It's hard to write a science fiction one-shot, because you have to figure out a lot of stuff about the setting. What does scifi technology look like? What does future society look like?

Once you know what the setting looks like, you have to get all the players on roughly the same page. Preferably without spending half the session giving them background on the setting. (In a campaign game or multiple linked LARPs you could just establish a setting bible for people to learn outside of game.)

It's a tricky balance to find. I'm more used to playing tabletop games than LARPing, and in a tabletop game like this I'd just leave stuff undefined. Then if someone suggested that something was true about, say, future medical technology I'd agree to it and we'd define the setting in play.

That doesn't work quite as well in a LARP situation, because people are separate from one another so might not hear about setting details being defined. Jim the medical officer decides that medvats on the spaceship can read the minds of dead people, so he brings a body to the ship. Meanwhile, in another chamber Johnny the expert in bio-sciences declares that medvats can't do such a thing. both keep playing for a while, then eventually meet and find their established facts disagree with one another. In a tabletop game we'd see this problem right away (or avoid it all together) and resolve it somehow: many indie RPGs are more about establishing authority in this manner than they are about determining if your character succeeds at a given task.


I am not entirely sure how to manage this dilemma, or how to balance between too much setting info and not enough. I suppose that this is an issue every game has to decide for themselves, but it's something to consider as you write these games.


The last two games haven't had this sort of problem: the January game was set in modern, totally mundane earth. The February game was a silly superhero game, so A) things could be ridiculous and B) decades of retroactive continuity meant that if two people established conflicting facts about the past, both were probably true.



One of these months I should run a smaller game, where all the participants are within earshot of one another and try out different LARPing techniques. Something in the Scandinavian Jeepform tradition, perhaps. Still plenty of months in the future for weird experiments.



In unrelated news: I love the internet. When I'm writing a setting and say "I need a name for a fake drug that exists in the setting" I can just type "random fake drug name generator" in Google and get a link to a drug name generator. Granted, it doesn't make great drug names, but I only needed one.