I personally would prefer a space larp (or even a #spacelarpcafe), where we do an away mission out here in the local woods.

but I'd settle for a high fantasy thing too.

I decided a 7 or 8 years ago that I wanted to be able to do all of the kinds of production that the walt disney company does, and that I wanted to be able to do those things without becoming a monster.

As of right now, about the only thing we don't do (other than being a monster) is theme park attractions.

(Give me another two years and we'll get #SpaceLARPCafe kicked back off.)

There's no reason for it to specifically be cryptid themed. @bstacey suggested dinosaurs, which would work very well.

I also love the idea of a world where a bunch of little steampunk-y robots are just out there, and your goal is to spot them all. I've been thinking about that idea since I stumbled on this kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1537376953/wrylon-robotical-field-guides/description a decade ago.

It could be a scavenger hunt. It could be in the #SpaceLARPCafe universe.

There should be enough to do to keep the locals engaged, but it should be friendly enough that it's fun to just play for the weekend, if you're just in town for the weekend.

#SpaceLARPCafe

This isn't something I'm actively working on, so much as it is something that I'm convinced I will do at some point, and that I have a bunch of pieces for folded in to other things.

I won't rehash the whole thing. Find the original post from 2017 if you're interested.

I'm looking back in to it today because I'm looking for things that I can use as visual inspiration as we build out v1 of the #SpaceLARPCafe

Stylistically there's a lot going on here, but practically it is pretty vapid.

Basically, I see it like this:

- You have a ship. Your ship has a record. That record is your ship's local copy of the "wiki". The wiki is the state of the universe as far as your ship is aware, and it *can be, but does not have to be* federated.

- Your ship is only online when your ship is online. The world changes without your ship, and your ship will not necessarily know about it unless it is associated with a dock. The dock will backfill data to your ship.

- Your ship can associate itself with a dock. The dock is kind of like a relay. It serves as a hub connecting lots of ships, and probably also federating with other docks. (This is the #SpaceLARPCafe but can also be wholly virtual.) It also becomes the server for the game world your ships connect to.

- The actual bridge simulation bits are built from structured data and text from the "wiki", and the results of various excursions get bundled back up and sent back to the wiki (which does not promise consistency, but will follow a trust model of some sort that I can invision, but don't want to take the time to explain.)

- The only multiplayer aspects come from the other members of your bridge crew and from the other ships connected to your dock. (eventually, maybe, if there's enough interest, dock to dock interaction might approach something closer to real time, but at some point this shit gets complicated and potentially expensive so I'm trying to short circuit as much of that as possible)

- Outside of the bridge simulator bits, everything is done through menus and text at the base layer. We might put a fancy skin on eventually, but under the hood it's all structured text. (The whole game world, in fact, and nearly every interaction within it, should be able to be modeled as flavor text + structured data. This is because all the data discovered about the game world is presented in a wiki! Players are invited to contribute to the wiki (video, audio, and text)

- There's not one massive, persistent game world. There are a bunch of small ones. There's not even one consensus view of reality, there are a bunch of fragmented ones. This might be a problem for a different style of game, but it adds some DIY hacker aesthetic to this one.

Doing it this way lets me bolt on to an existing game engine with some relatively light scripting, and to pass data in and out of the game engine in a way that makes it all feel like One Thing instead of a collection of a bunch of different things.

It means that we can have some basic proc-gen for "you've entered an unexplored region of space and when you get there you find X, Y, and Z" and then store that data for future explorers, while also logging the first people to visit the region, etc. etc. etc.

I have more thoughts here, but it's dinner time

Everyone is flying busted ass homemade ships, relying on a public wiki to know which worlds are safe. The whole universe is basically uncharted.

That gives us a *lot* of room to hang a story off of.

The #SpaceLARPCafe can be "renting" ships to visitors and serving as a "dock" for members.

Visitors can pick from a pre-supplied list of fly by planets and basically just do a training mission and a simple excursion.

Members can chart uncharted systems or do supply runs to charted systems or do rescue missions or salvage missions for other ships.

That gives us room to tell lots of different kinds of stories, but also to have a good reason for many of the stories to remain disconnected or not to build on one another (while also leaving *plenty* of room for us to have ongoing stories that do build on one another.