The Roswell Incident

So last Friday, thirteen brave souls gathered to play The Roswell Incident, the first in a series of freeform larps exploring first contact with aliens. 

I wrote episode 2 first (which I will talk about once I’ve run that). But once I had episode 2 done (or nearly done), I started work on episode 1, which I had decided would be set in 1948 Roswell, at the time of the famous UFO crash.

My early thoughts on Roswell was to set it at the airbase (which was then known as Roswell Army Air Field) concerning the fate of the UFO and dead alien. But as I sketched that out, it became clearer that I needed to change the game’s focus and bring more characters in. So I changed it to a few days before—a rancher finds strange debris which brings the army, FBI and others to Roswell.

Our wonderful mayor

(Click here for more detail on The Roswell Incident, including the cast list.)

Discord or face-to-face?

It’s always much easier to play (and run) a freeform larp face-to-face, providing you have 13 willing volunteers in the same space. If that’s hard to do, then playing online is a great alternative. But playing online has technical challenges.

Luckily, the talented Rei and Roger have developed the wonderful LARPPorterBot, which manages locations and items. I’d used this a year ago when I ran The Highgate Club, but it’s been improved since then. So I needed a crash course to get it running again.

I felt a childish delight in getting the bot running properly—and happily it worked well, with only a couple of glitches on the night.

Calls for sign-ups, casting and reserves

So how long between announcing your online larp and running it? I figure about three weeks.

• Day 1: Announce The Roswell Incident on the UK-Freeforms and Remote, Digital Larps, and Live Action Online Games groups on Facebook. I provided a link to the game site and the sign-up form. I should also have announced it on the ukfreeforms mailing list for those who aren’t on Facebook, but I actually did it on day 4.
• Days 2-6: Continue to engage with replies on Facebook and the mailing list to make sure plenty of people see it.
• Day 7: Issue the casting form to those who have registered an interest. As I was slightly oversubscribed, I asked for volunteers for the reserve list. 
• Day 13: Cast the game.
• Day 14: Send out character sheets, the game background, a “how to play on Discord” sheet. Oh, and a link to Discord. (I should have requested everyone to confirm receipt—I didn’t do that, which meant I spend the next few days worried that people had not got their characters.)
• Days 15-20: Wait nervously for people to turn up on the Discord server.
• Day 21: First thing, send out another link to the Discord server. This is both because the previous link will have expired and remind everyone that the game is today. (I had a couple of players get the day wrong last year for The Highgate Club, so I was ultra-careful this time.)

Eunice and the power cut

The British Isles was battered by a couple of storms in the run up to The Roswell Incident. I had assumed that if there was a problem, I could use my laptop battery and mobile data. However...

About three hours before the game was due to start, we lost all power thanks to Storm Eunice. And while I had battery power on my laptop, I had no mobile data. At all.

We ate tea by candlelight (which was great fun, but I was anxious).

Then, about 40 minutes before curtain up, the power came back on—and I hopped straight onto Discord and set things up. 

We were lucky—the other end of the village didn’t get power until 3 am the following morning.

Running an online larp

Running an online larp is strange. If I’ve done my job right, then all the players have everything they need—they only need to come to me when there’s a problem. 

Discord

So when I started the game, the players headed off to their starting locations and started playing. That left me to . . . do what exactly? So I sat at the GM’s desk for a few minutes, then headed into one of the channels to find out what the players were talking about.

Eventually, I noticed a couple of players in a channel I had to manage (because there were things to find). So I went there and did that.

But I wasn’t sure when to end the game.

When I’d finished writing, I guessed it would take 90-120 minutes to play. But I didn’t know—and I couldn’t tell how quickly people were powering through things.

At about 90 minutes, things still seemed to be going strong, so I told everyone that we would end in 30 minutes. I noted that some players were finishing, but I was also pleased that other players brought them back into the game.

After two hours, I called it a wrap. One group of players, who had figured that something was going on, ended the game with the line, “And we don’t know what their motives are!” Which made for a lovely cliffhanger.

Post-game feedback

I’ve asked for feedback for episode 2. Some characters will return, but I am waiting for the feedback to decide precisely who.

The vet, mayor and sheriff try to figure out what's going on

I also have a few corrections to make to the character sheets—things that came up during play that I hadn’t explained clearly. There were only a couple of those, which was satisfying considering this was its first run.

What’s next?

So what’s next?

Well, a few things.

Polishing: At some point I’ll put The Roswell Incident on my itch.io page for others to run. But that means polishing it, adding all the explanatory text in my head, and formatting things like contingency envelopes so that they’re easy to run. (I’ll also re-run it before too long.)

Prepping episode 2: I need to review the feedback, finish episode 2, and run it.

Episode 3 and beyond: I have a vague idea where I’m going with the future episodes, but now that we’re underway, I need to nail things down.

Improving the bot: I’ve offered to help improve the Discord bot. Unfortunately, I can’t programme, but I can help with improving the documentation.

So that’s going to keep me busy for the next little while.