The Credits for the Tales of the Future

It usually starts in the car, while out running errands. Sometimes, one of us will walk into the room with the other and say "I have an idea." Often, it's Jeff yelling in the middle of their shower to bring the iPad to the bathroom door.

An idea for a Tale spills out. Jordan usually transcribes the notes on the iPad, because he's not driving, or not in the shower. Jeff rambles. Jord asks the right tough questions. The roles switch. Voice dictation and translation is also a wonderful thing, although it can be a challenge to retranslate some technical term that got turned into gibberish. The concept for a Tale is born. It's a natural and easy collaboration.

Eventually, Jeff sits down with the notes and works through a nicely formatted first draft. This is a struggle, given Jeff's migraines. On rare occasions, the stars align, and it only takes a day or two. Most times, it's longer. Some Tales are lost because we didn't write enough notes when the original idea struck. If we are patient, persistent and leave enough of a trail, the Tale gets written. We both read the results as a sanity check. Jordan inevitably points out the things Jeff missed, and the second draft is much better.

We initially started writing these Tales to be able to add them to the thirty-odd Tales in Across the Sea of Stars. Since 2017, we've written Tales that haven't fit into that LARP, for various reasons. We've also been asked if we'd just run the Tales for people to play. That brings us to Tales of the Future. We have more than enough new Tales for one four hour LARP, so there will be at least a Volume 1 and Volume 2.

Thanks go to Rain Wiegartner for some early website sanity checks, and for their tremendous efforts to get more LARPs written.

Doug Hoover suggested we write LARPs like this. Philip Kelley ran some of our other Tales separately at an event at Northwestern University. So thanks go to them for planting and reinforcing that cyborganic meme in our heads.

We want to thank our players in the first run; it was our first time running a virtual LARP. We learned a lot, and their feedback was invaluable. We also had a lot of fun, and knew we had a good LARP on our hands.

We want to thank our players in the second run, because they were simply amazing, breathing life into these characters. We ran long, and then stayed up even longer, talking through what had happened. They also had great feedback. Wow! 🦆

Jeff is responsible for the various images that highlight these pages. They've spent far too many hours playing No Man's Sky since it came out in 2016. These are screen captures from one of their saves.

We can be reached by Gmail at 3.1quadrillionsteps.