So, I think this is the right board. Sort of. If all goes according to plan, it'll be
like a PbP, only instead of dice we have a bunch of drunken, bearded, bipolar midgets trying to dig out an underground house in the middle of an unforgiving wilderness. You can skip the next paragraph if you already know what I'm on about.
Dwarf Fortress is a game where you're a sort of omniscient overseer of a colony of very stupid dwarves. The kind of stupid where they don't realize that they are on fire, but do know they want a drink from your very flammable booze supply. The stupidity isn't really intentional on the designer's part, it's just that there's some bugs in the AI, some of which resemble
this son of a bitch. Anyway, despite what I've said just now, it's an incredibly deep game with a notoriously steep learning curve and staggering freedom for the player. A succession game is a game in which a bunch of jackasses like us take turns playing, each one lasting about a year, narrating the events that happen in the fortress.
Boatmurdered is the archetypical example, and
Headshoots makes good supplementary reading (guest starring our very own veekie, I believe). Needless to say, I don't expect this to be a serious game and wholeheartedly encourage you to be silly in writing your posts. You don't have to know much about Dwarf Fortress to play - in fact, it's probably funnier if you don't. The biggest hurdle in this case will be the user interface, and
this page will come in handy with that.
So, I'm currently looking through the rules for generating a world with as many options as I can work out how to max out, but I want to gauge interest and all that. Figure out who's interested in playing, who's interested in being "dorfed" (having a dwarf in-game named after you). All players will be dorfed, and have their titles changed to "Former Ruler" once they retire from rulership. If your successor isn't named in the fort yet, or you don't know who your successor will be, leave at least one dwarf unnamed for them. First come, first served, and all that. Although if two people who really hate each other from what I know of board politics post asking to play, I
will make sure you're adjacent and flip a coin to see who goes first. You can also request particular arrangements
relative to each other and I'll see that it works out as best I can.
You'll be expected to post a narrative of your time in the fortress, in the form of engravings, notes, a journal, letters, or whatever form seems plausible. Hell, if you're playing a time traveler from the distant future, you could record it in holograms for all I care. You don't have to do it all in one post, though. Turns will generally last an in-game year, but unless you've completely trashed everything you can pass to the next player early if you need to. Their turn will last a year from the date they pick it up.
Don't be a douchebag; while picking on former rulers is okay, and even encouraged if you're funny about it, don't go out of your way to kill them, undo their projects, destroy the fort, or otherwise be uncreative in attempting to ruin the other players' fun. Remember, this is a cooperative game, so the better people like your turn's results, the more you're winning.
This will be a fairly hands-off game, in terms of DMing. In fact, I don't really intend to do much of that. I might ask for a sub-board so that I can be a moderator, but that's about it in terms of active running of things. Once I've got the world generated and a site picked (I'll ask for opinions on what sort of site we should look for before picking one), I'll hand off the save to somebody else. I don't even want to play the first year - I'm exercising a bit of executive privilege and assigning myself the third turn. It should be noted that I'm not a particularly sage player - I haven't played the game much since 40d (an older version lacking many current features), so I'm missing out on a lot of knowledge. In particular, I haven't got experience with the military or hospital systems, both of which sound pretty important to avoiding !!Fun!!*.
*I'm going to explain the joke now, thereby killing it. For those of you with weak, elf-like stomachs, you should quit reading now before the gruesome violence toward the joke begins. Objects in the game that are on fire, you see, flash orange and red with a pair of exclamation marks on each side (x -> !!x!!), and Fun refers in general to terrible things that kill everyone, because of the game's slogan, "Losing Is Fun!". Despite that slogan, once your fortress becomes established, it's very easy to render your fortress invulnerable, but it's often not very fun to do so and cuts off a lot of options.
EDIT: Added link to Dwarf Fortress.