Ask me about blaseball and teaching in semi-rural New Zealand.

What's your favorite character archetypes and plot beats.

The last good while I've really had endings on my mind. It's in the nature and circumstances of the kind of media I enjoy (collaborative, generated on-the-fly) that I've many a time been bereft of an ending. They intimidate me, I dread them, and yet, when they do arrive it's a catharsis.

Arright so. I explained what Blaseball was at its core; a sports simulator which was also like a massive tabletop roleplaying game because the DMs (The Game Band) had particular story beats they'd hit, but also respond to what we the Fans were interested in (through the Decrees system).

In rough chronological order, Blaseball had two main Eras: Discipline and Expansion.

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The Discipline Era started with Fans voting to Open the Forbidden Book. This made the umpires go rogue and they would randomly incinerate players during games where the weather was Solar Eclipse. The next season (Season 3), Fans voted to add Peanuts to the game. As a result this guy showed up:



We got new weather, Peanuts, during which players could potentially swallow a peanut as they rained from the sky. Players had a hidden stat indicating if they were allergic to peanuts or not; if allergic swallowing a peanut would tank their stats, if non-allergic they'd get a stat boost instead. We also got a new mechanic where you could spend your Coins on Peanuts, and eat them.

Then it turns out some people hacked the site and gave themselves ridiculous amounts of Peanuts and Coins, which made the Peanut show up and yell BLASPHEMY while the devs fixed it in the background. The Shelled One showed up a few more times to explain when Fans had done things to earn "Strikes", and eventually-presumably some form of divine punishment. We eventually got our final strike because instead of eating peanuts for ourselves, we chucked 100 million peanuts into the afterlife where a big psychopomp squid was happily munching on them.

So, us fans could've followed the plot laid down for us, with the bloviating, self-important Shelled One demanding our tribute and worship etc etc, except someone discovered that the first ever player to get incinerated, Jaylen Hotdogfingers, still existed on the site and, moreover, was a valid target to be Idolized.

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The Idol Board was a new mechanic introduced in Season 6, which let you pick a Player and every time that Player did something good (a Batter scoring hits or homeruns; a Pitcher striking out batters or getting shutouts) you'd get more coins. This obviously made the better players in the game the most popular players to be Idolized, and eventually we got a Leaderboard where the best players in the league sat comfortably at the top (with names like Jessica Telephone, Axel Trololol, PolkaDot Patterson, York Silk, and Randall Marijuana). With the new mechanic also came some Blessings which interacted with it: one team could boost their most idolized player1, one team rerolled their least-idolized player2, and one team could steal the least idolized player in the whole league and max out their stats3.

1 2 3
Conner Haley, Leach Herman, and Howell Franklin. Keep an eye out for the third guy he may show up again later

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Where the Fans diverged from the Game Band's plan, and for which they richly rewarded us, was a fourth Blessing: One team could steal whichever player was on the 14th position of the Idol Board. As soon as someone realised a dead player could be Idolized, word got out and Fans from all over the League jumped on to Idolize the first player to be incinerated, Jaylen Hotdogfingers. It was generally agreed upon that the Seattle Garages, Jaylen's team, should be the one to win the blessing. There was a real sense of anxiety, but hope, that this way we might be able to pull fallen players back from the dead.

And then, consequences!

The plan worked. Jaylen rejoined the Garages' pitching rotation. In exchange, Mike Townsend of the Garages was "sent to the Shadows". (They even wrote a song about it! And by "they", I mean a group of fans who decided to run with the headcanon that the Seattle Garages were an anarchist community of musicians who also play blaseball, and then make actual real music we can listen to.) HOWEVER Jaylen was saddled with "Debt", a mysterious modification on their player profile which made its effects clear pretty quickly:

When Jaylen pitched, there was a chance they'd hit the batter with the ball. This rendered the struck batter Unstable, a condition which wore off after 7 games but made them vastly more likely to be incinerated if they played later in Solar Eclipse weather. To make things worse, if an Unstable player were incinerated, the Unstable status would jump to another player. We didn't find this out until day 32 in the following Season, when the Hades Tigers were playing the Canada Moist Talkers. Two Unstable players were incinerated, passing it on two other players who also got incinerated within the next day or so of games.

Unrelated to the Instability chains, one replacement for the incinerated players, Kiki Familia, played exactly 5 and a 1/3rd innings before getting incinerated. Over the remainder of the season, the Moist Talkers and Tigers lost four players to incineration.

This was about the time when everyone realised that necromancy was not, in fact, cool and fun and consequence-free.

(actually, we do get to sort of dodge consequences, because Jaylen's Debt gets "refinanced". From there when they hit people, they start Flickering, which increases the odds they'll permanently switch to the opposite team during Feedback weather. This still makes people sad because their faves keep getting yeeted to other teams, but it sure beats dying!)

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End of Season 7 (each of these seasons is a real-life week, also, remember). The Monitor makes an appearance.

The Monitor is a big squid, harking from the Trench and/or the Hall, aka the Hall of Flame where all the incinerated Blaseballers are hanging out in what's generally imagined to be a deep, dark, bottom-of-the-sea purgatory. They're pretty chill, and showed up just now because they realised Jaylen Hotdogfingers was no longer in the Hall. They like to eat "eggs" (peanuts), and let the Fans "see their friends" (view deceased players in the Hall) in exchange for tributing Peanuts.

The tributing of peanuts pisses off the Shelled One, who 's the league's favorite players all hanging out at the top of the Idol Board. players can't bat, because they're trapped in a giant peanut shell, but apparently can catch fly balls when they're out on defense. This goes on for a couple of seasons, until one of the worst teams in the League, the LA Unlimited Tacos, decide to do some Idol Board Science of their own: What happens if an entire team's pitching rotation is Shelled?

campaign material for the Snackrifice.

As it turns out, a team without an available pitcher is provided a Pitching Machine. Pitching Machine also gets , because everyone is idolizing them because a pitcher who pitches every game will be paying out a whole lot more than a pitcher on a team where they rotate days with four other pitchers. (also at this time a shadowy cabal of team reps conspired to pull a player called Chorby Short from the shadows. Which is like, definitely in my top 3 favorite stunts I helped make happen.)

All these players (a mix of the best players in the league, and also the Tacos' former pitching rotation) meet a terrible fate at the end of Season 9, when they all got kidnapped from their original teams and added to THE SHELLED ONE'S PODS. They then proceeded to curbstomp the Season 9 champions, the Charleston Shoe Thieves. The Shelled One taunted us, and let us know if we wanted to try free the players it would be waiting for the end of Season 10 for a rematch.

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Season 10. More Idol Board shenanigans. Jaylen (who, unrelated to Debt, had gained the modification Fliickerrriiing which was sending them on a world tour around the Leage) accidentally swapped places with a dead guy called Tillman Henderson, and ended up in the Hall. We kept pouring Peanuts into the Hall, expecting... something. The Baltimore Crabs won the Season 10 Championship, created a black hole which destroyed the Moon (don't worry about it lmao), and THE SHELLED ONE'S PODS promptly made their appearance.

What happens next, well... I'd recommend if you've read this far, you should take half an hour or so and watch it for yourself.

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What's quite funny about the fact that I typed all this out, is that while all this was a fun puzzle for the Fans to collectively solve, it's not actually close to my favorite story in Blaseball. One of the most compelling things about Blaseball, for me, was the fact that in-game the players were nothing but a name, a statline, and some randomly generated trivia about their "pregame ritual" and how they like their coffee. There was no canonical gender or appearance for any player. Instead, a team's fans would look at their players, share their thoughts and their fanart and other works that detailed what they might be like, and we developed a consensus reality.

The Blaseball universe canonically has separate realities; players can be Alternated which is described as replacing them with a version of themselves from another reality. Same name, different stat line. One time, when a player hit a grand slam, time froze, time jumped back three innings, the the site went down for three hours and eventually showing both timelines of the game in the teams' league standings. This was later narrated as having split the skies above Los Angeles, turning it into infinite Los Angeleses all overlaid on top of each other. Thanks to the Blaseball universe being shaped like this, it's a handy explanation for why some Fans interpret Lenny Marijuana as the lesser-known Marijuana sibling who didn't read the paperwork and ended up in the Garages' shadows, while others say Lenny is the father of Randall and Dominic Marijuana who made a deal with a devil to ensure his sons' success... and why both reads are valid.

Team culture varied from team to team, both in terms of how much consensus lore a player would have and also the worldbuilding of the city the team called home. Part of why I loved the Sunbeams was how rich our fan-made player lore was. The opening of the Hellmouth was nothing more than a few lines in the actual game, but we played with that concept.

We imagined a former small-town tourism hotspot in the east of Utah with a giant memory-devouring hole swallowing half of it. We imagined what it's like to live there, where the Hellmouth actively repels you if you're an outsider, then grants you an Adaptation once you both realise Hellmouth is now your home. We imagined the original lineup of Sunbeams players were just regular folks from the small, tight-knit community. We imagined Hellmouthians would see our ace batter, Nagomi Nava, and see her as the local psychopomp and cat cafe owner first and a sports star second. We imagined that the parking lot around the stadium is permanently molten asphalt, and imagined a thriving and fucked up lacustrine ecosystem for it. We joked that they stopped doing money there, and things just cost a numerical amount. If a packet of chips cost "three", you could pay in three of anything. Cool rocks. Yachts. Names you've shortlisted for your firstborn.

It's those stories I love. With Blaseball ending, it quietly kills me that there's no real answer to what happens to Moab and its residents. Does the Hellmouth, an entity summoned by Blaseball, close? Do the once-players start to age, now that their souls are no longer contracted to a sport where play must never stop? Sure, I could write or draw something, put my interpretation out there into the world, but also what's the point? I may as well write about life on SWEEPS-11, the farthest-from-Earth exoplanet discovered so far in our universe. The world of Blaseball is closed off to us in this one.

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In Season 18, Blaseball got a new feature called the Library. This was mostly meant to drip-feed us information on how this wasn't the first League, and the previous had been reset under apocalyptic circumstances we were liable to re-enact. In "the first day, zeroth edition", there's one particular line that made me scream with rage when I googled it:



Apophenia. Perceiving meaningful connections between unrelated things. Seeking patterns where there are none to be found. Seeing a randomly generated name, and a randomly generated statline, and imagining a person. Someone who, in the grand plot of Blaseball, barely registers, never thrust by RNG or Fan manipulation into the spotlight where the Game Band makes them a vehicle for their plotlines. Following their randomly-generated path through up to 26 seasons, and imagining some narrative thread that courses through their "life".

Which member of the Hellmouth Sunbeams would you like to hear about first?

• Lars Taylor
  
• Nagomi Nava
  
• Phineas Wormthrice
  
• Howell Franklin
  
• Sandoval Crossing
  
• Sutton Bishop