Custom mesh-radio hardware powers Strandfall, a solarpunk outdoor larp in Edinburgh

Game designer Adrian Hon, known for the ARG Perplex City and the app Zombies, Run!, is co-creating Strandfall with Alex Macmillan under a new collective called Experimental Social Scene. It’s a three-hour outdoor live-action role-playing game debuting this September in an Edinburgh park, where 30 players stage an expedition to investigate mysterious world-ravaging storms, restore a radio network, and find missing scientists.

The distinctive twist is that the in-fiction ‘spatial computers,’ dubbed McNair-Feldman Devices, actually work. Each is a 3D-printed, tripod-mounted unit combining a low-power long-range mesh radio, GPS, accelerometer, compass, and an ePaper display — deliberately built to feel like scientific instruments rather than consumer gadgets. Players deploy them across the park to form a network beyond cellular and wifi range, forecast invisible storms, chase them in scanning mode, and map an exclusion zone, enabling systemic gameplay that would be impractical to fake by imagination alone.

Hon argues that smartphones are ‘anti-enchantment devices’: people default to Google Maps and instant messaging and stare at screens, undermining the collaborative deliberation the game wants to provoke. Purpose-built low-tech hardware forces orienteering with paper maps and radio coordination instead. The team, advised by veteran Nordic larp designer Juhana Pettersson and backed by Immersive Arts funding, is designing for accessibility and role play, and sees the site-responsive format as adaptable to other locations and larger scales after the free September run.