Welcome to Threshold, the ORPGSoc Society Game for Michaelmas and Hilary terms, 2024/2025. This game takes place in a fictional afterlife - players will play as characters who have passed away on Earth with unfinished business and now inhabit a densely populated city block in a purgatorial threshold between this world and the next. Inhabitants of the Threshold are encouraged by government officials to use this time wisely, in order to facilitate their ascension to the next stage of existence. But the Threshold is also a place of great temptation - some lost souls spend all their time here pursuing vice in illegal Snake Dens: drinking, gambling, cheating, and squandering any hope of ascension.

Player characters will be expected to navigate this strange world of virtue and vice. Some may choose to focus on their personal development, righting the wrongs of their past and resolving their unfinished business, while others may succumb to their more self-destructive impulses. Characters will have to face issues of morality and redemption, of trust and secrecy, of life and death, and of the nature of eternity.

Threshold will run on the Tuesday evening of every odd-numbered week of term. For more details, see When and Where.

If you are new to Society Games, or roleplaying in general, we suggest you first read the Intro to the Wiki System, Uptime, and Downtime pages.

For information on accessibility, including how to change the Wiki theme to 'readable', please see Accessibility

To get more of an idea what tone the game will have and what sort of themes it's based on, see Style and Tone.

To learn more about the game's setting, see the setting pages in the sidebar, which contains locations that will feature in the game, as well as their associated NPCs.

And finally, if you wish to participate in the game, please read the Character Creation page.

To be able to run a high quality game and maintain a healthy work-life balance, if more than 24 players express interest in Threshold we will have to ballot. The ballot will be done in collaboration with Ventures, the other MT/HT society game, so not having a place in one game will make you more likely to have a place in the other. In the case of balloting, we will also attempt to recruit a 7th GM, at which point our player cap may increase to 28. In the event of balloting, we will admit groups in the following order until we reach a group which will take us over the player cap, at which point that group will be balloted for places. Subsequent groups will not be balloted. The order of priority for player groups will be:

1. Special Cases (mostly reserved for those who have booked the rooms we need, and to catch extraordinary circumstances)
2. From people who have chosen to ballot preferentially in Threshold:
   1. Oxford University students who have not played a Society Game before
   2. Oxford University students who have played a Society Game before
   3. Non-Oxford University Students
3. From people who have chosen to ballot preferentially in Ventures:
   1. Oxford University students who have not played a Society Game before
   2. Oxford University students who have played a Society Game before
   3. Non-Oxford University Students

If someone ballots with no preference between games, they will be entered into the ballot with the people who balloted for each game preferentially. However, if they get into both games and some people are unable to get into either, they will be asked to withdraw from one.