Viewscream

Last night I tried the horror-SF larp Viewscream by Rafael Chandler, designed to be played online using Hangouts or Skype or whatever. It’s been around for a few years, but I hadn’t heard of it when the Smart Party podcast mentioned it recently when talking about online roleplaying.

I downloaded it and as we are between games I suggested* we try it. I sent around the rules and a sample scenario in advance, and then we tried The Culler out of Space, the only three-player scenario in the pack.

This was a new thing for us. We’ve done a fair bit of online RPG-ing, but our larping experience is wildly different: Jon and I have done quite a bit of larp, while Terry hadn’t done any at all.
None of us had done anything quite like Viewscream though.

You can pick up Viewscream on DriveThuRPG for free, so I’m not going to go into it in any depth. This isn’t a review - just our experience.

Playing Viewscream

The three roles in The Culler out of Space are Bridge, Medical, and Cryo. The ship has disturbed something and weird colours are attacking the ship and creating problems. Each player is trapped in different parts of the ship, as the horror happens. I took Bridge (who "runs" the session), while Terry was Cryo and Jon Medical.

Overall, we were done in well under an hour. I think we were playing for about 40 minutes - but we were a bit quick to dive into the emergencies. Next time (and there will be a next time) we’ll be a bit more relaxed. Also next time there will be a fourth player, which means we’re bound to take a bit longer.

Some thoughts:

• We enjoyed ourselves and will try another one. As a first experience it was great fun, but I think a bit of experience would improve it significantly.
• We used Facebook Messenger, which worked just fine. Viewscream has some overlays that are supposed to work with Google Hangouts, but I don’t think they work for the current version of Hangouts.
• Terry and I switched our lights off so we were illuminated just by our screens. That worked really well, and Terry had some flashing lights and an alarm (from YouTube I think) that created some eerie effects. Easy to do and I wish I’d thought of it.
• As Bridge, though, I found it easy to lose track of who was doing what. I’m not sure I needed to keep track, but I felt I should.
• We missed a couple of the roleplaying cues - but I think that was down to inexperience.
• I found that the rules made a lot of assumptions about how the game is played. It talks about th Bridge framing scenes, but we found it played as one continuous scene. Enjoyable, but in looking at it afterwards I couldn’t work out what the author intended.
• For me, I’d prefer a little more background detail in the situation (but that’s the freeformer in me saying that).
• Next time I am Bridge I need to prepare some leading questions for the other players to try and draw out the nature of the emergency. There are some examples in the rules, but they aren’t carried over to the actual character sheets, so I forgot all about them. (That would have slowed us down a bit as well.)

*I confess to having an ulterior motive. With lockdown in force, the Freeform Games sales have dropped off a cliff. Some of our customers are trying to organise murder mystery parties online, and I thought I’d better try some online larping to see how that worked.