Troy Underground... Goodbye, Blue Monday!
Delayed news, delayed endings:
On March 1st, I told my players that the Unknown Armies play-by-post “experiment” was over. I wouldn’t be posting any more updates, and the server would effectively be put into safe mode.
This came after a rocky february, where the number of active participants had declined since the game’s launch on january 1st. The game had come down to a crawl between the few people who were posting regularly and the weekly advancement of in game time.
That month, there was a lot of talk around some new models for how to do PBP games. The important part - what made ambitious projects with an emphasis of group GMing like Troy work - was a baseline of roughly 25 committed players. I had half that, probably less.
The obvious thing was that it just wasn’t going to hold up in the long term. Krypton or bust.
I pulled the plug without feeling too bad about it. It was fun to run that setting behind the scenes. it was never tedious, seeing the systems and player interactions spin around like a rube goldberg machine.
Urasawa’s Pluto describes the artifice of a perfect android. A machine which contained the total confines of human experience and potential. It could choose to be, or become, anything. The only flaw with the machine, in the story, was that it wouldn’t turn on.
I don’t want to spoil everything that was going on behind the scenes in Troy, because that flaw might eventually be solved. So little of what was happening there ended up bearing fruit anyway, it would be like asking you to eat a handful of apple seeds.
If there’s one thing it’s committed me to do, now that’s it over, under wraps, comatose… I’ve got to get a finish on some of the other UA content I’ve been kicking around under wraps. It’s been too long since I’ve actually played the fucking thing for real.