What We Do
WeARGames is a small team making Unfiction (ARGs and IREs) and TTRPGs. We've been at it since 2018, and we're getting better all the time.
Unfiction
Unfiction is an umbrella term for varied forms of transmedia fiction that are immersive and/or ask the viewer to suspend their disbelief and treat the story as real.For our Alternate Reality Games, we like to tackle all kinds of different topics and genres, and we have several ongoing universes we like to tell stories in, including:
• The Immaterialized Thought Bureau
• Absgalan
• Sub-Liminal Spaces
• Tungsten / Under The Torchlight
We're working on adapting some of these into TTRPGs, and we've also run Immersive Roleplay Experiences (a sort of digital LARP) in them, as well.
Who We Are
WeARGames was founded by two people— Torri (she/her and ae/aer) and Zeke (ze/zem). They are the primary creative leads of the team, occasionally supplemented by Raven (xie/hir), OptiPri, and DraconicArcher (he/him). They are assisted by a Discord mod team including Becca (she/her), Cloud (she/they), and Evan (he/they), who are sometimes helped by a few others. We also get help(?) from our "Mysterious Benefactors."
We hope you'll give us a follow and stick around to see what we're working on next.Most of all, remember:
We AR Games, and games are fun.
Our Games
WeARGames primarily makes three types of games: Alternate Reality Games (ARGs), Tabletop Role-Playing Games (TTRPGs), and Immersive Roleplaying Experiences (IREs). We'll discuss the basics of each of these below, accompanied by lists of our past and upcoming games.We're working on creating in-depth explanations of the story, world-building, characters, etc. for each of our games, but some may be unavailable at this time. Please be patient while we work on things!
Alternate Reality Games (ARGs)
Alternate Reality Games are fictional stories, usually (but not always) horror and/or mystery, told through common means of communication such as social media, forums, and video, and presented as though the events are real. They have a long history, existing since the early days of the internet. There are even some things (such as the original Sherlock Holmes books) which predate the internet and fit the criteria of an ARG.Generally an ARG follows a limited set of characters who are experiencing a major difficulty— this can range from investigating a kidnapping to being stalked by an otherworldly creature. The story is told from the characters' perspective, using the author's chosen media and platforms, and frequently include interactive elements. These can include such things as puzzles to solve, codes to decipher, geocaches and dead drops in real-life locations, phone calls, emails, and many more. Frequently these interactive elements are used to gate off story progression, so that the audience must engage directly with the narrative if they want to see what happens next.If you would like to learn more, we heartily recommend the book This Is Not A Game by Dave Szulborski. It covers early ARG history from both a player and creator point of view, and is incredibly well-written.
Now that you know what an ARG is, here are some of the ones we've made and run, ourselves. They cover a wide range of genres, and include a broad spectrum of media and interactivity.
The Immaterialized Thought Bureau
The Immaterialized Thought Bureau is an ongoing universe that we anticipate telling many stories in. The original run took place mostly on Discord, and included some posts on Twitter and Youtube. It was the first ARG that the WeARGames co-founders ran together, back in 2018, and led directly to the formation of WARG itself.
ITB centers around the titular fictional secret (USA) government agency, which exists to harness and capitalize on a form of energy known as "Immaterialized Thought." This energy exists ambiently everywhere in the universe, in different quantities, but is primarily generated by the creativity and imagination of a distinct group of psychics.
These psychics, known as "IT Users," are divided up into eight categories, called Aptitudes, which define the ways in which each of them are able to utilize IT. Only seven of the Aptitudes are commonly known among ITB Operatives. They are: Destroyers, Stabilizers, Repairers, Creators, Dampeners, Seekers, and Delvers. The final Aptitude, Devourers, are highly unstable and dangerous, and are usually immediately eliminated upon discovery.Those with the "aptitude" to harness Immaterialized Thought usually begin to manifest these powers around the time they reach puberty (though it is not unheard of for the onset to occur later in life), and the ITB, as well as their rival institutions both at home in the USA and abroad, try to recruit (or otherwise obtain) IT Users as soon as they are discovered, creating a small army of psychic child soldiers.The story of the first installment followed a group of ITB agents, at first known only by their single-letter code names which designated them as high-ranking members of the organization, who had been assigned to perform some experimental research tasks on the general public. As they went through a number of creative exercises with the players to see how much IT they could extract and store over the internet, the agents became progressively more disillusioned with the ITB and the treatment of its agents. Players were able to see this via a group chat channel in the Discord server where the agents would speak freely between each other, conveniently "unaware" that it could be seen by the rest of the server.Over the course of the game, the group began receiving threatening messages from a former agent believed to be dead. It was later revealed to be a current agent, well known to be dangerously unhinged, but kept around for his prowess and ruthless execution of missions. The agents lost one of their number to him, others grievously wounded in the process.The group eventually uncovered the ITB's dirty secret— that there had been a secret hostile takeover by the openly corrupt enemy organization Gyras, turning the ITB's mostly benevolent intentions of protecting the non-Apt public from dangerous rogue IT Users and maintaining the environmental balance of ambient IT, into a tool of the military industrial complex, acting as human-weapons dealers to the highest bidders. With no way to tell who amongst the Bureau was allied with Gyras, they realized that there was no way to save the organization without (literally and metaphorically) burning it to the ground and starting over. They mounted what they knew to be a suicide mission to ITB headquarters, leaving the players, whom they had grown close to, heartfelt goodbyes. They succeeded in their mission, leaving only the players and a small handful of allies behind to rebuild a new, more ethical replacement that could perform the ITB's stated goals without making traumatized child soldiers in the process.
Under The Torchlight (Tungsten)
Tungsten was the second major ARG endeavor the WARG team undertook together. It primarily took place on Discord, but had a whole network of websites associated with it. The initial rabbithole was the Tungsten City Council website, and the accompanying LaFontaine Industries website.The basis of the story is a world post-post-apocalypse. Canonically, a global nuclear war took place in 2094, which destroyed most of civilization, and made most of the world uninhabitable. The story of Tungsten takes place in 3018, at which point society has mostly recovered, albeit with a massively decreased population and swathes of wasteland between walled city-states.Tungsten was so named because it takes place in one of those walled city-states, which shares its name. The few cities that have managed to establish themselves have mostly popped up around an exploitable natural resource which can be traded with the primary exports of other city-states. Canonically, other cities such as Cobalt, Iron, and Coal have been mentioned.The story revolved around the corruption of the mafia-owned city government, a radiation-obsessed cult who worshipped a pre-war nuclear company called Torchlight, and a serial killer trying to incite resentment against government inaction.With several future projects planned for this universe, we've given it the umbrella name Under The Torchlight. Upcoming stories being actively worked on are Cobalt (which was previously teased, but scope creep has put it on the backburner for now), and a presently unannounced story set in an entirely new city. Stay tuned for developments!
Absgalan
Absgalan technically exists within the ITB universe, but it was its own thing when we first created it. The story took place mostly on Discord, but also highly involved a website we created for it. It was our third major ARG, coming directly after Tungsten.The story followed two members of a niche religion (which might be described as a cult, though it is generally benign and does not follow the BITE model). Their religion is called Absgalar, and centers around their god, Absgal, who is also known as The King, and is represented as a green star.Absgalarans speak their own language, called Absgalarik, for which we made an extensive conlang. You can find several Absgalarik phrasebooks on the website. They also have their own calendar, where the months map roughly to the seasons of the western Zodiac, though they have different names and associations.The central characters, known by their Absgalaran names Sorrek and Barul, are young adult members of the church, who are making an effort to modernize their archaic religion by making a website and inviting folks online to learn what Absgalar is all about. They took advantage of the arrival of a special event in the religious cycle to get people involved.The primary focus was around a game called Absgalan, in which a small portion of a deck of magical cards are distributed to Absgalaran religious centers around the world. The deck consists of three types of cards: Echoes (people and animals), Alters (verbs), and Wonders (magical items). Each round of the game, three Echoes and three Alters are drawn, and players must choose to pair them. The choices they make fundamentally alter history, sometimes in very unexpected ways.
Divine Intervention
It was primarily run over Discord, but also heavily featured a website on which we hosted many complex puzzles, which teams of players competed to be the first to solve. Sadly, that website is lost.There was a second chapter to the story, called New Order, and a third chapter, called GROTTO. Torri will certainly have more stories to tell in this universe, so be sure to join us on Discord.
Divine Intervention is a universe spearheaded by co-founder Torri. The first game we ran in this universe was called Helldyve. It featured transmissions from an entity known as the Dyver, as they descended through layers of hell and traversed the multiverse. The Dyver was a member of the Ordo Linguaram, or Order of the Tongue, which was opposed by an organization called Hopeful Humanity.
Sub-Liminal Spaces
Sub-Liminal Spaces, abbreviated SLS, is a company that purports to be able to allow people to puppet living entities in other realities, actively shaping the histories of those worlds. SLS is run by a very small team, who have acquired the means to do this through an agreement with WeARGames' "Mysterious Benefactors." (Please be careful not to invoke their names, we try to avoid attracting their attention.) They are not directly connected to WARG as business partners, we are simply allied by circumstance.
SLS is a metacontextual vessel for a number of games we'd like to run (though that will require the expense of buying the domain name again...) and one that we have already. Well, two, technically. There was a brief story told at the beginning of SLS' introduction where players had to use clues hidden in an RPG Maker game that Danion was trapped inside, due to a malfunction during testing of their Sub-Liminal "veil penetration" technology, to rescue them. The game was from Danion's perspective of being trapped in a time loop within a fantasy game, which was supposed to let him out once he had finished it.The one full game that we've run in this "multiverse" is Limbo, which was the first of our deliberately made IREs, and is described in that section below.
Tales From Jones Hollow
Tales From Jones Hollow was a series of short stories written by Torri and posted on the WeARGames Patreon (which is currently on hiatus). They take place in the titular town of Jones Hollow, and depict a variety of strange, and possibly supernatural, events happening to a variety of characters over a non-linear timeline.Several of the stories are able to be viewed for free, so please give them a look! We hope to return to this series in the future.
Immersive Roleplaying Experiences (IREs)
Immersive Roleplaying Experiences, or IREs, is our name for what are, essentially, digital LARPs. They're text-based RPGs (with or without stats / mechanics) that take place in more-or-less real time, with transmedia elements, puzzles, and dynamic narratives with collaborative storytelling. Some of our projects (such as Tungsten and Limbo) blur the line between IRE and ARG. We formerly referred these types of games as ARRPGs, but that's a bit of a mouthful, hence the adoption of IRE, instead.
ITB Zero (ITB0)
ITB 0 was our first foray into an IRE with proper RPG mechanics and combat. It was made to be a prequel to the story of ITB, our first ARG as a team, and several players portrayed "canon" characters from it, but were given the freedom to make those characters their own. Players who made their own characters first chose their Aptitude, which determined the abilities they had, and later chose a specialization (or Sub-Aptitude) to diversify their characters from others within the same "Apt." Solar Sub-Apts work through, or act upon, the physical world; Lunar Sub-Apts through mental means; and Stellar through metaphysical or spiritual means.
The story broadly followed the downfall of a prodigy IT User who began to manifest a second Aptitude — something that already made for highly unstable individuals, and made all the worse by that second Apt being a Devourer. While other IT Users are able to produce and/or manipulate IT, Devourers consume it to become ever more powerful, making them intensely dangerous to everyone and everything around them. When Devourers appear, they are usually killed immediately to eradicate the threat, no matter how young or innocent the individual may be.The players, whose characters were students at the ITB's training academy, were forced to fight their friend and mentor, who they spent the majority of the game getting to know and love, after watching her mentally deteriorate as her new powers developed.
Limbo
Limbo is the first proper IRE we ran, set in the Sub-Liminal Spaces multiverse. We consider it a "proper" IRE, as opposed to the more abstract, semi-ARG format used in Tungsten (and to an extent ITB1), because players were explicitly instructed to create a character to play in a world with well-defined rules. There was a character quiz (made in Twine) that they could take, which would assign them a Race and a House within the city Limbo takes place in.The titular city of Limbo exists within a transitional (or, perhaps, Liminal) dimension between the physical realm of mortals and the metaphysical realms of Heaven and Hell. For eons, well before humans ever existed, this realm has been contested and fought over by the armies of Heaven and Hell, in an ultimately pointless battle, as they were cosmically predetermined to be of equal strength, and killing any given Angel or Demon would result only in them being born anew, in an endless cycle. Disappointed in Their children for their pointless squabbling, God disappeared, leaving the two groups to squabble amongst themselves until they could resolve their differences.Not long (cosmically speaking) after, the leaders of both armies, the Archdemons and Archangels, came to the mutual decision that their fighting was pointless, and any victory they achieved was short lived. Still unwilling to either share or concede to one-another, they decided on a more peaceful means of determining who would "own" Limbo. Now, once every hundred years, the Archangels and Archdemons come together in the city of Limbo for a complex game of cards using the Deck of Souls. Each time the Deck is called into use, it calls upon souls that reside within Limbo — be they mortal, infernal, or celestial — to represent each card, which are separated into the suits of Flesh, Spirit, Heart, and Mind.When their cards are played, the individuals pictured must face each other in some form of combat (not necessarily physical), and the winner awards a point to the one who holds their card.
The ones who participate in the game, and who are the only ones ineligible to appear on a card themselves, are the respective leaders of their armies, Lucifer and Michael. To the mortal residents of Limbo, the two generals appear as "invisible men," as the mortal mind cannot comprehend the true appearance of the Seraph and his Fallen brother. Other Angels, of the lower Choirs, and Demons, of their various hierarchies, take on appearances mostly in-line with what you might expect, though there are outliers.The mortals of Limbo, on the other hand, are quite different.Mortals who die with unfinished business, or "moving on" to one of the two ethereal realms, where they would become untethered from their mortal cares and motivations, wind up in Limbo. Depending upon who has control of the city at any given time, they take on a form reflective of their greatest Virtue in life (if it's Heaven), or their greatest Vice (if it's Hell). At the time of the game, Hell has control, thus the players and their fellow humans take on monstrous forms, with monstrous abilities to match.The races of Limbo, and their associated Vices are: Ghost (Wrath), Shade (Lust), Zombie (Greed), Skeleton (Gluttony), Wight (Pride), Banshee (Sloth), Vampire (Envy), and Lich (Ignorance). They are ostensibly meant to push mortals to resolve their mortal issues and move on, either by highlighting their worst attributes or punishing their base desires. (For example, Shades, as punishment for their Lust, cause grievous metaphysical harm to others whom they touch.) However, humans are stubborn, and many do not find this particularly motivating.
Limbo, despite having a general plot direction from the beginning, was very much a collaborative storytelling experience, and went places we could not possibly have planned or predicted over the course of its ultimately four year run time. It was never meant to go on that long, but it was greatly beloved by both players and GMs alike to the point that, once the story reached a logical endpoint, we created a fresh server for it as a sandbox for people to continue playing their characters without worrying about overarching plot. We couldn't hope to even begin to summarize how the game played out here, and we've spent long enough on the premise alone.
Tabletop Role-Playing Games (TTRPGs)
Our ARG TTRPGs are mostly original systems designed by us, though we do like working from System Reference Documents (SRDs), as well, including PUSH from Cezar Capacle, and Charge and Breathless from Fari RPGs.Our only publicly-available TTRPGs at this time are an adaptation of Absgalan, called How Do You Serve The King?, made with PUSH, and an adaptation of our in-progress board game, Grindstone, called Clanless, made with Breathless. "How Do You Serve The King?" was made for Cesar's PUSH Jam in 2022. An expanded version of it with more character traits, mission matrix options, and lots of worldbuilding is in the works. "Clanless" was made for Fari RPG's Breathless Jam 2 in 2025.We have also been working on several original systems, which are in various states of completion and have no set ETA for release.The one we've been working on longest is our hard sci-fi / cosmic horror game, Dreadstar Conflict (formerly "To War!"), which was originally run as an off-the-cuff diceless, GMed RPG. Most of the development has revolved around building a robust combat system, as co-founder Torri did an excellent job of setting up worldbuilding in the original run. We ran an early playtest of Dreadstar Conflict for Gehenna Gaming's Virtual Horror Con in 2021. Despite not having finished the original concept yet, we've also been working on a spinoff of it— Angel of Depth, which revolves around a specific distant planet colonized by humans who were cut off from contact with Earth long ago. Working on AoD has surprisingly helped a lot in developing the Dreadstar Conflict system's mechanics.We've also been developing a TTRPG adaptation of ITB, which we ran a playtest version of as an IRE in 2023. The bulk of development on the ITB TTRPG has revolved around the psychic Aptitudes (and their related Sub-Aptitudes), and the abilities each has.The last of our primary TTRPG efforts has been on a (mostly secret 🤫) adaptation of co-founder Zeke's first ever ARG, which ze ran from 2011 to 2012. This game utilizes the combat grid system we developed for use in Dreadstar Conflict. This game's development has mostly focused around its unique Class system, and the implementation of tactical turn-based combat.
Other Games
Embracing the full scope of what "games" have to offer, we have plans to expand our repertoire into other areas. Videogames are still on the horizon, but we've been working on developing a board game for several years now.
Grindstone
Grindstone is a board game, being developed by co-founder Zeke and zer husband Dave, set in Loscaria, the Land of the Six Clans. Players build an adventuring party consisting of two Heroes, plus any Followers and Lieutenants that they pick up on their way around the game board.Heroes have a class, which determines how much damage they do with their standard attacks, what resources they're able to pick up when stopping at the Inn at the beginning of each trip around the board, and any additional abilities they might have. They're able to equip gear found amongst the Loot they get from defeating enemies, and wield Spells, Skills, and Potions, which can be found at the various Shops found at the corners of the board.Games can be made longer or shorter with the inclusion of modular Dungeons (fitted to the corners of the board) and Side Quests (added along the sides). In a short game, players aim to get to the four Dungeon Entrance squares on the board, defeat the bosses, and open up the central Dungeon in the middle of the board. The Dungeon modules add the challenge of fighting through the optional dungeons to reach the bosses, and each one has a unique gimmick to make them more difficult. Once all four bosses have been defeated (by any player), all players try to fight their way to and through the central dungeon, and defeat the final Boss. The player who deals the death blow wins.Grindstone has been in development since 2016, and has been extensively playtested. It just needs tweaks, finalized graphic design and art, and a budget to produce it.
Contact Us
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