OMFG
So I have just got back from Alone2, which was the best larp game I have ever played. The sets, props, costumes, plot and atmosphere were breathtaking, and I was terrified, traumatised or adrenaline-fueled for almost all of it.
On an isolated terraforming and research base on a distant moon, I played one of the 9-man base security team who had been woken from stasis sleep to fend off an attack on the base by eco-terrorists. Everyone else played either base staff, or mercenary crews answering the base's distress call for their own nefarious reasons. The base was beautifully phys-repped by being entirely clad in white polythene, being staffed entirely by white-coated staff and being lit almost entirely with UV light. There was a hilarious talking food replicator that dispensed all of the meals, and a vast glowing control centre with a scary AI interface.
For the first night, we fought off terrorist attacks while each group of players whispered in corners forming conspiracies around our wildly different IC goals, and planning to stab each other in the back.
I diffused my first IED when the terrorists left a home-made bomb outside our airlock. Luckily for me, batelf had made me a lovely bomb disposal kit that contained everything you could possibly need, and was the best luxury item I could possibly have brought. With the help of another technician we carefully drilled, cut, crow-barred and lock-picked our way through the prop to find and snip the correct wires before it exploded. Meanwhile rumours began to circulate that a strange life-form had attacked some of the other crews that had come to answer the base's distress call. All we had to go on was a vague description of an elongated ant-thing the size of a man, and a grainy, blurry photo provided by the BBC Journalist who had turned up to cover the unfolding story. The photo was mostly of some odd, glistening phosphorescent teeth...
I liked that Journalist. The space helmets that we were given to go outside in at first were almost impossible to see out of, and consequently when I ran out of oxygen that night, blind and far from the base, he was the guy who dragged me back before I asphyxiated. Which was nice.
I didn't get any sleep that night, but managed to get a few hours the next morning, before being dragged out of bed again to diffuse another bomb. In fairness, this was one of my own demolition charges that I had been previously ordered to place inside our own base, so all I had to do was put it back in my Ace-like rucksack of explosives where it was sure to come in useful. Strangely, several of the terrorists defected that morning, making for the relative safety of the base they had been trying to destroy all night long. Needing some spare parts for urgent repairs to our damaged base, we requested some supplies to be dropped from the orbital supply ship, and on our way out to pick up the shopping we finally saw the aliens in daylight.
Now, a lot of props and costumes look better in the dark and it is not always a good idea to first show all of the monster in broad daylight. Unless of course you are physrepping your 4m tall Alien queen with a 4m tall Alien queen, and a dozen little scuttling aliens that look just as they do in the movies. Spotting the grey-brown bastards against the general backdrop of mud and leaves was tricky, and at first only their size and movement gave them away. Of course, our small group who had gone out to get the shopping were vastly outnumbered by a dozen Aliens and their enormous mum, and things did not look good for our heroes. Luckily the large demolition charge sitting ready made in my rucksack had a radio-controlled detonator, and having dropped it in the path behind us, I managed to blow up enough of them for us all to make it back to the Airlock alive. Barely.
The other group who had gone out to repair the geothermic power plant came back with a similar story of aliens overrunning the place, people having their heads torn off in tunnels, and thousands of eggs apparently placed in the geothermic ducts by human hands. They also found a control device for a nuclear bomb, that gave hours of amusement and entertaining roleplay to the two demolition technicians who suddenly found themselves able to take 'mad with power' to dizzy new heights.
Of course things took a turn for the worse after that. It rapidly became apparent that in order to have even a small chance of getting off the planet alive, we would have to work together, repair a damaged drop ship and fly out. We spent the rest of the night collecting the supplies we would need and killing the Alien bastards wherever we found them. Our numbers had been thinned a little by the terrorists, some aggressive politics, some suicides, a couple of murders and of course the famous Acidic Alien blood, so when the base was finally breached and overrun, we were a shadow of our former selves as we ran frantically for the dropship. The dropship could carry six people, but there were still a lot more of us than that.
Luckily, the Aliens and their queen were able to help thin our numbers down. In the dark, with a natural thick mist and some terrifically discrete mood lighting, our small plucky band were mercilessly hunted down through the forest with the slow, the weak and the unlucky picked off first. Those of us who made it as far as the dropship finally faced the queen and all of her little minions. I had spent the day preparing small explosive charges with radio-controlled detonators that could be dropped on the path behind us to slow down the pursuit, since that tactic had worked so well before. Sadly, at the very end I ran out of remote detonators before I ran out of plastic explosive, so my character's final moments were wiring up the last of the Marzipan C4 for a suicide-bomber charge at the Alien queen, in order to bring the rucksack of explosives to the place where it could do the most harm.
The six players who lived managed to escape in the dropship. Those left behind chose to activate the nuke rather than be eaten alive from the inside, and then I discovered that I could not stop shaking from the adrenaline for several hours. It was brilliant, and I must now catch up on a whole weekend of almost no sleep.