22: LOST
A setting with one or more central mystery, and providing a satisfactory solution.
Because that big capitalised LOST inevitably makes me think of...
(I am not alone.)
LOST was one of the biggest things on TV at its height. Here in the UK season one and two were shown on Channel 4 before the rest went behind the Sky paywall, so a lot of people here didn’t see the ending. And some would say “lucky them” as the ending was, inevitably, divisive.
It was partially an ensemble drama about survivors of a plane crash on a desert island, but it was also full of other genre elements - a smoke monster, an out-of-place polar bear, prophetic dreams, conspiracies, symbolic numbers (this is day 22, but should really be 4, 8, 15, 16, 23... or ideally 42) and more. One immediately popular theory was that the island was Purgatory. The fact that we didn’t see any scenes away from the island until the end of the first season certainly supported this. It was all very Bermuda Triangle, and had a far higher Weird Level than a show originally pitched as a scripted version of Survivor would suggest.
The nearly weekly “what the... ?” cliffhangers were one of the main features picked up by other shows, of which Heroes was the most successful. It may have also influenced the 2009 remake of The Prisoner, where the original was an earlier example of a similar premise.
It also got a video game, a board game and two ARGs (and some unofficial miniatures as well as the official six-inch scale figures) but not an RPG, which would have needed either an explanation for the GM to work from or a toolkit to create your own mystery box plots.
So how would you run something like this? The initial castaway premise gives you a great hook, and it’s easy to escalate mysteries (this PVP strip imagining a LOST RPG demonstrates just how easy) but I think a reasonably coherent explanation and finale would be required. Although in RPGs you have the advantage of only having to provide a satisfactory ending for a few people, not millions.
A drama-focused game would fit the show best, even though it does have plenty of adventure elements with the uncharted island and the polar bears and super-science bases and all.
I’ve tried less serialised and more adventure-ish games influenced by Alias and Heroes, but never gone for this.
Flashback mechanics appear in the likes of Leverage there to empower the players, and the Memoriam system in Vampire: The Masquerade fifth edition, where they can reveal unexpected things and the description mentions continuity glitches as a possibility. 3:16 uses them as well, in a looser way.
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