EVENTS
STRUCTURE
The larp takes place in real time. The structural framework of the larp is clearly defined by the setting and fixed events. The time until re-entry into Blankspace (= end of the game) and the current local time on Earth (or colony after the citizenship ceremony) is always displayed.
The larp begins on the first evening with a prologue lasting several hours, which takes place before the first blankspace jump and serves to establish characters, themes and relationships. After an off-game night, the second day begins and ends in the stasis chambers and lasts exactly 12 hours.
ACTIVITIES
There will be structured activities, e.g. to perform tasks on the ship or to prepare characters for the colony. Examples include:
- compulsory group activities - the flyby, the citizenship ceremony
- Workshops and activities about life on the colony
- individual activities - medical and psychological screenings, receiving messages from earth
- tasks on the ship - everyone is asked to help
THE
MONSTER
The monster is a metaphor for what your character is running away from.
Every character has something they are running away from. That's what the monster represents to them. It shockingly confronts them with their own demons and worst memories, with the worst possible view of themself.
This means every encounter is an opportunity for roleplaying with yourself. How you react to the monster should be a representation of how your character deals with their monster - and what the monster says and does will in turn depend on your reaction. We will practice in the workshop how you can represent different reactions to your monster - repression, overcompensation, ... - and create meaningful scenes.
Whoever sees it will be changed forever.
All characters instinctively know that they must not see the monster, and they are scared of it. Every time you see the monster, even from the corner of the eye, leads to a fundamental, irreversible change in your character. This can be a choice, or loss of a part of yourself - whatever fits best in that moment. You will find some inspiration on your character sheet.
The change does not have to happen immediately, but it must happen before your game focus switches to something else. In other words: If you want to, you can still struggle with it for two hours - but as long as the change hasn't happened yet, the character's gameplay is centred around the monster encounter and its direct consequences (e.g. because the character is still distraught or in shock).
While you are looking at the monster, it may give you a card - which in most cases leads to the character's suicide.
Typically, when encountering the monster, characters will try hard not to see it. If they fail, they initially only see glimpses - brief confrontations that trigger a change, but after which the monster can be suppressed again. So the first reaction when you see the monster is to look away again! Put your hands in front of your eyes, turn your head away, break down.
If you actively look at the monster for longer, we see this as an invitation to give you your final card. The card always signifies the end of your character arc! Whoever is haunted by their past and struggling with themself - initially, that will be all characters - is torn inside by seeing the monster and kills themself (represented by tearing the card apart). Only those who are at peace with themselves and their past have nothing to fear. Initially, this does not apply to any of the characters, but it can be the conclusion of the character arc for some of them. Towards the end of the larp, the final confrontation should increasingly become the default outcome of monster encounters.
SHADOW RELATIONS
Shadows of the Past
To bring the past into the present, some relations will have a second layer: Shadow Relations. Each character will have other characters that represent the past or one of their themes. This can be a person from the past, but also a need, ideal or concept - or a development. What exactly the shadows are can vary from character to character and for some follows its own rules. Reality and shadow connections are typically not completely different, but rather two ends of a spectrum.
At the beginning, the shadow is just a vague association, a "reminds you of" or a feeling caused by that person; towards the end, the layers blur and it is no longer clear which of the two is real. As a rough guideline: in the first hours, everything you do should still be completely plausible on the real level; after the flyby, dynamics should have emerged that have mostly detached themselves from the reality.
In the workshop, we will practise how this works and how you can best play with it. Don't worry if you initially find it difficult to project how this will play out - our experience from the playtest shows that it works quite intuitively in the game as long as you don't think too hard about it.
AN EXAMPLE
The captain acts as a mentor and role model for the young first officer. Both have a complicated father-child relationship in their backstory: the captain sees in the first officer the shadow of his ten-year-old child, whom he has abandoned; the first officer sees in the captain the dominant, absent father. In the beginning, the captain is simply a mentor to the first officer. Then he becomes more and more of a surrogate father, the two build up a bond that is unusually strong and emotional for people in their position, but still logically plausible. Towards the end, the captain behaves as if he really were the father, and as if the first officer were ten. The first officer accuses the captain of the things their real father has done.
METASPACES
In this game, there are two spaces that follow their own rules:
THE CORE
Strange things are happening close to the core of the Blankspace Drive. Some say its radiation triggers hallucinations, others believe it breaks the continuity of space, time and dimension. Only one thing is certain: if you get too close to the core, you experience things that can't actually be real. Things from the past, the future, a different version of reality. Nevertheless, everyone remembers it afterwards as if it had really happened - and anyone who gets hurt there suffers a real wound.
The core works a bit like a blackbox: You can play out scenes from the past or future, dream sequences or alternative realities. But unlike a classic larp blackbox, the scenes you play here are integrated into the flow of your story without an off-game time jump. This means that even if the scene takes place in the past or future, everyone involved has the memory of having just experienced it and suffers the consequences now.
By default, the shadow relations become the absolute truth there. You can therefore use this location to advance your shadow relations even early on in the game.
THE TIME PRISON
In the ship's prison cell, there is a time field in which time passes more quickly: you can serve your sentence while only a few minutes pass outside. You don't feel hungry or thirsty, and you can't hurt yourself either.
The time cell on the ship offers no comfort or distraction, but rather an extreme form of sensory deprivation and solitary confinement. It therefore serves purely as a deterrent or intimidation for the remainder of the journey - serious criminals are handed over to official jurisdiction on arrival. Sentences are usually about a few days, in extreme cases a week. Anything over that is considered torture and is strictly illegal. If a character has to spend over a month in the time prison, their personality is usually severely altered afterwards.
MECHANICS
INTIMACY
Our default for kisses is to place forehead and cheeks together, other techniques or real kisses are also allowed after calibration. Sex is not part of this game.
VIOLENCE
Our default mechanic for physical violence is grappling: Put your hands on each other's upper arms or shoulders and press. Who "wins" should of course not depend on your off-game physical strength, but on what makes the best scene for everyone involved. In the case of one-sided violence (e.g. knocking someone down), one or more people push someone against the wall or to the floor; in fights, you can also move around the room - but always pay attention to your surroundings!
After calibration, you can also play violence in other ways. Please note, however, that the main goal is the experience of the players involved, not a "good-looking" scene. We therefore explicitly do not want a representation that is purely acted (e.g. stage fighting) - except of course after opting out or for safety reasons.
STEERING: “GUT FEELING”
Many horror films thrive on stupid decisions. Sometimes the most sensible action in a situation is not the best play. And sometimes, as a player, you realise that a situation is unintentionally developing into plot solving or larp democracy.
In such situations, you can use the term "gut feeling". If you have a "gut feeling" in-game, this means something along the lines of "idea of cool play" off-game. This mechanic is not an obligation, but an invitation to reflect on whether this is really the play you want right now.
Examples:
“I have a bad gut feeling about this meeting where everyone sits around a round table for an hour and democratically discusses what we do next.”
"My gut feeling tells me that you'd better send a civilian alone into the engine room to see where the scary noise is coming from!"
SUICIDE
When a character sees the monster, it can give them a card that shows an interpretation of the character. The card does not exist diegetically (i.e it is not part of the game world).
The character's suicide is played out by tearing up this card. The tearing represents the action that leads to death - there is no representation of the specific mode of death beyond this. Afterwards, the character does not have to be dead immediately - as with any other character death, you can play out collapsing and dying, saying goodbye with your last breath, etc. The only important thing is that the torn card is clearly visible on or next to you if no one else was present. That way, others will know what happened when they find the character. How the character killed themself is not relevant and is not to be discussed. Only what - and why - is played on.
Whether you play this scene alone or in the presence of others is up to you. If others are present, they can try to convince the character to stop - but physically stopping a character from committing suicide (e.g. by holding them down) is not possible. Please make the decision to involve other characters in the scene consciously and think about how to best do it beforehand - avoid melodrama, public scenes or large groups.
SUICIDE
The monster will drive characters into suicide and the survivors are left with grief, questions and feelings of guilt. Dealing with this loss is just as much a part of the game as confronting your own monster.
We have talked with mental health professionals and try to treat this difficult topic safely and respectfully and especially not to romanticise it. We also expect the players to handle it carefully and respectfully.
The extent to which suicide is a theme of the larp and the character stories depends very much on the players and characters. Internal and external perspectives can differ - especially later in the game, when the monster and horror are very present, character deaths look more like murders by the monster from the outside. At the same time, the theme can be very present if a relation of your characters dies early on - and for some it is part of the backstory.
Rules for playing on the topic
In this larp, suicide is a symbolic action and represented by the meta-technique of tearing up a card (see above). Realistic suicide methods and play on practical deatails of it are not permitted.
For safety reasons, this larp will explicitly not be about suicidal ideation, but about the action itself and its consequences. No character harbours suicidal thoughts for an extended period of time - every suicide is a reaction to the monster. Whoever has received their card may play a few more scenes to find a conclusion, then the character dies.
A character's suicide should never be aesthetic or narratively a "good" ending for anyone, no one "finds peace" - suicide is always a tragedy. The best possible ending for any character is to reach the colony alive and start again! This doesn't have to be a happy ever after with rainbows and eternal happiness - for many, it's rather the beginning of a long, painful process of healing and coming to terms with the past. What exactly a "happy ending" looks like for your character is up to you - but the prerequisite for it must ALWAYS be survival.
There will be therapy opportunities and ways for the characters to work through their problems and past, to come to terms with them and thus become immune to the monster. There is always hope and a way out.
