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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) 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.

The current version of Lifeline, version 1.1, is a game for twelve players (two male, two female, eight neutral) which runs for two hours, in one room, under the direction of at least two GMs. Most of that will probably change in the next round of revisions.

Version 1.0: March 7th, 2009, at Intercon I in Chelmsford, MA. Raw draft written in twenty-four hours and cast on the spot with a room full of strangers. Given that, we'd say it went pretty darn well.

Version 1.1: April 4th, 2009, at the Brandeis Festival of the LARPs in Waltham, MA. A lightly edited version that was also well-received, although the players rather overwhelmingly declared that it needed a longer runtime.

Version 2.0: March 13th, 2010, at Intercon J, New England's premiere LARP convention. There are a few things that we want to do in this edit, including adding a few characters, expanding the runtime to four hours rather than two, lessening some of the random crack quotient, and obtaining a planetarium globe. All in hopes of making it more interesting and immersive and giving the players more time to figure out some of the screwy, screwy stuff that's going down in this world. This run is currently full, but we'll let you know how it goes.