Weighted Mortality: The First Death Game

**Weighted Mortality: The First Death Game**, or alternatively, **Weighted Mortality 1**, **WM:TFDG**, and **WM1** was the first game in Pandora's Box and the entire Weighted Mortality (WM) series.

This game's game master is Puppet (character).

The game began on September 5, 2021. It ran until September 26, 2021. It was succeeded by Weighted Mortality: Walls Will Watch.

## Synopsis

The game took place as a series of weekly voice-calls. Each one was summarized by a "death game log" entry after the game.

> "Nine players stepped into the main game grounds earlier today. Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. Claims were thrown, Sun declared himself the sage, while Moon declared themself the same. Neptune, the sacrifice, admitted to being as such. Argument ensued over the true sage, both coming to the conclusion that Mercury was the keymaster."
>
>

*-Puppet, in WM1's Death Game Log, Entry 1.*

### Main Game 1

In the first main game, players Saturn and Neptune died.

### Main Game 2

In the second, player Venus won on a sacrifice's victory. Venus chose Mercury to take with them, and the rest of the players were subsequently killed. This resulted in a "timeline break" where players decided, because it was so fun, to try the second main game again. This resulted in a main game 2(b) where, instead, players Venus, Mercury, and Mars died. This timeline is timeline 1-alpha, and the original timeline where Venus won is considered timeline 1-beta.

### Before Main Game 3

There are documents distributed, showing conversations between the game master Puppet and an unknown person. These documents are in French and run through Vigenere cipher. They explain things like why the game happens and what Puppet's motivations are. There is also a special card floating around, called "the puppet." The players obtained and worked hard to solve these documents, keeping many secrets from each other.

The third and final main game featured the newly-introduced gambling mechanic. It also had new rules and restrictions, meaning each player could only trade once. Two players make gambles to bet their lives- and win. This results in a four-player main game.

### Main Game 3

The final main game was intense; the players skipped immediately through preliminaries. Moon was the sage and was backed into a corner. They lied about the keymaster's identity, a bold move which resulted in their death. The player Sun then sacrifices himself. In the end, it was a sacrifice's victory and Uranus and Earth survived.

Puppet, the game master for the whole game, did not meet the requirements to survive. She had been trying to escape by hinting to the players "SACRIFICE YOURSELF AND TAKE ME WITH YOU," meaning, to win as the sacrifice and choose Puppet as your surviving companion. Because the sacrifice had not selected him, he carried out the according executions and then killed himself with a comically small gun.

## Game Mechanics

This game ran very simply, with only voice-calls and direct messages for planning. Trading was made through direct messaging the game master. Discussions happened outside of the view of the game master. Dead players were allowed to contact living through what was called "whispers." They were agreed upon in the canon to be forms of hallucinations- but no clear explanation was ever made.

This game developed many concepts that continued use throughout the Weighted Mortality game series. This game introduced the Your Turn to Die death-game format, the written executions, gambling, death game log entries, "timeline breaks," and use of ARG-inspired elements such as web links and ciphers.

## Documents

A few documents were released as pieces of lore for this game. These documents are ENEMY, MORTAL, SACRIFICE, SUICIDE, and the unreleased PUPPET. Also released were files titled Evidence 1, Evidence 2, and Evidence 3. These were images or spreadsheets. The final document to be important to WM1 was the Untitled Spreadsheet spreadsheet. Many of these documents were encrypted using Vigenère encryption.

## Relevant Characters

This game featured no properly developed characters, minus the game master Puppet. All of the games participants were mirrors of their real-life counterparts. *Pseudonyms are used for privacy on this site.*

## Trivia

* Weighted Mortality 1 features the only "timeline break" in WM history.
* WM1 introduced the "Weighted Mortality" moniker, named by one of the players misreading a randomly generated poem.
* The logo for WM1 features just one eye, a convention that was repeated for each successive game in Pandora's Box. The second game features two, the third features three, and so on.