Over/Under
So. I just finished playing the game Over/Under. For those of you who don't know what that is, it was a month-long, real time, play-by-post (PBP) game set on the station of Propsero's Dream from the Mothership setting "A Pound of Flesh."
This first bit will be a recap of my experience in the game, as my character, Aconite, and then I'll provide some thoughts on the game overall. All names mentioned here are PC names that were publicly available on Discord, so as not to dox anyone accidentally.
If you want a TL;DR recap of the game at large, a summary of my thoughts at the ending, or my thoughts on the mechanics, I'll label those sections appropriately, since this next one is... rather long, given it recaps basically a month of real time PBP roleplay.
Mothership is a sci-fi horror game inspired by Alien and probably some other stuff, and that's all I really knew going in. One of my friends, who played Herb Sullivan, Head of HR for the Stratemeyer Syndicate, kept messaging me about the insane things that happened in Over/Under -- to the point where I decided to join and experience everything for myself.
There were a few factions you should know about:
- The Stratemeyer Syndicate, the Evil Megacorp ™, muscling in on the station.
- The Local Teamsters, a massive union of blue collar workers.
- The Bratva, the local mob "family". Members of this faction were secret.
- The Tempest, a Private Military Corporation that acted as the law enforcement and military of the Dream.
- Canyonheavy Collective, who were... hackers, I guess. There was also a wargame element that oversaw everything, that mostly only bosses interacted with, where they could deploy soldiers, produce weapons and other goods, and take over blocks. Each faction had various goals in the wargame.
Also, there were more than 1,000 active players. The scale was. Intense.
Since I knew Herb, I decided I'd make a character who could find employment at the local "evil" Megacorporation. It took me a bit, but eventually I came up with my character, Aconite Collins. Her past was that she worked developing bioweapons and poison for other Evil Megacorps and was now away from that. She knew a lot about biology and chemistry and biochemistry. Her name was Aconite because that's an (uncommonly known) name for Wolf's Bane, a poisonous plant, and because I wanted to name her like a Nomai from Outer Wilds. That's all I knew about her to get started. I didn't make a Mothership character sheet because I had never played the game before -- mostly because of my fear of horror stuff. It also didn't seem like I needed one.
So, I joined the game. I went to find Herb and set up a job interview. I got hired for the Stratemeyer Syndicate. After asking around a bit, I found my way to the product development department. In there, I found that the VP of the company, Jenny, had made a very nice system (the Expedited Virtual Integrated Logistics system) to design products, along with a handful of brands. She details the system in her post here (https://lairoftheduskwitch.bearblog.dev/stratemeyer-product-catalogue), so I won't. In any case, I noticed no one had designed anything for the cosmetics brand Galatea. Being a very femme transfem girl IRL, and knowing that cosmetics are basically just biochem, I decided that Aconite would design some products.
Aconite's first product was PerfectSkin, a foundation that also acted as something that could close your wounds. While she was at work designing that, she got a gift basket from Sarah Anawai, although it wasn't signed as such. It had enough credits for her to not have to worry about getting deoxed (dying because she couldn't pay her O2 tax) for quite a bit, and some nice stuff.
She also heard of a bookstore called Diesel's, which specialized in lesbian content. Being a lesbian herself (like many of my characters), once she had a paycheck and her gift basket under her belt, she decided to go to Diesel's, where the friendly shopkeeper gave her a great book recommendation, fitting her tastes in exotic elven lesbian romance (matching my own, because. Why not?)
On the next day, she kept working at makeup, designing more products, and inspiring others to do the same, plus setting up a storefront. She also went back to Diesel's with some roses genetically engineered to make a lesbian flag (and maybe also make people more likely to spend their money, which I'm going to say worked super well considering what happened later) and a plan to purchase an item I had my eye on before.
What was that item? A "zine", code for a real PDF or some other thing that someone had made, called "A Street Doc's Guide To Transfem Care". Aconite bought the zine, and on the way out, Diesel referred her to a clinic where people could get HRT, saying that if Aconite ever needed it, she could go there.
Oh.
There was no cisgender explanation for a young, single, woman to be buying a book on transfem care, was there?
I mean. She could just be curious. But she's a biologist. She definitely knows how to do that. She knows exactly how this all works. So? Why buy it?
That's the moment when Aconite became trans.
After that, Aconite got Galatea a product placement in the Dream's premier serial fiction, written by soon to be girlfriend of Diesel, Harlicaux Verse. That same day, Jenny, designer of the Expedited Virtual Integrated Logistics system, was murdered in cold blood, only hours before she would have been elevated to part of the company's C-Suite. Mechanically, that meant that she would have been one of a few players in the game known as "bosses", who ran each faction, and had access to special actions, like ordering around troops and assassinating people.
Also that same day, Aconite participated in an HR bonding exercise, trust falls, led by Herb. She would go on to be one of the top participants in that trust fall exercise, although she wouldn't find out for a bit.
Sometime in that same day, Sarah met up with Aconite. She shared some drinks and snacks with her, and mentioned she was the one who left the gift basket. She also made observations about the current political situation that Aconite, having worked with spies before, took as thinly veiled death threats. They also talked about beetle racing, Sarah's totally real job at the Union, and more.
When Aconite went into work on the third day, another member of the C-Suite was dead. Only one remained, since the other of the initial three had been voted out with No Confidence. Aconite was promoted to brand manager of Galatea for her forward thinking work on the brand and getting a product promo. She got a bonus.
Later that day, the company was stormed by the local mob, the Bratva. They, along with every other faction on the Dream, wanted Stratemeyer off of their station.
The Syndicate collapsed, with the employees being allowed to leave peacefully, after being told to take whatever they wanted (although a random Bratva member did threaten Aconite's life, she told him she was unimportant and wouldn't take sides). So, Aconite took all of the Galatea supplies, went to the store, set up a production area in the back, and messaged the other employees who were part of the brand, offering an opportunity to continue to design and sell products.
This time, Aconite decided, she would not fall for the model of corporate evil that she was so used to. As the person in charge of the brand, now small business, she would turn it into a profit sharing collective, where each of the small time would get an equal amount of the profits.
One of her employees, the ever dedicated K'Vin, came up with a way to change the production model from selling one product of a small batch at a time for a tiny amount of credits to selling a full batch of product for the full price of that batch of product. Now, with no production costs, this meant that Galatea could make more significant profits, hopefully enough to cover people's living expenses. (More on the economy of Over/Under is coming later, promise!)
The same day that the Syndicate collapsed, though, there was a stationwide panic. Something called Caliban was infecting people. The people of the Choke, the area of the station where all the people who couldn't pay for their oxygen went, were coming back. An information virus spread through wireless transmissions and contact with people who were acting strangely. Or that's what the theories were.
In reality, no one knew what was going on. Various player-created actions were having massive consequences, and some or all of those stories were partially true for some time. In the end, it would all turn out to be a mass panic, with perhaps some truth mixed in there, depending on who you talked to.
Aconite, however, spent the day mixing makeup, until she did a large delivery of synthetic whale fat to the Solarian Church (which apparently they used to rescue a Cardinal later), and then was told what was going on. So, she went home.
Aconite then got a text from Sarah, who said that the thing to be doing was shelter in place. So, naturally, Aconite went back to her apartment, and, despite having her suspicions about Sarah, well, she was one of the few people she knew on the station, and Aconite wasn't working for Stratemeyer anymore, so there should be no hostility. Beyond that, Sarah was cute, and offered to bring snacks. Oh, and she had actually been in to buy makeup the previous day. And she said her block was under fire.
That night, Aconite and Sarah ended up talking about a lot of stuff. What was going on the dream. Dying Sarah's hair. Books from Diesel's. That the acronym from Stratemeyer was EVIL. That one made Aconite realize that maybe Strat being gone wasn't a bad thing. Sarah mentioned that her job involved mostly theoretical murder, Aconite decided she didn't want to know what was almost about it. Sarah complimented Aconite on designing Diesel's gay flowers. The night ended with them watching gay soap operas together, until Sarah fell asleep on Aconite's couch (for the next 4 days).
Those next days weren't too exciting, there was political drama -- every faction was yelling at each other, the Union fired a bunch of people for being suspected Bratva (including Sarah, who could have guessed), the Union President got fired because she fired people without asking everyone else, Tempest declared a war and then ended it with the deaths of only a couple of bosses and the mob letting all who wanted to leave their ranks leave, so on and so forth.
After that, but still during this calm time period (from 10/24 -11/4 IRL), Dream-Wide, changes happened. Peace came between the factions, and nation-building began. A rail system (because everyone on the dream wants to get railed!), a movie theater and a stage theater, a post office, a restructuring of what was formally an informal place people could go to to get enough credits to pay their O2 tax for the day (basically, a food kitchen) was expanded into something faction-funded and approved. An Emergency Dispatch Center (imagine 911) was established. A dating show was funded (with Herb in it!), as was an initiative to plug leaks in the station. A bank was made, an art collection established. A public broadcasting system established. Aconite asked for funds to establish a salon, but the council said no, saying that private businesses weren't where they wanted their money to go.
What was Aconite doing?
Aconite caught up with Herb at a bar, sharing stories of what they were doing without Stratemeyer. She visited the HRT pharmacy established by a Denizen. She joined an in-game production of the Shakespeare play "The Tempest" as well. She got another book recommendation. She made new marketing copy. She saw a bunch of girls fight in an arena with a dunk tank, getting everyone soaked (and she even got to sell some injury concealer to one of the participants after). She got convinced to put her name in if that ever happened again, despite not being able to fight. She worked through the two hour war. Two days she worked entirely (I was busy looking at apartments). During that time, she also pretty quickly got rid of all her Stratemeyer shares.
Sometime in here, I decided that Aconite was entirely raised by a corporation, and that said corporation didn't like her being trans.
After a while, it became apparent that the makeup business wasn't making much money, so Aconite went back to work for Jovanka's Bakery, which is what was left of the Syndicate, under its last remaining C-Suite member, Jovanka. She had heard it was alright from several people by now. She got a couple paychecks and tried to help with product design, but wasn't nearly as invested in this one, a bit wary of working for a corporation, but she needed a way to pay her bills. Being raised by a corporation, she was incredibly worried about being finically insecure -- after all, her worth as a person was tied to how many credits she had. Besides, she also needs money to live.
After that, she flirted with Sarah and talked with Herb some more at a bar. Sarah hinted to her that she wanted to fight her. Aconite went to Diesel (who was part of the girl fight) to get advice on fighting, thinking it would be an unarmed fight.
The next day (11/4), Aconite went to a tabletop games shop, and met a cute girl there, named Lily Strife. After helping her paint a mini model for a player-made wargame called Mini Marines, Lily gave her a discount for being a lesbian, and then some cake, with the warning that she had been given the cake to help find love, and was told it was a 50/50 chance. Aconite already had some feelings for Sarah, but, well... who knew what would happen. Lily was pretty cute as well. For the rest of the day, she worked on making the store a salon by herself, without council funding.
That night, Sarah invited Aconite out, the two flirted, and then went to a back ally to have a fight -- with knives! Dull, training knives, but it was still not what Aconite had prepared for. She held her own, although she eventually lost, but she had fun. Winning was never really the point, after all.
And the day after that (11/5), Jovanka's Bakery exploded. Well, not literally, but Jovanka's Proxy Robots (not Androids!), which she had started to use exclusively since C-Suite members started getting murdered, turned on the residents of the station. It was discovered that Jovanaka was dead and had been for a while, with her proxy androids having been taken over by an evil AI called Monarch. The entire station rose up to fight the Proxy Bots, and won rather handily, within the evening.
Aconite, however, didn't realize there was a war on for quite a while, as she was working at Galatea, making makeup. She also has the unfortunate habit of not checking her phone while working, so she missed the worried messages from Sarah, who ended up getting worried enough for Aconite's safety that she went to her block to try to get her out. She didn't find her there, so went to the store, although not before getting injured.
When she showed up with Aconite, Aconite immediately went into doctor mode, patching her up as Sarah informed her of what happened. As Aconite was making up ointment and stitches from raw hydrogen, carbon, and other elements, she did mention to Sarah that she worked on stitches that have an undetectable poison laced in them that seeps into your bloodstream when you're stitched up with them, so someone can save you from a combat wound, only to have you die from the stress of combat later, which was, admittedly, not a good thing to mention at that point.
Still, Sarah was patched up, the back of the shop was boarded, and they got to talking. It was clear they both had strong feelings for each other, but something needed to be addressed, even as the war raged on outside. Both of them weren't good people. When Sarah mentioned it, Aconite asked her a simple question "would you do those things again, now?"
Sarah said no.
So, Aconite said that those things didn't matter.
(In this next scene, we see a display of one of my favorite tropes: "You're perfect and wonderful and amazing even if you made a few 'small mistakes' and I'm horrible and evil forever because of all the terrible things I did".)
After some silence, Sarah told her that she was amazing too. Aconite didn't believe her, and, with a little prompting, she revealed that she felt like making makeup could hardly make up for what she did. That she felt like her efforts to be a good person now were in vain. That she worked for Stratemeyer, the company that, as Sarah had pointed out, was EVIL, that she went back to the remnants of that company (which was now attacking people with robots) for a paycheck when her business wasn't doing well. That even though she was trying, she clearly wasn't good enough at being good.
Sarah pointed out that she really couldn't have been expected to know that some mysterious woman she never met had been taken over by an evil AI, and asked who hurt her. Aconite told her:
I... don't know if it was one person... I... was raised... from birth... profits for the board. By any means necessary. I was good at biology and chemistry. I liked them. So I... excelled. Meant I would be... comfortable... but, also... well... I... I designed weapons for... spies... soldiers... things that... could've killed whole places like this... with the central ventilation, monitoring of O2...There... there were so many people who made me into that... one who broke me out of it... who... let me see the outside, but...He wasn't profitable. ...if you wanted to know why I'm... broken, like that... now you do... and you know it's... bad.
Sarah pointed out that Aconite was molded into a tool, not broken, and the two women sat together, in silence, as war raged outside. Two people who had been terrible. Who were just trying to do their best. Who had found each other in everything that went on on the massive station that was the Dream. Who could help to build each other up again.
All of the above that Aconite said was improvised on the spot, fitting the mold of her backstory I had come up with, but fleshing it out for the first time. A couple of details that she didn't explicitly say:
- She had no parents, only teachers and caregivers, who all had multiple other children under their care.
- Her caregivers were instructed to not let anyone be too happy, or feel too special, lest they be less productive.
- Even as a child, she had a credit balance. Were that ever to go to zero, or worse, negative, she would be deemed a loss to the company. Assets that are no longer valuable are terminated.
The next day, everything went back to normal, for a little bit. Aconite opened a bank account, and named Sarah as her beneficiary, should anything befall her, without telling Sarah.
Aconite opened the new salon, got a recommendation for a book, learned about libraries, overpaid for her books, bought a lootbox from the bank (entirely because it was funny, she won 500cr -- the exact amount a lootbox cost), quit the remains of the Bakery and sold all her shares, swearing off corporations for good after her conversation with Sarah.
But, the Dream was ending soon. Or, the cycle was finishing, we were about to wake up, Over/Under was soon to end. However you preferred to put it. Before closing down for renovations, Diesel opened a publishing company. Aconite submitted a couple of works to them (more on that later), under a pen name because she didn't want to be tied to them. Nerd she is, though, she couldn't resist tying her pen name to her real name some (Monkshood Hound).
Aconite got told about homecoming as Diesel asked for to do her style for the day, and resolved to ask Sarah.
On 11/9, Lily Strife entered Aconite's store, asking for makeup. Aconite was happy to help her, but soon the topic of a date came up. Aconite mentioned she was in fact seeing someone, and that it was fairly new, only started with the Jovanka-bot war. She felt a little bad about having to reject Lily, but didn't want to ruin what she had with Sarah. Lily understood, everyone parted amicably.
Aconite closed the shop early to get ready for Diesel's grand reopening, asking Sarah to come over to her place (so she could ask her to homecoming). Sarah came, and instead asked her to homecoming, like the badass she is. Aconite barely avoided mentioning she had heard about it in the same breath as discussing her book submissions.
Aconite, being a good girlfriend, mentioned someone had asked her out that day, but she let them know she was seeing someone, to which Sarah let her know that she would enjoy seeing other people fall in love with her. Incredibly surprised, because Aconite has the self-confidence of a particularly brave wet paper towel, she was nevertheless happy and texted Lily they could go out.
Then, Aconite went to Diesel's grand reopening, wearing a dress for the first time on the Dream, where her secret authorship was exposed to girlfriend #1 and girlfriend #2 was officially made a girlfriend and everyone met each other. She also did the styling she agreed upon for Diesel.
The books she had written? One a smutty fantasy romance (based on an IRL Witches in the Woods romance but if I recap that here too you'll never leave, dear reader), and the other, well... here it is (parentheses are notes I added to give context out of character):
Flowers in Metal Author: Monkshood Hound (Monkshood, another name for Aconitum, or Wolf's Bane, or Aconite) The cover shows a depressed looking “young man” (Aconite) in sparkling corporate attire, holding a book, nervously, outside a bay where mech pilots are getting into their mechs, apparently ready to drop out into space. “He” seems to be looking at the bay almost wistfully. A blurb reads: “Is it possible to find your true self in the midst of corporate evil?” Text: Set on a corporate space station in a far-flung system on the edge of space ((in reality a highly built up cooperate system)); a young, high achiever of a corporate raised "boy" faces trouble as "he" finds himself without the ability to enjoy anything, not even the work "he’s" told "he’s" so good at. That changes, though, when he meets one of the mech pilots on the station, Joyce (the 'he' in the screenshots above, names redacted to protect the innocent). Joyce and the boy quickly bond over a variety of topics: how neither of them relates to their gender, how they both have mixed feelings over the nature of their work and their employer, and how they both weren’t given a choice about any of those things. But, as things start to look up for Lilac (just another purple flower) and Arthur (after the noble king), cooperate interests interfere again. Will the two be able to be true to themselves? And can either trust the corporation to not put them against each other in the name of profit? ((The prose is decent, but nothing special. The dialogue, though, is superb, making one really connect with the characters, and the ending is gripping and believable, as well as cathartic)) ((yeah not everyone's as lucky as she is)) When writing that book, I decided that the "he" that Aconite mentioned previously was, well, Arthur. In other words, when a teenage transfem but not knowing it Aconite met a teenage transmasc but not knowing it "Arthur" (she never said his real name), they managed to help each other find each other.
Here is as good a time as any to mention that Aconite rebuilt herself with bioengineering to have exactly the body she went with an experimental method (not perfect, but very advanced) when she realized she was a woman. The company wasn't pleased with her, but she was too smart to simply kill for one act of disobedience, and she was still willing to work for them... for a time. She was separated from her friend, though, and when he tried to escape to the outside world he had told her about... well.
He wasn't profitable. Anyway. After that, she went to homecoming, where she danced and drank a bit with her girlfriends (I was at D&D so that's about all she did). She did make sure to tell everyone she was in The Tempest the next day, though! Also at some point she wrote the following description for the Galatea brand:
"I hope everyone enjoys the updated Galatea production catalogue. I know that Galatea started off as a Stratemeyer brand, and many on the station weren't fond of us because of that. However, since the fall of Stratemeyer, I've taken the brand and made it my own passion project. In some small way, I hope that by helping people look like their best selves, I'm able to help however I can. I know that when I was younger, and in a much worse place, makeup helped me get out of that hole, even if only temporiarly. I hope that perhaps it can do the same for some of you. -- Aconite Collins"
Then. The last full day of the dream (11/10). Aconite rehearsed for the play. She got a library card. And then she acted in the play. She was cast as Miranda. If you're not familiar with the play (I'm not either), Miranda is the woman lead, the daughter of Prospero, who is essentially the main character, and the love interest of Ferdinand.
In the heavily edited version of the Tempest we put on (because, really, we would never have finished if we had to do the entire thing, in full Shakespeare too), Ferdinand was also cast as a woman (who was pretending to be a man), so that the yuri faction that was so predominant on the station would be pleased.
Aconite played a fairly well-liked Miranda, taking backstage breaks to message Sarah -- marriage was even mentioned when she mentioned how quickly the play characters were getting married. The play went well, Miranda and Ferdinand (Jules, the banker) had surprisingly good chemistry, I had fun editing her lines to fit our style of the play, and also to fit her, for example placing emphasis on "I have only seen a woman's face in my own reflection", or having her say "Miranda: Miranda" when she introduced herself to Dashing Ferdinand. (A really funny note here is that people got OOC confused on what gender Ferdinand was supposed to be, which resulted in the decision that no matter what gender Ferdinand was, Miranda liked Ferdinand, damnit!)
She went home, had Sarah help her out of her too-small costume dress, and snuggled up to watch TV and drink hot coco.
And on the last day?
She went to visit the bookstore again, buying more zines now that her finances were secure. She put more money in the bank. She went to visit Lily, solely to give her a kiss and confirm on a date for later. And she opened the Galatea storefront.
-- TLDR: My Character --
When I started, Aconite had a lot less of a backstory, and a lot less of a character, than she did at the end. I certainly never anticipated her getting two girlfriends, or really even being able to get out of working for evil corporations, given the setting. However, not only did she grow as a character, but as a person -- a person who is now happy and prospering on the Dream, with her two wives, her makeup business, and, for the first time, a smile.
I never expected her to get where she is, but I couldn't be happier for her. Oh, and she's a published author, too! I've gotta start figuring out how she does it...
Aconite also has like, the most art I've ever had for one character or campaign, which I'll put at the end.
-- TLDR: The Game as a Whole --
The mob, the church, the hackers, the union, and the PMC team up to kick the shit out of an evil megacorp and its corpse, while copious amounts of yuri and yaoi, and like. Maybe One. Straight. Relationship. Happen in the background.
-- Slightly Expanded: The Game, Narratively --
I have a hypothesis that, whenever you take a group of people, and tell them to make something, they will generally try to make something good. I've seen this sort of thing happen enough that, at least for small groups, I can be fairly confident in it. (How is it, then, that our modern nation-states seem committed to making things bad? That is a question I am not going to answer here, nor am I qualified to.) This certainly proved to be the case with Over/Under.
Although most of the factions were set up to be unlikable to some degree (the mob and PMCs are not exactly known for being nice folks IRL), every faction pretty quickly changed its image into something nicer. Tempest Company became actually good cops, devoted to defending the Dream and her denizens. The family did a little bit of murder, sure, but they were mostly chill Dreamers, looking out for other dreamers. The Union, as I understand, was basically just Tumblr. Caynonheavy turned into a bunch of cowboy hackers who just had fun.
Stratemeyer was the exception, but inside the company, we were actively discussing how evil we actually should be. Some wanted to be more evil, some less. I knew my character didn't want to do evil, after all, she joined Strat because they didn't seem too bad, but I was prepared to have her ignore some things (like the EVIL system) to support the evil megacorp just a little bit if that's the way we went.
For better or worse, though, the other players, fueled by hatred of IRL corpos, decided to dismantle Strat in short order. Which, no shade -- that was great fun too, and definitely better for Aconite than otherwise.
Besides that, though, I loved seeing how people built community. The O2 Kitchen, and then Accord, to make sure no one would become deoxygenated from not being able to pay their taxes. The HRT pharmacy, designed to give affordable care to all. Diesel's. The therapists. The church's philanthropy. It truly felt like everyone on the station was stuck in a bad situation, but, working together, managed to make it better.
That was never more true than on the two major incidents: the choke incursion and the Jovanka-bot war. While Aconite may have been holed up inside, experiencing yuri, for both those times, since she's no fighter, I was peeking around the station and watching the news, seeing people from every faction (even the Bakery during the Jovanka-bot war!) team up to take on the threat, unified, as one. Of course, some people were running the bad guys in those, but, they were, naturally, doing it so people could have something to fight against.
All in all, I'd say that Over/Under was a good story, with a happy ending, and a hopeful middle. One that I greatly enjoyed participating in, even minorly.
-- The Game, Mechanically --
Now. I never interacted with the wargame. So I won't comment on that. What I did find interesting, and want to talk about, though, was the rules for denizens, ordinary players. Or rather, the near complete lack of them. When I started a business, I just had products to sell, for however much I wanted, to whoever wanted them. There were no economy rules for us. We could get paid to work for factions, or paid from other people for doing, well, whatever we could get them to pay us for. We could sell shares or "tokens" that the hackers mined. But besides our faction paychecks, tokens, and shares, the economy was entirely roleplay based.
This was... interesting. There was, essentially, infinite supply for whatever you might want, with no cost to the supplier, only money coming into the economy, and no money going out for manufacturing or anything similar, besides the lifestyle expenses of the business owners. I'm no economist, so I can't comment on how that truly impacted the economy, but it did feel a little strange.
That said, it certainly wasn't a bad thing. I certainly enjoyed the freedom it gave players to do anything they wanted that made sense within the fiction, without restraining people with mechanics. It was nice to be able to actually make a living being independent of a faction. It was nice to have players able to form a bank. It was cool to see everything people sold (and there's so much I didn't see!).
-- Closing Thoughts --
I've done a lot of RP. I've played a lot of TTRPGs, and probably ran even more. Aconite joins one of a few characters who has survived a campaign, whose story is finished. If you play in my games, you might see her appear as an NPC in the future, as many of my previous characters do.
If Aconite were a Witches in the Woods character, I would make her a Common-Born with only non-combat features, low Body and Charisma, high Intelligence and Wisdom, and middle-of-the-road Agility.
If she were a Thirsty Sword Lesbians character (which, I mean, she got close to it), she would probably be a Seeker with a very strange set of commandments.
And as a Mothership character, she's a scientist with high intelligence and sanity, and not much else going for her.
If you'd like to use her in your games, feel free. She runs the Galatea makeup shop on the Dream (or, really, wherever you feel like), she has two lovely wives, and she's never stopped trying to make up for her past. Or perhaps you'd just like Monkshood's books. Up to you!
Art credits:
- Galatea Product Catalogue: @cugros on Discord (with some products made by others, such as @anarchy.goose, @sentheath, and @.leepeep, )
- Aconite Profile Pictures: @zeroflee on Discord

