Messages from Callisto: Design notes

Messages from Callisto is the fourth part of my series of linked freeforms involving aliens. I ran it earlier this month, online. The overall series background is here. Previous episodes were:

• The Roswell Incident – a flying saucer crashes in 1947 in New Mexico. I ran this online in February 2022 and face-to-face in February 2023. I’m working it up for Freeform Games.
• All Flesh is Grass – a mysterious barrier is erected around a village in Maine. I ran this online in April 2022 and face-to-face in February 2023.
• Children of the Stars – mysterious children are discussed at an international science convention. Ran online in September 2023.

I started thinking about Messages from Callisto in October 2023. While I had finished most of it by the end of the year, preparing Roswell and All Flesh is Grass for face-to-face at Retcon meant I put Callisto on the back shelf.

State of the world – and what next?

By the end of Children of the Stars, I knew:

• Aliens had revealed themselves to be living among humans.
• The alien Cuculus villages would be isolated and studied.
• A space warning system was being developed.
• A mission was being sent to Callisto to investigate the artefact.
• The Russians continued to work on an advanced beam weapon.
• The Chinese were working on a warp drive.

So what would come next?

I set the next game six years later, when the mission to Callisto sends images of the structure.

So Messages from Callisto is set in 1990, six-ish years after Children of the Stars. It’s another conference, which makes it easy to reuse old characters. Looking ahead, I’m concerned that if I have too many conferences, the freeforms might be a bit samey with lots of high-level meetings or conferences. There will always be some of that (I want characters to repeat and the players to make the high-level decisions that affect the overall plot), but I will mix it up in future games.

Six years passing

So what’s happened in the intervening six years?

Aliens among us! First, I decided that the human reaction to the presence of aliens would bring out the worst in us. So, aliens are second-class citizens (if they are citizens at all – they are certainly not covered by the European Convention on Human Rights). All aliens must wear identification revealing themselves as an alien. (Do all comply with this? Hmmm.)

Callisto: With more detail from Callisto, the structure has revealed itself to be something artificial. So what do the players want to do next? Do they send another mission? A manned mission? Do they send a nuke? What they decide here will affect future games.

Other aliens: I’m enjoying extrapolating what the aliens presented in some classic SF would do. So the Consciousness is based on the alien flowers in Clifford D Simak’s All Flesh is Grass, and the Cuculus is based on John Wyndam’s The Midwich Cuckoos. So what happens after those stories? In Messages from Callisto, both are petitioning the human race.

A new alien: While I haven’t introduced a new alien this time, a mysterious object has been detected outside the solar system that is likely to arrive in about three years. How do the players want to prepare?

More science projects: There are yet more science projects to enjoy. New projects include artificial hibernation research, Moonbase Alpha, AI research and a mission to seek hydrogen breathers in Jupiter.

More messages: I decided that Messages from Callisto was a better title than Message from Callisto – but that meant I needed more than one message. So there are now two…

Decisions

So these are the large decisions I want to explore:

• The Callisto object: What happens next?
• The Cuculus request: The Cuculus will offer the players a dilemma. What will the world decide?
• The Consciousness: Back in All Flesh is Grass, the Consciousness kept its barrier up. How will the players react if the Consciousness drops it?
• The incoming object: How do the players prepare for the visitor?
• Symbiote hosts: How are new Symbiote hosts arranged?

Plus, I’ve included other, personal decisions that need making. No real angst, though. That’s something I should probably add to the series one day.

Writing

This game has more briefing sheets than earlier games:

• A setting and cast list, with a short “the story so far” covering key details from the previous episodes.
• A general sheet on the different aliens on Earth.
• A report on Callisto.
• A report on the intrusion web and its intruder.
• A report detailing the other science projects.
• A game schedule.
• Background sheets for the Tau and Symbiote aliens, giving them more detail from their point of view.

As a result, I wrote less on the character sheets because the details were in the briefing sheets. (I say I wrote less, but the character sheets were no shorter than the previous games, so perhaps there’s more in this one. Or that as the series progresses, there will be more and more baggage to include.)

As for writing the Messages from Callisto, it was relatively painless. I followed the process I outlined in Writing Freeform Larps (explained in more detail when discussing Children of the Stars part 1, part 2 and part 3), and everything fell into place.

Series evolution

A few things have evolved as the series has developed:

Tau: I changed the name of one of the aliens from Tau Ceti to Tau. I discovered that Tau Ceti is only 12 lightyears away, which is much too close. So I dropped Ceti. I don’t know if the players noticed. (I’ve not specified exactly where their homeworld is located – one of the players asked this time.)

Stardrives: I realised I needed to decide how the aliens travelled between the stars. I came up with six or seven modes of stardrive. I told the aliens but didn’t tell the humans. (Arguably, the humans had enough time to ask the aliens before the game, but I wanted this to be something the aliens and humans could talk about.)

I also need to decide how this affects earlier games. For example, I am running Children of the Stars and Messages from Callisto in November. Different types of space travel aren’t necessary for the earlier game – but do I keep things simple and add the information to the alien briefing sheet anyway?

The big-picture story: I also did some work on the big-picture story. I want to keep my options open and let the players dictate where we end up, so I created options that gave me a sense of where we are going.

The overall name: I changed the series name from The Fermi Solution (which was always a working title) to The Dark Forest (which is the hypothesis that we don’t see signs of alien civilisations because predators are out there).

Running the game

This post is long enough, so I’ll talk about Messages from Callisto’s premiere next time.