Messages from Callisto

A very short note to say that I've published Messages from Callisto, the fourth in my series of first-contact freeform larps, on Itch.io.

Classified images from Voyager showed a regular, pyramid-shaped structure on the surface of Callisto. The structure looked too regular to be natural, and in 1983, the US government sent a follow-up mission, Arcadia, to Callisto to learn more.

It is now 1993, and the first signals from Arcadia have arrived. UNET (United Nations Extraterrestrial Taskforce) is meeting in London to discuss Callisto along with several other issues that have all come to a head at once.

Messages from Callisto is a 3-hour freeform larp for 13 players.

I've written a longer post on Writing Freeform Larps, going into some of the details in publishing Messages from Callisto. TL;DR: It was more involved than expected.

Posts about Messages from Callisto.

Reflections on a campaign larp

So from what I could tell and what the players told me (and others afterwards), the players enjoyed my two freeforms at Consequences. Several players want to find out what’s coming next, and other players (who missed one or both episodes) want me to run them again.

Which has me in a bit of a quandary.

The big idea

So a recap.

I’m writing a series of connected freeform larps set in the same universe. The freeforms are based on the science fiction first-contact novels and movies (and other media) that I have always adored.

Some characters appear in multiple episodes. Some characters appear only once. The games are always written for 13 players (although I’ve managed when Life has interfered). The games are also designed to be independent – you need not play in the previous episodes, but I hope you’ll get more out of them if you do.

The games so far are:

The Roswell Incident: Kind of a prequel. Sets the scene and introduces some of the main themes. This is now published by Freeform Games.

All Flesh is Grass: Based on the 1965 Clifford D Simak novel of the same name.

Children of the Stars: The players grapple with another alien race. Friendly or not?

Messages from Callisto: A mission to Callisto has unsettling news.

The Stars our Destination: The next game, which I’ve started, is set on Rapa Nui (Easter Island).

So far, I have run each game twice – so I have two alternate “timelines” taking place.

Timeline 1 is is an online-only game, started in February 2022. It’s suffered from occasional technical difficulties.

Timeline 2 is a face-to-face series that started at Retcon in February 2023 and continued at Consequences in 2023.

There are a few differences between the two – aside from the differences the players have created. I have changed some character names and alien details (one alien has completely changed from my original ideas).

But I’m keen to carry on with them. The two timelines are diverging, which is both scary and exciting.

(I should also note that while I have a vague sense of where I’m heading with the overall arc, I don’t know how I’ll get there…)

Multiple runs

At a convention like Consequences, it’s common to have multiple runs of popular games. This year, The Ashlight Labyrinth and Incense and Insensibility both ran twice. 

While that’s an easy thing to do for a one-shot, that’s a little trickier for ongoing games.

One easy answer is to start each episode with a summary that basically says, “Forget what happened last time; this is the real history.” As I understand it, that’s what Tony Mitton’s Linfarn Run series does.

But I don’t want to do that. I want the players' decisions in an episode to affect later episodes. If the players decide to multilaterally disarm and dismantle the world’s nuclear stockpile, then that should be part of the history going into later episodes.

I guess I could run (say) Children of the Stars twice at the same convention. They could have a common background (let’s say Timeline 2), but I would then end up with Timeline 2A and 2B (or is that Timeline 3 and 4?).

But that’s not what I want to do. I’d rather start Timeline 3 with The Roswell Incident and start afresh.

Playing previous episodes

The other issue is whether players who join the game at episode 4 (say), would like to play an earlier episode. They already know some of what happened in those episodes (because it’s part of the background) – but would playing in an earlier episode appeal?

I don’t know.

I’d like to think that my games are enjoyable enough that they would have a good time playing even if they already knew some details. 

And freeforms are often re-run, and players often play them again. At the recent Retcons, I played in two freeforms that I had played previously – in one case, I even played the same character. It didn’t affect my enjoyment – I had either forgotten the details, or deliberately overlooked them.

So, I hope that players will enjoy playing in earlier episodes. (And if it were me, I’d be tempted to push the game in different directions.) I guess I’ll find out in due course.

2-3 monthly campaign

I guess my ideal approach for the campaign would be to run them at 2-3 monthly intervals with a stable of players.

If anyone is in the Leeds/Harrogate/York region and wants to organise such a thing, let me know!

Available for others

A final constraint is that I plan to make the games available for others to play.

So far, The Roswell Incident is available via Freeform Games as one of their murder mystery games (although the main mystery isn’t a murder…)

Next to get into shape is All Flesh is Grass, which I hope to start work on shortly. When that’s done, I’ll make it available on my itch.io page. With a fair wind, I hope to get that up in early 2024.

However, making a game where earlier games affect later games presents a few challenges. For Children of the Stars, I anticipated one big outcome and several little outcomes. (And there was another outcome I hadn’t predicted!)

So for Messages from Callisto, I prepared a set of notes for each character based on the big outcome and briefings for the little outcomes. And between the games, I hurriedly stuffed character packets accordingly.

However, as the timeline goes on, that’s likely to become more complicated.

So I will probably provide the game as MS Word documents (rather than a pdf as I might normally do), and highlight the areas that need changing. (It’s that or provide different files for each option – along with really complicated instructions for assembling character packets.)

I am already taking the highlighter approach for The Stars our Destination as I am already writing different sections of the text changes for different outcomes.

To sum up

So:

• I want to keep the games in their own timelines. I want the in-game decisions to matter. So I’m unlikely to run them more than once at the same convention.
• I will make them available for others to run.
• The next game will be The Stars our Destination and is set on Rapa Nui. The title may change (but it’s unlikely). I hope to run that online in the first half of 2024 (Timeline 1), and then in person at Consequences (Timeline 2).
• I will probably run another game at Consequences, but whether that is episode 6 or something else, at this point I have no idea.
• I’m not sure when I’m going to start Timeline 3.

My first Consequences

So last weekend I attended Passionate Consequences, the freeform larp convention (with some boardgames) held every year in a holiday camp near Poole.

Loads of people found it hard to believe that this was my first Consequences. Many of my larp friends attend – and many games played were ones written at Peaky. Consequences started in 2007, but as it’s on the south coast (near Poole), attending it always meant taking five days (including travel). And while I had a day job and a young family, that was more leave than I was comfortable taking.

Now I don’t have a day job, it’s easier to take leave, and so in 2023, I went to my first Consequences.

Consequences

Consequences is held at Naish holiday village, so the accommodation is mostly holiday chalets. My accommodation (a two-bed apartment, not actually a chalet) was fine – it was clean and (once we’d figured out the heating) warm. As ever in this sort of accommodation, there were never enough towel rails.

Typical accomodation / gaming lodge

The accommodation is all self-catered, and I ate a mixture of ready meals and bar meals. Unfortunately, the apartment’s oven was a little shonky. I’d bought a non-microwavable shepherd's pie but couldn’t get the oven up to temperature. So tipped the pie out of its foil tray onto a plate and used the microwave, and all was fine.

Thursday

I set off from Yorkshire at about 9, having walked the dog, and after a long but easy drive, arrived at about 3 pm. I checked in and chatted with old friends.

Horrospital

My first game was the tricky-to-pronounce Horrospital, a horror-comedy game by Tony Mitton for 25 players. Horror in freeforms is never very horrific. It is inevitably played for laughs and involves comedy vampires, werewolves, demons and the like. It’s always over the top and never very scary. Which sums up Horrospital nicely.

I played Orderly Peeler, an undercover cop. I was investigating a series of murders, and I got much of the way through solving it, but couldn’t quite get the final piece. This is partly because I was tired, but mainly because I didn’t sit down and discuss the murders properly with the character who could have filled in some gaps.

(I was tired not because of the long drive, but because the game started at 8 pm and I’m often tucked up in bed at 10 pm. I remember starting to flag at about 9:45 pm and thinking, blimey, we’ve got a way to go yet.) 

Anyway, Horrospital was very enjoyable, my favourite bit was explaining to everyone that the reason I was investigating the murders was because I was studying for an NVQ. I’m sure everyone saw through my nonsense.

Friday

I woke at 6 am (as usual) after a not-very-long night. Although I returned to the chalet early(ish), I didn’t go straight to bed as I wanted to relax and unwind first. I also needed to review my character for the morning’s game. I was originally signed up to play Sam, but a last-minute dropout meant I changed to Stevie. Who I hadn’t read. So I needed to read, absorb and take notes. Perhaps unwisely, I did that before going to bed and, as a result, got only three or four hours of sleep.

Antarctic Base 13

This was a ten-player tense SF game set at an isolated research station in the Antarctic – with strong The Thing vibes. Written by Rich Perry and Alli Mawhinney, I’ve wanted to play it for a while. I’m glad I did, as it was great.

I played Stevie, the comms operator. Which meant I had access to lots of information – and I didn’t like going outside. My favourite parts were searching the base when everyone else had gone outside and doing something in plain sight in front of other players who were so caught up in their own thing that they didn’t notice me doing it.

It’s not perfect – the character sheets need a bit of work, and a couple of bits feel creaky, but the core concept is great. 

After that, I had a short nap to wake up and lost badly at Dune Imperium, which I’d not played before. (I can see why it’s popular, but it’s a bit long for my liking.)

Children of the Stars

This was the first of the two games I was running, and I was looking forward to seeing how it would work. I had 13 players – and it went really well. I had a few pre-flight nerves because the first run (online) didn’t go well for various reasons. But this time, it went off without a hitch.

Discussions about weighty matters...

The players bought into the ongoing story. A couple had played in earlier episodes, and I had four playing in both this and Sunday’s Messages from Callisto. And I could see the decisions I’d given everyone were causing them to think.

As ever, I made copious notes and have a few changes to make – mostly clarifications rather than anything game-breaking.

Saturday

I woke with a headache on Saturday and decided to eat in the restaurant rather than battle the kitchen appliances. My headache had cleared by the time it was to play my first game.

Old Nick’s Game

Old Nick’s Game is written by Charlie Paull, Alan Paull, Roger Gammans, and Nick Hollingsworth. It’s for ten players and is set in Hell and is based (loosely) on Old Harry’s Game, a Radio 4 comedy which I know of but haven’t listened to.

I will admit to being slightly apprehensive about this game as I wasn’t sure about my character. I was playing Antonia, the mother-in-law of another character. Gender didn’t seem very important in the game, so I wasn’t worried about that, but my character didn’t believe that they were in Hell – instead, this was all a rag week stunt. But the character sheet felt muddled as a result.

As it turned out, I needn’t have worried as the game was great. It played really nicely, and I had a whale of a time pretending we weren’t in Hell. I particularly enjoyed threatening to report Satan to HR if he continued his bullying. My favourite bit was discussing my favourite fiction (which I decided was Mills & Boon romances) with Satan, and he summoned Jane Austen from the pits of Hell – and she turned out to be extremely foul-mouthed. She must have had a very good editor!

Between games

The most important thing I needed to do on Saturday was prepare the character packs for Sunday’s Messages from Callisto. So once I’d had a bite to eat, I popped back to the apartment to sort that out.

Messages from Callisto is set ten years after Children of the Stars, and decisions the players make in Children affects the background to Messages. I’d thought about this in advance and come up with options – so I had extra background and briefing sheets for each character. And now I knew what had happened in Messages, I could prepare Children.

(Would I do this again? It was a lot of work, but it was also very satisfying. So the answer is probably yes.)

Once I’d done that, I went back to the main area and got into a game of Villagers. While I was playing, I was asked if I’d fill a spare place in Better Than Life, as a player had dropped. So that was my evening sorted.

A Better Than Life Sandwich

A BTL Sandwich is a series of three short minigames featuring five characters. The scenes are all unrelated. It was written by Martin Jones for the Across the Universe weekend game, but he’s run these separately many times since.

The three minigames are all wonderful – tense, angsty and funny. The character sheets were all short, so it didn’t take much for me to catch up. It’s a great pick-up game.

The three minigames were:

• The Judgement of Solomon: The fate of a child hangs in the balance… I played the judge – and I might have played this before. There’s no good decision here – wonderfully angsty.
• The Gig at the End of the Universe: Inspired by The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy – and at about 30 minutes, probably the right length for a Hitchhiker’s game. The light relief to the other two more angsty games. I was Zaphod Beeblebrox, man! Delightful nonsense.
• Waiting: A dramatic game about waiting for aliens to attack. How long do you have, and what must you say before the end? Fabulously bleak.

Looking back, Better Than Life was one of my favourite games of the weekend. And it finished relatively early, which meant I was in bed by 11 am and got a good night’s sleep.

Sunday

A good night’s sleep left me refreshed for Sunday. I heard stories of people not getting to bed until 4 or 6 am. I don’t think I can do that.

Devil to Pay

Devil to Pay is a 26-player pirate freeform written by Brian Richburg and Alison Joy Schafer. It was an old-style freeform larp with long character sheets, rules, contingency envelopes, items, abilities and more. I found the long character sheet hard to read at first, but it soon made sense during play.

I played Laurens de Graaf, a Dutch privateer. To my surprise, my character survived. I was expecting to die horribly – but I won a duel and ended up with just enough loot to survive the game. It was great playing with Nickey, who was my wife and rescued our daughters before they could be killed in a pirate raid.

Messages from Callisto

Messages from Callisto follows Children of the Stars. It’s for 13 players, and I had four players who played in both games. Three played the same character. The fourth was a last-minute addition – I would have cast them as the same character had I known.

Thanks to a few typos (and some mistakes when stuffing envelopes), Messages from Callisto had a slightly creakier start than Children. But once it was going, it went well, and everyone seemed fully engaged and having deep discussions.

I have come away with a page of notes and improvements – but players told me later that they had a good time (and want to play other episodes), so that was all wonderful to hear. (I’ll probably reflect on that in a later post.)

Next year?

Next year, Consequences will move to a new venue. I suspect it will still be a long drive from Yorkshire, but I’m planning to go again.

Messages from Callisto: How did it play?

Messages from Callisto is the fourth part of my series of linked freeforms involving aliens. I ran it earlier this month, online, using Discord. Last time I talked about its design; this time, I’m reflecting on how it ran.

Scheduling

My first challenge was choosing a date for the game. I created a Doodle poll with some dates and emailed everyone who had played before (and was still interested in playing), and while I got the most popular date, I still couldn’t fill the game.

(Now that games are being run face-to-face, online games may be less popular. I’m not sure why – I enjoy running and playing them online. They’re not as good as face-to-face, but they’re better than not playing…)

Anyway, with about a week to go, I still hadn’t filled the game (and I didn’t want to run it with fewer players), so I pushed it back three weeks and filled all the places. (Happily, I got two new players – one new to freeforming.)

First contact with the players

Once I sent out characters, I started getting questions.

One player complained about their character, and I realised I hadn’t read their casting form response correctly. So I radically changed their character to suit what they were looking for – and I’m glad I did so; I think the character is much better for doing that.

I also received questions about science and the specific NASA timeline that made me realise I should have set it three years later. Not that it would have made any difference to the plots, but ‘realistically’, the flight time from Earth to Jupiter is about six years, leaving no time for the development and construction of the probe itself. So in the rewrite, I’m moving it to 1993.

On the day

The day didn’t start well as I had a player drop, and I spent a while finding a replacement. Thankfully Julie stepped into the breach.

As for Messages from Callisto itself, well, maybe there were too many meetings. I had five topics for discussion, but perhaps they didn’t all need to be meetings. And while I had identified those who needed to attend each, it turned out that everyone wanted to hear what was going on.

And despite scheduling the meetings to last only ten minutes, inevitably, they overran. So there was less one-to-one roleplaying than I had hoped for, and not everyone had time to talk to those they wanted to talk to.

But apart from that (and a few players said they liked the meetings), the game went well. The time passed quickly, and we had good decisions (and dilemmas) to manage.

As I now do with all the games I run, I asked for feedback and stories. I got a great response, prepared an epilogue for everyone, and shared some of the stories.

Future changes

I’m hoping to run the game face-to-face at Consequences in November, so I need to take on the feedback from this run.

The main changes I need to make are around the meetings (as discussed above) and the decisions.

One player noted that while making decisions was good, the decisions themselves were made by only a subset of the group. He wondered if decisions could be delegated to subcommittees so more players are involved.

So I may do that – or I may give each player a vote, even if their character wouldn’t necessarily have one. That steps outside the usual “you are your character” style of play that typifies freeforming, but I will try to word it so it’s not too jarring.

However, a more challenging change concerns Children of the Stars, the previous game. I’m also running Children of the Stars at Consequences, and if the players make different decisions, that will affect Messages from Callisto…

I’ve got ideas for how I manage this, but that’s a bigger topic I will probably cover in another post.

Overall

Overall, I’m pleased with how Messages from Callisto survived contact with the players. From the feedback I received, most of them enjoyed themselves (nobody seemed to have a terrible time), and I have good feedback I can use to improve the game for next time.

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.