The MUSH is a mix of innovative new systems, and old-style gaming brought to life. We aim to create a persistent world that allows tabletop gaming across the world with a mix of characters you could not fit at a single table. The design choices the team have made ensure systems that nudge the story and allow the interactions between characters to feed into the systems.
The culture of the MUSH is clearly set out in a way to respectfully take the ethos that Urban Shadows inspired in us, and allow it to develop on a broader stage, with a longer-term cast.
The Silver Line’s Chicago is a city of tension and territories, of backroom deals by aldermen and moonlight pacts between packs of wolves and shady wizards. People here live a liminal existence, between the mundane world and a world where wonders and terrors are made manifest every day. The Silver Line calls to the dispossessed, the homeless, the queer, the outsiders, the doomed and the beautiful, brightly burning artists who see and hear and capture it all, their work never seen or heard outside the secret halls and bars of those who already know. Step right up, don’t worry about the fare. You’ll pay that later. But for now, this is the express line to where you need to be, whether you know it or not.
In our setting, a spirit is a semi-sentient or fully sentient being that exists in the spirit realm and represents some aspect of the material world. These beings vary wildly in personal power and the level of their personal awareness and intelligence. In general, the spirits of things like landmarks, old buildings, wildfires and other ‘powerful’ natural and man-made phenomena are more powerful, more individual and possessed of more fully-formed personalities. Spirits aren’t human, but they are people.
Even manmade concepts become spirits, sometimes very powerful ones. Those include media characters, as well as concepts like fate and luck and death. These personifications of fundamental human concepts can be some of the most powerful spirits. It is perhaps a lucky thing for humanity that the more powerful a spirit is, the harder it is for an individual human to gain their attention.
Bishop Berkeley’s famous dictum aside, spirits are shaped by the human conceptions of the things they represent. We now know that wolves don’t really organize according to the pack behavior described by popular media. But because humans think of wolves that way, as they think of them as ravenous and raging, wolf spirits tend to embody those qualities. Even though humans generally can’t see the spirit world, it is human perception and thought that gives most of it shape and form. Because of this, the spirit world is different according to local beliefs. In modern America, it is largely shaped by TV and movie depictions of the supernatural, influenced by some religious and cultural heritage and a touch of leftover theosophical cosmology that became new age and modern mysticism. The spirit world of the Kalahari or Tokyo or the deep Amazon is quite different, shaped by different perceptions of the world.
If fae are beings of pure spirit who put on flesh, humans are beings of flesh who also embody a spirit. It is this internal spark of creation that gives us souls and lets some people directly perceive and interact with spirits. It is also this spirit that sometimes survives the death of a human and shifts largely into the spirit realm, rather than passing into nothingness or a different plane of existence. The larger question of an afterlife is still not truly answered, because human ghosts don’t actually go anywhere on those rare occasions they occur. They just continue to exist in the spirit realm, while affecting the material realm to a greater or lesser degree.
Ghosts are, relatively speaking, delicate things. Some are all but carbon copies of the mind of the person who died. Others are only limited aspects of their people. The rage of teenager who was bullied into suicide and died hating her tormentors. The sadness and devastating guilt of a mother who drowned her children and thus seeks living ones to replace them, only to bring tragedy again and again. The kindness and gentle love of an elderly woman of God who brings a sense of peace to anyone who steps into the garden she tended in life. All of these are potential ghosts. In general, the older a ghost is, the less of a ‘person’ they are. The idea that ghosts are faded recordings of dead people is not far off in most cases.
The spiritual side of Chicago is a funhouse mirror of the material world. The two sides of reality are intertwined, with events in the material world shaping the spiritual and events in the spiritual giving the same area in the material world a certain emotional resonance. In the spirit world, the streets you walk down, the buildings around you, the clothes you wear, everything has a spirit, greater or lesser, more or less engaged. For humans, this can be terribly confusing and disconcerting. Imagine having your apartment door greet you when you get home, your favorite chair sigh and creak in anticipation (or dread) and your tank full of goldfish babbling greetings and requests for food.
In addition to the spirits of purely material objects and beings, more abstract spirits flow through the city. Hunger spirits come in many forms, but they are all predators. Rage spirits throw things and howl, though only truly do damage when someone engages with them, spirits of music and love float through the air. The high rises murmur to one another and the highways are full of phantom vehicles, living to race place to place or caught in eternal traffic jams.
And through it all, connecting the various parts of the city, runs the Silver Line.
While all the trains of the L have their own spirit manifestations, the Silver Line is singular and unique. It seems to travel in the spirit world from the deep, dark woods beloved by the wolves of the far north to the fae kingdom based on the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 in the far south of the city. How it gets there is less certain. The Silver Line seems to choose its own path through Chicago, weaving in and out of the spirit world, stopping where it will, at any L station, even a few that technically don’t exist anymore.
The Silver Line picks up and delivers people according to its own agenda without explaining what that agenda is. But it is the safest and quickest way to travel through the spirit world. All over modes of transit involve the possibility of dealing with predatory spirits along the way. But the great steel, art deco Silver Line train runs down tracks that are clear of any danger or hinderance. You can bargain with it, though the train will not communicate or personify itself, to go someplace specific, but if you do, at some point in the future the train will deliver you someplace it wants you to be and you will be given hints at a task. The hints take the form of advertisements in the train, or a paper turned to a certain page and story on the seat in front of you, or a flyer sliding down the central aisle, waiting to be picked up. Failure to perform that task means the Silver Line will never stop for you again.
There are greater and lesser powers in Chicago, but the Silver Line seems to be more powerful than any of them. Whatever influence it has on the city directly, by way of those mysterious missions, is opaque, but the train seems to be invulnerable to attack or disruption. And those who try tend to end up vanished or leaving the city after dozens or hundreds of tiny assignments from the Silver Line to riders add up to the offending person’s life being ruined.
Wheaton's rule. Don't be a dick.
If someone asks you to stop, stop. If you ask someone to stop, we expect them to stop. We reserve the right to remove anyone from our house at any time for any reason.
Look to the spirit and intent behind these rules in addition to the letter of the law, because that's what staff will be doing if concerns are brought to us, and it would be ill-advised to consider this list 'pure letter of the law' or comprehensive. If something that falls outside of what we've directly addressed in policy, we'll try to address it with a definitive answer promptly.
Trying to rules-lawyer this policy does not look good for anyone making the attempt from any direction; don't.
This game is created by, and for those groups who are underserved in our gaming community. To be welcoming to those who can be pushed to the edges of our gaming world. We, as staff, are part of these groups, and we hope to welcome others like us into our world.
In this system, inspired by the ethos of the Urban Shadow’s system, we encourage you to play someone you are not in real life. We seek, with you, to avoid parody and stereotype, but to branch out and explore life through the eyes of your character. Play someone new, but avoid the gay best friend, smart Asian, angry black woman, shamen and medicine men, voodoo priests, gangbangers with a racial component, victim tropes, predatory person using trans symbology, and all other harmful stereotypes. Play a new person. Someone interesting, someone flawed, but someone created thoughtfully.
All things strive. All people have their stories. The werewolf that falls for the human, the psychic who struggles to be with others but does not wish to be alone, the demon that is so fascinated by humankind, the poor, the rich, the innocent, the just, the wise, the doomed and the foolish. All strive.
All strive to connect - unlike other games with werewolves and vampires, the connections here are on a (mostly) human level. Friends, flatmates, work-colleagues, neighbours, ...we are not dividing our society across the boundary lines of your archetype but of your in-game alliances. Where those lines are, that is where the story happens.
All things come to an end - after a time, your character will come to the end of the advancement possibilities. To keep that character in play, you need to buy off the corruption, and your character will become almost paralysed. So, we ask that you go into this, accepting that all things pass, and all characters have their season.
The MUSH is neither entirely consent-based nor non-consent; it's a hybrid of both. The consent policies are in place because the point of the game is for the players to have fun. Some subjects are fun for some, and absolutely not fun for others. In this complex area, we expect players to be mindful of others’ feelings and consider the consequences of their choices. Actions do have consequences and you may have to live with the results of yours. Please consider using the dice to settle any disagreement, and talk to us if you run into a position that is more uncomfortable than you can bear.
Fade-to-Black is an incontestable right, and can be invoked without question. We have also adopted the use of X-card, although it is not coded and cannot be used retrospectively. Players may choose to Fade To Black (FTB), change the content of the scene based on the reason for the press, end the scene, or pose their own characters out of the scene. We would love to see players working together, but if a player chooses for their character to exit a scene after a x-card is played and does so politely it will not be held against them. However, using the x-card in scenes with multiple other players comes with an expectation that those players can step aside and continue the scene without the player who is discomforted if OOC agreement cannot be reached.
Characters in the game may be adversarial, but players should not be. While we do not expect every player to be friends with every other player who frequents the MUSH, we do expect - even require - players to negotiate, collaborate, and work toward ends that are mutually agreeable to the players, whether their characters like this outcome or not. IC/OOC separation is crucial.
When we refer to consent in policy, we're talking about the player's consent, not the character's.
Because of the ethos of the game, we have decided to have a wholehearted ban on either of these topics as either a plot or a background element. This is out of respect for those who have endured these in their real lives. These things are not a shortcut to character development. Take the long way around.
Please report any harassment to staff by page or request, including logs if you can. You can also take some other steps to protect yourself:
Page-block them. You can do this easily by typing page/block =on (e.g., page/block Bob=on). Use the monitoring system to begin tracking pages from someone. Leave the room where the person is. Silence the channel the person is using to bother you.
PG18 is the rule for everything. No child players, characters or pictures that imply a younger age.
Death happens, as it does in life. It should be avoided, but if your character ends up in a situation where the consequences of their - or another’s - actions may cause death, we won’t be stepping in to save them. The story continues.
4 alts max. You can link your alts using our rhost system, or leave them unconnected.
We’re doing homes and businesses a little differently here at the SLM. You can create virtual rooms from any room on the grid. These can be marked public or private, and your descriptions of these can be stored on your player bit. Those public ones frequently created will be considered as an option for a permanent place to be created. The aim is to make a grid that is no bigger than necessary, created by the story our players tell.
We do not host your graphics on this game - we have made provision for you to embed them, if you want a played-by image. Those are not necessary for you to play here.
If you do not log in for 30 days+ you may find yourself in the freezer, releasing your played-by for others to use. You can be released from the freezer at any time but if you have lost your played-by to another player you will need to select another. You may also lose your name in the same way. Send us a request if you wish to be released from the freezer.
By logging in, creating a character and participating in scenes that are logged automatically by the system, you give your permission for the system to store your data for the purposes of playing the game.
Staff will not hold a position of power with their player alts.
Staff alts are clearly marked as such but we will not staff from our alts, and ask you to respect that.