Chimera Larp

It’s Breakout Day for the call centre staff of Zonix Inc, an evening devoted to training and teambuilding. But there’s an efficiency expert on site, and rumours of layoffs are pending. Secrets abound, mysteries flourish, and it might be true that the night teams are full of vampires. And what on earth is the product you sell when you make these calls?

ZONIX INC is a multinational company based in Auckland, but a fairly small one. The company sells products to customers by means of cold calls from a call centre. In the call centre, employees use computers to manage their calls. They cannot make personal calls, and the computer places each call. As soon as a call is answered the computer provides a simple script, standard sales stuff but with a numerical code instead of a product name. All the customers on the database know who Zonix is and what the numbers refer to, because many of them agree to make a purchase. Few of them ask questions. No-one who works in the call centre knows what the products actually are. The call centre has a high employee turnover and is not a very happy place to work.

Employees are divided up into small teams named after New Zealand trees. The teams work closely together and everyone in a team is familiar with their teammates. Zonix’s local branch is run by Lenora Bracklee, who seems a perfectly typical member of senior management. It was Bracklee who announced this paid, compulsory “breakout day”, probably to counter drooping morale.

This game is the original "big KapCon larp", and is a horror-comedy set in the corporate world with a rather unexpected twist, where getting fired may be the least of your worries!

By Morgan Davie, Zak Clark, Luke Walker, Jonathan Todd and Nate Cull. Originally written for and run at KapCon X, January 2001. Additional material by Anna Klein, Rowena Knill and Blair Purkiss for Battlecry 2010