Storyland design challenge: The Wayfarer's collective

The Wayfarers Collective is a Location-Based Entertainment (LBE) concept that brings a unique approach to immersive theatre. It's designed as an overarching brand with a series of unique attractions, with each one representing a new destination and new mysteries to uncover. When you visit a venue, you join members of the Collective to help them investigate and document peculiar places in which they have arrived.

We wanted to focus on bringing people together in an age of individual digital experiences. Guests actively participate in an adventure through collaborative puzzles and interactions with actors, all within a heavily themed physical environment that changes as the story progresses in real-time.

The concept is built around four core values, guiding both the design and operations of the venues:

• Be Together: Every instalment encourages and facilitates interaction between people through its puzzles, which helps to foster a sense of belonging and create shared memories. The venues are also designed with accessibility in mind, as everybody should be able to join.
• Physical First: We opted for physical sets and environments to provide a rich experience and a direct path to immersion. Technology plays a supporting role to enrich the experience.
• Opt-in: Stories are opt-in. We offer rich story worlds for those who want to dive deep, but for casual visitors, the venues are designed to be enjoyable regardless, providing a simpler story, games, and a nice meal or drink.
• Education through entertainment: The storylines and challenges are based on real-world themes, allowing guests to interact with these concepts in a playful and natural way, where entertainment and story always come first.

Target Audience and Experience Structure

The experience is aimed at people 12 years and older looking for a fun half-day activity with friends and family. The concept is highly flexible and can appeal to a wide range of people due to its opt-in nature, mixed with puzzles, games, and food and beverages.

Guests experience a linear story that unfolds in real-time and is divided into various phases. The change between phases is marked by a scene with actors that provides new information and unlocks new locations and puzzles.

At the start, guests get access to the TWC Dossier App (a web app). It's a tool for guests to keep track of their findings and receive update messages from the Wayfarers. Importantly, the app is *not* part of any puzzle mechanisms. This is a deliberate choice so guests are not incentivized to look at their phones, allowing them to enjoy the physical environment and each other's company.

Puzzles are an integrated, canon part of the story world, providing bits of information and encouraging guests to collaborate to solve the larger mystery.

For the Reykgras instalment, the venue is divided into four distinct areas: the town square, the geyser field, the lava field, and the lava tunnel. The Icelandic-style town square uses continuous building facades to surround guests with theming and hide back-of-house areas, allowing for easy movement of staff and supplies out of sight.

As the core concept is physical-first, the majority of the effects are practical in nature. The two main practical effects are the earthquake scene and the grand finale, which involves a character "disappearing" into a volcanic fissure.

One of the show scenes I did technical design for is the grand Finale, in which one of the characters disappears in a vulcanic fissure. To simulate the volcanic fissure:

• A basin of foaming water is placed out of the audience's sight, with air pumped through it to cause foaming.
• This foam is shot up using compressed air and lit with lights to make the liquid appear to glow, simulating magma.
• Fog outlets are placed behind the actor to simulate a smoke plume.
• A row of lights and CO2 jets are placed in front of the actor, which fire off as they fall through the trapdoor.