Lasers & Feelings Game Wrap

This week I finished a 3-shot of the excellent one-page RPG Lasers & Feelings by John Harper. L&F is not exactly meant to tell a story longer than a one-shot, but I wanted to challenge myself and try something different.

The Goal

After playing a couple of one-shots in different systems, I wanted to try something a little longer. I also wanted to bring some seriousness into the story, as we often tend to strike a comedic tone around my table. But I still wanted to run zero-prep and greatly share ownership of the story with all involved.

I decided to go with Lasers & Feelings as the system because it's extremely simple and short. I've played two one-shots with it already, but those had turned into mostly comedy. That was fine then, but I knew I'd have to put in some effort to keep this story from spinning out into hilarity.

The Setup

I planned three sessions. We ended up with me as facilitator plus three players in the first session, minus one player for the remaining two sessions. Using CATS, I set expectations: mainly to put heavier topics like war, slavery, violence, and oppression on the table. I also introduced the structure for the three-episode story:

• Episode 1: Establishing the world in a somewhat "classic" one-shot
• Episode 2: Establishing the main conflict and ending on a cliff-hanger
• Episode 3: Resolution

The Story

Reading TTRPG stories of strangers can be boring, so feel free to skip to the conclusion for some takeaways.

Episode One

Aboard the ship "Golem" we meet our three main characters:

• Reistrud Zeral, a time traveller here for his own hidden reasons. He got aboard through some time-travel hijinks where he forged his own papers in the future.
• James Hubble, an envoy of the Consortium. This position uses religious imagery like robes and rituals. He's also sworn to celibacy—at least for his time in office. A journalist is producing a documentary on him and his work, which is why he's currently carrying a body cam.
• Bog, a weapons expert, currently employed as bodyguard to James. She's a non-human with blue skin and a third eye on her forehead.

Consul Kiev sends an urgent message to this crew to investigate the planet Zeta3. The Alliance—a much smaller association than the powerful Consortium—has been buying more iron than the Consortium permits. This surplus is suspected to be located on Zeta3.

The crew arrive on Zeta3 and are greeted by Zen, an important figure in the Alliance. They are shown the iron-working facility, which—at first glance—seems to be in order. With the help of a distraction by James, though, Bog and Reistrud find a secret second level below ground where weapons are being manufactured. When James' distraction is found out, he, with the words "This may not be diplomatic," gives Zen an uppercut and knocks him out. Zen still manages to fire his pistol, which wrecks some critical systems of the facility, starting a chain reaction that sets the whole facility on a path to blow in a few minutes.

The workers of the facility start escaping through the escape pods, which fling themselves onto a neighbouring moon. The crew decide to save the knocked-out Zen by putting him into an escape pod before entering pods themselves and making it back to the Golem.

Aboard the ship, James realizes that the journalist has clipped the uppercut from his live stream and it's gone viral. Reistrud whispers coordinates in time and space to Bog before disappearing through time.

During the credits/epilogue, a creature twice the size of a human with superhuman strength is teased.

Episode Two

While the relationship between the Consortium and the Alliance is still strained, nothing can be done about it. James can't be trusted and has overstepped many lines with his violent outburst. For this he's also been relieved of his office and his status as a citizen of the Consortium. He's fled to Doron, a planet controlled by neither faction, full of criminals and fugitives. James has spent six months here trying to use his diplomacy skills to work his way up to find a way off the planet.

As we rejoin him six months after the events of the last episode, he's trying to buy a spaceship that's still registered with the Consortium. Just then the hangar is attacked by rebels. Simultaneously, the Golem crashes into the hangar's roof.

This is the place and time Reistrud had given Bog. She jumps out of the Golem, runs through the battlefield, and grabs James off the floor. When they can't make it back to the Golem, they instead get into a random ship parked here. They lift off and flee to the "dark spot" on the backside of the planet, instructing Golem's AI to follow them.

Out of immediate danger, they land in the freezing wasteland of Doron's dark spot. Plans to switch back to the Golem to get off-planet are thrown off when the ice below their feet gives way, sending them tumbling through the ice into a tunnel system. Following the tunnels down into the warmth, they find it lit by torches and end up on a balcony overlooking a ballroom.

They observe 21 pairs of Alliance civilians dancing to music emitted from four stone statues at the sides of the ballroom. At the far end, a priest is performing a sacrificial ritual at an altar. James remembers rumours of a "Syndicate Z," a secret outgrowth of the Alliance rumoured to be based on Doron. The sacrificed creature confirms another rumour: it's a Grobgron—a humanoid creature twice the size of a human.

Unnoticed by the people inside the ballroom, Bog and James make their way around the top floor and reach the central communications room. They split up as Bog calls for help from the Golem while James goes through the log of past communications. He finds out that important people from both the Consortium and the Alliance have had secret meetings here, cooperating in the shadows. One of them turns out to be Consul Kiev.

While James discovers this widespread corruption and secret cooperation, he unwittingly sends a "Reply All" message into space through an open microphone, which captured his mumblings to himself.

Golem promises to pick up Bog and James, but it can only get them at the centre of the ballroom. Of course, the statues come alive and try to stop the two from reaching the Golem. They're partly successful as Bog makes it back on the ship while James is captured by Syndicate Z.

Episode Three

Bog commands the Golem to return for James, but Golem refuses as a meteoroid is quickly approaching. Someone, apparently unhappy with James' message, had flung it at the origin of the signal. The command centre ordering this strike was quickly blown up itself and a warring front formed between Alliance and Consortium.

James had, of course, survived and two weeks after the events of episode two made his way to a moon of Doron. Here, he sent a signal to Bog and the Golem requesting to meet at his childhood home on Marango.

Consul Kiev, in charge of the Zeta system, had trouble mobilizing his troops for the war at his front door. He thus required higher-ranking soldiers to whip civilians into shape to fight at the front, Bog among them. When she got James' message, she immediately deserted and made her way to Marango.

James had a tough time travelling through the war-torn system and, while hitching a ride, met another envoy, Ellie, who recognized him. Because Ellie was the reason James had been thrown out of his first school, she felt she owed him one. She promised to set up an audience with Prince Delphi, ruler of Marango and a rank up from Kiev but still below the King of the Consortium. Ellie obviously couldn't set up the audience for James directly, as he was a fugitive, so she instead opted to set it up in her own name.

James and Bog meet up at James' childhood home and pick up a book from James' father, who had been an army general. They travel to Delphi's palace and enter her throne room under the guise of Bog being Ellie and James being her guard. They're shocked to find Kiev demanding military support from Delphi. When he becomes suspicious of Bog-as-"Ellie" for messing up some royal ritual, she strikes him down unconscious.

Delphi recognizes James and turns out to be sympathetic to their cause. She explains that the Alliance and Consortium are two sides of the same coin: the Alliance was conceived as an external threat to keep the people in the Consortium submissive and docile. While not everyone in important offices on either side might know this, there are enough people in the know for her herself to be powerless, even though she is one of the twenty Princes.

Going through James' dad's book, Bog finds a military manoeuvre that might help them. They use Kiev's equipment to send that command to both sides, which causes them to regroup at a rallying point. This way, both fronts retreat and cease fire for the time being.

The Conclusion

The Play-by-Play

Episode one was pretty much what I'd hoped. We had established some religious themes, the Consortium vs. Alliance conflict, and gotten to know our characters, all while still telling a pretty classic Lasers & Feelings story. I was surprised and excited that a silly minor detail (James' body cam) would turn out to enable far-reaching consequences for that uppercut in the end. While originally only one of the players was up for all three sessions, this unexpected cliffhanger motivated the other two (one of whom successfully) to try to make it to the other two sessions as well.

In episode two, it took a while for me to find a plot. But once the characters were in the cave and I had Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom in my head, we got the ball rolling (pun not intended). Syndicate Z and the Grobgron were ideas of the players when I asked them about rumours of Doron's dark spot. The "success with complication" for looking through the computer terminal leading to the "Reply All" was another incredible cliffhanger. That player later even sent that voice message into the group chat, making us hyped for the finale.

For the third episode I had different options of where we could go: another breaking-James-out-of-trouble episode, delivering a document, infiltrating the enemy, or stopping the war. After choosing the latter option, we quickly got into the flow and established a lot of James' backstory through his home and his meeting with Ellie. We had a short hiccup when the PCs asked Delphi how to stop the war. As per the game mechanics, she should've known, since she was the answer to the Laser-Feelings question "Who do we need to talk to stop this war?," but she couldn't simply stop the war for multiple reasons. First of all, I can't have an NPC deliver the plot resolution to the PCs. Secondly, the rest of the story was too realistic for Delphi to present a naïve solution like killing the King or Kiev, or offering a truce or whatever else. Instead, she gave the PCs information on the conflict and we together came up with the solution I described above. I was happy with that because it's just a good short-term solution to stop people dying, but it also doesn't simply resolve everything wrong with the Consortium or even just this conflict.

The Learned

Overall, what surprised me most was how my view of the Consortium shifted. In the beginning they're just the employers of the PCs as per the rule page. It then was contrasted with the much smaller Alliance which it kind of also ruled over by regulating their trade and weapons manufacturing. Then it turned out they had at least some corruption going on with Kiev working both sides. Only in the moment when I-as-Delphi said it did I myself finally realize that the Alliance is a creation of the Consortium.

While I expected some challenge in telling a compelling and cohesive story in this system, I did not expect to have to describe and solve corruption in a (seemingly?) democratic organization.

The End

Overall, I'm immensely happy with how this turned out. I did indeed hit all the goals that I'd set myself when planning this mini-campaign. I ran with zero prep and it was incredible to find out the story together with my players. Tonally we also stayed exactly where I wanted to be: A serious and challenging story, but still lots of funny breather moments and quirky characters.

Thoughts? Reach out on Mastodon @Optional@dice.camp, message me via SimpleX, or shoot me an email.