Because of the number of people who have responded asking questions about “The Lazarus Transform,” I thought it best to go into a brief description of how the game event will take place in Second Life.
The Lazarus Transform will take place October 29th, 2006, at 4:00 p.m. Second Life Time. It will take 4 to 6 hours, with scheduled “freeze frame” time for breaks.
Pre-registration is now open. Early bird discounts will be offered until October 15th.
The event will take place on private land and will feature a special build: the interactive environment of the Infinite Prophet, a tramp freighter starship.
The style of the event is that of a “hard science - gritty” sort of science fiction, along the lines of the movie “Aliens” or “Outland.” There are no blasters, no faster than light travel, no aliens, no matter/energy converters and no teleportation.
There will be room for 25 players total. Players will receive their character write-ups before the event so that they may spend some time putting together costumes. In order to preserve the immersive feel of the story, if you don’t bother to put together a costume you’ll be asked to wear some basic onboard starship coveralls and a generic human avatar that will be provided to you free of charge.
There will be five factions of five players apiece. Playing in a faction does not necessarily mean you will automagically be friendly with those of your faction. In fact, it’s more likely that cross-faction alliances and enmity will develop during the course of play. However, if you wish to join the game in a group of five, this might be the best way to do so. The factions are:
- Alliance Crew (Crew on board the Infinite Prophet under the command of the Captain)
- Simplicity Homesteaders (A group of colonists: farmers, artisans, and philosophers on their way to the planet Thoreau)
- The Distro Collective (Nanotech enhanced cyberhackers on their way to the planet Hawking)
- Biogen Continuum (Genetically altered people on the way to the Mendel Colony)
- The Transported (Criminals on their way to the prison colony of New Australia)
There are no aliens in the game, but if you are interested in playing a Furry, I would suggest playing a Biogen (you can explain that your fur is a genetic alteration).
The game will use a Rock, Paper, Scissors (RPS) LARP system and each player will be given a free RPS HUD to facilitate this.
Play will take place over a 4 to 6 hour period. Every effort will be made to ensure that your character has interesting goals and motivations and has ample opportunities to interact with each other. The game will be overseen by a Storyteller, a narrator and referee who will keep the story moving and deal with any conflicts that arise that cannot be solved with the rules.
There will be no “winner” or “loser” to the game, although at the end of the game prizes will be awarded to the best roleplayer, the best costume, and the “most fun” player.
People griefing the event will be tossed out the airlock, will lose their registration funds and not be allowed back in.
For more information as to how to register, click here.
Below is the backstory to the Fireseeds Theatrics special in-world roleplaying event, “The Lazarus Transform”
The era of faster than light travel has not yet arrived, but we can get pretty close to that speed.
However, humanity has done a lot of growing in the interim. The Distro movement, the Biogen continuum, and the Simplicity Paradigm are all schools of thought that have made life on Earth five hundred years from today an interesting proposition.
Life on Earth in this century is very much overcrowded. The Death rate has slowed, the Birth rate is still climbing.
We are running out of room.
Cryosleep is an option: people can be stacked like cordwood then. First the technology was tested on criminal elements, then on people who paid for the privilege. Cheap energy sources can keep them frozen indefinitely. But without a place to go, some promise of the future to fulfill, it’s just a long, slow journey towards suicide.
So, the Colony Project began.
Like massive messages in a bottle, ships were flung into the void towards “likely” planetary systems. The truth is, nobody ever expected to hear back from them.
But hear back they did, some as early as 50 years later, courier boats arriving with messages of new colonies needing people. Successful, thriving other homes of humanity.
This gave rise to long haul tramp freighters, set to travel the spaces between the stars, delivering their cargo load of cryoslept corpsicles along with supplies.
The Infinite Prophet is one such freighter.
Packed with cultural refugees, the Prophet is on route to Hawking, Mendel, Thoreau and New Australia colonies with resupply stops at Von Neumann I and II.
Everything is on target for their first rendezvous with Von Neumann I, when the ExpSys triggered the crew out of cryosleep. Mysteriously enough, a score of passengers somehow also were awakened.
Off course, the Infinite Prophet has drifted near the event horizon of a Class 5 “Sunkiller” style black hole.
And now their only hope of further survival revolves around a complicated, highly theoretical mathematical model called “The Lazarus Transform.”
The Lazurus Transform. Coming soon from Fireseeds Theatrics.
If you’d like to keep up with more about The Lazarus Transform or any of the future Fireseeds Theatrics roleplaying events, subscribe to “Seeds of Fire in Dream,” a virtual world roleplaying blog by Sam Chupp, co-designer of the White Wolf Game Studio roleplaying games “Changeling: the Dreaming” and “Wraith: the Oblivion.”
You may subscribe through our Feedburner feed at http://feeds.feedburner.com/fireseeds, or access the site directly at http://fireseeds.geekhero.net
Thank you for your time and attention.
“The Lazarus Transform” is part of the “Wander Star” series of science fiction thriller SL LARPs created by Sam Chupp using the RPS system.
Set on board the long haul tramp freighter “Infinite Prophet” en route to the outer rim, “The Lazarus Transform” is a tense, mysterious drama with no set script: the individual participants decide the way it goes.
The Infinite Prophet’s cryosleep chambers’ revive cycle has been triggered earlier than was expected, and for the first time the crew gets a chance to meet their passengers. What secrets are they hiding? How much longer will the voyage continue? Is all truly well, as the crew seems to think?
Individuals will be offered a chance to pre-register and get their choice of characters earlier than others soon.
I believe I’m to the point where I’m going to just create a storytelling event on Second Life and make it happen on my own: it would be nice to have a SL RP HUD, but after trying to learn and trying to make the SL RP HUD myself, I am finding that I just don’t have the coding skillz to make this happen that way.
So I’m just going to do what I know I can do best: run a story event.
I’ll probably be using the Huddles RPS thing, no matter how goofy it is.
More as I know it.Â
I believe I’m to the point where I’m going to just create a storytelling event on Second Life and make it happen on my own: it would be nice to have a SL RP HUD, but after trying to learn and trying to make the SL RP HUD myself, I am finding that I just don’t have the coding skillz to make this happen that way.
So I’m just going to do what I know I can do best: run a story event.
I’ll probably be using the Huddles RPS thing, no matter how goofy it is.
More as I know it.Â