All Eyes on Me

Festival of the Larps 2017 happened this past weekend, and I wanted to note down a few things.

I very much enjoyed my time there, like I always do. I've never had a bad time at Festival. It's a very special weekend for me, as it's Brandeis's home larp con and I've not only been attending it for over ten years now, I've been involved in its organization for a lot of that time. I really love larping at this event.

But this time around I was so tired that I didn't get quite as much out of it as I usually do. I had periods where I would mentally check out of my games where I was a player just because I was so exhausted. I liked everything I played, but wasn't quite as sharp and on the ball as I usually am. Still, it was all good, and I don't think I ruined anything for not being at my best.

Friday night I played Alleged Entertainment's The Day We Came Home. I generated a handful of character sheets for this game, but I knew little enough (remembered less) that I could play without being spoiled. It's basically examining issues around immigration in a sci fi setting with the format of a political game. Not my usual style of larp, but it's a good example of its genre, and I'm glad I gave it a try. Also Tegan, one of the writers and GMs, totally blew my mind with her advice for how to address missing PCs due to drops: "If you need something from someone who isn't here... get it from someone else." A revolutionary and practical shift in mindset when cast issues arise!

Saturday afternoon I played Primal Spirits, where everyone is the innocent avatars of animal creatures in the early days of the world. I was Rabbit, which pleased me, as I applied a lot of my theory of rabbithood from my favorite novel, Watership Down. All the world was my enemy, and when they caught me, they would kill me-- but first they must catch me. I had a rather primitive sense of justice and had to come to terms with my children's status as ultimate prey animal. Again, my tiredness curtailed my play a little, but in collaboration with Peter Litwack I came up with a pretty clever trick to make myself come out on top in a race with Horse-- the winner would be the fastest to reach an apple, which I buried in the ground at the other end of the track. Because I was the faster digger, I won! Frith, a rabbit trick!

That night I ran the larp version of Silver Lines. I love, love, love that game. It's a very solid mystery, and physicalizing the various in-game locations with props translates it nicely from the tabletop form to the live-action one. I missed having Jenn as my co-GM, like I had at Intercon, but it's manageable with only one person; you just have to play all the NPCs. It really makes me want to write more games in this style, set at other points in the Hawking story timeline.

I did have one problem post-game that I didn't handle well. I had one player who had a stronger than usual emotional reaction to her journey in the game. I should have just shut my dumb mouth and listened, but she kept relating it back to how the game was written. Even though I knew better, I kept trying to interrogate her to see if she had legitimate criticism I needed to incorporate into an edit, but I think it just made her feel judged. I should have just listened and let her express herself. As it was, I felt kind of like a bully.

The last thing I played was supposed to be a cowboy game called Once Upon a Time in the Wild West, a prepackaged game from a professional larprunning company called Questoria. Sadly they had a lot of players not show up, so they had to sub in a short, smaller parlor game in its place. That was actually fine by me, because being so tired, I didn't mind a quicker larp. The new one turned out to be a murder mystery set at a seance, which I enjoyed enormously-- not least because I was the only one who solved it correctly! I love mysteries; I've been studying them and writing them a lot lately, so I'm actually glad the game turned out the way it did.

So yeah, overall, good weekend, though I was sorry my overall dragginess, particularly mentally, made me less sharp than I usually am. Thank you to everyone, particularly con chair Adina Shreiber, for all the hard work to make it happen!

The highlight of my weekend was the running of Silver Lines, my mystery tabletop-game-turned-larp set in the future of the Mrs. Hawking storyline. As I mentioned, this was the first time I ever ran it as a true larp, with physical locations and physical props, and I was nervous about how it would turn out. But I am pleased to report that with the invaluable support of in_water_writ as co-GM, it was a definite success!



I love mysteries, and if I may say so myself, I'm getting pretty good at writing them. Base Instruments is my most recent serious triumph in the genre, and this one turned out really strong as well. Good thing, because two of my players, specifically those who took on the roles of Mary and Arthur, signed up expressly because they wanted to solve a murder mystery. So it was important that it be good.

I really love this story, and I think the game itself works really well. It tells a moment of the greater Hawking story that is unlikely to ever make it into a play, but still is fitting and important. This run also drove home to me how flexible it is as a module. It only has five players, which is pretty easy to fill, but at least three out of five can be seamlessly any gender, and all but one can be turned into an NPC who the PCs can encounter and get necessary information from. It's as open to as much or as little character-based roleplaying as you like, or you can focus on making the mystery solving your primary drive.

The physicality of it, the props and the locations, worked well. Jenn and I divided the NPCs equally between us, which worked well because it enabled one of us to interact with players while the other prepared other aspects of the game. The players suggested that sound design could be used to further flesh out the locations, such as crowd noise or music to set the scenes.

The players went through it VERY efficiently. In previous forms, all of which were more tabletop-style, the game took about four hours, but this group reached the end in a little over two. That surprised me a little, but they seemed to have fun, so I didn't mind. And they didn't miss any of the planned parts of the game. I really enjoyed running it the whole time, and I'm really indebted to Jenn for helping me. She did an amazing job!

I'm looking forward to rerunning this larp version at Festival of the Larps 2017 April 28th-30th at Brandeis University. If you'd like to play, be sure to come out then!

For once I'm actually on top of getting my game together for Intercon ahead of time. I have most of the materials for Silver Lines ready to go at this point, and I still have over a week to put the finishing touches on it, and make some decisions about how much I want to use things like physical props.

I said that I'd planned to test this "conversion to larp" at SLAW this past November, but honestly that didn't really happen. I had made a number of modification to the running style and the player materials, but I ended up having a visually impaired player sign up for the run. Since most of my modifications were visual aids or involved rearranging furniture to represent a space, it seemed like that version at best wasn't going to add anything, and at worst would be actively less accessible. So I basically ended up just running the original tabletop version, which seemed to avoid those issues, as well as gave the players a perfectly good time-- even if in that form you probably can't call it a larp. But it does mean I'm going into this Intercon run with an untested version of the game.

I am reasonably confident it's going to work okay, even if it's not perfect. It's basically the same game content-wise, just with some changes to HOW it's presented and run. I know the story works, which is the most important part. But I hope the players bear with me a bit if there are any bumps in the execution.

offside7, the chair of the bid committee, just let me know that my bid for Intercon Q was accepted. That would be Silver Lines, my idea for an experiment in combining live action and tabletop RPG forms, based on the mod I wrote for inwaterwrit's bachelorette party. I think some of the members of the bid committee are skeptical about the combination working, but I've pretty explicitly billed it as an experiment, so it's clear that players will have to bear with it a little. I am confident, however, that it's a solid mystery game-- I've gotten pretty good at writing mysteries --and I'm actually really excited to implement some of the ideas I've had about physicalizing some of the in-game events that in the pure tabletop version were simply talked through.

I have run it by myself pretty effectively, but for this it might be nice to have another GM to take on some of the NPC roles. And to set up other upcoming locations while one locations while one location is occupied. Ten people have played this game so far-- it's only a five-person party --so maybe I'll ask one of the former players. Or maybe Bernie would be able to be there. I'll have to make some plans.