All Eyes on Me

Am now back from my lovely weekend of larping at SLAW. This was kind of my weekend of "games I am not sure about," since in an effort to expand my larping horizons I signed up for all games that were not to my typical inclining. By and large this tactic was a success, and I had a very good weekend overall.

Friday night Charlotte, April, and I all played in Martha Stewart's Guide to Interdimensional Summoning (and Basting a Turkey.) Fortunately Charlotte had reminded me just before the game that it actually took place at a party and not at a business conference like I originally assumed, so at the last minute I changed my costuming plan. I thought I looked quite nice, wearing my black asymmetric cocktail dress with my white gold anniversary necklace, the nearly-matching silver infinity earrings, silver pumps with the perfectly-matching silver bag, and my silver-gray pashmina over my shoulders. Though I had a good time in it, this game was not to my taste. It was a game purely about schmoozing, with most interactions conducted solely for their own sake, which is totally fine, I just tend to prefer a little bit more plot. I did end up bonding with the demon who had been my childhood imaginary friend, but I did it mostly as a favor to him-- he needed it and I didn't, which I think may have been a common thing about demons and humans in the game. Glad I tried the game, had a nice time, but it was not exactly what I was hoping for.

Saturday morning I drove Charlotte and Ryan in early so that they could play in their morning games. I had nothing in that slot, so I decided to go cruise a nearby thrift store. It was a very nice, well-organized Goodwill, and there were lots of stuff to choose from. Unfortunately most of the things that caught my eye weren't in my size, but I find it amusing how often even in the thrift stores my eye is drawn to items from Express. Very frequently I see something I like the cut and styling of among lots of random pieces on the rack, and when I check the tag, Express is the maker with surprising frequency. I ended up taking home a fantastic black sweater with a drapey fold-over collar, two dressy knee-length skirts, one with an orange and white cloudy pattern and the other with swirls in various shades of red, and the neatest thing of all, a low-sided oval pan with a copper bottom and a stainless steel interior. It needs polishing, but this pan that looks just like it is selling for hundreds of dollars, and I snagged this one for four. Score! I'm not sure what you would call such a thing-- it's oval kind of like a gratin pan but only has one long handle, and the sides are too low for a saute pan --but I look forward to shining it up and cooking with it, which will promptly require shining it again. :-) 

Pleased with my haul, I returned to WPI to grab lunch and get into costume for The Sound of Drums. I wasn't sure if it was going to be my cup of tea, and I was fairly certain I would like Two Hours in London, but natbudin had highly recommended it and I trust the man's judgment. So, in the spirit of the Try New Games weekend, I went for it. My costume wasn't terrible, but it was weaker than my usual standard. Despite playing a sixty-plus-year-old, I did end up wearing my brown tribal-looking bikini with my brown pashmina tied around my waist like a skirt, and Charlotte kindly lent me her huge patterned green scarf to wrap around my shoulders. This mostly concealed all the decidedly-not-sixty-year-old body in the bikini, and I made some attempt to paint age makeup on my face, but I didn't white my hair and overall looked pretty much like the vain twenty-something I am. Also, I think I lost my brown and white headband scarf at the gamespace afterward, which I am annoyed with myself about.

But the game itself was excellent. The world is very full and well-thought-out. I loved my character and was incredibly busy throughout the whole game. I also had great interactions with Susan, who was my brilliant-but-mad younger sister, and Ryan, who was the troubled outsider with the haunting in his soul. I even got to use my badass spiritual strength to beat up a fallen god! It was awesome. The culture they built, with its ways and its norms that were so different and unusual, was really well-made. There was one small instance of "Christianity as the great bogeyman of non-mainstream living" that irked me, but otherwise I thought they did a really nice job of establishing the foreign people. There was also lots of interesting story told, which pretty much makes any game for me. Overall, I think this was my favorite larp of the weekend, and the one I was most glad that I took a chance on. Congrats to Tory and Lily for making it!

Saturday night was Clarence. By this point I was really dragging, energy-wise. This weekend marks the third week in a row of little sleep and poor eating, and I think I am reaching my limit. Luckily for me, Clarence is a game that is impossible to screw up, and I was playing an AGM so I could afford to be reactive rather than active. Fortunately, others were doing a fantastic job of pushing the game along. This run was blackbagged and carried off over the shoulder by electric_d_monk, whose portrayal of the fanatically German-nationalist GM Bucher drove the events by sheer force of personality. By the end of the run, we had vampires passing on their nationalities as well as their vampirism, resulting in bronzite's General and rigel's Carmilla being determined to be genetically perfect Aryans who of course must then go on to spawn the Master Race. With the use of the time accelerator to hasten their growth, soon we had six little Ubermensches prancing about named after the Von Trapp children singing songs from The Sound of Music. And naturally, these unstoppable German supermen went on to take over the world and some surrounding planets, leaving Brewer as Kaiser of the Earth and Mars. It was a typically insane run, but the birth of the Master Race, I think, was a uniquely amusing touch.
 

"Allow me to explain zee rules of Der Kriegspiel."
 

Sunday lightgamer was nice enough to let me ride over with him and twilighttremolo. I was signed up for In the Jungle that day, the final game of the sort I wasn't sure what I'd think of. But I like the work of emp42ress and simplewordsmith, so I wanted to see what it was like. My costume was like most of my others this weekend was a little half-assed, since I tend not to keep worn-out clothes around, but I settled on an outfit that when my parents last saw me in it told me I looked like a bum. I figured that would work. It is a game about hobos, a pure conversation exercise where we do nothing more than talk to each other in character. The game was at bare minimum cast, but it was a good one, including myself, natbudin, rigel, nyren, beholdsa, and electric_d_monk. Being in it with such good larpers helped a lot, keeping the converstion interesting and helping ease some of the awkwardness I was feeling about just having to spitball. Not something I'm certain I want to do again any time soon, but I enjoyed the experiment in this instance and I'm glad I decided to give it a try.

Now I am exhausted. I have been going at a breakneck pace for the last three weeks and I simply can't go any more. I have been kind of hoping that if I have one day where I sleep really well and eat properly it will fix my weariness and the mess my digestive system has been in, but I think I need a more consistent effort to really fix things up. Wednesday I will be going home for Thanksgiving with my brother, and I'm hoping to reset myself over that break with healthy eating and enough rest. I have things I need to get done in the near future, such as writing more Resonance characters and getting out the casting questionnaire for The Stand, but as cool as my activites have been, I think my body needs a bit more of a break before it will feel back to normal again.

On Friday night I helped captainecchi and electric_d_monk run the fantastic League of Extraordinary Hogwarts Students. I loved playing this game, and I only wish I'd had time to study everything more carefully. I read all the character sheets and the rules, but  I still wasn't quite familiar with the inner workings of the game to be all that useful as a GM. I mostly got answers from Matt and Lise and then passed them on to players. I was particularly proud of katiescarlett29, who stepped in as Irene Adler even though she wasn't totally confident about the improv part of larping, and of nennivian, who I always thought was a larper waiting to happen. By and large the run went very well, with lots of activity and engaged players, but I wish I'd been intimate enough with the game to be able to give better suggestions to the couple of (usually new) players that got stuck. I wanted to talk to them after the game, but I was so blasted by gamewrap that I had to drag myself home and sleep. I have been sleeping badly lately, and I had to get up for a 9AM game the next day.

Saturday morning that 9AM game was the fifth run of Oz. It was an excellent run, one of the best, with the capable assistance of Jared and Bernie as my fellow GMs. We were a little nervous about the casting in places, but it turned out that everyone had a part they enjoyed. Standout players include the awesome natbudin, who we initially wanted for EVERY ROLE IN THE GAME, but we finally settled into a part because he wanted to see him portray the personality-- which he did amazingly. Again, Charlotte was fantastic, showing so much talent for getting into and becoming characters. I was incredibly impressed with wired_lizard, who played the character the way I had always imagined it to be, and gave me a few new ideas on top of that. Zachariah came up with some fantastically clever stratagies for executing his fairly difficult plotline. Hell, pretty much everyone in the game did an excellent job. I should probably stop casting bronzite as my big bad, because I think people expect him to be the villain all the time, and so no one is inclined to trust him. In the previous run of Oz, Marc Blumberg as the villain did very well and in fact managed to achieve his goal of cataclysmic destruction, but it was more because the characters he was in opposition to made a fatal error that they could not fix. John actually pushed things farther along the doom track than anyone so far, but his opposition managed to repair it properly. I was immensely pleased with this run.

Saturday afternoon, I went home to sleep. I think it helped a little, but I was still pretty draggy for the rest of the weekend.

Saturday night was the fifth run of Alice, again assisted by Jared and Bernie. I think it went well in that players had a good time, but this was the WEIRDEST RUN EVER. Though of course there have been variations, the previous four runs tended to follow some pretty clear trends. Basically, there is a pattern of connections that is supposed to get made, and with some variance in the order in previous runs they all came together, leading to an endgame scenario where two large groups are polarized against each other. A lot of those connections did not click this time around, and I'm not sure where the broken link was. The villain was vanquished again, but not by the person who is supposed to and always has in the past. In all the previous runs, either the core villain group acted so covertly that nobody knew who they were until the end of the game, or they formed a tight-knit group so cohesive that they just overwhelmed and crushed all opposition. I feel like they were more scattered and freewheeling this time around, which made them more obvious and less able to protect themselves should someone decide they were a target. There were still some fantastic performances-- I loved Lise's analytical approach to her character and she made amazing process putting together the pieces of her challenge. And April was excellent, not to mention wearing a fantastic costume. I guess any game where the players have fun is a success, but I was really shocked at how weirdly this run went.

Then I went home to sleep. Again, my sleep has not been terribly restful these days, so still. So. Draggy. Blah.

Sunday was Diamond Geezers, the only thing I played. I had a blast. I was playing an ex-military demolitions expert whose rough, ruthless, but not terribly malicious outlook I enjoyed. It was an interestingly set-up game, basically us in a confined space with a few story hooks built in but a plot that was more or less on rails. I wasn't exactly expecting that, but it was a really fun character game, involving yelling in Cockney accents and waving guns around. We experienced an odd phenomenon that I think was troubling Brad as GM that the only ones who were talking much, at least at first, were bleemoo, Charlotte, and myself, and everyone else was fairly quiet. I wonder if it was because the three of us were comfortable doing the accent and they felt slightly intimindated to speak if they couldn't. It's not like mine was any good at all, though Josh's and Charlotte's actually were. Josh was so much fun to play off of, and Charlotte continued to prove my theory that she has always been a larper, whether she knew it or not. Definitely recommend this game as a fun silly character experience.

Oh, as a side note, I was amused at usernamenumber pointing how at Brandeis, of course there was going to be less shooting and killing and more hand-holding and agreeing to work things out. :-) I have noticed this trend myself.

Next year I shall be con chair. I am looking forward to it. I am in the process of pondering a few thing to help optimize, which I will record when I have a better handle on my thoughts. Until then, thanks to everyone for making our very own con a fantastic experience again!

Suddenly remembered I had a silver polishing cloth that I got with that bird brooch, and decided to see if it could do any good to my slightly tarnished silver pieces. I was shocked at how much tarnish came off into the cloth on some of them, like my infinity earrings which didn't even look very dull. I had no idea coming into contact with me could cause such corruption. ;-) The piece that really needs it is my silver-set amber necklace, though as much is coming off into the cloth the metal didn't seem to get much shinier. Maybe it just needs a lot more work than I had time to do before needing to leave this morning. Perhaps I'll give it a shot this afternoon.

In pleasing news, our wonderful bid chair (possibly all of bid comm?) bleemoo just informed me that Alice and Oz have been accepted and will be running this April at Festival of the Larps. Now I may commence bullying everyone I know who hasn't played into signing up. Though there are certainly more than a few experienced larpers I've yet to wrangle into my worlds, my first thoughts are April, nennivian, and blendedchaitea, all of whom have expressed at least mild interest. I know katiescarlett29 has reservations about trying larping, but she is of course welcome and encouraged as well.

Now that bids are getting approved, I am now intensely curious as to what else is going to be running. We're probably a ways away from a schedule being put together yet, but I'm still very interested at what the list currently looks like. I remember captainecchi  and electric_d_monk telling me they were rerunning the awesome League of Extraordinary Hogwarts Students (with some additions that sound absolutely fantastic) and lightgamer was looking in the gamebank for something to bid. If anyone else threw something out there, I'd love to know what it is.

Went contradancing with morethings5 last night, and got to see captainecchi, electric_d_monk, natbudin, and v_cat. It's something I've been wanting to try for a while, and when Lise mentioned it recently I figured now was a good time. The dancing turned out to be really fun, and not too terribly difficult to pick up. It probably helped that Jonathan very kindly showed me how the steps beforehand, so when the caller called them out, they were a lot easier for me to follow. He was such a good partner. :-) Unfortunately, by the end of the fourth dance I got so dizzy I was slightly motion sick, which worsened with the car ride home, and didn't go away until I finally fell asleep. Blast my so very fragile equilibrium.

Still, it was fun and fantastic exercise. And Nat showed me this really cool iPhone application that helps track calorie intake and burn when you're working out and watching what you eat. I'm thinking it might be worth downloading, at least to get an idea of what sort of numbers attach. I've had weird eating habits in the last week or so, but I have been working out pretty consistently. That reminds me, I need to keep taking weekly pictures to monitor my tummy progress.

I'll be honest, I cast Oz mostly by feel; I checked the casting questionnaires mostly to make sure I wouldn't stick someone in a part they'd hate, and then went with my instincts. I think by and large it worked, at least with people I got a chance to talk to afterward. I took particular care with captainecchi, seeing as I screwed up casting her for Alice in the first run and gave her a character she couldn't play. Fortunately, Oz had somebody absolutely perfect for her, and I was very pleased with the way she played it. She had a tough job in game, and came very close to getting it done.

One thing I found and will have to modify for the next run is that there is such a thing as too much gamespace. As with Alice, I had the entire building of Golding, but unlike Alice, fifteen players do not fill space in the same way that twenty-seven do. The place felt strangely empty, and I was worried it meant that people weren't busy enough. It turned out that most people felt they did have enough to do; it was just that they were so spread out that not as much appeared to be going on. That will have to be remedied; I like the feeling of bustle.

The one thing I did find useful about the space was that there was an ampitheater classroom with a projector screen in it. I made this the window of the viewing deck on the Emerald Station and had a series of slides depicting space just outside. I liked it very much and thought it added a lot to things. The game, as was pointed out to me by the lovely v_cat, who was by the way excellent in her role, turned out to be very GM-heavy, which was not my intention, but she's right, that needs to be corrected. The trouble with most things in that vein was that while I did a good job hammering out the plot stuff, I ran out of time when it came to mechanics. The first editing job required will be the fix all the stuff that was in my head but I never managed to get on paper. I'm very grateful to Bernie, not only for helping me GM, but for helping as well as he did when I didn't have time to get him as well up to speed as I should have. Another mechanic that I borrowed from Lise and electric_d_monk-- who was, by the way, exactly what I pictured for his role-- I need to hammer out a little better as well, but I liked it very much in theory and think I can get it where it needs to be. The role that had the most to do with that mechanic was played by in_water_writ, for whom the personality is just amazingly perfect. 

By and large, I am pleased. Some editing I believe is all that is required to smooth out the mechanical issues. Also, there is the matter of all the people who didn't get in and would like the play. I would love to run this again as soon as possible, if there is some time and space before the end of the year.

Next-- Saturday afternoon run of Paranoia

I just got an e-mail telling me that I got in off the waitlist for "All's Well that Ends," the Elizabethan larp about the death of Christopher Marlowe at Intercon! I'm delighted; I really wanted to be in this game, given the setting and the connection to Doctor Faustus. So that was a very happy surprise to find in my inbox.

I also recieved, and promptly filled out, the casting questionnaire for League of Extraordinary Hogwarts Students. My excitement for that game was renewed with the questions involving Victorian literature. Phoebe loves the Viclit, you see. I'm very excited to see what captainecchi and electric_d_monk can do with the intriguing combination of steampunk and magic, especially with the characters from Viclit in mix.

Heh. It just occurred to me that I will be in an Elizabethan game, and then a Victorian game. I like!