The MUSHroom

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Back in 1998, I got together with a bunch of friends from around the world and started OtherSpace MUSH – an original-theme space opera “multi-user shared hallucination,” which is a creative way of saying virtual live-action roleplaying.

At its peak, during our Telnet days around 1999 and 2000, we saw more than 100 players exercising their imaginations, throwing pebbles into plot pools, and becoming the main characters in an evolving epic. As graphical MMORPGs – especially World of Warcraft – and then mobile phones (and their distracting apps – sorry, be right back, I have to catch up on my Marvel Snap missions) took hold of our attention, games like OtherSpace faded into obscurity.

I tried reviving and reinventing the game several times: Within the PennMUSH platform on Telnet, in forums, on Slack, on Discord, in the web-based AresMUSH platform. But I’ve never been able to achieve the critical mass of active participants that’s really needed to drive their own stories forward and, maybe more important, I haven’t had the bandwidth to provide story hooks or live events.

After the 25th anniversary of launching OtherSpace, in 2023, I put it on hiatus and thought maybe I’d left that universe behind for good.

Then, in July 2024, I started working on Southpoint Access, which does an excellent job of scratching my journalistic itch for providing local news to my neighbors. It’s a heck of a lot like how I felt in 1998, when we launched the daily edition of the Central Pasco Times in Florida. And what else did I do that same year?

I love symmetry. So, I’m trying again. I plan to start slow, with a focus on a single crew aboard a Sivadian freighter called the Diamond Lil in the year 2650. Some details up front:

  • Participants are invite-only, but you can reach out to me on Discord or via email to jointhesaga@gmail.com if you’ve got interest in an invitation.
  • Invited? (If you’re here, consider yourself invited!) Submit a concept for a passenger or crew member aboard the Diamond Lil.
  • For now, I expect to use forums to tell a collaborative story asynchronously, although events on Discord also are a possibility. Mostly, I want to make sure we’re able to participate without requiring constant real-time engagement. I think real-time is more immediate and engaging, but we take the world as it is and hope one day it’ll return to what we want it to be when it comes to online storytelling! (Edited to add: What the hell – we’ve still got the Telnet port – jointhesaga.com 1790. Come on down! Here’s a trailer.)