The Three Empires
The Three Empires is a roleplaying game played over Messenger between four players. It has a storyline in development and the players themselves influence how it will shape up. GMing is usually done by one player at a time directing the events and the NPCs that don't have a specific controller.
At the start of the game, nobody yet knows much about what is going on and the worlds and empires are pretty much bare with little detail. But as things progress the environments, objects and creatures the players meet are fleshed out. This is the second of such campaigns, the first being Whisperingworm which started as an improptu attempt for a Messenger-based Interactive Fiction game.
The Players
Happyturtle: The GM of the current storyline.
Shadowcaller: One of the players.
Murska: Murska, the original starter of the Whisperingworm IF, is… a wolf. And an eyeball, wreathed in green flames. Happyturtle is, based on internet relationships and having no basis in real life, his daughter. Her being much older than him has proven to be no issue, due to time travel. He insists he is bad at roleplaying and GMing although, considering his reputation for deceit, this has been brought to question by the other players based on such frivolous things as 'evidence' many times. He is from Finland and likes and dislikes a great many things which vary on a daily basis. He does have a soft spot for strategic and tactical gaming and music, however.
Wolfbane: The newest addition to this little group.
Story thus far: (Summary)
Dan(Murska) and Lucia(Happyturtle) wake up, apparently abandoned, on a ship called Tarrus. They're waken up by Kara(Shadowcaller), a strange woman in a full-body suit. After some discussion they find out the ship has been attacked by unknown assailants who have disabled it's drive systems with a single shot. Kara happened upon the drifting ship deliberately hidden in a difficult-to-find location in the system and decided to salvage what she could, but happened upon Dan and Lucia in stasis instead.
They took what they could from the ship and boarded Kara's ship, Anubis. Anubis is an unarmed but fast vessel created by Kara herself. They talk a bit about each other, and later Dan gets a prerecorded message from the first officer of Tarrus which tells him that Dima is dangerous and that is why the ship was disabled and moved out of the way. The message also reveals he had known a salvage ship would happen to find them and that the crew intends to return. It points to coordinates in the asteroid cloud for more information. (Not all this information is known to all players, Dan didn't show the entire message to others.)
They decide to head there. Once there, they land into the secret base in an asteroid and are greeted by a horribly warped humanoid figure who turns out to be said officer. The officer explains that an alien substance which crashed into a nearby colony warped multiple humans there in the same way and created chaos, warring and a quarantine. He asks for Dan's help at making sure the quarantine holds.