My 3rd European LARP! Once again, I will write down my thoughts and observations of this, my second game with NotOnlyLARP after Mission Together in August 2022. I participated in the first run of Zero over the weekend of March 4-5 2023 in Madrid, Spain. All photos are by the author unless otherwise specified.
Pre-game
Even before I’d gone to Mission Together, this game started being trailed back in June 2022. Like I assume most LARPers, I seem to be drawn to concepts and ideas and this one being sci-fi already had a significant hook into what makes me tick as a LARPer. This is why I was interested in this and not for games like Giovanni:The Last Supper (which is currently running as I type this first part of the post). I was slightly hesitant to sign onto Zero until Mission Together (otherwise known as MT) was firmly in the rear view mirror. If you haven’t already then you can read my thoughts and experience on that game here: Mission Together A Retrospective. I had missed the initial signup window for Zero but after applying to join the standby list I was told I had a place.
After signing up and joining the relevant facebook pages, nothing… It was mostly silence until the first few days of January 2023. I will admit, I thought it was likely that was going to get pushed back (I suspected that as the hotel was still being built when booking and thought it might not be ready in time). However, we all got our characters on Jan 8th and this time I would not be a military character!
The game was thematically a prequel to Mission Together in that we were onboard the original sleeper ship on the way to colonise the planets referenced in that game. I would be playing Mason, a stakeholder (top of the social food chain) who was a popular broadcaster on effectively the YouTube of the future, he might also have a drug problem. So definitely not a military character then! After reading it, my first thought was to play him a bit like Ellis from Die Hard with elements of Jeremy Clarkson and Simon Cowell. One of my favourite parts of MT was the training sessions delivered IC (In Character) to other players, being able to give play to others and that was very much part of the brief for Mason, but I wasn’t sure how that was going to work. It sounded like I’d be doing some video work potentially but one of the parts of the brief was also to be in charge of morale!
Discord servers were joined, costume measurements sent in and commemorative mugs duly ordered through the latter half of the month of January. There were sporadic emails through February but it all seemed a bit muted. The majority of the discussion seemed to be focusing on what do to in Madrid before and after the game rather than the game itself.
My character didn’t have anywhere near as many contacts as they did back on MT (this game had roughly a third of the characters that were on MT) but I’m still hesitant about reaching out to people I don’t really know. Probably a combination of the anxiety and/or imposter syndrome I seem to encounter when booking onto games like this. When I went to Odysseus, I knew one other player well and a couple of others I’d met on other UK games, MT was better but before Zero, I only knew 3-4 other people that were on my run and they was mostly from one of those two previous games. It was also relatively short, I was booked to fly to Madrid on the Saturday (the plane would land at 09:55) and the workshops were scheduled to begin at 12:00, the LARP then starts at 16:00 and ends at somepoint on the Sunday afternoon. We then have an after party and then I would fly back Monday lunchtime.
I will admit, it was with a degree of relief that the player (who was both a romantic and antagonistic contact towards my character) reached out in the days ahead of the game. Just saying Hi can do a lot but we were also able to swap ideas and make sure we were on the same page in terms of our characters relationship and, happily, we were. How that would translate into the actual game was still an unknown variable but it certainly helped with my confidence ahead of flying out to Madrid.
The Location
Some of the players at MT had stayed in the capsule hotel in Bilbao ahead of that game. The Bilbao location had been considered as a potential venue for Zero but it would depend upon how many players they had as the Madrid location was larger, so I’m guessing the game passed a threshold as we were playing in Madrid. This was also quite the change from the convention centre we had played MT in, but that was a game designed for three times the number of players, we only had 50 characters for this game and even then the space did feel crowded at times. As bizarre as it sounds I also got lost a couple of times, not terminally lost, but I would walk down a corridor convinced it would take me to a stairwell I needed only to find myself at a dead end, probably helped by the fact all the corridors looked the same.
The space certainly felt sci-fi already without anything really being added to it. The beds were comfortable enough but I’m not sure anyone who suffers from claustrophobia would be ok shutting themselves in there.
Time In!
Ahead of actually starting the game we had the eponymous workshops. As before these were a combination of the safety techniques used in the game (I do quite like their system and would like to incorporate it into my LARPs) and information as to how the game would actually run. I think they missed a trick at this but I’ll talk more about that later. For the most part they were handled efficiently and on point.
The background of the game is that we were on the “Zero Ark”, a colony ship heading for the Kepler Cluster to colonise the world of New Eden (backdrop to the world of Mission Together). The player group was one of the numerous emergency crew who the ships AI could wake up if there was a problem. So naturally the game started with us waking up to an alarm siren.
Before we get much further I probably need to explain the social structure. If you’ve seen the Black Mirror episode “Nosedive” or the season 5 episode of Community “App Development of Condiments” (Meaow Meaow Beanz!) then the social structure of the game would be relatively familiar to you. Everybody was given a rank, and this rank deemed their place in the social order, from 1 being the lowest to 5 being the highest. The highest of the high were the Stakeholders who were responsible for social order and arguably the most important person there was the HR Stakeholder as they got to both promote and demote people through the ranks. This was a carry on from the system that had been on Earth and we (as in the Stakeholders) had been tasked to keep it going.
The first two hours of the game were mostly chaos, lurching from bad news to worse news. We had been on our way to New Eden (located in the Kepler cluster) and the trip should have taken 500 years (with us in Hypersleep) but when we woke up we were 200 years late and off course. Eventually it became clear that we had to eject a number of cryo pods in order to maintain the ships power system, we had to lose so many pods with either seeds, animals or fellow colonists.., This was the first big decision that would be taken by the Stakeholders and it’s one we sweated quite a lot (as we would all of the big decisions we had to take). We eventually decided on a combination of pods which (by design no doubt) would have to include some colonists. We saved the ship but at what cost?
Our primary document in this first part of the game (one the early power crisis was over) was the “Emergency Protocol” which was provided to the Stakeholders early on. It boiled down to basically the following points: –
1. Pick a Captain (more of an honorific than actual command)
2. Assemble a committee to determine the best form of government on New Eden (But basically keep it the same)
3. All emergency decisions should have their economic value weighed (lives of 4 & 5 crew members are more important than lower ranks!)
The next big decision was that we had to hold that days “Social Restructuring”, this is where we decide who deserves to go up in rank and who is going down. Each Stakeholder brought out names and reasons as to why they should moved up or down, but this was only based on our interactions over the course of the past 3-4 hours of game. The HR Stakeholder had the final say (and was in effect the defacto leader) but they could only move/remove so many points a day. Conducting the first ceremony we had to endure the usual heckling from a bunch of 1s and 2s (in fact one 2 got demoted down to a 1!)
Now you might be thinking at this stage that the Stakeholders would be ripe for a coup and that thought had certainly crossed my mind in the run up to the game. However, revolution was never really going to be possible as we had 3000 frozen marines we could use to put down any kind of dissent (I’m reliably informed that the game didn’t have 3000 hidden NPC’s so we were asked to please don’t test that particular theory!)
The items in the emergency procedures would get worked on throughout the course of the LARP, we picked a Captain (one of my more ‘dedicated’ fans from when I was a popular Holovid Broadcaster back on Earth!) and a political committee would get quite political. The Stakeholders would use this as a way for the more ‘rebellious’ types to focus their energy on when realistically it was of never going to change (not while we were on top!).
As the PR Stakeholder, my job was effectively that of Morale officer, to that end I didn’t have a problem with lower ranks approaching me, maybe I should have..? It was interesting the way some characters would look down and/or avert their gaze when either I or a fellow Stakeholder was in their area. As the game wore on this first night, all the departments; research, medical, logistics, science, etc all started to knuckle down to their respective jobs/tasks. There was an Empty Epsilon setup for pilots to train, researchers were building devices with real Arduino micro-controllers (as well as writing the code!), etc.
I met and talked with the few contacts I had outside of the Stakeholders as well as getting involved in some other plot lines (including a doctor who had brought a pregnant woman on board to study pregnancy in space, and the woman in question was only a 2 so would only get limited medical aid). All at the same time whenever there was a decision to be made the Stakeholders would gather and the HR Stakeholder would listen to our observations and then decide on a course of action.
There was a lot of plot going or around us as we moved through the ship, could we find a cure for the Hypersleep/Nanobot virus, what were the strange squid like creatures we’d seen when we woke up, what was in section WD and why was it so important, who would be nominated to be ships captain, what did happen to the previous emergency crews that had been woken before we had, could we regain control of the ship, where was the ship in relation to New Eden? There was an awful lot of documents on a website that needed to be read (but that wasn’t a job for a 5!) and we started to put a picture together that ultimately we had a rogue AI (Artificial Intelligence) on our hands. We were able to restore control of the ship but we were still two hundred years of travel from our destination and there were only 5 emergency crews left and if we let the AI control the ship it would take us into oblivion so we there would have to be a human hand on the wheel as it were for the next two hundred years. Would the Zero Ark become a generational space ship, it was certainly discussed at great length amongst the Stakeholders. The WD section of the cargo would provoke some comment, the documentation had indicated it held significant importance but when we discovered all it held were a few rich individuals who had paid to leave Earth, I thought for a moment we would have anarchy (not that there was much threat of that with out frozen marine backup force.)
Towards the end of the game we had another critical power problem and this was a big one. We would have to lose our last remaining animal stocks, seeds and nearly every last human colonist, if we kept the WD section…
As you might imagine there was a lot of debate on that point! Although interestingly enough the most debate was what else to eject. No matter the cost, section WD was going, but there was a lot of debate about what to save. If we save the colonists then there would be nothing to eat, lose the seeds then we would have nothing to grow, same for the animals. So we ejected the WD section, the seeds and the animals, we reasoned we had a functional hydroponics section and we could live a plant based diet for the next 200 years (the plan was that we would rotate with the other emergency crews).
A short while after that, we had a transmission directed at the ship, garbled at first but it soon became clear. It was a ship from the Kepler colony we had been heading for, in the two hundred years since we should have got there they had been searching for us and had developed a functional FTL propulsion system, we would soon be on the new colony.
Definitely more of a ‘Star Trek’ ending but that was fine, I imagine what would have happened had we ejected the colonists only 30 minutes previously? I was at complete peace with the ending we had, I’ve commented before in other blog posts how hard it can be to end a LARP in a satisfying way.
Post Game
With the game over it was time to restore this spacecraft back into a hotel (there would be a second run of the game but a week later at the same location). There was an optional safety debrief, I didn’t attend as I didn’t have any significant issues, but maybe I should have? That’s something I’ll touch on later.
We were treated to Pizza and then there was more of an after party at a nearby bar, I didn’t go, not for any other reason but I was all out of spoons, the combination of the early flight and the long day previously all took their toll and I retired to bed. The early flight had felt like a good idea at the time (so not to waste my precious holiday) but I absolutely felt the effects of it so I’m not sure I would do anything like that in the future. There was a time when I could LARP all day, drink all night, see the sun come up, have half an hours sleep and then do it all again, but that feels like a long time ago now.
Critique
I think the social structure was interesting (and not just speaking as a 5, I’d have happily played a 1) and I think it should have been more in the spotlight. Some players went with it and really did lean into it, I also did to a degree but I had other motivations driving my actions. One of the more interesting parts of the workshops back on MT last year was when we were encouraged to walk around the room using the racist names for each others planet that had been in the original design document. I’d have liked to have seen something like that in the pre-game workshops to reinforce the social structure on people. A lot of people did play with it but I don’t think it was as prevalent as it could have been or at least that was my perception. Talking to a couple of fellow players in the days after the game and they felt it had been too heavily lent on, the truth is probably somewhere in between.
This is a minor quibble but it did catch us on the hop at a couple of key moments. There were times when we were told we had a timeline in order to make a decision. Absolutely fair, but the timeline kept getting compressed, ie we were told we had 5 minutes (we start a timer to keep track) and then roughly 30 seconds later we get told we have 3 minutes, etc. I know we were dealing with a rogue AI but it compressed what could have been some interesting debate, but this is a minor quibble.
Conclusion
This was a very different game for me than perhaps what I’m used to. I didn’t have the anxiety that I did before previously travelling for games but there was definitely more than a hint of Imposter Syndrome which is something I’ve never really felt before. I played Mason as well as I think I could but, realistically, I do wonder if another player could probably have done a better job with the material. A long time ago I wondered if there’s probably only a few archetype characters I can portray well (I know some people can play any kind of character and are positively chameleonic in that regard) and maybe I’ve been lucky with my previous two games (Odysseus and MT)? If I boil down all the characters I’ve played over the last 30ish years then the majority would come as something like Soldier, Scientist (alhough nearer to a Genius, Billionaire, Playboy, Philanthropist for my UNIT character!), Wizard and probably a couple of pilots. Back on Odysseus, initially I railed against playing another soldier whereas I embraced the soldier role on MT but Mason was very different to what I’ve done before and I went with it as much as I could. One question I seem to be wrestling with more and more is can you really teach an old LARPer new tricks? I’d like to think yes but that question did weigh on my mind quite a lot with this game, maybe more than it should have. As one of my favourite quotes from Blakes7 goes “Regret is part of being alive, but keep it a small part”.
Feelings aside I enjoyed this game, realistically more than I did MT last year as overall I had a much better play experience. I was nearly always on the move, I participated in some major decisions and I had same great scenes with brilliant players, really, what more is there?
And that is why we LARP.
So thanks for reading, if indeed you still are.
Critical Path 
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