Ulysses A live roleplaying game for 14-18 players. Dedicated to Ruth Harper. © Stephanie Pegg, 2019. Published by the Flying Monkeys Collective. Sample file Smite the sounding furrows; for my purpose holds To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths Of all the western stars, until I die. —Alfred, Lord Tennyson In the year 3029, Star Seeker Ulysses returned to Habitat Ithaca after twenty years of journeying, slew the many suitors of his faithful wife Penelope, and restored himself to the throne and obligations of ruler, spouse and father. Now he calls to him the comrades who were left behind on his long journey home; to set forth on one last expedition, beyond the Western Stars of the Spiral Arm: to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. Will you join him? Or will you remain in the world of women: the housekeepers and wives, the daughters, the thought-sibyls, the goddesses, the technomancers... Do you want to? Will they let you? Ulysses is a classical Greek tragedy IN SPACE!!! for 14-18 characters, written by Stephanie Pegg. Note: Ulysses is a larp inspired by ancient Greek epics—there are a lot of big feelings, like rage, love, and hate, and family disputes typically don't end until someone is bleeding on the floor. There is a strong gender divide, and the game has no gender-neutral or ambiguous characters. Cross-dressing is welcome. The game has cultural norms consistent with the canon, such as slavery, violence, and a sexual double standard. There are some background non- graphic incidents of non-consent or dubious- consent sex that may be discussed in the game, but not roleplayed. Much of the game is thinking about what life is like living in a different time, what it means to be transgressive, and dealing with the consequences of your actions. Sample file For the Organiser Contents Introduction ........................................................................................................ 4 You’re Reading This And You’ve Never Larped Before ......................................... 5 You’re Reading This And You’re Unfamiliar With Homer’s Odyssey ...................... 6 Staging Notes ..................................................................................................... 7 Casting ............................................................................................................ 7 Printing and Props ........................................................................................... 8 Physical Setup ................................................................................................. 9 During The Run ............................................................................................. 10 Game Mechanics ............................................................................................... 11 Special Abilities ............................................................................................. 11 Consent Issues .................................................................................................. 13 Plot Overview ................................................................................................... 14 The Face That Launched A Thousand Ships ................................................... 14 The Long Journey Home ................................................................................ 15 The Death of the Suitors ................................................................................ 15 The Republic of Women ................................................................................ 16 The Cattle of the Sun ..................................................................................... 17 The Gods ....................................................................................................... 18 Pollution ....................................................................................................... 18 The Greek Ideal ............................................................................................. 18 Credits .............................................................................................................. 20 Sample file 3 For the Organiser Introduction The first time I heard Homer’s Odyssey , I felt like I’d been punched in the face. This was not the first time I had heard of it—The Odyssey is one of those cultural osmosis texts that permeate Western culture. But I knew it as an adventure story with a chorus of colourful monsters, the loose outline of a quest to get back to a loving family that is a common design pattern in popular culture, and as the inspiration for some literary texts that felt like they would be a lot of work to read. I heard it for the first time in 2018, shortly after a lot of fuss was being made about Emily Wilson’s newly published translation. Wilson had made poetic choices to use frank contemporary language and tightly written verse, to help the reader feel as an ancient Greek might when listening to Homer’s archaic and stylised language; more than that, she is a translator who is also a woman. A friend of a mine staged a group reading of the new text, and what I had thought of as an adventure story turned out to be a sordid family drama with an absentee father, a housewife struggling to hold on to her home, an angry young man frustrated because his life does not match his ambition, servants choosing sides with blood on the line, hero-kings who needle each other, cocks of the walk torn between self-interest and following their own nature, women who follow the rules and are possessions, women who flout the rules and get away with it, and the eternal contradictory whims of the divine, by whom any action, no matter how chaotic or malignant, can simply be waved away as “a God put the thought into my head.” Over everything is a model of consumption, of eating or being eaten up, in a world whose values are both alien and familiar. There are two other primary sources. The poem Ulysses , by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, is another of those cultural artefacts that I had the wrong idea about—eminently quotable verse at the end of the poem about a hero’s journey, against the backdrop of a man who has struggled for a long time to get to his home, finds it dull, and immediately wants to leave again. The Gate to Women’s Country by Sheri Tepper is a work of angry feminism that I had struggled with as a teenager. I understand it better now that I have a working knowledge of Greek tragedy under my belt: she writes a future where a peaceful human society is possible only if men and women live Samplestrictly separate and regimented lives.file As a young girl living a reasonably happy life in a modern democracy, Tepper’s premise seemed overblown to me; as an older woman better able 4 For the Organiser to take Homer on his own terms, having reached an age in which #MeToo is just another sally in the gender wars, the casus belli of the novel becomes more explicable. Three confronting texts that cannot agree with each other make the perfect basis for larp, an artform where there is no such thing as a unified point of view. So travel to Ithaca. Embrace what you find there and accept the gifts your host may choose to give you. Honour your own and others’ gods, pour the libation from your cup, make peace with your loved ones or do not. And then leave. You’re Reading This And You’ve Never Larped Before Live roleplaying (larp) is a way of acting out stories. The participants take on characters who have a history, an emotional life and relationships with the other characters in the game, and then act out what feels right for the character. As an art form, it is more immediate than theatre; as a roleplaying form, it is held more in the body and more in the moment of time than the ‘tabletop’ kind where you simply narrate what your character is doing. Larps can be silly or serious or anywhere between. Ulysses uses the form to give up to 18 players a role in the world of The Odyssey one week after its hero has finally reached his home. The game takes about three hours to run, with two hours of in- character time, and pre and post-game workshops to help people get in and out of character. There are rules that govern how characters can engage in physical conflict without anybody getting hurt in real life. The game has a two-act structure. The first act is a regular day in the lives of the characters in which they can talk or have minor scuffles, after this is a five-minute break in which the characters are ‘resting’ for the night; this is followed by the finale—a fateful day that the gods are witnessing: all fights are mortal, all oaths are significant, and the ships of Ithaca will sail out to the Western Stars (which heroes Samplewill go is for the players to decide.) file 5 For the Organiser You’re Reading This And You’re Unfamiliar With Homer’s Odyssey The Odyssey and its companion text The Iliad are two of the oldest works in Western literature. They were written around the 8 th or 7 th century BCE, combining the new literacy with a rich oral tradition that seems to recall the lavish fallen courts of Mycenae and Crete, and perhaps an even earlier memory of nomadic life on inland steppes. Homer’s works (there is scholarly debate about whether the author referred to by archaic Greeks as ‘The Poet’ was an individual or a team) quickly became a collective identity-forming canon shared across the Greek speaking world; they were admired and incorporated into Roman literature; from there they have been continually repeated, translated and adapted into the 21 st century.