Summers are where campaigns go to die.

Schedules get impossible to coordinate, time passes, the fizz escapes the bottle. But where some see a campaign necropolis, I see opportunity! An opportunity to table a bunch of funky one-offs for which I normally don’t have bandwidth or audience.

Here’s what I’ve spun up while everyone’s on summer standby. This is still pretty early in dead-campaign season so I’m thinking we’ll do this story one more time in a month or two.

The IGRC home game group is not larp-aware, like, at all. I thought it’d be kind of fun to see what they’d do with a very lightweight live-action game. Jay Treat’s Strange Gravity is, fundamentally, a Star Trek larp, with each player taking a ship role that also stands in for a set of facilitation roles. It’s GM-ful insofar as all the traditional game mastering duties are atomized across all the players. This also means that there are some duties that simply won’t get addressed in play if you don’t have every role filled. Interesting!

The game starts out with someone, probably the game’s owner, distributing three fundamental roles: the Captain, the First Mate, and the Counselor. Everyone else has free choice of the rest of the roles – pilot, warrior, diplomat, just think through any shot of the Enterprise crew – and then you start “Academy Training.” This is a series of vignettes you play through to learn both your in-game and facilitator roles. For example, the First Mate’s job is to start and end scenes, as well as cast who will be in those scenes. The Captain’s job is to pose moral dilemmas and guide everyone through the primary plot arc. And so on. You play both as the character attached to the role, and as a co-facilitator with responsibilities thematically tied to that role. If you can do those both at the same time — like, have your Captain present a moral dilemma as the Captain –that’s ideal. Or you can just indicate when you’re in or out of character. It’s a skill.

The game is very easy to teach, but it’s a long sequence. All the rules are on 16 cards (32 sides), and you just work through the cards one at a time until it’s time to play. There’s a ton of safety talk, like two or three card sides’ worth, which is good to have in an open convention setting but probably overkill for most tables: feel free to walk out, no touching, be liberal with cutting scenes early. Given the very PG-ness of Star Trek proper, I just don’t see folks going down a real dark or gross path in the course of play.

Strange Gravity comes with nine scenarios, which hilariously will take less time than all the setup work you just went through. (Setup-is-play, remind yourself of that.) There are recommended times attached to each segment of gameplay, and the scenario itself comes in at one hour. Everything else? Well more than two hours, and we ran long because we had seven players. It looks like you could trivially keep all the characters in place and play additional scenarios, jumping straight in and in fact spending maybe an hour playing through each.

There’s a lot of good creative juice to be gotten just by getting up and moving around. Strange Gravity suggests this at a couple points – for example, after Academy Training you’re supposed to set up your seating area like the ship’s bridge – but mostly this is left unaddressed. You’re expected to “do larp things” and know what that looks like. We didn’t really move around our seating to reflect the bridge setup, but we did stage an “away team” expedition to visit a belligerent space bug queen. Props, a little bit of light costuming (weird sunglasses, headsets, maybe blasters and comms toys), and being willing to stand up and make Kirkesque speeches goes a long way toward making this fun. 

I really liked Strange Gravity. I think, when I present this next time, I will be more careful about each player’s duties being constrained to what is literally and specifically assigned to each card role. For example, the “start and stop scenes and assign who will be in the scene” role for First Mate kind of drifted into more of a GMing role. This unfortunately undermined the Captain (whose job is to create moral dilemmas), the Counselor (whose job it is to set up relationships between characters), the Diplomat (who announces new ships arriving and assigns NPC roles to players) and so on. 

In Sidney Icarus’ Decaying Orbit (Australia’s RPG of the year in 2023) everyone plays various subsystems of an AI tasked with running a big space station. A big space station that’s falling into a star, that is! The hook is that the AI has just woken up with minutes to spare, and is reviewing its records trying to figure out what went so wrong – and what final message it will send back to Earth before it’s consumed.

Decaying Orbit is a somewhat distant For the Queen hack but very much its own thing as well. Like For the Queen, players take turns answering prompts on cards. The prompt deck is customized to one of four space station types, each of which modifies a core deck of common prompts. So like if you’re playing New Eden (a colony ship, the scenario we played) you’ll see parks and living quarters and a seed vault, but if you choose Hephaestus (a science vessel) you’ll see biological containment enclosures and secret labs and such. Nice way to push different tones beyond vibes and keywords. 

The first half of Decaying Orbit is all about setting up the mood. One very neat design gesture is that, because we’re all playing programs, we should tell our stories from a computer’s point of view. So instead of setting up little scenes like you would in For The Queen, we have video logs from crew members, sensor records, health charts, recordings, what have you. Makes for a really interesting experience.

The second half of Decaying Orbit is when everything goes off the rails. The prompts change a bit, or rather the overarching directives of how to interact with the prompts. Instead of human stories, now it’s about how things went wrong. When it’s all over, and everyone’s apophenia has slowly drawn together a conclusion – quite a bit like how Lovecraftesque has everyone orbiting various theories – everyone adds a bit to the final message the AI sends to Earth. In our game, our colony ship came to be infested with an intelligent fungus that made our ship change course, ate through the supplies, and eventually infected the human crew. A little scary, a little sad.

Next in my “summer is where campaigns go to die” series: Adam Bell’s Uneasy Lies The Head, a competitive (!) gmless (!!!) game of courtly drama. I had intended to make it a one-shot but the setup is beefy. Quite productive and interesting and fun, but also a long honking process. This is apparently the cut-down version of the setup game Bell initially designed, which he included in the box as a standalone activity called Hungry Out Of Habit. It involves yarn and little cardboard constructions.

The prologue phase of Uneasy is all about fleshing out your main character, their assets, and the various shenanigans that take place as assets get traded/stolen throughout the phase. There are three categories of setup choices — titles, holdings, and laws/rumors — all of which expand on your character as well as a quickly growing stack of notecards representing other assets (castles, magic swords, lovers, whatever). They’re the things you’ll tap later in the game to gain dice toward accomplishing things. They’re also how you set relative rankings in Power, Esteem and Knowledge. I haven’t looked closely at the underlying math but the ranking came out exactly as I expected: my True Heir is the most powerful, but not well liked and dumb as hell. Perfect.

As of this week, we’re only about a third of the way through the 13 “rows” you play through. One player is the “focus” and is responsible for either setting up a scene of their choice (they choose location and who is appearing with their main, casting extras as necessary), or executing a Plan. There are a dozen Plans and they’re somewhat similar to the minigames in The King is Dead. There are actually a lot of similarities to TKID. Maybe less horny.

So far so good! We will hopefully get to finish this up next week. Dad’s general, at the direction of the church leader is about to go to war with an icky heretic which has also drawn the attention of the spymistress to improve her own standing in some weird three-way bid for victory. My True Heir is gonna Demand (a Plan) the spymistress step the fuck off and let daddy do his thing. Complicated, since she’s the king’s illicit lover. That was a fun twist: nobody chose to be The Monarch, which left the spot available to be just someone else’s asset. So the king is the spymistress’s chew toy.

Each minigame has its own rules but mostly it’s about setting a difficulty number, optionally calling for a vote if the roller thinks it’s too difficult (you can actually vote the difficulty up or down, it’s great), assembling dice (2 to start, tap your resources and explain why they’re useful to get more dice), gather help or hindrance (other players tap their assets to get their own dice) and then rolling. You’re looking for different die faces — the deluxe boxed game comes with a really nice set of custom dice with each of the sigils in the game. Helpers can add their faces to your mix. Hinderers cancel out matching faces.

The three ranked categories — Power, Esteem and Knowledge — also give you difficulty ratings for certain things. Like 1 to 5 from top to least powerful if you’re trying to leverage your own power, and 5 to 1 from top to bottom difficulty if you’re targeting someone else’s power.

Each of the mini games lays out the make (you hit your target) and mar (oops) outcomes. So far we’ve only done one — Make Introductions, by the heretic, who is trying to grow his cult — and his mar was pretty epic. The characters showed up all right, but there was a ton of chaos that followed.

You can also call for an in-scene roll if you feel like someone’s exceeded their power, knowledge or esteem in the course of describing what they’re doing. That’s mostly where you use those ratings I think.

Probably the biggest hurdle to getting this kind of game to go, similar to Fiasco, is the discipline of beefing for fun. Like, lots of interesting stuff bubbles up in the prologue which is supposed to kick off the various petty resentments that will drive the game. But if you don’t pay close attention, if you’re maybe a little tired, or nothing is really tickling your fancy, it can be hard to decide what to care about.

We stopped this week at the start of Row 5, which means our fifth player — the general — hasn’t had a chance to play yet. And he’s the player least hooked into what to care about. He got talked into the holy war by the church leader and that’s all well and good, and there’s a rumor circulating that he wants to attempt a coup, but after our session he was just shrugging. I think he’ll figure it out once his boots are on the ground.

Weird side note: Bell makes terrific use of public domain artwork throughout. The custom card deck is 52 pieces of post-Renaissance courtly art, the book has a ton of it, it’s great. I’m always kind of skeptical when I see folks hyping public domain art, but it’s real nice here.