Legally Distinct (Part 1)
Legally Distinct: Creating A Cult About “Horses”
Stories from the Worm Cult in Over/Under from Cody Bechberger/ HelloYesToast
Part 1: The Beginning
As I mentioned in my Cataphracts series, one of the biggest steps in my journey to becoming a Cataphracts referee was a little month long game of about 1,000 people called Over/Under. It’s hard for me to remember how the beginning of this experience felt since it was a number of months ago, but suffice to say I had no idea how much I was going to invest in this experience and how much it was going to give back. It was a truly life-changing experience that helped me to learn a lot about myself while introducing me to some of the most amazing people I have ever met. All because I allowed myself to be a little silly and encouraged others to be silly as well, but I’m getting ahead of myself.
Let’s start at the beginning with Day 0, October 13, 2025.
For those unaware, Over/Under was a large play-by-post (pbp) war game sponsored by Tuesday Knight Games to promote Mothership Month and their Prospero’s Dream boxset for the tabletop roleplaying game Mothership which was running alongside it. My friends and I have streamed 2 modules for this game in the past and I backed the first edition and Wages of Sin campaigns so I was seeing the news promoting this game but really had no idea what it was supposed to be about or what would be happening. When the Discord server went live and I realized it was a free activity that just involved chatting I figured I would give it a chance. I’ve never gotten used to forums and wasn’t as active on Discord as I felt was necessary to keep up with the different servers I was on. My nature in large crowds can shift from trying to be the center of attention to never wanting to be seen based on my mood.
But I figured if I’m going to go big then I’m going to try and be as annoying as possible and see how quickly I can get myself killed. While seeing the posts on the server the day before the game officially opened I started trying to lean into the obnoxious behaviour and got the idea to start asking people if they wanted brain worms... and strangely enough some people started being interested in the idea. So I made a thread,a subspace for a chat, and started directing people there and we started scheming. Keep in mind I did not expect this idea to get me anywhere. I fully expected everyone to eventually look at me and realize I was just being a big goof making shit up as I was going along because I was being completely honest about my lack of goals and mostly just trying to be entertaining. I even made some enemies (mO2hawk being one, who will come up later) but overall we were all just getting really hyped to see what this whole thing was going to be. My character was starting to solidify as the head of a collective and at 12 noon on October 14th, 2025, the game proper started…
…and it immediately crashed. Luckily, I was part of the first wave that got in and I immediately started up the grift again. We are Worm, the character I would play throughout the rest of the experience, was born. I was the first post in both new channels, The Blocks and The Market (see images above), and I remade my thread to grab people back in. I’m scrolling back and realizing how many people I would interact with much more later were present in those early days—Scalgreave, Oxi, Capo & Kevi, Hezi, Tretimus, Izzy, Tommy, Messenger—it’s funny. But anyway, I set up the thread and we started to build an identity as a group.
I never said it was a good list…
At the same time, I along with everyone else was vying for positions in one of the various factions. The actual “game” of Over/Under was played at the faction level; each faction had goals they were looking to achieve being led by a number of bosses with access to resources and information. They also had denizens who would try to help achieve the faction goals while being paid a salary. Every day you were expected to pay for your lifestyle as well as the O2 tax and if you couldn’t pay then you were killed, so getting a paycheque from a faction was a major priority. I set my sights on the Canyonheavy Collective (CHC), as they had a larger paycheque and access to a unique resource called tokens that were used to play a minigame to get more tokens and provide power to the factions core. They were exclusive and secretive and within a few hours of expressing interest I was in a private thread with a boss from their faction discussing my loyalties and being told Worm was in! This was great!
And then I got to the first night and another private thread opened up with a Bratva boss. I was terrified. One of the expectations of the CHC is that its members can’t be a part of other factions except for the Solarian Church but the Bratva was a secret faction who couldn’t be normally identified. It would mean a second paycheque and my personal goal was shifting to wanting to ensure that everyone in my group was taken care of and that no one would potentially be at risk of dying. So I accepted, and Worm became a member of the space mob, which would have no negative consequences—except that it totally had a ton of consequences.
See, my idea for our operation to make money and get better access was radical transparency in terms of information sharing. Faction documents were things shared within the faction, but not outside, so they were very important pieces of information to get your hands on. My group was starting to worm into the different factions and so I took a subset of the group into a private thread to scheme and trade documents freely. I brought everything I had to my factions as well, providing CHC and Bratva with as much info as I could (though I should have told my CHC bosses I was in Bratva as a show of trust, that totally wouldn’t come back to bite me in the ass…), and encouraged those within the other factions to do the same. I wanted us to become invaluable but also quiet. And the schemes started to take on a much more grandiose scale as we imagined trying to make ourselves a legitimate faction with actual goals, or of simply trying to infiltrate everywhere and maybe topple one of them for ourselves.
So that’s how things went as the game moved into its first weekend of existence. My head was down, but I was working to make connections in each faction looking for more information and trying to keep myself as a valuable resource. It was a lot of fun! Worm stood out due to the weird name and the mystique around the cult, even getting some coverage in the press that sprung up quickly in the game. I might take one of these posts in the future just to talk about all of the different art that was inspired by this game as it’s such a unique thing to come out of this kind of experience and is part of what makes Over/Under so special; the newsletters that players created for fun is just a part of that. Everything changed on the first Saturday though…
Oh no, it’s the consequences of my actions…
Fuck. Now what was I going to do?
The news hit me hard. How could I have been so stupid? Everyone is going to think I’m terrible at this game and I’m going to be burned. I descended into a spiral of confusion and annoyance at myself but luckily the weekend offered some time for me to plug back into my real life. I needed to remember that Worm was a character and I was still a 33 year old husband and father of a toddler that needed to make sure his family was still important. So I disconnected for a bit and started planning…