breakinglight11 | Festival of the Larps 2015 con report, part I

This year's Festival of the Larps has come again, reminding why again it is one of the most special weekends of my year.

For this year's Festival I wrote a new game, Woodplum House, a two-hour comedic larp in parody of the works of P.G. Wodehouse. I love debuting new games at Festival, as one of the so even though I've probably been too busy for an extra project, I decided to throw one out anyway.

When Brockhurst did not fill in time to properly cast, I decided to switch it out for another run of Woodplum on Friday night. That was late enough in the process, however, that even with last-minute digging we were still two players short. I was really nervous about that, as I hadn't really given any thought to modularity when I was writing it. But I believe good GMing demands being able to compensate under less than ideal circumstances. So I selected two characters I think the game would still be functional without and tranferred some aspects of their personality and in-game activities to other PCs or to the world at large. It wasn't perfect, but it enabled players to have enough to interact with. I was really relieved to see that it worked anyway.

Both runs went well, though the fully-cast one was a little smoother. There is a fair bit of plot in the game, at least for a silly two-hour, but for most of it, the payoff is not intended to be the achieving of goals so much as getting into situations that provide opportunities for silliness and hilarity. The players in both runs were funny, creative, and silly, which is what I hoped the game would bring out of them. I spent a lot of time in both runs playing the role of Persephone, his lordship's prize pig, who at the top of the game is too full of porcine ennui to win the blue ribbon at the fair. The biggest source of humor in the game, I think, are the Dark Secrets, of which every character has three, and the corresponding Rumors about said secrets that fly thick and fast through the game. I think I did a particularly good job of writing those, as people cracked up every time they got a new one. This is a game where if the players are laughing, things are going well.

I think my favorite moment was when the valet, played by

readerofposts, and the maid, played by Pink Emily, accused each other in the parlor, each pointing out that the other didn't have an alibi. I was especially glad to amuse

captainecchi and

electric_d_monk, who know Wodehouse well enough to assess whether I captured its spirit. And my friend Kevin, with whom I did a play a couple years ago, came with a friend to try out larping and had a good weekend. That made me really happy.

The game could probably use some smoothing out. I do plan to edit it at some point, but not right now. It has a few small little mechanical things in it that are a bit clumsy, but it probably has plenty to do for a silly short game.