The Crossroads Space Station Swingers' Club

I was commissioned in 2024 by my friend and LARP author & GM July Pilowsky to draw a roster of aliens for their LARP (live action roleplay game) "The Crossroads Space Station Swingers' Club", which made its debut at the LARP convention Intercon W in February. They were the lead GM, of course, and I was their trusty assistant GM and also a character in the LARP as one of the hosts of the alien swingers' club, which was a lot of fun.

The game is set in a galaxy where many different species of aliens have newly discovered one another as they begin to explore the stars, and, naturally, a swingers' club has opened on a diplomatically-neutral space station frequented by members of these various species. The two acts of the game take players through one of their characters' visits to the club in its early years, amid the excitement of first contact (saucy wink), and then through their very last visit some time later, on the eve of the space station's decommissioning amid diplomatic breakdowns in galactic politics. The game itself is not literally in real life a swingers situation, as clothes-on game mechanics that resemble modern dance stand in for hot alien hookups, but exploring the ways the movements of the different alien species complement one another and blend together as players mingle is the main feature of the game. The mood of the game was chill and lighthearted, with an emotional finish as characters affirmed their friendships and vowed to stay in touch despite the imminent loss of their club.

July gave me brief descriptions for each alien species, but encouraged me to get creative with each one, and I had a lot of fun drawing a collection of very different-looking aliens for players to base their characters on. Players were able to see these illustrations with the game documents before the convention, with enough time to put together costumes for the game, and seeing how people interpreted my drawings as costumes was such an incredibly cool thing. The players who chose to be Rigellians, the jellyfish-looking aliens, coordinated their costumes and incorporated LED lights into layers of tulle and floaty streamers for tentacles, and they were especially memorable, but everyone's costumes were great.