Seeds of Fire in Dream

Happy Rez day to my SL friend and Tiny Empires vas­sal, Prince/ss Wil­low Birman!

(Repost from Story Games because I’m at work and can’t re-write it yet)

So I have been try­ing for three Sun­days in a row to get a group together to play Spirit of the Cen­tury in Sec­ond Life, and just this Sun­day I suc­ceeded. We had a group of three: myself, and two oth­ers, and we got to play with some of our Sec­ond Life coded object toys to help assist play. 

We used Sec­ond Life voice and some in-world dice that actu­ally “roll” — they bounce against each other using the Havok III Physics Engine and come up with some pretty good ran­dom­ness as a result and we had some coded Fate Chips that could be “spent.” 

It was a lit­tle annoy­ing get­ting all the lit­tle bits together– took about an hour to make every­thing work with each other. But once that was done, we were off and running. 

The scene we had went well, and it bodes well for the next time we’re going to play. At one point Sec­ond Life had a bit of a prob­lem with its code data­base and so we couldn’t quite use the fate chips, but that’s OK — I just kept track of what had or hadn’t been spent separately. 

Now, I was try­ing to keep it sim­ple at first, but SL offers a few things that don’t appear on other shared gam­ing spaces: I can pipe music to my game through Shout­cast, I can bring up a web page and dis­play it on the mas­sive video screen, I can use in-world graphics. 

As a visual aid I had the FATE Lad­der on a “sign” that was easy for the play­ers to see. 

Two of us dressed in Pulp-style cos­tume, which was fun but not required. 

I still think table­top via SL is viable, but I would *love* to see how it does as a vir­tual LARP. 

If you’d like to know more about this game, stay tuned for how you might participate!

Today is my sec­ond Rez­Day. Amaz­ing, innit? Alexan­der Basiat’s been kick­ing around Sec­ond Life for two whole years. Noth­ing like the old­bies, but it’s something! 

I am still caught in Sec­ond Life’s web, just not as tightly. That’s OK, I think it’s healthy. I had a really cool con­ver­sa­tion with the fel­low who does 12 Volt The­ater, Jack Jaf­fee. I am try­ing to do more in Sec­ond Life and I invite you to come along with me in the future. 

Thanks, SL, for two cool years! 

…Sam

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.

Check out the Metaverse’s answer to “One Red Paper­clip”, “One Orange Cube.”

http://theorangecube.blogspot.com/