“Larp”, which stands for “live action role playing” game, is typically one of those words that can outright kill the mood. (No offence, larpers!) But this? This sounds a-ma-zing.
The Verge reports that some larpers took a retired naval destroyer and used it as the setting for a real-life Battlestar Galactica role-playing game. It’s an offshoot thing, but one that doesn’t stray too far: the game takes place aboard a Celestia, which is a ship that the show mentions but that we never get to see. Everyone aboard has a role to play out, and that’s where things get interesting. If you’ve watched the show, you know this means a ton of tension as the humans try to survive and figure out who the cylons are.
“One of the game’s three weekend-long runs ended in a surrender to Cylon agents, another became mired in a bitter ethnic cleansing, and a third — while it had the lowest death count of any run — resulted in the fictional ship itself exploding,” The Verge writes. Like I said, it sounds amazing.
Now they’re looking to bring the game to American shores, although they’re still trying to work out the logistics of it all.
The project will tentatively “launch” in some form in 2014, but the team still hasn’t decided where to hold the game or how to fund it. Besides a small grant-funded stipend for Dolk, the original Monitor Celestra was paid for by participants; this time, the team has also considered attempting to get help from the show’s owners themselves. The game hasn’t been officially licensed, but Ericsson doesn’t think this will be a problem — especially because Moore and others are clearly already aware of it. “Anyone can cosplay as Starbuck, there’s no copyright issue there,” he says. “We’re really doing the same thing on a large scale.”
Hopefully they manage to figure out a way. I’d pay money to participate in this sort of thing.
You can read more about the project here.
Can a real-life ‘Battlestar Galactica’ cross the Atlantic? [The Verge]
Leave a Reply