The Canary

The Canary is a small, dingy maintenance ship tasked with refueling Jarnax Corporation's medium-space satellites. The Canary's new crew are all suited for such tasks, being low-status employees with the proper assortment of skills. The current mission couldn't be simpler: get the ship back into working order and refuel four satellites. But there's a more sinister purpose behind this seemingly simple mission, and it's not one that bodes well for the crew.

tl;dr: psychological horror in a dystopian sci-fi setting

Good for players who: like mystery and drama, don't mind tabletop-esque mechanics, enjoy leaning in to an emotional experience

Bad for players who: prefer to focus on goals over emotional experiences, have triggers around mental illness

Run Time: 1.5 hours plus pre-game demonstrations and post-game wrap-up

Players: 4

Suggested player experience level: Intermediate to expert; the theme makes it less ideal as a first LARP

The Canary is a psychological horror game about being low-level employees for an evil megacorporation in a sci-fi libertarian dystopia. It uses custom playing cards to represent items and die rolls to represent physical abilities. It can be played without first playing The Dove, which is in the same setting and uses the same mechanics, but players who have played the Dove first will be especially offended by how janky the space ship is and may notice some easter eggs. 

What is a prerelease sale?

It means the game isn't as thoroughly tested as I'd like it to be, so you get a discount! All fully released games have been playtested multiple times and run by GMs other than the writer, meaning that the GM guide has also been tested. 

Games in the prerelease state have been playtested - they've been run several times and are confirmed to be solid, fun games - but they've only been run by the writer, meaning the GM guide itself has not been tested. It's possible there are obvious questions that haven't been answered or bits of set-up that aren't described as clearly as they could be. 

You're taking a little bit more of a risk on a prerelease game, which is why you get a discount. This discount is only available for a limited time, because as soon as the game has been run a few times by people who give feedback - feel free to be one of those people! - the game will move into a fully released, full price state. 

Running Requirements

The game requires two adjacent rooms with a physical door between them that can be closed. The smaller and dingier the rooms, the better. 

The various ship systems require some amount of pre-game set-up from the GM, mostly in the form of printing, cutting, and taping things to one another. It should take less than 1 hour. 

Various options for props are presented in the GM guide that vary from less convenient free options to more convenient purchasable options. You shouldn't need to spend more than a few dollars beyond what you spent purchasing this game if you take the most frugal route. Any props created or purchased for this game can also be used for several of the other games in this setting and are not consumed when running the LARP; you can create/acquire everything once and run this LARP as many times as you have a set of four friends who want to play. 

You can save yourself some time by purchasing the Dove Components Deck rather than using the print-and-play card files included with the game documents. The print-and-play card files include only the cards strictly needed for The Canary while the Dove Components Deck has extra cards used in The Dove.