At the Queer Geek Ladies Night starring Story Games Seattle, I facilitated Final Voyage of the Selene.

For those that don't know, Final Voyage of the Selene is about the passengers and crew of a space ship traveling from the frontiers of space back to Earth. Only something goes wrong before they reach their destination and the ship has to be evacuated. The story is about these characters, their interactions, and what goes wrong that requires the evacuation.

Characters are semipregenerated-- you're given a name, a brief description of their role on the ship, and two questions. One has to be answered "Yes and..." and the answer to the other question must be "No but..." Other than that, details about them are up to you. You're also randomly dealt an Agenda that your character is supposed to be working towards. You get to pick which other character is the target.

There is a Prelude where you give a glimpse into your character's life, personality, etc. and their reasons for being aboard the ship, followed by three Acts with different things you're supposed to be focusing on. (Act 1 is social, designed to show life on the ship and these characters interacting with each other, Act 2 is about secrets, where the characters are supposed to be learning or hiding something and things start to go wrong, Act 3 is about confrontation where everyone is required to pursue their Agendas and things really go wrong.) The Finale is more narrative- we get to see who gets off the ship and the Epilogue shows us what happens with these characters and their Agendas after the fact.

The doctor and engineer knew each other from before. Despite everyone's best efforts, the ship's systems started to fail and there was no way they could get them back up without a great loss of life. The Ambassador and Professor Carris were suspicious that it was the engineer's fault. The doctor insisted it wasn't. Then again, who knows what the truth is because she had her own agenda involving the engineer. (Well, a couple actually but one involved infecting her with some sort of alien parasite.The Engineer willingly agreed and they became brood buddies and more...) All characters made it off the ship. The doctor and the engineer got a gig together aboard another ship, as did the professor to continue his research while the Ambassador got to live a nice, peaceful life after all the excitement.

This is an interesting little system. No dice involved, which makes me wonder how conflict would be resolved if it ever came up. (So far that hasn't been an issue either of the times I've played.) Giving everyone a randomly dealt Agenda that is designed to target other characters helps insure that players/characters have goals that will keep them interacting. It's a pretty quick game too, as the Prelude, Finale, and Epilogue are mostly narrative. We didn't have too many group scenes and it would have been nice to see more of those. (One of my other players made that comment and I agree.)

For being new to story games, the other players were wonderfully open and creative. We all got along pretty great. It was great to see them take these characters and make them their own! I should have explained about the Act structure beforehand so we could have built towards that a bit more effectively and some players might have pushed towards their Agendas a bit harder in Act 3.

All in all, I was quite pleased with how this turned out. I hope to see some of these folks at meet-ups in the future and make it out to more Queer Geek Ladies Night events. :)

- Dani, aka Dr. Tsien