Writing and publishing Messages from Callisto

I’ve just published Messages from Callisto, episode #4 of my long-running science fiction first-contact freeform larp campaign.

That’s a bit of a mouthful, so let’s break it down:

Episode #4: Previous episodes are (in order) The Roswell Incident, All Flesh is Grass, and Children of the Stars. I’ve written two more episodes (The Stars Our Destination and Aurora Horizon), but they need to be worked up into a presentable state. I think there may be two or three more episodes in the saga.

Science-fiction first-contact: Some of my favourite SF books and movies involve first contact with aliens – so that’s what these are. They are set on Earth – and we are not alone…

Freeform larp: A type of larp involving prewritten characters with detailed backgrounds shoved into a situation they must deal with. (Or in other words, the kind of games that this site is written for.)

The premise: Classified images from Voyager showed a regular, pyramid-shaped structure on the surface of Callisto. The structure looked too regular to be natural, and in 1983, the US government sent a follow-up mission, Arcadia, to Callisto to learn more.

It is now 1993, and the first signals from Arcadia have arrived. UNET (United Nations Extraterrestrial Taskforce) is meeting in London to discuss Callisto along with several other issues that have all come to a head at once.

Writing Messages from Callisto

I wrote Messages from Callisto using the process explained here and in my book. It came together fairly easily, once I had my main ideas. 

My design notes for the game are here, which explain my thinking behind many of my decisions.

Running it

I have run Messages from Callisto twice so far. The first time was on Discord in 2023 (see here for a more detailed writeup) and then later that same year at Consequences (see here).

The second run was particularly ambitious, as I also ran Children of the Stars at the same convention, and I wanted decisions in the Children of the Stars to affect Messages from Callisto. That made everything much more complicated than it needed to be – as this blog post explains.

I next expect to run it in 2027, which is when the third campaign is due to get to it.

Making it publishable

It took me a while to get Messages from Callisto ready for publication. The main challenge is that it follows on from three other games, and decisions made in those games mean that history might change. 

This may even mean that different runs will have different characters!

The way I have dealt with this is through different coloured text. Black text is the standard game text – that doesn’t change. Red text is my “default” text. If you’re playing Messages from Callisto as a standalone game, then use the red text. Blue and purple text represent variations – including some that haven’t yet featured in my games, so I had to write that from scratch.

The game files are MS Word files, so that GMs can make whatever changes they need.

So when you come to run Messages from Callisto, you can amend the coloured text to suit your particular campaign. 

And if your campaign has gone in even stranger directions – you’re free to make whatever changes you need to make.

Publishing format

The other thing that took a bit a longer was putting it into the format I’m using to publish the games. When I first wrote Messages from Callisto, I hadn’t started publishing these games. When I did, I changed the format of the files a little. That meant that I needed to change the format first.

That shouldn’t be a problem going forward, as I now know how I am publishing the games.

The British Library version

The final thing I did was prepare a submission for legal deposit at the British Library. 

Before the 2023 cyber attack, they had a portal that could be used to upload electronic copies of documents. That hadn’t been available since the attack, so I dropped them an email to find out what  I should do.

Anyway, the British Library isn’t set up to manage lots of different files, so for a larp like Messages from Callisto, I’ve combined all the files into a single pdf. (This was their suggestion when I got in contact with them for Freeform Games.) After all, the files are for record, not to be actually played.

So that’s what I did. (In Messages from Callisto’s case, I turned the MS Word files into pdfs first, before combining them.)

Messages from Callisto

So there we have it. You can now download and play Messages from Callisto. Enjoy!