The Leonids, by Lily Benderskaya & Tory Root
It's November 17th, and despite the cold and work crunch, there's a handful of students from Auriga College out in a lonely mountain field watching the meteor shower. It's a beautiful clear night with a soft wind that rustles the pine trees, and the stars seem very close and bright, and time stretches like you could sit out here forever. There's barely any light, yet the field is luminous, if chilly. This is the most peaceful the campus has felt since that one student died a month ago. Even when the stars begin to fall...
The Leonids is a low-plot, low-mechanics, roleplay-focused game about a bunch of art students going through shit together. With some weirdness threaded through. It'll reward playing into your character's feelings, pursuing connections, and making your own narrative choices. This game contains themes of drug abuse, suicide, freshman anxiety meltdowns, and dealing with the aftermath of a violent death. Due to the small size of the game, it may be difficult to avoid dealing with any/all of the above, though there are roles which don't deal with these themes directly.
So is there off-campus housing for ghosts? AirBnBoo?
- a dead guy
So this was the year when we went into Iron GM with absolutely no pre-planning or strategy while in the throes of writing another game, got the ingredients, word-vomited for a day about our college experiences, and won the contest. I'd say this is clearly how to do it, but there are probably only so many games we can get away with writing about our weird art school. But the ingredients were magic realism, coming of age, a distress call, and a 10" round mirror, so we had to write this game.
It ran in the Iron GM contest about five players short, which did confirm that it can run short and run beautifully, but fuller runs are better, and we got to see everyone in play at Festival. Whee!
February 24, 2019, at Intercon S in Warwick, RI.
April 5, 2019, at the Brandeis Festival of the LARPs in Waltham, MA.
August 17, 2019, at Falling Stars in Berlin, MA.
September 14, 2019, at Be-Con in Chicago, IL.
November 10, 2019, through the Greater Boston LARP Society at the YWCA in Cambridge, MA.
April 2, 2022, at a larp day in Canton, MA.
March 2, 2024, at Intercon V in Warwick, RI.
The Leonids is a game for twelve players (characters have assorted predefined genders) which runs for maybe three hours, in one room, under the direction of one or two GMs. Average character sheet length is about fifteen hundred words.
The game is runnable as is. There's documentation (casting at the door, printing and stuffing, runtime GM information, and a game bible) written for the original contest submission that would need minor updates, but is at least extant. This might be one of our first games we fully box.