Into the Silent Sea, by Lily Benderskaya and Tory Root
Wherever you were before, all you can see is a blurred and endless sea of stars and sea and fog, without direction or sanity.
Whatever ship you came here by is trapped, motionless, sliced open and hanging in this foggy void.
Whoever you once were, all you have of yourself now is vague impressions, driving thoughts, and the marks your life inscribed upon your body.
And sitting before you is a silver egg, and every time it rattles, fear trickles down your spine...
Into the Silent Sea, our (edited) 2018 Iron GM contest submission, is a sci-fi amnesia game about colliding realities, the ways in which circumstances transform identity, and bad decisions involving birds. There will be minimal costuming and pregame reading. This game deals with slavery, mind control, and the pitfalls of privilege, and contains some puzzles.
"Consent is good!"
- somebody who hadn't gotten all their memories yet
The Iron GM ingredients this time around were sea stories, metamorphosis, math, and the prop of a silver shakey egg. The math ingredient made us write a puzzle. Paranoid & Crotchety, writing a puzzle. Imagine the day. We hope you're happy, Iron GM contest theme comer-uppers-with!
At any rate, this was our 3rd time doing Iron GM, our second time with just the 2 of us, and we just planned the game, went to bed, woke up, and wrote it. It won 3rd place. Just like our 1st one. And our 2nd one, written with 2 other people, won 1st place. See, that's all very mathematically elegant. And probably means that co-writers are auspicious for winning. But mostly we just wanted to write a game together for the first time in a while, were busy with work, and figured Iron GM would make us pound it out in a weekend. And hey, we got a game! Complete with cute paper animal ears that people can wear while discovering horrifying memories involving slavery and mind control, because that's how we roll.
The first run really suffered from a short runtime in the standard 2-hour Iron GM slot: despite the memories handed out being brief and few, especially compared to some monstrosities we've committed, people didn't really have time to process them and play through the consequences and fallout. The second run, with an expanded runtime, felt very different, and the game definitely benefits from time to breathe.
February 25, 2018, at Intercon R in Warwick, RI.
April 20, 2018, at the Brandeis Festival of the LARPs in Waltham, MA.
October 26, 2018, in a private residence in Arlington, MA.
October 27, 2018, at SLAW at WPI in Worcester, MA.
November 18, 2018, through the Greater Boston LARP Society at the YWCA in Cambridge, MA.
February 23, 2019, at Intercon S in Warwick, RI.
March 16, 2019, at Dice Bubble in Troy, NY.
February 4, 2022, at a larp day in Canton, MA.
Into the Silent Sea is a game for twelve players (characters have player-defined genders) which runs for about three hours, in one room, under the direction of one or two GMs. Average starting character sheet length is a few hundred words, and there is moderate in-game reading. It can be cast at the door, and can run a few players short if needed, though it is suboptimal.
The game needs no major edits, and has casting, stuffing, and runtime GM information written for the original contest submission that would need some updates, but is at least extant. It is close to boxable.