All Eyes on Me

I just remembered something that kind of made me laugh.

Years ago, I was writing a small, short, funny larp that was supposed to capture the feel of the Blandings stories of P.G. Wodehouse. None of his characters, but that kind of silly rich people in that kind of Interwar British country world. In that vein, I wrote a character kind of like the Honorable Freddie Threepwood, a good-natured but stupid posh ne'er-do-well, whom I named Gavin Alaric Post II-- in honor of his mother's beloved late bichon frisé, whose portrait still hung on the manor wall, to remind the second Gavin of all he could never live up to.

(That is, in my opinion, the second best joke in the game. The first is, of course, the reason why the earl's prize show pig Persephone is currently unable to compete, having come down with a case of porcine ennui.)

Anyway, one of Gavin's current problems, as shiftless Wodehouse gentlemen of his station are wont, is that he has fallen in love with a chorus girl, but already has a history of romantic entanglement with her sister. I decided to name his current lady love Bonnie Day as a bit of a cute pun, "bonne ideé" being the French for "good idea." It struck me then, that it might be equally amusing to call his former paramour "Molly Day," as my schoolgirl French led me to remember that "mal" is often the word for "bad".

I was feeling quite pleased with myself until, out of an abundance of prudence, I happen to actually look up how you say "bad idea" in French-- which as it turns out, is not "mal ideé" but actually "mauvais ideé". Yet again, I fail my many, many years of French education! I was quite put out, since I was feeling so smug in my own cleverness.

I can't remember if I used it anyway. Heh, I probably did. Even if it may have made me look dumb rather than clever! But I just laughed so much at the idea, I don't know if I could resist...

I ran Woodplum House on Saturday morning, as I thought it would be a nice place for a short silly game in the style of P.G. Wodehouse. I think it largely went well, as the cast mostly seemed to enjoy themselves, but I kind of got the vibe that the play style did not suit all the players. As with my other short silly game, Break a Leg, this game really requires active, creative players to really make it work. Like, the characters are given outsized, absurd personality traits and a series of exaggerated wants, the players of which are supposed to think up ways to pursue. That's where the comedy is supposed to come from, the crazy things they come up with to pursue their desires. But if you're not the type of player who likes to be proactive or come up with your own tactics, especially with the added burden of making them funny, then it's probably hard for you. The other alternative to playing this game is just to riff on your character's schtick-- like, be the horrible aunt haranguing everybody for their life choices and the various ways they've disappointed you --but again, that requires improvisation that not everybody is good at. That's probably the sort of thing I should make clear in the blurb. As it was, a handful of the players seemed a bit adrift, not doing much of anything. Fortunately the energy and efforts of the rest mostly seemed to carry things. And this is the first run where people actually made an effort, and a successful one no less, to ousting the troupe of carnies living in the west wing! Ah, well. I like the game, and I know with the right people in the right roles it works fine. I'll have to advertise it a bit more carefully in the future.

Tone tends to be very important to me when it comes to whether or not I can become absorbed in a given piece of media. By tone, I mean the overall feeling and vibe a piece gives off, plus the attitude they take towards their story or subject matter. Embracing the right tone for the right story is something I care very deeply about, and can make the difference between obtaining my buy-in to the tale you're telling or shutting out my sympathy completely.

This can have an even more significant effect when I'm already invested in a property. For example, contributing to my notorious pickiness about fan fiction is that if I feel a fic has a tone that doesn't fit properly with the original, I usually cannot get into it at all. I guess it doesn't necessarily have to reproduce the same tone exactly, but unless it feels compatible, it just doesn't work for me. Similarly, in a series, if later installments go too far off the tone, or embrace a tone that doesn't gel with earlier ones, I get skeptical and put off.

Recently I experienced this most strongly (at least in the anticipation) of Guardians of the Galaxy. The Marvel movies have generally had a light tone that was not SO frivolous as to cut off drama, which I've always thought worked for them. When Guardians was announced, I was seriously doubting that it was going to work in context with the rest of the series. It pushed the boundaries of the silliness and weirdness allowed by the series, and I thought it was going to be really ATONAL, disrupting the vibe the world had established. I was surprised to find that Guardians worked, even with the tone shift, probably mostly because it wasn't quite as exaggerated as I thought it would be, and because it existed at such a remove from the other stories, a literal galaxy away.

I am still doubtful of when the Guardians stuff bleeds into the already-established-on-Earth stuff. I still don't quite buy the notion of Rocket Raccoon existing in the same universe as Jessica Jones torturing and executing the man who raped her. Though to be honest, Daredevil and Jessica Jones are a fair bit darker than the films ever got, which is a tone shift of another kind. I guess when I get dramatically invested, I'm more likely to buy things getting a bit darker than getting sillier. That may just be my personal bias.

But it's something to think about in my own work. It occurred me to that maybe my silly Woodhouse parody larp Woodplum House could be part of the Breaking History universe, except that it's REALLY out there tonally from the rest, and that gave me pause. Again, it was weird thinking of that and Mrs. Hawking existing in the same world and theoretically being able to meet. Okay, I think she's dead by the 1920s, but that's beside the point. Hell, I'm even slightly worried about how the Hawking stories are going to take a slightly darker turn with the second trilogy. I don't want to go all grimdark even so, and I don't want to alienated people who liked the tone of the first set. I have to tell the story I have to tell-- just as any writer does --but it's one more of the many things to take into consideration when you're taking on the challenge of serializing.

The schedule of games for Intercon P is now available for viewing, and I've made my signup plan for this year.

Friday night I will be helping to run Pub Crawl, the new three-hour horde game I'm writing with Alleged Entertainment. It's interesting because it's ENTIRELY horde, and the cast rotates at player discretion the entire game.

Saturday morning I am running Woodplum House, my silly two-hour Woodhouse-inspired comedy of manners. Happily, it starts at 11AM who want a light fun larp and don't want to get up early.

That's what I'm certain of. I am trying to decide whether to sign up for one or both of the following games.

I am not wowed by any of the games in the Saturday afternoon slot, but I tend to like historical fiction dramas, so I might go for The Congress of Vienna. It should have some fun costuming and takes place after the defeat of Napolean, which is a cool time period.

On Saturday night I will probably go for wired_lizard's game, The Inversion of Me and My Room. It sounds weird and trippy, but I generally enjoy her games enormously, so that's good enough for me.

I think I will be signing up for Inversion first, and then we'll see how I feel about The Congress of Vienna by the time the second round comes around.

This weekend will be quiet for me, which will be good. I have no particular plans, and I'm fairly certain I will have the house to myself, so I think I will spend it at home getting things done. I really need to clean the place, get a little light exercise, and finish the larp I'm running at Festival this year.

Rehearsals for Mrs. Hawking began this week, and things went smoothly. Turns out it simplifies things when you already have the blocking worked out. Because of the holiday I have the whole weekend free, which is good for me, but we'll be getting into our regular about-four-days-a-week schedule on Monday. For me, I'm doing okay. I feel good working on a project I believe in and have high hopes for. I do well being productive, active, and forward-looking. The fact that a lot of this stuff necessary for production has been figured out previously makes thing smoother and easier.

The only thing I'm struggling with really is money. My finances have been a minor mess for a while now, and the costs of the last show didn't help. I'm expecting, because of not needing to buy nearly so much, that this next one won't be close to as expensive, but there's still no return on any of this. And there's already been a few expenses that weren't an issue last time around, like having to pay for rehearsal space. This is something I'm going to have to figure out, as it's starting to get serious. Not sure how to handle it yet. But I'm probably going to have to add in some other sideline just to bring a little more cash in.

The first round of signups for Festival of the Larps opens at 7PM this evening! I am excited to see how players make their choices. Remember that you have to sign up for the convention before you are allowed to sign up for individual events.

I hope some of you will consider playing in either or both of my two games, Brockhurst on Friday night or Woodplum House on Saturday morning. Brockhurst is a story-heavy narrative game of fairly standard form, set in a great house in Yorkshire during the First World War. Woodplum House is a light, frothy two-hour comedic game in a fanciful 1920s setting like Blandings Castle or the Jeeves and Wooster stories.

It occurs to me that other than the stark difference in tone-- Brockhurst, like most of the greater Breaking History universe to which it belongs, is a period drama, while Woodplum is a silly absurd romp --there is no reason why Woodplum could not be part of that same world. Heck, Woodplum takes place in 1922, less than ten years after Brockhurst, and in Shropshire like the Blandings stories, making it not difficult not to contradict anything in Brockhurst's Downton-Abbey-inspired Yorkshire. And nothing in the nature of the universe is all that different from anything that's possible in Breaking History. Again, other than the rather ENORMOUS tonal difference, there is theoretically no reason why Woodplum couldn't be devolving into freewheeling absurdity while Josie Jenkins is cutting it up in Chicago, or while the next generation of the Bellamys is working out their place in the changed world.

What am I going to sign up for, you ask? Well, I think I'm going to try not to take up too much space as a player, since the counts this year are a bit lighter than they've been in some years. But I would like to play Sky No Longer Blue on Saturday night, since I've never had the chance before. So that will likely be my action for tonight. Other than that, I may play nothing, or maybe I'll help fill a game that needs a player. We'll see how it shakes out!

Hey, larp fanatics! It's come time again to bid games to build the schedule for Festival of the Larps 2015!

The festival is going to be on Brandeis campus from April 17th-19th. And we need games! So go to the Festival website to put in your bids. Personally I recommend larger games of around twenty players, but of course games of every size have a place.

I personally am bidding a NEW game-- because I'm a nutter --called Woodplum House that I mostly wrote this weekend! It's a small silly 2-hour, 10-player comedy of manners! The blurb:

"The English countryside, 1922. Welcome to Woodplum House, the ancestral home of the prestigious Lilywhite family in the charming rural village of Stoke-on-Stump! Lord Nigel Lilywhite is hosting a lovely garden party preceeding the afternoon wedding of his only daughter Emmeline, with only a few choice intimates in attendance before all the guests show up for the ceremony. But in this silly comedy of manners, the polite social occasion will be turned upside down by lovers' quarrels, raffish pranks, and scandalous secrets of misspent youths. There may even be a mystery or two to solve! Join these genteel aristocrats as what should be a civilized afternoon tea erupts into high-spirited comedic escapades!

A 2-hour light, comedic game in parody of the works of P.G. Wodehouse, with no actual characters harmed. Expect roleplay-heavy gameplay with a high reliance on schtick and absurdity, with some interpersonal puzzle-solving."

DOESN'T THAT SOUND LIKE A CRACKING GOOD TIME? Also I'm incredibly proud of naming the village Stoke-on-Stump. It's perfect and hilarious.

I also want to bid at least one other game. But which one? The obvious choice I think is my most recent large game Brockhurst, the Downton-Abbey inspired one that ran last year and will run at Intercon this March. It's 19 players, and since it would only be third run I think it would fill again.

What does everybody think? Anybody have any votes? What should I run? What would you like to play in?