This is going to be an experiment in a LARPish game run over Discord, for reasons that I'm incredibly anti-social and have decided not to go out or let anyone into my house for the foreseeable future. As such the LARP will be over Discord, with various chat rooms for each faction. Your role and position in each faction will determine your chat privileges and access. While you have complete liberty to set a personal goal at a tangent to your faction, in general you and your faction will be attempting to head towards one of the victory conditions - Diplomatic, Conquest, Transcendence or Economic. Cooperative victories are also possible for each of these.

Each person will have a mechanical role in the game, which is a match of Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri with a customised scenario and all players under my control. One player might control diplomacy and social policies while another issues commands for what each base builds. Cooperation is necessary but hardly inevitable as competing interests may result in all sorts of decisions being made. Of course, some players may end up with more significant roles than others, depending on their faction and how many players there are. A military officer of a peaceful faction may find themselves itching for conflict!

Notably this is designed to be able to scale indefinitely - while there is a maximum number of players, it will be very easy to expand up to theoretically hundreds of players, each playing a different role in the game, down to each unit or base individually. The load on me as the GM is meant to be minimal, with the mechanics of the backend only informing the ebbs and flows of the drama for the players - don't focus on trying to win, just play to be the character!

Each character will be initially assigned a role in the game mechanically in one of four archetypes:

• Governors - they run the bases and civilians.

• Soldiers - they control military units and prototyping.

• Scientists - they control civilian units and science.

• Diplomats - they negotiate, rule and decide social rules.

Each of these will get screenshots of the areas they control before each year in-game and can then, based on that, make decisions about what they want to do. This will benefit from continuity and good communication, so expect a certain amount of chaos.

A faction will require at least four players to move into player control but if the player count exceeds 28, or on player request, the roles will begin to be subdivided.

The game will fall into three time periods each week: Time-In during the transit to and from perigee (2), Downtime during the apogee (1) transit and a short period of Time-Out during perigee. The satellite only passes close enough to Planet (3) to be functional fully during the close passes on the way by, the rest of the time being barely responsive at all.

To put this in other, less in-character words: Two short Time-In periods separated by a short Time-Out on Saturday, with one long Downtime for all the other days. During Time-In, all chat channels will be fully active with Diplomats controlling their respective voice channels. During Time-Out voice channels will be deactivated, permitting text conversation at a slower rate - it also gives time to check any mechanical questions with the GM before the second Time-In.

This is designed to permit a broad spectrum of people to participate. Players in New Zealand can be online either Saturday morning 9-10am, the evening 9-10pm or both. Players in the UK can be online Friday evening 10-11pm or Saturday morning 10-11am or both.

Every player will have a mechanical effect on the game, though they are not guaranteed major decisions every turn! As the game proceeds the mechanical choices should be detailed enough to be meaningful while not being overwhelming, even for those unfamiliar with the genre, interface or what on earth the pictures mean. Any requested clarifications can be put through during the Time-Out period so that nobody ends up disadvantaged by mechanical questions or missing information.

Orders can be as general as "defend the bases" or specific enough to cover exactly which square to move into, terraform and what to build. The way to submit downtime is through either a public post in your faction chat or by a private message to the GM, Sneakabout#0697.

For those uninterested in reading too much, here's the tl;dr.

1) You make a character in the setting and get a role assigned.

2) You turn up on Discord during the two 'Time in' windows (NZ Saturday am/pm, UK Friday pm/Saturday am and look at your downtime results/character info.

3) You play your character and, by the end of the second window, submit any orders you want to go through.

4) Rinse and repeat every week!