All Flesh is Grass

All Flesh is Grass is the second episode of a series of first-contact freeform larps with the working title of The Fermi Solution. It was originally meant to be a prologue to the series, and I started writing it first. That’s until I realised that I wanted an even earlier prologue, set in Roswell in 1948.

So despite having All Flesh is Grass mostly written, I wrote The Roswell Incident and ran that first.

All Flesh is Grass is set in Millville Wisconsin in 1965. The locals have woken up to find a strange barrier surrounding the village. Solving that mystery is the heart of the game.

The game itself is closely based on Clifford D Simak’s 1965 novel of the same name.

After Roswell

Although it was mostly complete before I ran Roswell, but with Roswell’s completion I realised I wanted to make a few changes to All Flesh is Grass. The main changes were:

• Adding two characters from The Roswell Incident (my original idea for The Fermi Solution is that episodes will feature some continuing characters—not always the same ones).
• Adding a paragraph about what the characters knew of Roswell and what happened there.
• Improvements to how I managed/explained the Discord bot.

Adding two characters solved a problem I had with two of the weaker characters—it meant I could give them to a single player to play. That presented the slightly different problem of finding someone happy to play two characters, but I covered this in the casting form (see previous post) and it wasn’t a problem.

Running All Flesh is Grass

From where I sat, in the GM desk and flitting around, listening in, the game seemed to go well. Some notes:

• My original estimate of how long the game would take was too short. I pessimistically thought we would be done in two hours, but I wrapped the game after about 2.5 hours. I think that’s my brilliant players making the most of the characters I gave them.
• The Discord bot behaved itself and didn’t cause any problems this time—although not everyone had read the instructions.
• The returning players (those who had played The Roswell Incident) seemed happy, and the new players dived right in and embraced the daftness.
• I forgot to take any screenshots of play—so I’m afraid these are from Roswell. 

This is Roswell...

Epilogues

After the game, I sent out a feedback form to capture feedback and allow players to tell me some of their highlights and what their characters would be doing in five years. I used this to create an epilogue sheet (which I enjoyed creating—I hope the players enjoyed reading it).

I based the epilogues mostly on the player’s description, with some curating as I have an idea of what is coming up. My favourite epilogues are where the player ran with an idea and did crazy stuff to their character. My favourite:

After reporting on the events in Millville, Preston quits her job as a journalist and writes a tell-all book: Millville: Village Under the Dome. Preston passes it in instalments through the barrier, and when the FBI finds her manuscript, she is arrested. Nevertheless, her manuscript is published and becomes conspiracy fodder for cranks everywhere.

Stars

When I wrote about stars and wishes I noted that I’d not used them for a freeform larp. Well, now I have.

As part of the feedback, I asked players to award stars (Give a star to someone and tell them what they did that was so great). This was my favourite bit of the feedback—an outpouring of lovely stories about the game.

I shared this with everyone—I hope they enjoyed reading it as much as I did.

Feedback

Feedback included ideas for arranging the spaces to allow people to talk privately. I feel strongly about not limiting game spaces, having been bitten that way before. But some players didn’t like having other players drop in on them when they were deep in a private conversation. So in future, I will highlight some channels as PRIVATE and encourage players not to disturb anyone in those channels (without limiting them by numbers).

One player wanted more pronouns on the character sheet, which I understand but I’m not going to do. I wrote the characters as gender neutral so anyone could play them—and I don’t want to go through the character sheets adding he/she/they pronouns each time I run it.

A couple of suggestions were made to give those in power more reason to think that aliens (rather than Soviet agents) were behind the events. I agreed and have tweaked some characters so that should be more likely.

Someone suggested that I make the game structure clearer. For example, at the end of the game there’s a big decision to be made, and it’s worth identifying that at the start of the game so the players don’t become distracted by trivial matters. So I think that’s worth trying next time.

Next time

So now I need to write the next one—we’re leaping forward to the 1980s (I think) and will be more international in scope. No title yet, but I have ideas of things I want it to include.