Lenny’s been having a hard time. First, there was the car crash. A bystander said he was all right, just a little banged up, but he still had to go to the hospital. A friend tried to cover for him, saying he was texting while driving, but everyone in town knows Lenny has a drinking problem, a problem that’s only gotten worse since he lost his side gig as a gravedigger. Some townspeople felt bad and brought him a bouquet of magnolias in the hospital. It turns out, he was mostly worried about his pet baby raccoons, so one kind soul promised to take care of them for him. Once he got out of the hospital, he mostly dropped off the map, but that wasn’t too unusual — Lenny Crabbitz is always a tough guy to find.

But don’t feel too bad for Lenny; he doesn’t really exist. Lenny’s just a figment of the collective imagination behind /r/HaveWeMet, an occasionally obscene subreddit where complete strangers invent online personas and pretend to know one another. There are now enough figments to fill an entire town, dubbed Lower Duck Pond. Niall O’Neill runs an Irish bar called Pot O’ Beer on Sorenson Street, while Ty is the park ranger at King’s Falls National Park. Meanwhile, on 13th Old Street, the mysterious Zack runs a shop called From Beyond, which has been tenuously linked to the occult. There’s a weatherman who posts daily updates on the conditions so that residents will know if they should bring an umbrella when they leave their fictional houses in the morning. He’s such a celebrity that he even has a merch shop.

It’s a gigantic text-based role-play campaign where everyone is Dungeon Master

Created by /u/Devuluh, HaveWeMet is full of stories like Lenny’s, all invented by the sub’s users. “I used to spend an unbelievable amount of time on Reddit,” Devuluh says, “and would often passively come up with ideas for subreddits in my head.” After noticing a number of threads where people posted comments like “it’s me ur brother,” Devuluh became curious about whether a community existed where users pretended to know one another. “I asked on /r/findareddit if such a community existed, and after finding out it didn’t, I created it.”

The first members came from the FindAReddit thread. So many rushed to subscribe that HaveWeMet made it onto the trending list the next day, bringing even more users. Two years later, Lower Duck Pond counts 82,200 members, roughly the same population of Sioux City, Iowa.

As the town has grown, so have the amenities. Earlier this week, it was announced that Lower Duck Pond was in the process of staging a reopening for its library. The announcement came from the town librarian, and it reads as follows:

I know it’s been empty and abandoned for quite some time, but it you swing round you should find the building to be refurbished and full of books once again. I will be working as the librarian, so don’t be afraid to say hi. Also, regarding some of the rumours about the mysterious symbols on the sidewalk, I can assure you the Library is totally safe and open to the public. I haven’t seen or even have any knowledge of any occult activities taking place around here. I look forward to seeing you all down here!

This kind of post isn’t out of the ordinary for HaveWeMet, but as Devuluh sees it, the most interesting stuff happens when multiple users start to play off each other. When that happens, you get his favorite kind of thread, “the ones that span across multiple posts from different users, and have long, drawn-out stories.”

“It’s essentially a massive exercise in improvisation.”

This is where HaveWeMet actually starts to resemble more conventional forms of role-playing. At the start, it was a fun experiment where people would post once, maybe twice, and then forget about their role. Like a long-running D&D campaign or a massive RPG, HaveWeMet has become a collaborative project — only this project is shared between tens of thousands of people, some of whom are so active in the community that they’ve become an integral part of its existence. The result is a gigantic text-based role-play campaign where everyone is Dungeon Master, and the world’s birth and continuing survival are directly tied to cooperation.

Like any long-running series, HaveWeMet has inspired a few spinoffs. /r/WillWeMeet is a variant of HaveWeMet set in the future, and /r/LakeWobegon, a sub reserved for more serious-minded role-play. Perhaps the most interesting spinoff is /r/HaveWeMeta, which is strictly intended for meta-commentary on HaveWeMet. Users are making up rules at the same time they’re making up stories, which can cause serious problems if not everyone has the same rules in mind. In one recent conflict, a user was upset that someone was pretending to be their character’s daughter. The user had been planning to create an alt account and role-play her as well, but someone else swooped in before they had the chance. “I know it’s not against the rules to pretend to play someone that’s a family member,” they wrote. “But when I made the character and made the mini plot/post, I just feel like it’s shitty to pretend to be a character I created? Am I overreacting?”

“We even have a ‘Town Council’ for members who want to talk with other members, or discuss concerns and feedback for the sub itself,” Devuluh says.

Mostly, though, HaveWeMet lets users play with the rules of online identity itself. There aren’t many anonymous spaces left on the internet, and where they’ve survived, communities are always on the lookout for impostors accounts. On most of the internet, creating a sock-puppet account will get you banned — but HaveWeMet embraces it.

Visitors seem to thrive on the offbeat creativity of the setup. “I like posting because it’s essentially a massive exercise in improvisation,” said one user, who posts as local librarian Colin Thesaurus. He compared it to Welcome to Night Vale — the popular Lovecraftian podcast — but it’s collectively authored, one thread at a time. “It’s a tone I love, and something that keeps bringing me back to the subreddit.”

Like improv, the riffs tend to be self-reinforcing. When the sub realized you could role-play as animals, users went all-in: Ulysses the alpaca (an actual person) was elected mayor, then replaced by none other than Bruce the Moose. Others start goat choirs alongside salamander breeders and literal ducks.

The chaos seems to bring people together. Weatherman John Levee, one of the most prominent posters in the sub, said he’s drawn to the sense of camaraderie in the town. “The community is lovely, all of this free-form, unrestricted posting,” they said. “It’s interesting to see how people interact when you aren’t given a backstory, or a character, only the post, and the knowledge that it’s happening in a small town where everybody knows everybody.”

That community can be a rare thing. Levee compares it to listening to community radio as a child in the UK, getting broadcasts from a tiny town in the Midwestern US. “I live in the UK, where the idea of having a radio station for a single town was strange,” he told me. “Although I never visited this town, the quirky small-town-ish-ness of the place was something I enjoyed. Odd folks who all lived in the same place, where everybody seemed to know everybody.”

Correction: An earlier version of this piece referred to the fictional town as Lake Duck Pond. In fact, its name is Lower Duck Pond. The Verge regrets the error.