A butterfly breaking out of a chrysalis…a family sitting shiva…a small group of explorers arriving on a new planet…a community rattled by a crisis…a city council deciding how and whether to allow an interstate to pass through the middle of town…a friendly local bike shop adapting to a changing neighborhood…a person confronting changes in their health.
Make a Scene 2022: Beginnings, Transitions, Endings focuses on life cycles, both writ small and large (perhaps from microscopic to universal!). Life cycles are all about the constant shifts that define existence in our universe, whether as an individual creature, family, community, ecosystem, nation, or planet. This may include rites of passage, transitions in a family or community, shifts in health and ability, and structural changes in government or economy. Or maybe you’ll write a cool scenario about amoebae or tardigrades and teach us about their life cycles!
This doesn’t mean that every scenario at Make a Scene will only be about life cycles, but that life cycles will intentionally constitute at least one piece of every scenario this year.
The following scenarios debuted at Make a Scene 2022!
Best Friends Don’t Have to Be Forever
by Quinn D and Eva Schiffer, for in-person play
In stories friendships are often absolute and eternal, but that’s not how real life works for most people. And that doesn’t need to be a tragedy. Best Friends Don’t Have to be Forever explores how friendships can be a deep and important part of our lives, while still being ephemeral as we all grow and change.
About the authors:
Quinn D has over a decade of experience writing, running, and participating in roleplaying events in a variety of formats and styles. Quinn values the format for its ability to build empathy, educate, explore human existence and create social bonds. Quinn’s recent focus has been on emotional content, identity exploration and empathy building in a visceral and safe manner.
Eva Schiffer is a larpwright and tabletop rpg designer. She has been writing games for more than 10 years and playing for more than 20. She has been the primary organizer for Peaky Midwest since 2014.
Bidi Bidi Bom Bom
by Kat Jones, for in-person or online play
It’s 2019 and you and your friends have reunited in advance of your 20 year high school reunion. You find yourself thinking back to 1998, the summer before your senior year. You had memorized the words to all of Selena’s greatest hits, watching the Selena movie on repeat with your friends. You remember late nights playing Truth or Dare, dreaming about the future, and imagining the people you would eventually become.
Now 20 years later you find yourself nostalgic for those days. Playing another game of Truth or Dare with your adult friends you find yourself revisiting what you’ve lost, but also thinking about the insight you’ve gained.
Bidi Bidi Bom Bom is a game about friendship, queer awakening, and the music of Selena. Inspired by coming-of-age movies like Now and Then, Bidi Bidi Bom Bom follows the same group of four friends in 1998 and 2019, as they share secrets and dreams, and help each other figure out who they are.
About the author: Kat Jones (they/she) is a queer Latina game designer and scholar. Kat’s games explore identity and community, while offering playful social commentary. They have co-authored two games featured in Honey & Hot Wax: An Anthology of Erotic Games: The Sleepover with Julia Ellingboe which focuses on teenagers sharing information about sex, and You Inside Us which explores a relationship between an alien symbiote and their host.
End of the Circle
by LolV Peregrin Lacave, for in-person or online play
The grandparent, D, is slowly succumbing to dementia. From the confines of their retirement home, there are four who visit them, hell-bent on learning about their life and the love who was yet couldn’t be, back in the time. The four are trying to cure a ghost, to undo the trauma, and finally find an end to the Circle.
The End of the Circle is a ten persons scenario that talks about the things we’re forced to forget, the ones we remember, family, and intergenerational trauma.
About the author: LolV Peregrin Lacave graduated in Ancient Languages and Archeology. They are a queer autistic activist and performer who uses larp and arts to put disabilities, mental illness, community, and LGBTQIA+ narratives in the spotlight to raise awareness on these particular subjects.
Friends Help You Pack,
by Andrea Humez, for in-person play
How many times in your life have you moved to a new home? From moving out of the college dorm and into their first shared apartment, through starting families and ending relationships, to losing a life partner or saying goodbye to living independently, packing up your home is a key moment in the transition. Over the course of their lives, six friends gather whenever one of them needs help packing, despite the strains and conflicts that come up as their relationships evolve.
This larp contains difficult life transitions potentially including orientation/identity, ending relationships, pregnancy/parenting, financial issues, illness, death, and death of loved ones. Much of the content of game will be player-generated. Players will have significant control over which topics are included in game and how they are addressed for their own character.
About the author: Andrea Humez started playing and writing live roleplaying games with the MIT Assassins’ Guild back when dinosaurs roamed the earth. She also acts and directs theatre. Recently, she has written “The Last Time (Not The Last Time)” with Kristen Patten (a 2-player relationship-focused online LARP) and “Between the Penthouse and the Lobby“ with Alyse Leung (an in-person LARP about twelve women making life choices while stuck in an elevator). Her favorite roleplaying themes include conflicting loyalties, old relationships in need of repair, and clashing personalities. Friends Help You Pack is her first scene-based game.
(Not) Home for the Holidays
by Mia Kyhn, for online play
Sometime in December, a family gets together in a virtual call to plan this year’s Christmas celebration. They have all been separated by geography and circumstance, but this has never kept them from celebrating Christmas together. Until this year…
“I Won’t Be Home for Christmas” is an online larp for 4 players about navigating family relations in difficult circumstances, about the ways a family changes when the children grow up, about generational gaps, conflicts and compromises, and about Christmas. It is a celebration of the many ways I’ve seen and experienced people band together to make the best of a bad situation. The larp deals with tough subjects, but the heart of the story is the love that the characters feel for each other.
This larp contains divorce, death of a parent/grandparent, parental alienation, mental health issues. None of these will necessarily be big topics in the larp, but they will be impossible to avoid completely.
About the author: Mia Kyhn co-designed the online larp Qualia as one of her first larps in the summer of 2020. Since then she has co-designed two more online larps and set up more runs of them all than she can count. Her larp writing tends to focus on close relationships and deep emotions, exploring how our connections with other people shape us. Mia currently lives in London, UK.
The Vigil
by Kevin L McIntyre, for in-person play
Players take on sequential roles contributing to a narrative centered on an individual’s obligations to a community. During play characters will wrestle with volunteering to sacrifice themselves for the greater good, knowing those who remain may not share the ideals motivating the volunteer. Lit birthday candles are used as both a timing mechanism and to increase the stress of the situation. Trigger warnings for suicide, murder, and religious fanaticism
About the author: Kevin McIntyre grew up outside Omaha, Nebraska, and lived briefly in Kansas and Iowa before settling in Minnesota where he works as a trainer for the Minnesota Department of Revenue. He dabbles in fiction writing and game design, currently co-designing a silly larp featuring space squid with Jon Cole.