SHAKESPEARE 2985
 or "A Great Reckoning in a Little Room"

A game by Nick Wedig
nickwedig@yahoo.com

When a man's verses cannot be understood, nor a
man's good wit seconded with the forward child
Understanding, it strikes a man more dead than a
great reckoning in a little room. Truly, I would
the gods had made thee poetical.

-William Shakespeare, "As You Like It"

Marlowe 3.0 will die, to begin with.  He or she will meet his or her end in a tiny holographic generator shack on the asteroid Shakespeare 2985.  This is inevitable.  The question you'll find out in this game is "Why is Marlowe 3.0 going to die there?"  Along the way, you'll construct intergalactic espionage plots, learn about Shakespeare's sonnets, explore your neighborhood, intercept secret coded messages and help your friends.

This game is played by overlaying the game world onto your real life.  In the fiction, it is the distant future.  Humanity has colonized the solar system, though they haven't yet leaped to interstellar travel.  (Even Proxima Centauri is damn far away.)  The solar system is fractured into a variety of political factions, from megacorporations to android separatists to theocracies based off of ancient, misunderstood Star Wars movies.  

The mundane, 21st century world around you now is, in fact, a carefully constructed hologram, made by the virtual reality virtuoso Marlowe 3.0.  Though he made this holographic world for entertainment purposes, the virtual reality may contains clues to something greater and more sinister.

For as long as anyone can remember, Marlowe 3.0 has been entangled in all sorts of complicated interplanetary espionage.  He angered the Reformed Church of the Jedi by stealing the only surviving copy of the Original Trilogy from their temple on Ganymede.  He is spying on the Mercurian Queen for the Martian army, and he's spying on the Martian Army for the Mercurian Queen.  He is a wanted man on Venus for violating fruit shipping laws.  Europa mistakenly thinks Marlowe 3000 their loyal agent.  And none of these powers can touch him officially, because he has dirt on every king, prince, bureaucrat and elected official in the solar system.

And this clever holographic virtual reality around you contains clues to his plots.  One of you will play Marlowe 3.0.  The rest will play spies, conmen, weirdoes, androids and Jedi that hang around him.  They are all, of course, spies working for one of the planetary powers, and they all want Marlowe dead.  You have all come to explore Marlowe's newest work, a virtual recreation of 21st century life, in the hopes that you can locate the clues to his schemes, uncover the secrets of his missions, foil the plots and ultimately kill Marlowe 3.0 himself.

BEGINNING THE GAME:

The game begins when you send a message to a friend or acquaintance, saying "Operation (codename) will commence on Asteroid Shakespeare 2985 on (date)."  The codename will be the title for your specific play-through of "Shakespeare 2985".  Make it a good, science fiction espionage sounding name.  You'll also use the codename as a code phrase, when you see the other players in real life.

For the date, you want a time in the not-too-distant future.  How far in the future depends on how busy you and your friends are.  The date you give will be when the game begins.

The message that you send can be in any format.  Phone, text message, carrier pigeon, email, snail mail, weird notes left inside someone's sock drawer, whatever.  Just keep in mind: outside of the Stage, you can only use a given method of communication once per game of "Shakespeare 2985".

By sending the first message, you cast yourself as Marlowe 3.0.  Marlowe 3.0 is setting up the meeting in order to fake his own death, one way or the other.  Possibly by uploading his brain into an android body and letting his meat body die, or as some cloning experiment.  Over the course of the game, you'll be revealing why Marlowe wants to do this.

When your friend responds, they can accept and start the game, or decline and go about their lives.  If they accept, then they are supposed to declare a real world location that you both can have access to.  Someone's house, a school or a restaurant would all work.  The important thing is to have a location where you can meet on your proposed date and not have problems when you start acting like weird alien robots or whatever.  This will be the asteroid Shakespeare 2985 where everyone will meet on the proposed date, to discuss the game's details and create an official start to the game. 

You'll also need to recruit some more players.  Each player should send out another message, like Marlowe's initial communiqué.  If someone turns you down at this point, try again, until your starting pair becomes a quartet.  And then, once you have four players, do a third round, taking the total up to eight players.  That should be enough, I think, though there's definitely room to vary the number of participants.  Gather everyone together at Shakespeare 2985 to discuss the game, make a proper Stage, create characters, and go over the rules together.

Each player should pick a planet to be publicly working for.  The "planet" could be any planet, moon, asteroid or other major astronomical body in our solar system.  I just call them planets to keep things easier.  No two players should work for the same planet.

The player should post on The Stage (see below) what planet they work for and a brief description of what the planet is like in our far distant science fiction future.  Because of all the twists and turns and espionage going on, these planets won't be the powers they're really working for.  But it gives a starting point.  

Players should also construct a cover identity to play in, which includes their name and a single line description of who they are and why they work for their home planet. 

You'll need to discuss with all the players a few matters.  Discuss what form your Stage will take, what the timescale and playable area of the game are and then go over the rules as a group to make sure everyone is on the same page.  You should all agree on a final end date for the game, where you'll meet back together at the same location, at which point Marlowe will die.  

THE STAGE AND OTHER COMMUNICATION ISSUES:

It will help at this point to make a centralized information repository of some sort.  All kind of things will work: an email listserv, a wiki, a group Facebook page, some sort of interlocking series of Google+ circles, or even an old-fashioned bulletin board with info on it.  Anything that can get information quickly out to all the participants will work, so long as everyone has regular, continuous access to it.  We'll call it "The Stage", just so that we have a term for it and so that it sounds all Shakespearean.

This central information repository will make sure everyone is on the same page.  If anyone changes their stats or does something other people should be aware of, then you should post a description there.  When someone locates and interprets a poem, then the quote’s hider should place a notice on The Stage, letting the others know that they have a limited time to find and interpret the poem themselves.  The Stage also should have a record of everyone’s Hint Token and Force Point totals (everyone starts with zero of each), a list of any communication methods they have used and any Achievements they have earned.

There's a strict rule of communication in the game: you can only use any communication method once.  If you send someone a text about the game, then that's all the text messaging you're allowed to do.  If you send an email with a poem's interpretation, then no more email related to this game.  The Stage and face to face conversations don't count for this.  But any other sending of information (such as sending interpretations of poems or spending Hint Tokens) needs to occur via a different method every time.  You should have on The Stage a list of every player and what methods they have used.  Keep the other players honest in this regard by checking off the methods they used to communicate with you.

If you ever think that it might be unclear that your communication relates to your game of Shakespeare 2985, then simply begin your communication with the codename that was chosen for this playthrough.  Start your phone conversation or telegram by saying “Sigma Eighteen” or whatever you called your game.

TIMESCALE AND PLAYABLE AREA:

You should adjust the timescale of the game depending on whom you're dealing with and how often you see each other.  There are two important time factors to the game: the total game length and the time a player has to find and interpret a poem after the first interpretation is submitted.  You want the second of these to be a small fraction of the first, so that you can have several rounds of hiding, finding and interpreting poems.  

If you see each other every day, you might have an end date about a month in the future, and a quote interpretation response window of one day.  If you're more distant acquaintances or doing this as a school project, then the game might last several months and have a week response time.  A summer camp might run the game in a week, or a family separated across several cities might play over a year.  If you only have a day to spend on the game, the window of opportunity might be an hour or less.  Pick a timescale that works for you and your other players.  

A closely related issue is how large an area you are playing in.  This is the extent of Marlowe's holographic virtual world.  Beyond this range, there's just the inky black void of space, and you won't find anything useful out there.  The clues and poems and such will always be somewhere within your play area.

If you're a group of adults with access to modern transportation, you might choose to hide poems throughout your home city.  Or you might stick to a smaller physical scale: only on a specific college campus, school, office, house, etc.  Just make sure the playable area is equally accessible to all the participants.  If all the poems are hidden in a house where three of the four players live, then the fourth person might feel a bit disadvantaged.  

If you're really spread out geographically, you might use the Internet as a playable space.  Maybe you hide quotes and poems by placing them on websites, in Facebook updates, Flickr photos or forum discussion boards.  (You might also get some mileage out of a game where you hide quotes via encryption rather than physical location.  But that's probably a different game entirely.)

GAMEPLAY

So now you've gathered your players, created a brief sketch of characters and the solar system and determined some play parameters and all that accounting busywork.  Now it's time to get down to playing.

The game consists of this: you are all science fiction spies exploring Marlowe's latest virtual reality, seeking out clues to his schemes and preparing to get your revenge on him.  Marlowe and the other spies are all beaming messages out to their compatriots via tight beam hyperwave radio apparatus.  This equipment is very reliable and very secure as a transmission method, except that it generates a lot of heat.  So much heat that other people notice them quickly.  Thermal dampeners can be used to hide your transmitter for a short time, but they tend to fail unpredictably.  When a thermal dampener fails, then all the other spies in the area will detect the transmitter automatically.  Once they locate the transmitter's physical location, they can intercept a brief coded message and attempt to use it to learn more about the sender's espionage tricks.

What this means for you the player is that you and the other players will each choose a quotation from one of William Shakespeare's poems.  Sonnets are preferred, but you could easily choose a section from a monologue or poem in one of his plays.  You could even branch into one of Christopher Marlowe's plays.  Pick a good one.  Pick one that you really like, or one that seems to apply given the other stuff already revealed, or one that you cannot understand at all.  Don't make the quote more than a few lines long, though.  You want it to be short enough that it is ambiguous, so that people can have several different interpretations of what it is referring to.  This quote will be the coded message your spy is sending back to his home base (whoever that might be.)  

Write the quote down, and then hide it somewhere in the play area.  This hiding place is where you hid the transmitter.  You want the transmitter to be found by some of your fellow players, but not by all.  Once hidden, you should place a notice on The Stage, saying "Anomalous signal detected!"  Then you give a detail about the location.  You might give an address or GPS coordinates, or a hint like "hidden under the stairs" or "highlighted in blue on page 32 in my favorite book".  If you have a larger play area, you may need to be more general in directions and hide things less thoroughly, while if you have a small playing area like a single house, you can be more specific with clues and hiding places.

As a player, you want to find all the other player's transmitters.  They’ll post message on The Stage, giving clues to the location of a hidden quote.  Go to the locations they describe, hunt around and try to find the hidden 'transmitter'.  

When you find the quote, you are given the opportunity to interpret the poem.  You send a message to the person who planted it in the first place, which identifies where the quote comes from (a copy of Shakespeare's collected works and/or access to Google will help with this).  Identifying the source is a way of making sure the player actually found the poem that you hid: you’re verifying to them that you found the poem that they placed.  

After you identify the source, your message should explain how the quote is code for the placer's secret spy activities.  Are the characters mentioned in the message other spies?  People he's spying on?  A secret file he has stolen, or a package to be delivered?  Make up whatever details you want.  You’re trying to construct a novel, entertaining explanation of the poem that will please the person who placed the quote.

Note that this interpretive message is limited by the "only use a communication method once" rule.  So if you send someone a text message, that's quick.  But you won't be able to use texting later on when you find a poem near the end of your window of opportunity.

So after some time, you will receive messages from their players identifying and interpreting your poem.  As soon as you receive a message interpreting the quote, post a message on The Stage.  The message should say something making clear that you received an interpretation message.  You should say who it is that located the transmitter, and increase their Force Point total by 1 point.  (Only the first person to find a poem receives this Force Point bonus.)  Then it should state that the other players have a specified amount of time to find and interpret the poem themselves (this length of time varies depending on your game).  Any interpretations entered within that time span will be evaluated.  Anything that misses the deadline will be passed over.

After the deadline passes, the quote-hider will have received some number of explanatory messages.  Maybe they only received one, or maybe they received one from every other player.  Now the quote-hider has to decide which of these several interpretations is the true one and which ones are mistaken.  (If the hider only received one interpretation, their choices are obviously quite limited.)  

The quote hider then receives one Hint Token for each interpretation submitted and one Force Point for every player that did not submit an interpretation in time.  Each player whose interpretation was not chosen receives one Hint Token.  The quote hider should update The Stage to reflect everyone’s new point totals, and note which player had the correct interpretation.

The person whose interpretation was chosen now knows more about the placer’s plots than anyone else, because they helped author those plots.  The chosen player can now hide another quote of their own and give a hint to its location, as everyone did initially.

IN CHARACTER INTERACTIONS

If you see another player in your everyday life, you may want to discuss the game.  You could discuss it out of character, but it's more fun to roleplay out your two characters running into each other and discussing their plots and angling toward their goals.  When you are talking with another player, you can raise your hand in the air, like a salute, and then say the codename of this particular mission.  This acts as a signal that you want to communicate about the game as your character.  If the other player(s) return the salute, then you can roleplay out the interactions of your characters for as long as you like.  When you want to exit the scene or stop speaking in character, simply repeat the salute and the codename.  This is the signal to end.

This lets you have little micro-roleplaying events throughout your daily life.  You should do at least a little scene in character any time you see the other players, but that's really up to you guys.  Just realize that it is fun and can get you some useful information on what the other players are up to.

These scenes probably shouldn’t require any mechanics.  If you really need a conflict system, you can adapt the Force point system that is used in the final larp (described below).

(This face to face roleplaying in character is not limited by the "only use a communication method once" rule.)

HINT TOKENS

Hint Tokens can be spent in several ways.  You can:

-Spend 1 to receive an additional clue to the location of a hidden ‘transmitter’.
-Spend 4 tokens to be told the precise location of a hidden quote.
-Spend tokens equal to the total number of players to be allowed to interpret a poem without having to find the hidden transmitter.  
-Spend 1 token to be told the next secret on a player’s sheet.
-Spend 3 tokens to ask and receive a truthful answer to a specific question about a player’s secrets.
- During the final larp, spend 1 token to know how many Force points someone has 

In all these cases, you need to contact the appropriate other player, via some communication method.  Remember the rule about only using a communication once (this is one place that rule is really important).  Once they give you the relevant answer, they’ll decrease your Hint Token total on The Stage.

ACHIEVEMENTS:

Over the course of the game, you can give someone an Achievement for something amazingly great that they did.  An achievement doesn’t need to be because of something they did in game, but it will happen naturally that many achievements are based on the game itself.  But you can just as easily give someone an achievement for being awesome in their daily lives as you can for them doing something creative or clever in the game.  

You can only give one achievement to each player over the course of play.  (So no teaming up with one other guy and just trading back and forth achievements.)  When you give someone an achievement, post on The Stage "Achievement Unlocked: Agent (codename) has unlocked the (humorous name) Achievement.  They achieved this by (tell what they did)."  Then increase your Force total and their Force total both by one point.

FORCE POINTS AND THE FINAL LARP

The game ends with another meeting at Shakespeare 2985, same as it started.  And this time, Marlowe will die before everyone leaves.  Force Points are used in the final larp to achieve your goals and determine who gets to kill Marlowe.  

You’ll want two sets of tokens or counters: one for Force Points and one for Hint tokens.  As each player enters the larp, have them take counters equal to their values.  Then when they spend either kind of point, they can discard tokens into a nearby discard pile.  This helps everyone keep track of their point pools without messy bookkeeping.  You’ll also need several opaque envelopes or small boxes or piggy banks or something.  These are used to secretly bid on Marlowe’s demise.  You’ll need one for each player with his or her name or other identification on it.

When you arrive for this final larp, you’ll be roleplaying your character.  You will by this time have acquired a list of secrets and goals and info on the other characters.  Pursue the goals that you have acquired, and try to thwart those opposed to you.  This final larp is also a good time to spend your remaining Hint token to discover everyone else’s secrets.

If there are any conflicts in the final larp, you can use Force points to determine who gets what they want.  When two players are interacting and cannot decide how things turn out, each blind bids some number of Force points.  You should put some Force counters in your hand, then hold out your hand closed so that the other player can’t see how many points you chose to spend.  When all involved players have held out their hands, open them up and show how many Force points your chose to spend.  (You can choose to spend zero points if you don’t really care about the conflict.)  The highest bid wins the conflict, and gets what they want.  They can briefly dictate how the conflict turns out.  The lower bidder loses, but gets some Force points in recompense.  The loser discards the Force points that they bid, but then the winner gives their bid Force points to the loser.  Thus the loser gains in Force points, even as they fail to achieve their goals.

(In case of a tie, both players discard the Force points they bid, and no one gets what they want.  In a three way conflict, the winner gives their bid to the second place player, who gives their bid to the third place, etc.)

You can also use your Force Points to secretly bid to kill Marlow 3.0.  Everyone’s goal is to be the one who dictates how Marlowe dies.  And by this point, you should have some idea why you want Marlowe dead.  

Each player has an envelope with their name on it.  At the end of the larp, whoever has the most Force points invested in their envelope will be the one who decides how and why Marlowe will die.  Throughout the larp, you can place some or all of your Force tokens into your envelope, as a secret bid.  

At some point during the final larp, Marlowe will decide that it is time to die.  As Marlowe, you want to find a time that is about 3/4ths of the way through the game.  Try to find a time where the action is starting to wind down, because everyone has dealt with their other goals or reached a stalemate.  

When it is time to die, Marlowe gathers all the players together for one more round of open bidding.  The contents of the envelopes aren’t revealed yet, though, so you’re trying to guess how much other people have invested in their envelope already.  And there will be a bit of play after Marlowe’s death, so you may want to keep some or all your Force points to achieve your secondary goals.  So everyone makes one more public bid of Force points, which will be added onto their secret envelope bids.

Then you open the envelopes and add the totals up.  Whoever has invested the most Force points wins.  They get to decide how and why Marlowe dies, and can act out Marlowe’s death, and narrate details as needed.

After Marlowe dies, you probably want to have some more roleplaying.  After all, the central character just died, and that is likely to have repercussions for other players and their schemes.  Roleplay this out for a little while, until matters seem to stabilize.  

(Marlowe, you’re dead, so you can just observe and go around discovering people’s secrets and such.  It’s fun to be an invisible observer in this sort of game, trust me.)

Once it’s clear the action has died down, you’re done playing.  Sit down with everyone and talk about what happened in the game.  Share any cool stories about what happened.  Reveal your secrets, and be amazed at the neat stuff your friends made up. 

CHARACTER QUESTIONNAIRE

The only thing you should determine at the start of play is your cover identity.  Thereafter, you answer these questions as other players spend Hint Tokens to find out your true goals and secrets.  So you discover your own character’s plots in play just as other people are doing so as well.  That way, you can reincorporate new info you got from other players by spending your own Hint Tokens or from interpretations of poems. Each time someone uses a Hint Credit to ask you a question, reveal the answer to the next unanswered question to them.  If you’ve gone off the bottom of the questionnaire, then repeat the last ten questions as needed… maybe you have several layers of secret reasons to kill Marlowe.  

Ideally, you give them that info in an in-character way.  Perhaps you narrate them uncovering a secret file on you, or hacking into a computer system, or intercepting a transmission whose encryption is partially broken.

What is your cover identity?
Why are you friends, colleagues or allies with Marlowe 3000?
Who are you really?
What planet are you from?
What do you say you want?

(Repeat from here down if needed)

What do you really want?
Which planetary power are you currently working for?
Which planet are they secretly acting against?
What is your mission?
Which planetary power are you feeding their secrets to?
Which planetary power have you betrayed?
What planet's plots must you stop at any cost?
What secondary objectives does your mission have?
How do you plan on killing Marlowe?
Why do you want to kill Marlowe?

GOOD MISSION CODENAMES

Good mission codenames will be unique and sound appropriately like a science fiction project or like a spy mission.  Invoking mythological characters, Greek letter, numbers, colors and astronomical bodies are all good ideas. 

Venus 13
Red Apollo
Double Upsilon
Orion Delta
Omicron 7  
Green Prometheus

EXAMPLES OF PLANETARY POWERS:

Mercury, which recently overthrew a Jedi theocracy and placed Mary, the Quicksilver Queen in charge.
Venus, largely devoted to research bases of the interplanetary university The School of Night.
Earth, rich, powerful, corrupt, fat from the hard work of the other planets.  Divided up between several titanic megacorporations, particularly the Essex Corporation and Walsingham Incorporated.
Mars, a war torn wasteland following a brutal civil war.
The asteroid belt, which bills itself as neutral territory and vacation spots for the rest of the solar system.  Really a collection of squabbling tiny states that can't agree on anything.
The moons of Jupiter, under control of the Reformed Church of the Jediism.
The moons of Saturn, an android separatist state, trying to live independently of human society.
Neptune and Uranus are almost entirely unused, except for prison satellites and factory stations mining their atmospheres for hydrogen and noble gases.
The Kuiper belt: the wild frontier.  Pluto and Eris are trading hubs, but the rest is no man's land.

EXAMPLES OF REASONS TO WANT TO KILL MARLOWE 3.0:

Walsingham corporation's spy network, seeking to distance themselves from an embarassment.
Essex incorporated's rival spy network, cleaning up any loose ends that know too much.
Jedi supporter seeking revenge for Marlowe for aiding the Jedi Order's downfall on Mercury.
Preventing the uncovering of the Babington Nanomachine Plot.
Testing a new bioengineered assassination technique, chose Marlowe as expendable.
Marlowe uncovered your scheme replace the Venusian ambassador with an android.
Homosexual lover, seeking revenge
Scientist from the School of Night seeking human test subject, though the test will be lethal.
AI researcher wanting to eat Marlowe's brain, to synthesize it into Project Arden.
Interplanetary imperialist, wants Earth to rule the entire solar system. Wants Marlowe to fake his death and go to Neptune to keep the colonists there entertained (so that they won't revolt.)
Rival hologram artist, angry at Marlowe's plagiarism.
Insane space cultist, speaks to angels
The target of blackmail by Marlowe 3.0 , or the agent of someone Marlowe was blackmailing.
Marlowe's only true friend.  Wants Marlowe 3.0 to fake his own death and ghost write for a yound and upcoming hologram artist, William Starkiller.
Puritanical religious zealot angered by Marlowe's ungodly ways and writings.
You believe that Marlowe 3.0 knows the secret of the Jupiterian Nuclear launch codes.  And if he won't tell you, then you'll just have to dissect his brain to find out.
Marlowe 3.0 stole the prototype for a functioning faster-than-life spacecraft, and you want to keep him from selling it off to a rival (and recover the craft, of course.)
You're secretly Marlowe 2.8.01, and are upset that you were obsoleted by this hack.

REASONS FOR MARLOWE 3000 TO WANT TO DIE IN THE MEETING:

Marlowe 3.0 wants to fake his own death to escape the repercussions of his scheming.  He's already uploaded his mind into an android body.
Marlowe 3.0 regrets a long life of scheming and lying, and wants to die as part of his repentance.
Marlowe 3.0 wants to die to raise the esteem his art holds in the art world.
Marlowe 3.0 is the latest in a long series of clones, and this body is wearing thin.  Time to introduce the newest one.
This Marlowe 3.0 is himself just part of the holographic virtual reality.  The real Marlowe 3.0 escaped to the Kuiper belt weeks ago.
Knows everyone else's secrets and will blackmail them into helping him fake his own death.
This is all a computer simulation, and the only way for Marlowe to escape is by dying in the virtual reality.
Marlowe’s timeline had been radically fractured by temporal experimentation, and his death at this time was the only consistent feature of the alternate lives.  Dying will merge the alternate timelines together again, preventing the universe from exploding.

“Shakespeare 2985” by Nick Wedig is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.  To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA.