Krusadis: Punainen Aurinko

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Krusadis: Punainen aurinko (Eng. Krusadis: Red Sun) was a science fiction larp about an encounter between two cultures. It was set on two spaceships, the warship Punainen aurinko (Finnish for Red Sun) and the trade vessel Hóng tàiyáng (Chinese for Red Sun) that represented these two cultures. The game was designed so that both of the ships could move rather freely in space using the computer game Artemis Bridge Simulator. However, the setting was designed so that an encounter between the two ships would become more and more likely as the larp advanced. Punainen aurinko was at war with the Jinrei Dynasty, and Hóng tàiyáng carried Jinrei refugees who had been sentenced to death by their own emperor.

The larp was played at a school. The two spaceships were built on two separate floors, and the gymnastics hall on the bottom floor hosted one big meta room that could become e.g. a friendly space station with a bar, a bazaar, and an embassy, or a planet where the characters would face an enemy ambush. The elevator had been propped to become an airlock that the characters could use to get in and out of their ships. When the two spaceships eventually met, it could also be used to travel between the ship. The players of the bridge crews could quite freely decide where the ships would go, and the game masters would use the travelling time to build the relevant environment in the meta room. There were also separate meta rooms on each ship, and a 12-person npc team to portray various personae that the player characters could meet. Before the larp, the organizers said it would strive for 360 degree illusion but consciously fail.

The organizers had come up with many ways to simulate various functions on the space ships. In the engine room, there was a screen with the Artemis engineering simulator. However, each control had a physical counterpart that the players had to adjust before they were allowed to touch the Artemis controls. There were levers you had to physically pull, cords that you needed to connect, and a container where you poured “liquid coolant”. Sometimes you would have to crawl into a maintenance tunnel to do “repairs” by changing worn-out glow sticks into fresh ones. To do repairs, the players had to use duct tape and cardboard on the walls, and there were less and less of these available as the characters ran out of resources.

Krusadis: Punainen aurinko was the third larp in the setting of the science fiction world Krusadis. It was, however, designed to work as an independent whole. According to the larp's website, it was a partial rerun of an earlier Finnish larp called Tehtävä: punainen aurinko (2015, Eng. Mission: Red Sun) and set in another universe.

Credits and info

Game masters: Janne Vilen, Kirsi Oesch, Kalle Rantanen, Thomas Ruotsalainen

Auxiliary game masters: Aki Honkanen

Duration: 15 hours of runtime + workshops + debrief

Run: Helsinki, Feb 23–25, 2018.

Number of players: ~50

Participation fee: 45 e

External links

Original website (in Finnish): krusadis.wixsite.com/krusadis/punainenaurinko