TTRPG, LARP & Escape Room Design

Anterra: 6 Simultaneous Escape Rooms

Role: Narrative Systems Designer, Worldbuilder, Puzzle Designer, Live Game Director
Format: Live Action Roleplay (LARP) • Escape Room • English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) players

Anterra is a live-action narrative experience built to simulate high-stakes teamwork under pressure. Set on a colonized planet experiencing a solar flare crisis, players take on specialized roles in a modular base where communication, critical thinking, and inter-team coordination determine survival outcomes. This game was run as our Thanksgiving Event in my role as Education Director at the Santa Monica College of English Language, with the pedagogical goal of encouraging as much English use as possible. Given the driven pace of the story, this also required logistical arrangement of each team to avoid common native languages and stragetic deployment of advanced speakers to provide support for emergent ones. Team selection also took into account students’ puzzle type preferences.

Designed for multilingual players of mixed experience levels, Anterra blends the jigsaw cooperative learning strategy with branching narrative, asymmetric role mechanics, and embedded logic puzzles inspired by real-world STEM challenges. Players must decrypt transmissions, interpret maps, assemble devices, manage finite resources, and weigh ethical dilemmas in a ticking-clock scenario with dynamic consequences.

I did the narrative system design, writing lore and mission scripting, creating flexible station mechanics, and designing for emergent team behavior within a structured narrative arc. In addition, I designed all the puzzles, with the assistance of my usual collaborator on TTRPG campaigns, Alec Grey. Game balance accounted for real-time player adaptability, scaffolded communication difficulty, and cross-role dependencies to simulate both crisis response and bureaucratic breakdown.

Logistics:

As I was running this game for 70 students effectively solo (teachers were given simple instructions to monitor their escape room only), I recorded synchronized videos that were started in all classrooms simultaneously. In these videos, I performed the role of game master as mission control, directing them to move throughout the school at specific times, giving them their directives for both the overall game and the individual puzzles, and kept them on track with a timer and other “station-wide” events. Therefore, the beginning and end of the videos were the same in every room, but the middle segment was specific to the escape room set in that classroom. Then, during the game, I was free to move between each escape room to provide hints and narrative urgency.

Takeaway:
Anterra proves that serious games can be high-agency, high-emotion, and high-strategy—bridging environmental storytelling, player-led pacing, and narrative consequence into a single embodied system. Students spoke excitedly about this event for months afterwards and I’ve been told it is one of their best memories of being an international student.

Game Introduction

Played the day before. Character sheets handed out.

Game Start

6 classrooms that double as team and job stations. To get an accurate idea of gameplay, pause and unmute the videos at different times:

• The first 6:54 are the same in all rooms. This has them move from their normal classes (fluency level) to their team rooms and introduce themselves in character.

• At 6:54 their time is interrupted with a red alert! They are given deployment instructions to their job stations and time to travel.

• At 9:34 they are in their job stations and receive the specific instructions for their escape room puzzle and the information they must bring back to their teams to survive the solar flare. Additionally, at 11:33, the Magnetic Shield Control Room experiences a yellow alert as the blast shield bulkheads are deployed for an additional level of challenge.

• At 52:48 the job stations are over and they return to the team rooms to share their answers from the puzzles to determine the correct shelter location.

• At 1:07:30 they must make their final decision on where the safest location is on their maps. The solar flare hits and the correct answers to the puzzles are revealed.

• At 1:09:10 I somehow manage to tie this space opera back into a Thanksgiving celebration, and they go eat a buffet!

A reimagining of the Myst universe built for tabletop play for middle to high schoolers as a summer camp. This project expands the original lore into a multiverse of unstable Ages, corrupted ink, and ancestral conflict. Players explore fragmented realities created by Atrus, Kathri, and their children—each with distinct puzzles, environmental storytelling, and narrative stakes. I created custom backgrounds, classes and species in D&D 5e which enabled students to learn about literature concepts like genre, tropes, and plot structure through their character’s meta-savvy perspective. Designed to evoke the feeling of outsmarting the system while operating within carefully crafted logic bounds, the game blends exploration, choice-based narrative, and layered mechanics in a modular campaign structure.

Myst-Inspired Narrative Puzzle TTRPG