LOST the game (spoilers for the TV show)

[RangerWickett]

Four years ago I found five friends who weren't watching LOST and who had no interest in the show, and I asked if they could refrain, because I wanted to run the series as a game. I wanted to see how things could go differently if the plot wasn't constrained by the need to stretch things out to 6 seasons, or by actors leaving, or by soap opera character interactions.

(Also, it gives me an opportunity to wash out some of the bad taste in my mouth for how the ending went down.)

So the premise is: "You've crashed on a tropical island. Your goal is to survive until rescued, or rescue yourself. Go."


The Party
Finally my friends and I have wrangled time for a game, and we'll be starting on May 1st. I sent them the attached document with a video game-esque "Character Select" screen. A few characters aren't available because I want them for my own plot reasons, or because they don't speak English, or are likely to be pulled into a plane turbine and die.

(Oh, and if a PC dies, there are plenty of back-up characters available.)

After everyone picked, we ended up with a party of:

• Sawyer
  [*]Sayid
  [*]Charlie
  [*]Hurley
  [*]Paulo

That last one amuses me to no end. I ripped video from the DVDs to send everyone their 'flashbacks,' and then made character sheets for each person. Since Paulo was kind of a non-entity in the real series, I made my first major edit to the show to give him more useful skills. Now, before becoming a chef, he studied Egyptology.


Rules
Because I wasn't satisfied with any of the modern RPG systems I own, I smashed Gamma World until it fit my needs, and wrote up a 4 page RPG system to handle the game. I still need to figure out rules for heroin withdrawal, though.


Running the Game
The way I plan to run it, basically, is that everything works the way it did in the show, except when PC actions change things. Certain timeline stuff will likely stay the same unless PCs meddle. Day 5, Locke goes out hunting with Kate and Michael. Day 16, Ethan kidnaps Claire, and Locke and Boone find the hatch. Day 27, Michael starts to build a raft, and Claire comes back. Day 41, Locke and Boone find the plane.

The butterfly effect is probably going to screw stuff up fast, though, especially if they decide to just circumnavigate the island's coast and find, "Oh hey, look, a sailboat!" I'm excited to see how things go.

I'm heavily drawing from Lostpedia's resources, and the hardest part has been making a map. How big is the island? Where are all the hatches? What other weird things should I add, and how should I handle random encounters with Smokey and boars and polar bears? I've got a month to figure this out.

Anyone wanna place bets on how long it takes them to get off the island?

 

[Stoat]

Awesome idea!

Re: Polar Bears, Boars and the Smokey, I'd introduce them in roughly the same order the show did. Bringing in Smokey right at the beginning emphasizes that this is not just a survival game. It should also force the PC's to make some hard decisions: should we hide? should we try to track that thing? turtle up and fortify a position?

Have you statted up Smokey? If so, please share.

My guess is that the PC's will explore more territory in a more organized manner than the folks on the show did. I also think they'll be even more likely to resort to violence, particularly with the other survivors. Will your Sawyer want to have anything to do with Kate? If not, I think the inevitable conflict with Jack will be a lot bloodier.

 

[Janx]

Sounds like a cool idea. I did something similar but different for babylon5 a few years ago. Turned out great.

The dangers of heavily sourcing a known work is:
players might look up spoilers
you might subconciously resist valid deviations by players
there might be huge shortcuts when characters are PCs and not scripted actors

I'd recommend:
have some alterations ready, just to make your Lost different from the show, You could consider it fixing and refining it for RPG play vs. teleplay.

Be ready to swap out character roles. If the PCs are going to walk around the beach, let Locke find the Hatch and tell everybody. That might draw the PCs back, so THEY can be the ones to obsess over it.

You probably do need to be prepared for the obvious shortcuts like circumnavigating the beach. That's the first thing a party should try to do, to get information. It may be "sandboxy" to let them do that, but it may cut out some challenge. The fix may be as simple as altering the island to make them go inland (perhaps the beach reaches those steep cliffs, so they have to go inland to go around). The goal to this kind of re-organization is to neither force the players, nor to make it so patently simple if they go left, and thus miss all the content.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I would have been tempted to do this with a straight-up D&D setting, like the Isle of Dread, instead, for all of the reasons outlined above, just to disguise what you're actually doing. That said, I think your results will be very interesting.

 

[RangerWickett]

By the way: xkcd: Anti-Mindvirus

 

[Shiv]

There are some pretty comprehensive maps of the LOST island out there. Just Google Image Search "LOST map."

I look forward to seeing how this plays out. I hope you plan on updating us regularly.

 

[invokethehojo]

God this sounds cool, I am very interested to see how this turns out. You should post a brief description of what the players discover, how they react, and what they think is going on for each session.

 

[invokethehojo]

whoops, hit the button twice.

 

[Starman]

I'm heavily drawing from Lostpedia's resources, and the hardest part has been making a map. How big is the island? Where are all the hatches?

Try this site.

 

[RangerWickett]

Yeah, I went to the LOST map site to get the baseline for my own map. I think I'm going to make my island slightly larger than theirs. And I need rules or guidelines for exploring an area for useful stuff.

Last night I talked to the player who's playing Hurley, and he seemed interested, but commented how wildly rare visual splinter personality hallucinations are. He wondered how Hurley got released from the institution without being put on heavy meds.

After this, I had to wonder why Hurley only saw some ghosts, but not others. Like, on the island he should've spotted tons of folks. If it's only folks who knew him or want to send him a message, I suppose that works with Dave, since Dave wanted to talk to his crazy wife Libby, who was also in the institution.