The Earth was hit by the biggest solar flare yet. We watched in amazement as the aurora borealis was intersected by the white lines of falling satellites, and few realised how much it would change - soon after the satellites, the power grid cascaded, plunging most of the world into darkness.
We knew that our civilization could not survive another such catastrophe. So we overcame all our differences and sent the spaceship Daidalos to our star in record time with a daring plan to stop the next solar superstorm. A year later, we lost contact with the ship, and with it, our hopes.
The year is 2037 and Earth has changed. The effort to send Daidalos 2 is struggling with the inability to come to an agreement, leaving each country looking for its own way to deal with the aftermath of the inevitable impending eruption. And now, when no one expects it anymore, one of the last observatories picks up a signal: the Daidalos is coming home.
Daidalos is made up of stories of six pairs of people who were close, but a mission separated their lives for nine long years. Many didn't believe they would ever see the astronauts again, and it turns out that waiting for the outcome on Earth may be even harder than the Daidalos mission itself. How much has everyone changed? And will they find their way back to each other?
Earth and Daidalos are still separated by the vast distance of space, so it will be impossible to communicate directly with each other most of the time. We want Daidalos to be a play about melancholic words that wander uncertainly through an empty universe where someone somewhere far away is waiting for them. Perhaps.
The best of the best went on a mission and carried a very heavy burden on their shoulders. They left behind their loved ones. It is clear that the mission did not go as planned and that Earth forgot its heroes perhaps too soon. In Daidalos, we would like to show those individual people underneath the great deeds, and how fateful events could have changed them and their loved ones.
Daidalos is a conversational online sci-fi larp for 12 players who divide between themselves the roles of the crew of a spaceship that returns after a long time and an impromptu team of people on Earth who (un)expect them. The focus of the game will be existential "video conferences" between the astronauts and people close to them from an observatory on Earth. The game will alternate between phases of classic video conferencing and one-way communication.
Daidalos was originally written in Czech and in this language it is run by the authors. The international version is a project of people who played this game, loved it, and wanted to show it to the wider world (with the authors’ blessing, of course).
You can get in touch with us via FB page of the game.
Sign up fee is 15 Eur. It will help us cover the cost of translation and if we get in the green numbers, we might order ourselves a pizza while organizing this game.
The game will take place online. We will be using discord, google docs and jamboard.
Daidalos is a game for 12 players. All players must be over 18 years of age. All characters can be played by players of any gender. You will have the chance to tell us, which gender would you like to play, during signup.
The whole larp is run in one day, approx 13:00 - 22:00CET. The game itself will probably be 3.5 hours long. The larp will be preceded by about 3 hours of preparation, during which we will test technique, game preparation and finalize the game. That means we will flesh out character relationships both in the groups and between you and your partner, and we will flesh out the details what happened during the last years.
As well as time and a quiet corner to play, you'll need a good internet connection, a good headset and a microphone. We'll also ask you to prepare a simple costume and set up a place to play from. More precise instructions will be given to players in the design document before the game.
Next run is planned for 9.12.2023 (Saturday)- approx 13:00 - 22:00CET. Sign-up interval lasts from 7.11. to 17.11. If there are more people interested then there are characters, we will randomly pick who gets a spot.
Players sign up in pairs. Each of the players has to fill out their own sign-up form. One of the pair will always play a character on Earth and the other a character in space. You can decide who will play in which group or leave it up to us.
Sometimes I daydream and wander with my mind somewhere far away in the universe, where I give in to the wonder of the magnitude of it all. And that feeling, my friends, is what I want to pass on with this game.
A long time ago, Roman and I were looking at the stars at a larp. Now, years later, my friends and I decided to see what was happening up there. What started out as a lighthearted boredom during a pandemic quickly turned into a heartfelt project about the universe, humanity, and us.
One of the things I enjoy about larps is how they turn the interpersonal far into the near, and then back into the other far. It seems to me that sometimes this distance game can be almost cosmic.
Like the ancient Greeks, I love getting lost and finding myself again in the mysterious constellations and their stories. I also believe that every predicament is also an opportunity and that even in loneliness there can be a powerful narrative.
I've been making larps for a long time, but I've never made an online larp before. I've been looking at the stars even longer, but I've never flown into space. There's a first time for everything.
Mia played this game in Czech. Liked it so much that she drafted Bebe. They translated the game and tested it in the first unofficial international run. Then Iva joined to help them run the larp and spread the hype.