Lifeline, by Lily Benderskaya and Tory Root
So here's how it went down. Sluggy and Zonk've made sure that you had a lifeline. That's a pretty standard, if damn dangerous, piece of spacer rescue equipment. Heavy cable tethered to a probe, shoots out into space like a great big rope to safety. The seeker probe homes in on the nearest ship and slowly cranks the cable in, slowly enough that you don't all get thrown off it when you hit the rescue ship. You're stuck back on the cable at the end, so you've just got to hang on and wait, dangling in space, until the probe's settled and the cable's cranked in. If Zonk's telling the truth, there's a ship there for the probe to find, and you won't just sail off into space until you run out of air or go mad. Because the chances of hitting a random ship, this far out from the colonies, before you all die? Pretty much nothing. And you do know you're not alone out here, right?
Lifeline, our (edited) 2009 Iron GM contest submission, is a black comedy about shattered identities and religion gone wrong, played out by a cut-throat band of half-amnesiac escaped prisoners floating through empty space. With geese.
"That was the best game I've played all con."
- a drunk guy
The goal of this game: maximum immersion, maximum screwiness, and occasionally scaring the bejeezus out of our players. We run it in the dark. With little LED flashlights. And a rope for the players to cling to.
We wrote this game in twenty-four hours flat according to the rules of the Iron GM contest. In fact, less than twenty-four hours, as we each got three hours of sleep, and Tory had to clock an hour at work. It did not win, but it failed to win by less than three points, so we're not too torn up about it. And despite its failure to win, Tory was informed by a room full of drunk people that it was awesome, and then commanded to run it at FestEvil, where it was also proclaimed awesome by at least one sober person.
Unfortunately, due to the whole running in the dark thing, Lifeline is nearly impossible to photograph, so despite her growing tendency to go snap-happy while running games, Tory has no photos of any runs.
March 7, 2009, at Intercon I in Chelmsford, MA.
April 4, 2009, at the Brandeis Festival of the LARPs in Waltham, MA.
March 13, 2010, at Intercon J in Chelmsford, MA.
April 17, 2010, at the Brandeis Festival of the LARPs in Waltham, MA.
November 20th, 2010, at SLAW at WPI in Worcester, MA.
Lifeline is currently a game for sixteen players (some characters have predefined genders and some are up to the player) which runs for about three hours, in one room, under the direction of two or three GMs. Player count will change as of edits. Average character sheet length is under a thousand words. It could be cast at the door with the removal of one character, and can also run short.
The game went on the bench pending some character cuts/merges and rewriting a few cheesy elements left over from its Iron GM origins. It does not have particularly functional casting, stuffing, or runtime GM information. And then, after years on the bench, we rebooted it.