Lifeline, by Albert Lin, Lily Benderskaya, and Tory Root
Right. You want out of here? This shitty floating space prison? Of course you do. Huddle up.
Getting out of the airlock’s the easy part. Rush the guards, take their shit, grab suits from the emergency locker. Easy way to die in space, right? Well that’s where the next part comes in.
See, our buddy over there has managed to smuggle in a lifeline. Seeker probe flies off to find a rescue ship, trailing a cable that we can all hang off of. So grab ahold of that and if it works, if you don’t get knocked off, if you’ve got enough air for the trip, if he’s not jerking us around and there’s actually a damn ship and we don’t get shot on sight—yeah. We might actually make it out of here. Whole fuckload of if’s, but nobody gets parole around here, so what else’re you gonna do, rot?
Oh. And there’s also that little problem. Yeah, don’t forget to grab whatever weapons you can off the guards. We’ll need ‘em. You listen to any deep spacer worth their freeze-dried salt? You know what I’m talking about.
We won’t be alone out there.
Lifeline Redux is a sci-fi survival horror boffer larp about a cut-throat band of escaped prisoners fighting horrible creatures while floating helplessly on a rope in the depths of space. This game runs in the dark with relatively few sources of lighting. Expect to have few weapons, limited oxygen supplies, limited mobility, and very high chance of PC death (though death is unlikely to stop you from playing.) Given that this is a game with workshop-created characters, some of the story content may depend on what people bring to the table. However, you can reasonably expect to encounter violence, an oppressive government, wretched prison conditions, body horror, assholes shouting at each other, mercy killings, horrible deaths in space, and general terribleness.
"KNIFE FIGHT IN SPACE!!"
- rowdy players in the game briefing (it happened!)
So when Lily and I finally got to go to Intercon again after years of covid (and missing Intercon U due to our own cases, to our horror and dismay), we realized, holy shit, it's been fifteen years since we ran our first game at Intercon. And we'd already, in our various brainstorming about boffer one-shots, decided that said very first game, Lifeline, would make a really fun boffer scenario. And also that it would be easier to just ditch a bunch of character sheets that haven't aged well and do workshop character creation because this is a pretty ideal situation for it.
Thus: our fifteen-year-anniversary celebration, our first boffer game, our first non-litform game, all in one. Let's be real, though: Albert, who we made sad eyes at to help us figure out how to stat and run a boffer game, did most of the work. Because it turns out that when a pair of litform writers decides to write a non-litform game, they flail around like cats floating in a void figuring out what to do. (Tory sewed symbolic spacesuits. Lily perfected a creepy computer voice.) Still, people had fun! We didn't kill any of them though. Need to fix that for the next run.
March 1, 2024, at Intercon V in Warwick, RI.
Game StatsLifeline Redux is a game for up to twelve players, which runs for about four hours, in one large room with some space dividers, under the direction of two or three GMs and with the help of three or four crunchies. Pre-game reading of rules and world information is about 2,700 words, and there is a small amount of in-game reading of workshop prompt cards and a few other things. This game contains live boffer combat with some idiosyncratic limitations, and while we would not prevent somebody from playing as a noncombatant, we wouldn't recommend it, as it would probably be boring.
The game needs some mechanical and game flow updates after the first run, but that shouldn't be much work. There is a fair amount of documentation on the GM end of things, but also boffer games are extra hard to box, so who knows about that.