't get used, you will still have made stuff. Do it for the love of doing it, and allow yourself to love doing it while you do so.

- Turn it to 11. Way past all-the-way up. If it's slapstick, make it slapstick as hell. If it's romantic drama, make it dramatic. Subtlety does not translate well in a server full of 1200 people. Leave subtlety for the quiet moments, but turn the subtlety up to 11 too.

- Embrace secrets and lies and all the messy shit that happens when they get uncovered. Be a spy or a mole, fall in love with two people at the same time, embezzle money, and do crimes.

Relationships with other people are the mechanical hook and they should be messy as fuck.

- Embrace conflict and conflict resolution. It's not always a comedy, sometimes things need a little drama. Sometimes you need to escalate, sometimes you need to de-escalate. Again relationships with people are the mechanical hook for the average player, and the more interesting they are, the better

- Don't ask permission. If you want to be an android bartender who moonlights as an information broker, you better open a fucking bar. If you want to be a bicycle messenger who smuggles drugs, you need to be a bicycle messenger first.

Just do the damn thing and eventually the bit will reward you.

- Just make friends with people. Not only is that what the game is truly about (the REAL Over/Under truly is the friends we made along the way) it's how you engage with the game at the mechanical level.

Your relationships will become important at some point.

And because I apparently haven't done /enough/ #over/under posting, a thread of things I wish I could go back and tell myself, AKA How To Over/Under

- Embrace the bit above all else. Stick to it until it's eventual reward and even then...hang on to the bit. The bit above all else.

This has been - like I said - 4 days of typing. And I'm terrible at endings. But thank you all. It's great to have you as friends, it was great to create together, and it was, above all, the most fun I've had online in many years.

You guys who made it all happen - ie EVERY PERSON ON THERE - thanks.

I'll probably expand my horizons because of this. I'll probably break down and /make stuff/ again, just for the joy of making it, sales be damned. I'm definitely writing again. I'm definitely making art and dumb little sketches again. I thought that was lost to me and I got it back.

There was so much I didn't get to do, so much I didn't see, so much I wish I'd thought of at the time, and still, the whole event is just this incredible memory that will stay with me forever. I made real friends. O/U discussion is still happening even now in a dozen or so spin-off discords.

A lot has been said about how the ending of O/U had "last day of summer camp" vibes, or how O/U felt like Woodstock, something amazing happening for the first time. It was so cool to be there. I haven't even captured a fraction of the cool in like 4 days of typing it up.

We fought a buncha fake wars, we did intelligence and sabotage and counter-espionage to each other, we called each other names and argued. But like...a VERY LARGE amount of relative strangers just evolved a community out of nothing, created a shared reality, and spent a month living in both.

And I feel like that screenshot sums things up perfectly for me. It was a bunch of people who created something for their friends, together. That's incredible. You don't always get that in this world, let alone with strangers you've known for a month.

It's one of the nicest, funniest things that a person could have done. The running joke about my character secretly being a dog (because I use compact mode in Discord, my PFP doesn't usually cross my mind), Eustace coming to us for a ship...I mean there's layers to it. Lots of layers.