Across the Sea of Stars

Content Concerns

Across the Sea of Stars is a sprawling science-based science fiction game filled with challenging ideas and adult themes. The characters deal with daunting and emotional dilemmas that aren't easily resolved. During the Tale periods of the game, every player will face additional challenging intense issues and difficult questions. Tale characters are often hurt, or die.

First, your safety during play is critical. If you have any concerns, let's talk privately about those concerns beforehand. We want you and everyone else in the game to have a good experience. This LARP is not be suitable for all players. Your safest choice may simply be not to play, and that's fine.

Second, this is a LARP for adults. It is not suitable for children.

Third, this is a LARP about difficult ethical and moral choices. It is not suitable for all adults.

Fourth, Tales are assigned randomly by the Vim during the Tale Periods, and it is logistically impossible to control what you might get handed to you. (There are a few Tales written to involve specific Home characters, and they may actually be a Tale character in the Tale.) Furthermore, you will only manage to play a subset of all the Tales in the game. (There are currently more than 40 we use in a single run.) Tales with specific safety concerns are marked on the envelope containing the Tale, so you, as a player, can decide that a given Tale is not for you. Since many Tales run at the same time, with the other players in the game, opting out may mean you have to wait to get into a different Tale.

Fifth, it is difficult to summarize complex character and Tale issues into a brief description. This is our best attempt to spell out what we and our editors believe may be sensitive subjects. It is, by the nature of LARP, incomplete, because we don't have knowledge of or control over what you and the other players may bring to the environment. Again, if you have concerns, let's talk about it beforehand.

Finally, it's also difficult to summarize complex Tales asking interesting and hard ethical moral dilemmas in a way that doesn't make them all sound like terrible experiences. We want the Tales to challenge you, to get you thinking, to see what answers you can find. There is also some comedy, some lighter moments, and some content that doesn't need an explicit warning. Just ask anyone who's played one of our many other Tale LARPs. It's why our Tale-based LARPs run over and over again, with new audiences asking us to run them. Across the Sea of Stars was our first Tale-based game, but we've written several since then. We've also used that experience to add more exciting Tales to Across the Sea of Stars

Character Gender and Relationships

There are three important notes about gender and relationships:

1. This game was written in 2004, so many of the characters are gendered and use gendered pronouns. The world has changed, and we have as well. Starting in 2023, we will cast the Home Characters of the game regardless of the written gender. We will allow the player to decide the gender and pronouns they want used for their Home Characters in the game. Some day, we may get around to generalizing all the pronouns in the text, but that's a huge job.

2. Consequently, some group of characters may be in a relationship, especially in the Tales. If you are unable to play intense relationship drama that would be difficult or impossible because it does not match your real life relationships, then you should choose a different game.

3. Some characters belong to races that don't have two genders.

We are trying to make this game as accessible as possible. If you have concerns, let's talk about it beforehand.