The past weekend was quite a busy one with Family Weekend and all the bustle it creates on campus. However, there was another event going on that only a small number of people knew of. From 6 pm on Friday to 6 pm on Monday, RPI’s Games Club held “The Morning After”, a well-known live action role-playing game, often shortened to LARP, that many came to find a most enjoyable adventure.
The background for the game is set far into the future where man has built spacecrafts that can move faster-than-light via a dimension known as hyperspace, and various countries and even companies have left Earth and have begun to colonize the worlds of other stars. However, due to the nature of hyperspace, anyone cognizant during the voyage through it goes 100 percent certifiably, irrevocably insane.
Therefore, to prevent this, travelers are put into a comatose state for the duration of the faster-than-light travel. Then, when the spaceship has exited hyperspace, all aboard awaken, refreshed, and invigorated.
Now here’s where it gets interesting. The process that averts the madness also has a peculiar side-effect—amnesia. Now, this loss of memory is, thankfully, only temporary, and by the time the spacecraft docks at its destination, it is completely cleared up. The peoples’ memories trickle slowly back to their minds, until they are capable of fully remembering who they are and their reason for traveling. As to provide some solace to the passengers and crew, they are each given two items: a nametag, which has the person’s name already printed on it, and a 15 second message recorded by the recipient prior to the jump into hyperspace to help them along at the other end of their journey.
As one can imagine, this leads to all sorts of interesting situations as the players, who take the part of the passengers, meet and greet one another and slowly over time realize who they are and what their relations to other passengers are. The game becomes a race against time as everyone works around the clock to try and piece their memories together before someone remembers his or her own and attempts to act on them. The plot twists and turns as passengers begin following their true agendas and surprises come around every corner. This game is filled with intrigue and eventful circumstances, more often than not generated by the players themselves, that keep everyone on their toes, and make sure that no one gets left out.
However, a note to those looking for a slaughter-fest. This is one you might want to hold back a bit on. This game is, as is the nature of LARPs, more centered on interacting with other players than slicing and dicing and trying to paint the place red. Otherwise, jump at the first chance you can to apply when “The Morning After” comes around again in three years time because spaces for this voyage are limited and this is a journey that you don’t want to miss.
