The Greek myths tell us of Jason, winner of the Golden Fleece. His ship was the Argo, and his companions, the Argonauts, included heros as varied and incomparable as Orpheus and Hercules. The Argo carried this band past storms and monsters; they faced love and treachery, sin and madness; they won immortal renown, and their stories live to this day. Argo — this Argo — is more modest, but also concerns living stories: an online role-playing aid running on the MUCK server. The goal and emphasis of Argo is to enhance online role-playing by providing elements of chance, skill, and earned character development. It is best used as a supplement to consensual role playing: players may opt to plan plot developments ahead of time, as in a traditional TinyPlot, or they may agree to let some or all plot turning points be indicated by the outcome of skill rolls and combat.

Argo is a `points' system: character generation takes place by means of allocating points for various attributes, advantages, disadvantages, skills, and spells. There are no character classes. Rather, one creates the kind of character one wants by allocating points to the categories that best fit the desired persona. There are a number of good role-playing game systems on the market, many of which are superior to Argo in important respects (realism, flexibity, completeness). But Argo does have two important qualities: One, the terms of copyright insure that anyone can use and expand the system as they see fit. Two, it is designed from the ground up to be implemented online. As an online gaming system, Argo features:

• A complete character generation system, including statistics, advantages, disadvantages, backgrounds, skills, and spells.
• Flexible commands for displaying or rolling against attributes, skills, and spells.
• A realistic combat system, allowing easy toggling between `combatant' and `non-combatant' status.
• Spells and psionic abilities.
• Commands for influencing rumors and reputations.
• A two-denomination money system.
• An experience point system based on skill and spell use, player voting, and staff decree.
• Staff utilities for examining and approving characters, allocating experience, monitoring roleplay, and configuring Argo.
• Utilities for creating objects used by the system.
• Online documentation.
• Easy installation via an #install command for all components and uploadable scripts for props and documents.
• Modular, expandable construction, including theme-specific add-ons.