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Originally Posted by Hack&Lube
Wow...
I didn't even know these existed. I knew there were larpers for fantasy and medieval and civil war groups but what do you do when you all get together and LARP for BSG?
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I think the dominant LARP genres are pseudo-medieval fantasy and modern vampires (or at least they used to be really popular), but there is other stuff out there.
I've larped for I think a dozen times over about fifteen years, and only one game has been historical. (Truly historical created by my university friends not pseudo-anything. It was set in Germany in Weimar Germany (between WWI and the Nazis for those less history oriented.))
Most games have been set in the present day, I think one has been a near future game, and then there was this BSG larp.
As to how it works, well that's not easy to explain. This will be long, I hope at least someone is interested
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You don't have any Vipers or Battlestars to play with... [edit] I just read the page and watched the video. It's basically like a murder mystery night but on an old destroyer. Interesting.
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Well yes and no. There were no actual Vipers, but there were some people going off on Viper, Raptor and shuttle missions outside the ship. I was never on one, but from what I understood, those people went through doors which took them "to the shuttle bay", but actually outside the ship. They were then taken to the old submarine that was right beside the ship to roleplay what happened on that flight.
However from my point of view the Galactica pilots might just as well have actually gone to do epic space battles. What I saw was what non-pilots saw on BSG; pilots hurrying through doors to "where they keep the vipers", maybe some sounds of battle, and then maybe if I was around I could see them coming back and hear bits of what happened.
The Celestra was a "fully manned" ship (actually doubly manned when you counted the Galacticans) with players playing everybody from the doctors and nurses to the maintenance, plus plenty of civilians. So us not actually being in space and not having Vipers affected maybe 10% of the 140 or so players. (Maybe 10-20 left the ship in the game. A little more if you count the people who got airlocked
)
Also, about the "mystery night" thing, not really, as there is no "mystery" to solve or a clear "winning condition". Everybody mostly decided on their own goals based on what made sense to their characters and what they think would make for some fun gaming.
I'll explain the basic situation to give you an idea. I'll be cutting corners like crazy, because all of it would take a book. Plus I actually only know maybe 10% of the stuff that went on. Anyway, hope you know your BSG universe
The Monitor Celestra was a Vergis corporation deep space exploration and science ship with a Tauron crew that had come back from it's last mission just in time to watch the cylon attack on the homeworlds from afar. They rescued some civilians from a Tauron temple, hooked up with the Galactica fleet for a short while, but got quickly separated, which is where the game really started to get going.
The characters were roughly divided into five groups:
1) mostly Caprican Galactica crew who were on the Celestra with orders to turn it into a military ship. These were further split into various engineers, officers, pilots and a small group of marines.
2) Tauron Celestra crew who obviously were not crazy about the idea of losing control of their ship to anyone. This made them reluctant to try and find the fleet. (There were other major problems with that idea anyway.) These were further split into the numerous engineering groups and officers.
3) Tauron civilians, many of whom were either deeply religious, ha'la'tha or both. Obviously there was the whole clan and vendetta thing going on.
4) Tauron Vergis scientists, plus administration and security, that had their own quarters and were doing some research which everybody else was certain was propably very very bad.
5) Miscellaneous civilians, like people from the Roslin administration, a couple of Graystone suits, some media people etc.
The game was four six hour episodes spread over three days. During the episodes everybody played all the time. It basicly started with the Galacticans entering the Celestra, and went from there, with breaks only for showers, sleep and breakfast. Meals were served on the ship. Our game ended with the Cylons blowing up our ship, others ended differently.
The gamemasters were not even inside the ship when the game was on, except for the safety crew, cooks (who were dressed to not stand out) and "cylons" who helped the GM's keep track of what went on. (Think number 6 from BSG with less porn... Plus they weren't actually cylons, but that gets too complicated.)
The gamemasters only had control over things that happened outside the ship. They largely didn't know what went on inside the ship until after the game.
Despite there "being no plot", there was a huge amount of interesting stuff going on all the time. The various crew members spent a lot of time fighting cylons or trying to keep the ship running. The scientists had their mad project going. Much of the game was about the cultural and racial tensions inside the ship continuously building, defusing and turning up again, and this is also what I was most involved in. All of those things interacted to create so much stuff to play with that really there wasn't any need for a plot.
Rergarding this game, I have to explain something about the ship; The panels you see on the video worked and effected other panels on the ship, and they needed to be constantly manned by people who knew what they were doing or stuff didn't work. Without the FTL crew the ship didn't jump for example.
Now, I didn't touch a panel during the game myself, but it was extremely cool to walk down the hallways and just see and hear actual people in their helmets and overalls actually doing stuff to keep the ship going while I was busy trying to get the Tauron terrorists and the Roslin administratives to talk to each other before somebody starts to do ethnic cleansings.
Btw, one of the many reasons we lost the final battle was because the guy manning the power room listened to a ranting philosopher who was convinced that we should talk to the cylons. So the guy at the power panel turned the power down for some of the weapons systems and communications power up, right before the battle.
In retrospect I propably should have done something about that philosopher after I first threw him out of the CIC to let the crew there prepare for the final fight.