Kensei: A Boffer LARP in the making

The conversation began when my friend Kat mentioned he would rather go to a totally combat oriented LARP if it was well executed over a poorly executed Nordic LARP. This sparked in my head an idea. I've always love the stories behind tournaments. We've seen them all the time. Most of these are Martial Arts movies, Bruce Lee in Enter the Dragon, Van Damme in Bloodsport, The Championships in the Karate Kid. Anime like Dragonball had the Tankaichi Budokai, and there were numerous Tournaments in Yu Yu Hakusho. Hell, movies like Dodgeball and Balls of Fury(which is ripped straight from Enter the Dragon) all share the tournament style story telling.

What about this makes it so appealing? Mostly, it's the use of the tournament bracket system to build suspense and tension. It allows casts of characters to be in the same place at the same time and see which ones would/could/and should clash with each other. It's a time for deals to be struck, alliances to be made, and rivalries to be forged/ended/continued. Tournaments are breeding grounds for interactions on multiple levels.

One of the most popular examples of this bracket is Bruce Lee's Enter the Dragon. In truth, their tournament was never described in terms of actual organization. It was clearly a MacGuffin to get Bruce Lee to his revenge and interact with hustler John Saxon and bad mothafucka Jim Kelly. But let's look at this clip:

In this clip we have Lee versus O'Hara. We as the audience realize that O'Hara is responsible for the death of Lee's sister and she responsible for his scar. There is no dialogue or pithy exchanges during their match. They know what is at stake here. In the background you have the other fighters watching, with the Tournament Organizer holding Court and shaming his fallen minion and leaving with his entourage and setting up for the next intrigue.

My thinking started going: Well, why can't we make this into a LARP? A Boffer LARP, for sure, but one that is designed to enhance and highlight the emotional drama inherent in these genres of films. Why are these people here? What is at stake for them? What are the consequences of their winning? Their Losing? What are they willing to risk?

I was also thinking to my Theatre LARP friends. There are a lot of opportunities in a setting like this. Social Opportunities, Support Opportunities. Just because it's a tournament doesn't mean the only Combat is physical. There is a competition of politics, of social ladders and skills that require. Why should the drama be restricted to the ring?

And thus, the Kensei was born.

The Kensei is a LARP set about a generation into the future. Reality TV and Internet Media has become the main opiate for the masses. Presidential Regimes are toppled with a blog post, new starlets are made with nothing more than a camera and a night on the town when you've forgotten to your underwear. While not overtly stated in society, sensitivity to Sex and Violence have declined. Out of the Internet fighting pits came a man known only as Honor Reigns. Reigns had the right set of martial skill, honest charm and business savvy. With it, he made his image and technique into a house hold name, creating a martial arts boom. Soon, other schools began to form, and a whole new subculture took hold.

It's been 10 years since the rise of Honor Reigns Empire. Rich, famous and arguably The First Authority on Martial Arts in the last three generations, Honor has decided to hold a Martial Arts Tournament to decide who the best in the world is. He named the tournament Kensei, after the japanese word. Depending on the characters used, it means Saint of the Sword or Saint of the Fist. Honor Reigns has found the middle ground and declared it to mean the Saint of Combat. Many media outlets and schools question Reigns motives for holding the tournament. Some believe that Honor is planning to retire or has become ill, others see it merely as a publicity stunt to take Honor Media over it's financial plateau, some think Reigns wishes to use this as a personal spring board to something much larger than running a top Five Media Group.

Whatever the reasons, the tournament has brought forth fighters from various schools, both major and minor and those who hold no ties to any school. They have also brough workers, crafters, doctors and medics to make a name for themselves and their skills, it has also brought the managers, the gamblers, and of course the reporters to vie and barter with currencies real and esoteric. Alliances form, rivalries forged, and the fighting in the ring.

So far a handful of us have been going over surface material, possible "Races" of Fighters, Classes of Crafters and Social Classes. We've looked a lot to DR for influences in combat while looking at New World of Darkness for Social Considerations (Ie; the Harpies of Vampire the Requiem are the Media Class). I want this to be something that, even if you aren't a combat player, you could be important in. Dystopia Rising has something like this, but even the most skilled politicians in game most likely have some proficiency in weaponry. What if the lines are a lot clearer, what happens then?

I want to explore themes around competition. Corruption, Cheating, Politics, Fame, Infamy, Violence, Sex. All the things we know are going on behind the scenes in sports and entertainment, but we never see happen. I also want to do something that hasn't been done so far as I've seen: Use Media to record the LARP in real time. Media Class players must Vlog, Blog, or stream the event live and in character. That is an ambitious statement, but one that is interesting.

So far, we're at the Logistics section, how do we do this? We'd need space, possible sleeping areas for multiple days, internet access, and the like. It's not so much the problems we see but what we don't see that worries me.

That is why I'd like to bring this to your attention, my readers and friends. I'd love to get my friends in on this and make this a thing. So I'd love your input.

Later.

The End Was Nigh 3: Jacob Rude Against the World Crime League

Well, after six months of waiting and bashing my head in trying to get it out of my system. Scheduling with Camarilla/MES stuff conflicted with their schedules and this was the first time I could make it since Janurary. First up, thank you to Ericka for being awesome and giving me a ride, honestly, you are my LARP mentor.

For those of you who just went through the mods she through out this weekend, that last statement should scare the shit out of you.

So we got to game, and I set my gear down in the Barn. The Barn was empty for the most part. Since the Original Sin club moved/closed down, it's been something of a ramshackle for squatters without a place to live. I liked it, it was a lot less crowded than the shanty town. The problem I had was that the power was off (In Game, all essential areas had emergency red lights on), and since the Barn was so low priority that when it became pitch black out, so did the interior of the Barn. It sucked because someone placed a bench right infront of the bunk room door and I nearly went flying through the curtain. I have an idea for this in the future of the Barn isn't going to get used (maybe someone else can use it in my stead)

"I'm making a face at you right now, and you can't see it"
(Photo By Katherine Chartier)

Anyway, this was the first game where I finally got to play Jacob 'Rude' (not his real name). Jacob is a Retrograde, a mutation of humanity ('actual' humans are rare, and possibly villains) who were raised too close to radiation. They look ghoulish, almost zombie like, so they wear decorated masks to distinguish themselves. Their favorite phrase (or at least their most used) is "Don't shoot, I'm alive". They're pretty cool at handling radiation, halving damage from it. Rude is from the Brokelands, the remains of outer Old York (New York got bombed out and flooded). Like most people who grew up in Old York, Rude has a general "fuck you" attitude. In short, I play him like he has the Common Sense Merit from New World of Darkness, he looks around and goes "Are you fucking kidding me?" He's a Tinker, a builder of weapons and armor and carries with him a giant combat wrench (tm) he calls The Fix.

In game, Rude came in with a Caravan lead by Brock (played by fellow LARP buddy Ryan) who immediately set to get people to teach him his required skills. Five minutes in, he runs into Wulfram (played by my friend Kat). Wulf and Rude are friends from the Brokelands, with Wulf the Scavenger and Rude the Tinker. They immediately hit it off and decide to work together.

Of course that's where things went south.

It seems that someone was messing with Psionics (Psychics, basically DR's version of Mages). One of them created a Maelstrom of 30 Damage Fire that cleared out the area, with Wulf and Rude just barely outside of his periphery. Settling that, a bunch of us were tasked to help dig trenches to make sure radiation fallout didn't seep into the ground water. We ran through the forest searching for three sources of concentrated fallout, fighting through waves of Shamblers and Diggers, Basic Zed and Zed that can burrow through the ground, respectively. This was the part where being a Retro was cool, because every so often, everyone in the area got blasted with radiation damage. Rude got half of that damage. However, by the end of the run, everyone was declared to have radiation poisoning. That meant roleplaying vomitting, bloody eyes and ears. So I went to the Ops booth and dabbed some prop blood (I'm assuming, DR NJ tends to go balls out with these things), making sure I dribbled it on my mask to make it look like Rude was crying from his eyes.

We went back into town to get healed. Wulf and Rude both calling for healers. No one was available, so for nearly two hours, Kat and I played sick and dying in the main hall. The problem, the radiation took a point of health for every hour it wasn't healed. Rude had 1 point of health left on the sheet. So of course, that was obvious. Rude and Wulf started laughing. They were going to die. Rude, who was a fucking Retro was going to die of RADIATION SICKNESS. He was seriously pissed at this notion. At the last 15 minutes, someone showed up and did the required procedure. It was already late into the evening, and Rude had just had enough. So that was Friday.

Saturday began with Raider O'Clock. That point in the ass crack of the morning when the NPC shifts start and send out parties to attack the cabins and sleeping areas. My Raiders were Dread Surgeons, and their first trick was to gas the room (in real life, they shouted out the command. Anyone within earshot was subject to it's effects). Rude, a Retro, was immune mostly save for some grogginess. For the record, I'm not a morning person in real life. So I was groggy in real life as well. Next thing I know, someone (Ericka, who was Storyteller in charge that weekend) bound my hands while I was still getting my bearings and then proceeded to cut out one of Rude's kidneys. She was kind and did patch him up, but that was the start of the day.

Bitch.

So the hunt for Kidneys started. They caught the culprit but Rude never got his back. He fine with that though, though he was peeing in odd colors later on.

After that was the NPC shift. These are always fun, and this month was no different. It was also a change for me to get some color out in the sun. The ST on call was Ericka, and her first mod she had me go on was to roleplay with a group as a swarm of Cicadas. Cicadas in game are hard to kill and could eat through everything. They were noted by their buzzing sound, created through Kazoos. I didn't have one, so I started making the sound with my lips. We made a circuit around camp, which lead to people fleeing in droves as the buzzing got closer and closer. The lakefront area emptied out quickly, and then we found ourselves converging on the Double Tap, the main bar and meeting area for Characters. Many of them ran in to the bar and closed the doors, while some formed a literal shieldwall. What they didn't realize was that Cicadas could get around shields, and we did. They panicked and backed off, leaving the door open. Everyone filed right out of the building. In a game where Zombies, Raiders, and unspeakable horrors are out to get you, people ran shitless from swarms of cicadas.

The next Mod was a Raider mod, moving through the camp as a roving pack of hockey mask wearing Raiders. We had a good run, got killed a bunch of times by one concentrated group of skilled players. But that went south the moment they ran into another group of Super Raiders, soon the entire area was a warzone. At one point, I spawned (NPCs can respawn like in video games) and hid in a set of bushes. A pair of non combatant PCs showed up and I came out, scaring them. It's part of the job, harry the fighters, scare the townsfolk. Do not think you're safe in these woods.

The next module was an RolePlay mod, I was to give out the town's first Newspaper. I was a Newsie, so long as I didn't have to sing Carrying the Banner again (don't ask) I was okay. The module kinda went flat. I'll admit, I was pretty low on spoons at that point. Two travel and combat heavy modules in 80+ degree weather will wipe you out. The body was hydrated and the spirit willing, but there was no umph. I also picked a bad time to stop by the Double Tap. For those of you who don't play DR, Literacy isn't a given. In fact it's a skill you have to purchase in game. So many people couldn't read, and at 2 Credits a pop, it was a bit of a bitch to shell out for. Eventually, ST staff did it again and got better results. So I'm going to call that one on me.

My final mod was a Slaver Module. I played a part of a group of Slavers who set a honey trap for the towns folk to try and capture and enslave them. We put a bunch of the slave NPCs out in a field and had them screaming for help while others ran to town. When they came back with people, we sprang out of the nearby tents and towns and proceeded to lay siege on the players. We had about four or five PCs captured and tied up and ready to go. One escaped and got reinforcements, so we set up another ambush. This one turned into a battle, one we couldn't win. We had gotten a number of the PCs into a Wagon and were "ready to go" when the battle hit a pitch. A bunch of us decided to cut our losses and Fair Escaped on out. Those that remained fought well, and died. One of the PCs was killed in the fray.

After that, my shift was done, and I was pretty low on spoons. I ate some soup I brought with me and napped...for about two hours. I got up at a crawl and attempted to finish out the night. This was the night I got to Do Shit. Rude is a Tinker, that means Repairs mostly for him. He set up shop at a work bench and started bang away on peoples stuff to fix them, making him a nice pile of credits. He also stopped by a fight against Raiders and Chopped the NPCs broken weapons, getting him nice pieces of scrap for future building/possible trading. Barring the work, I socialized a bit, got to know the towns people. I saw a drag show in character and witness two weddings, one intentional and charming, the other unintentional, and psychotic. When the "presiding priest" is Nacho Man Randy Salvage, and his nuptials was a long winded diatribe  filled with ooh yeah, dig it, and ended with "And now by the power invested in me, I now pronounce you man and wife, dig it!" it was needless to say a whirlwind of emotion.

Of course, as the night rolled on, so did the terror. People died, and as they died they came out of the ground again. Death is not singular in Dystopia Rising. I mentioned earlier that the PCs are mutated strains of humanity. That mutation is in part connected to fact that everyone carries the Zombie Infection. It's what allows us to heal over time, our powers. However, once we're killed, the infection takes hold a little bit. Each  Strain/Race has a different number of times they can  be killed, some are 2 times, others are much higher. When those run out, you come back as a Zed. When you die before that, you go through the Gravemind, the hyper conscious mass that speaks to the Zed. It tortures you a little, and you come back relatively in tact, but slightly less than yourself and a bit crazier. 14 people died this month, which in a game of hundreds isn't a bad thing in a game. In a LARP though, it doesn't matter. These were now over a dozen people closer to their last ride when they'd come back and try to eat the ones they love.

Ericka, who plays Commissioner Rosemary Van Buren in the game, went to the Morgue to see if the rumors were true and her friend Daisy had been killed. Rude knew Rosemary (whom he called Rose) and went to support her. He also did it for another reason. It's not approved yet by the Storytellers, but Jacob Rude has a Fascination with Death. Retrogrades, when their Infection takes hold, they come back as any number of truly advanced and dangerous forms of Zed. Everyone knows it, and Rude is intimately aware of what will happen. He knows, with unyielding certainty, that someday he'll come out of a Morgue as something that may potentially kill the ones he legit loves, and they may have to be the ones they put down.

Soon, others joined the small 'party' at the morgue, awaiting loved ones who may have fallen. Some were only rumored to have died and resurfaced, some did not. No one came back as a Zed, so silent celebrations were had. Rosemary went to the Tap to make sure Daisy was okay, Rude went to inform her of the new "re-arrivals". While no one saw it, in the darkness between the Morgue and the Tap, Rude cried. I did that scene because, frankly, that is as much me living out his story than me living out his story for other people. It'll be revealed why that happened, but it was something I needed to experience personally. It worked.

Shortly after, I called it a night. I did not play Rude on sunday, instead opting to clean up the Barn early to get out and food after game early. If anyone asked, Rude left on the next Caravan out Saturday night.

In the end, I enjoyed the game very well. I have to admit that I got hit very hard and got tapped of energy. Sunday was murder for me to get up and get moving. I also felt like, despite knowing a fair chunk of the players and their PCs, I wasn't tied to anyone and I missed out. This was a sort of ennui and disconnection which probably added to my like of motivation. I'm not pinning that on anyone other than myself. That's my personality being inept with reaching out to others. I was almost happy in my little dark private barn (though for the love of god I'd have killed for a match in there) and just the quiet of screaming players and raiding Zed, but it also lead to a lot of what felt like me walking around witnessing other people, instead of taking place. That's a weakness I have to deal with in my gaming, and I'm glad I got to explore/discover that.

As for the future, well, Rude was a lot more fun to play than my first one. I can't guarantee every month. I'm unemployed and it costs to go to and fro from games. So I promise to come back. I want to thank Ericka, Allie, Shoshana, Bartosz, Alex, Kat, Ryan, Jason, Jester, Robin and Taran and a crew of others who made me feel welcome in game. Also like to thank Michael Pucci for building this fucked up nightmare circus of a game and Peter Woodworth, whose DR-centric novel "Dead Heroes: Runner" made me love Old York even more and I got to meet this month. You folks gave me a whole new kind of world to play in, and a whole new style of gaming to think about. I've got ideas, and you've only yourselves to blame.

So in the end, Jacob Rude will return. And so will his looney toons player too.

Later, and keep on swinging

Nordic LARP

A few weeks ago, I was introduced to The Monitor Celestra. Celestra is a game setting place in the Revised Battlestar Galactica on a ship of the same name. Located in Sweden, the game took place OOCly on a decommissioned Cold War era ship, which is in keeping with the aesthetic of the TV series. It's a game of politics, survival, interpersonal conflict. With the threat of Cylons looming over them, humans trapped in claustrophobic halls of steel are the biggest threat.

There's videos of it on youtube. It looked and felt like an episode of BSG. Those weren't actors doing scenes, those were LARPers enacting their roles. There was high tension and drama, with standoffs and political jeering in a way that felt like a bleed in between reality and fiction.

And apparently, it's coming to the States.

So yes, I made Seal Noises. I like the concept, and I would love to play in there. I even have the idea of playing a Colonial Priest, as Religion was very much a factor of the show and my love of the Hellenic Mythology is known. I would like to explore the nature of the gods and faith in such a chaotic nature, and as my friend Sarah mentioned, I could have or create myself a copy of the Sacred Scrolls.

So as I began my research, I learned that the Monitor Celestra was a Nordic LARP. Most people would go "Well, yes. The game was run by Swedish gamers." However, I've heard the term before. Nordic LARPs are experimental games developed from the ground up. Their main focus is primarily immersion. You aren't a PC with Stats, you're a character living out these lives. Through my studies and watching videos in Youtube (Look up: NordicLarpTalks) I saw games that had players as mental patients, and the marshals did contradictory things to give the impression that the players were perceiving reality in a distorted way. I saw a video about a LARP where the developers had created a space where not only did they simulate a desert region, they could control the lighting to set up an 18 hour day/night cycle. The theme of this LARP was not "We have powers and therefore let's see what we can do" it was an exploration of Love and Intimacy when things like biological gender are not the social norms for relationships.

Most of these games are one-shots, meant only for a few days. The players and devs set up before hand with workshops to get them prepared for their roles and exploration. Where most Larps are interested in rules, mechanics and errata, Nordic Larp do workshops to explore the culture of their people. From how they live to how to translate things like Sex and Violence into LARP. One Nordic LARP developer even commented that in most LARPs it is oddly more likely to die than have sex. Where most games are escapist in nature, these games seem mostly geared towards exploration and delving into themes.


This is what strikes me most. LARPing in the Nordic countries doesn't seem like a dorky way of playing games, not entirely. They're exploring themes and learning. They're discussing using LARPs as teaching exercises. Culture, social norms, languages, conflict resolution, and god knows what else. This is a burgeoning field  of interactive education and counseling.

I was blessed with an internship under a Drama Therapist. She taught me about putting on external roles to explore and juxtapose with internal ones or to express the conflict between them. For some of the patients, it worked and they got some insight. For others, it was at the very least fun to explore and play and forget their situations for an hour. I say I was blessed because in most other careers, my hobbies of pretendy fun times would lead to me being committed more often than not being treated like someone with a mental disorder than treating someone with a mental disorder.

A lot of the work we did in my internship started with warm up practices, exercises, practices, then a debriefing at the end to see where everyone is at the end and to help them come out of their roles (a key thing, if you've been in a particularly long and/or strong session). This is the same thing as what is going on during preparation for these Nordic Style LARPs. What would happen if my supervisor had access to this system? What if the psychology field saw benefit from it and wished to explore?

Nordic LARPing strikes me on the fact that it's an all or nothing thing. You're in there the whole time, minimal breaks if any. You're in the world, fully immersed. I see a lot of this being used in boffer LARPs like Dystopia Rising, whose staff often use their plots as messages, social experiments and examinations of character. Considering some of the staff for DR, who are in ways associated or also keeping tabs on the Monitor Celestra coming to America, it doesn't surprise me that their game is more than just an excuse to go out into the woods to club one another with foam.

In the end, I find myself drawn to Nordic style. I'm too much character driven narrativist. I enjoy having myself taken out of myself and made to view things differently. With projects like Celestra and others coming through the pipeline, hopefully I'll be able to partake.

Or hell, I'll make one myself.

Later

Developing the Fear 2: Man Plans, Fate Laughs

So, the time is nearly upon us. New Chronicle. That time in the Mind's Eye Society (nee' Camarilla) where all of the stories go back to the beginning. Everything is rebooted, and we all make new characters. I have been preparing for the New Chronicle in one form or another since August of last year, building and defining ideas for my characters in the various venues as well as the setting for Mage. I have built, organizes, planned and disseminated information.

One of the projects I've been working on is a setting document for the venue. It started when the Changeling the Lost ST made one, and then every other Storyteller in the room (past and present) collective said "I hate you". So I made one, aided and abetted by said Lost ST Abby with assistance from my friends and fellow players Brandon, Ephraim, Greg and Matt. It's pretty cool and I love to share:

The Supernal Stage Handbook

But, that being said. I still don't feel prepared. In fact, two weeks before game goes live, I'm pretty fucking terrified. These are my fears

The first is that The game tanks. Mage just isn't that popular of a game in the city (or really the Region). Most of the players are those who loving LARPing in general (god love em) but in a town where studio space costs to play it gets to be a matter of "Can we afford to hold this small game that isn't bringing much of anything in?" I know I'm a lone few who can say this, but I love Mage and would actually be disheartened if I couldn't play/run in it. I've been dealing with the Coordinator in making concessions to keep Mage strong, as well as trying to use the small size as a way to recruit people into the club. It's a shitty feeling knowing your game is on the chop block, but this is actually something I will fight for to keep.

2) You know that handbook I just posted? All of that material and background going for shit. I don't know how, I don't know where, but just the thought of that amount of work being disregarded. It's just a fear from last chron where there was no sense of personal agency and everything had to be doled out to the players. A few of them are playing a very "a Mage can  be an island". My counter point, and ultimately my plan to prevent this is to remind them that "For those that remember Atlantis, Mages have never had any sort of luck with islands." I plan on making an invested plot for each one, bringing them in a bit further. But this is going to be a lot on me, and I hope I can do the job.

I don't know, I hate this feeling. I've prepped, I prepared, I love this venue, but I feel like I have less of a clue now than I did in October.

Man plans, Fate laughs. And Fate is a very active things in Mage.

later

Putting on the Mask: Prepping for Roleplay

So in my last post I talked about giving your character attitude to enhance your performance and to make roleplay better. I didn't do much of a good job in saying how. The reason for this is simple: I can't speak for you. I can only speak for myself. I hate writing something and making people feel like I mean "And thou shalt." If you have a different method and it works for you, do it up. Hell, TELL ME ABOUT IT. I like hearing new things.

So this post is going to be more about the development of attitude for a character, which dovetails nicely into another discussion: preparing for RolePlay. Ready? Good!

As I've mentioned before, I'm a Jungian Counselor in my day job. One of Jung's many contributions to psychology was the concept of the Persona. The Persona is described as that aspect of our Self (Capitalization intended) that we put on when interacting with others, and is commonly depicted as a Mask. Every day, we put on the Mask of the Student, the Teacher, the Artist, the Worker, The Spouse, The Lover, the Fighter, the Dreamer. We wear Masks that are mixtures of these things depending on who we are with and the setting we find ourselves in.

As a roleplayer, I find it easier to play characters that hold a kernel of myself in them. Taglia was the part of me that wished to help but did not wish anyone to discover his own weaknesses, Rhys was the socially outraged New Yorker, Declan was the writer who never wanted responsibility, Rave was the snarky wiseass who kept secrets to protect himself and ended up bleeding for it. These are all aspects of Me, the Self as I see it. I'm not saying that there isn't anything to be said of creating a character wholecloth. As I'm discovering with Owen, my upcoming Littlefinger-as-a-Sith-Lord Vampire, being a morally grey character after years of playing White Hats is interesting and challenging.

My default method is to take a part of me and build with that as the premise. The one thing I truly and totally do not approve of is playing an avatar of yourself with a sheet. I've noticed far too many people who put too much of themselves into their characters take things far too seriously than fun-pretendy times. You are portraying these characters, you *aren't* these characters. So in my humble experience, always build a character that, while in some ways similar, is not inherently you.

So now comes the question: How, Craig, do you do this?

A few tricks, a lot of them coming in the development and referring back to them on the way to the next game. The first is simple: Have a background, write it out, keep a copy with you. Remember the details to remember where you character is coming from. Rhys came from a family without a father and a negligible mother, a manipulative grandmother and a secretive grandfather. As such, his past was laden without trust. Write these out and read them as you start your prep, write out new ones as time goes on. I usually do written reaction papers on the way out of a game or in response to a scene. Sometimes it's easier when your game allows online scenes where you can act out their reactions, have a record, and still be able to walk away from it. But if a game does not generally hold an online aspect there is usually some form of journal or scene written that describes the PC at this point in their life. You take these and you read them to remember who they are and where they are, so you know how they would react to related (and sometimes unrelated) things.

Rhys was very close to becoming a player Avatar, as was Rave. Both of them had my core reaction of analysis and snark. But I put enough history into their backstories as to make their motivations and reactions distant from my own. I'm a writer, I do not write my protagonists to win and they will often suffer even if I have to do it myself. This requires a lot of sitting in the metaphorical mirror and getting real with yourself. Rhys was decidedly more screwed up than anyone care to notice and Rave never finished a story unless he was broken and bleeding either metaphorically or physically.

Another trick I do are playlists, all of my characters have a playlist. Rhys was mostly Muse and classic Rock,  Owen is mostly Rza, Kanye and a few others, all describing sex and power. Rude is mostly Thrice and some Imagine Dragons, earthy tones but with an acid kick. Rave was fueled by Yuki Kajiura, especially the track Cynical World. This is to help me get into their mood, tempos, upswings. I live in the North Bronx, meaning at best I have an hour train ride into New York City. This gives me plenty of time to put the music on, read my material and go in guns blazing

Another thing, and this is the one thing that if you learn nothing else from: Make Ties. Nothing enforces your character more than other players and their characters being in on it. Reality is based on perception, a thing becomes more real the more people agree that it is real. Somebody thought of it, and someone believed it. Right now I'm in the process of building Jacob Rude, my Retrograde Tinker (Who, by sheer nature of being a Retrograde, gets to wear a literal mask) in Dystopia Rising, one of the things that I must do as a player is create ties for him so he can enter the space more readily as other people know him and his story. His credibility as a character is maintained in no small part by the other characters around him.

And having character ties, especially historical ones, helps in building them. Rude had a mother and a father, some siblings. A tie with a PC made another character his uncle on his mother side, gave him a location as his home. Their tie comes in at the Uncle's death, peppering that relationship. My Mage in the Accord venue has romantic ties with at least one PC, which began and end messily in the bathroom of the club he was DJing in. That tells me he's the kind of person who fucks around, and having another PC to attest to that reinforces it. Maintaining this part of the character is easy, you just play. Creating ties nails down aspects of your character into solid ground, because now other people are involved.

Finally, and often something I forget, is the physical build up. By this I mean trying to get a few ticks down in my head well enough so he is distinguishable from me. Rave, my NY Jedi Persona, was a master of Shii Cho, a style of lightsaber combat. I prefer the form myself, but while I am definitely more analytical and observant, Rave was the one hauling through the battlefields after only a quick decision. So before I had to perform for a show, I would do the sword form of Shii Cho we made in Jedi. The first time would be as me, the second time as him. I would do this over again until a little bit of the outward swagger and the snarl formed on my lips, until the careful step forward was a committed lunge. While it was subtle, I felt the shift, and that is all you need sometimes.

All of these things help to build and enhance your character's Mask and keep it going. Congratulations, you've got a character Persona you can portray. I think this method is healthy because you've built up something that is insulated from your personal Self. I can't imagine playing Dystopia Rising, a game that is as much physically taxing as well as it is emotionally taxing. My friend Ericka plays a charcter who, in one of the more recent games, was executed on the steps of the main building by an invading army. She also recounted the traumatic experiences of her character (she got better after her brains were blown out) in the more previous game and decided to back out because it was becoming too much for her. She decided to take off the mask of her PC and be herself for a while/do things she as a person wanted/had to do. Imagine a player whose character was only a weakly veiled version of themselves. Imagine someone who was Too Far in the head of their characters in a full Method Acting overboard Tom Cruise kind of way? How ugly could that turn if their character went through that? How much damage? Having a metaphorical mask to put on and take off helps protect you from the wear of this other poor bastard you're playing.

Now, for the most important trick, what to do after the game. I like to call it the Debriefing Process, in which a person comes down from playing their characters, effectively removing their mask until they need to put it on again. A lot of this is doing the reverse of building/putting on the Mask in the first place. Write out your character stuff as soon as you can and then set it aside until the next game. Pour the memories out and then put them aside. Listen to music, but put it on shuffle, let other themes and tracks be heard. The idea is to reassert yourself as your dominant Persona and not the one you've created. Debrief and take a break.

It's not a perfect system. I had a hard time doing it when I first did Dystopia Rising, it's the shock of the immersive LARPing experience. It's easy to throw yourself into hypothetical scenarios when you aren't actually in the woods in the middle of the night with things chasing after you with malicious intent. It took me a weekend of NPCing to get to that point, with the key moment of me putting on the mask of an outerguardsmen and knuckling up to the front lines of a battle.

Live Action Role Play is all about exploring situations and scenarios, some of them maybe be a little too far out but that's what the extra padding of the Persona is for. It's the land of make believe, and you get to play whatever roles you've always dreamed of in worlds you may or may never have for a few hours, or a day, or a weekend with other like minded people. We enhance our time together by making the veil of disbelief as see through and raised as we possibly can and then share in the communal come down once veil has lowered. That is the core of what we do, in my opinion, take with it what you will.

Later,

Walking the Walk: Attitude in LARP

Last week, I did a class for New York Jedi. The class was about doing quick solo performances that display your character (Shameless Plug Here). In the end, it wasn't what I expected. Everyone did sword demos and movements, but there was something missing for quite a few of them.

A few years back at New York Comic Con, my friend Rob watched us perform. Also a performer, Rob mentioned that the fight choreography was mechanically sound, but it was clear that it was stage and choreographed. It was missing character. Showing off the videos from the class, I realized that this was the same thing. Characters have ticks, small little things that make them their own. This can be as simple as a repeated flourish of a saber, or the bark of laughter to punctuate a strike, or the snarl of a fierce competitor. Without those beats, those little nuances, what is the difference between your character and you?

The reason for my belief comes from he fact that we as performers have the task of making the audience, that nebulous clutch of people for whom we don't exist, complete the circuit to lift of the veil of disbelief. They've come to see and to try, we have to give them the boost. In Jedi, our audiences are usually fan boys at conventions or passersby on the street. They've seen it before or they don't know what they're seeing or expecting. So we as performers need to give them as much of a boost as possible. We need to give them the illusion that this is a fight and not just a staged fight. There's a difference. The difference is Attitude.

But wait, this is a LARP blog.

The same principle extends to LARPing, how does your character comport themselves when interacting? What are their ticks, their reactions? I've seen players come in and just portray themselves cranked to eleven. While this is all well and good, it gets boring if it's the same character all the time in and out of game. So what makes your character distinct from the other characters and yourself?

Let me take a look back at my past PCs and some of the future ones.

Vincenzo Taglia: The phrase "drink to forget" didn't apply to uber-eidetic vampire, but like hell if he didn't try. The need for a drink was strong in Tag. His major character moment came when in his first game the Ordo Dracul went out on a mission to rescue a missing Dragon. They returned and the wine had been drunk. Taglia went on a five minute rant in broken Engilish/Italian (another tick, he would slip into his native Italian when upset) to the rescued Dragon about the wine being gone. Wine/Lacrima became something of his tic. To the point where when three other Mekhet came up to him with plot, they asked if he was ready to listen. "No," he said. He drained his glass of wine and filled up the next one. "Now, I'm ready."

Rhys: The stereotypical New Yorker. Nothing shocked him, he saw it all, he'd seen it all. Even if he hadn't. It didn't help that Rhys was tethered to the will of New York City. He'd walk, in, see the situation, sigh and then go off. The phrase "I'll ask"/"I asked" became his thing, as he went off to get information from the City. His identity as a New Yorker in a game trapped in a train station helped set him a part from the other Mages. This character and his attitude will be coming back to the Accord venue.

Now, the problem comes in the development of the next characters. How do they carry themselves?

Jin: My West Court Lost, is the designated Common Sense in the room. While I tend to play things frustrated, Jin is more stoic and direct. He follows the attitude of the knife, the answers are simple once you cut away all of the rubbish. So his tone is direct, his motions sure. He doesn't do anything that isn't being fully committed on.

Owen: Owen lives in the world of Greys. He's neither actively evil nor openly good. His tone is usually ambiguous, and his mannerisms passively flippant. A lot of Littlefinger and Alan Rickman, the shrug of death to morally questionable things. "What is his talking about?" /Shrug "No Idea".

Jacob Rude: Oh dear sweet, half rotted off Jacob Rude. Acerbic, speciest, pragmatic and with a survival track a mile wide. Jacob's main trick is always being mindful of the exits. He's not a coward, but he's not stupid. He's not a fighter, he's a fixer. He knows when it's time to cut and run. If he's in a room with multiple exits, be sure he'll try and stay in the center. If he's in a room with only one exit, his back will never be turned to it.

So with these in mind, how does one go about having attitude?

It's simple: just do it. Don't make a show of it, don't explain to people what you're doing or be obnoxious about it. It sucks to beat your audience (in LARPing, your fellow players are the audience) over the head with what you're doing. Just do it, it's natural to your characters, make it natural to you. If Rude is going to check for all of the exits, then I'm going to do a cursory scan, maybe calmly peek into a a room. Someone calls me out on it or brings it up, you answer. It's not a big thing to him, it's natural. That's what attitude is about, you don't broadcast it, it just is. It won't be perfect at first, it never is, but you work through the kinks and you make it more natural until you can get it. I do recommend preparing and post-game. But more on that in another post.

Later,

If you want me to go into this more, or wish to add to it, please comment. This blog is me trying to put my thoughts in order, and having another voice always helps - C

Genre Appropriateness: It's not what you do, it's how you do it.

This blog comes from something Michael Pucci, game developer and founder of Dystopia Rising, had said. To paraphrase, he commented on the act of players watching movies and taking in media to get into the mood before a game. He mentioned that the popular movie of choice was "Zombieland", a comedy/action movie about the Zombie Apocalypse coming in and survivors with their own agendas.

It's nice, it's got Zombies, Tallahasee is definitely a Merican if there ever was one, but it doesn't nail down the Genre. What the story is at it's core.

A few years back I taught a class at New York Jedi about Psychology and Storytelling of Star Wars. I open it up with one simple question: What genre is Star Wars?

It's a fairly simple question, right? Wrong. I got Sci Fi, Space Opera, Adventure, Mythic Epic (someone was trying to appeal to the teacher). In the end, Star Wars is a Fantasy-Adventure story. Yes it has Aliens and Spaceships, but that could just as easily be Races and Ships in a more medieval setting. Star Wars took elements from several genres, Western (Tattooine), Jidai-geki (The Jedi), WWII films (the trench run and the Empire in general) and a bunch of other sources and mixed them in a bowl. At it's heart, it's a Fantasy-Adventure tale.

Why Fantasy instead of Sci Fi? Because the Force is explained in great length (some times too much length, Episode I) and the technology is never glanced at. Planet Killers? Sure. Swords made of expanding beams of laser that can somehow stop? Done. No questions asked. The Force is gone to at great lengths by Yoda, Obi-Wan, Vader and the Emperor. It's their magic system, and that makes it a Fantasy.

So what is Dystopia Rising at it's core? It's a Survival Horror game. Here you are, at the end of it all, with low resources, the clothes on your back, and an entire world that wishes to rip your face off and eat it/wear it/wipe it's ass with it. Zombies are just the more obvious attraction, cockroaches in the grand scheme that just seem to multiply and swarm.. You've also got Raiders, Nazi's, Pikies, G-Men, Stephen King's managerie of Oh My Fucking Christ You Sick Bastard,  and anything else coming out of the minds of the sick puppies running the show.

Hi Guys.

So is a game that has Zombies in it a Zombie game? Up to you. Me, Zombies may be a common occurrence, but the themes of the game are survival and community. One of my favorite novels is the Newsflesh trilogy, written by Mira Grant (aka Seanan McGuire). Beautiful political thriller about the media, it just happens to be during the Zombie Apocalypse, except the Apocalypse happened and people just moved on with their lives a lot more paranoid and very armed. I love the series and would love to play DR to the effect of the series, but it doesn't mesh because the themes in it do not jive fully with Survival Horror.

So to counter that, people suggested a few other sources. Spaghetti Westerns (The Original Django comes to mind, look it up); Deadwood, with it's backwater encampment feel and ensemble cast of bastards, fuck ups, and the odd decent person is actually perfect for reference; Book of Eli, a Post Apocalyptic movie starring Denzel Washington nails most of the aesthetic of being in a "after the end times" scenario. Hunting cats, trading, scavenging, moral ambiguity and a sense of nihilism vs. higher purpose; the Original Evil dead, cabin in the woods with unspeakable nightmares just waiting.. There are dozens of other sources, but I think at it's heart you have to focus on the elements of Survival in nightmarish times.

This whole talk got me to thinking about my game: Mage The Awakening. What were 'It's Themes? It's genre? The story of Mage is, at it's core, a story about the corrupting nature of Power and the corruptibility of the Soul. You have access to the powers of magic, can sense, nudge, shift, control and hack the very fabric of Reality. How does this affect you? What happens when you fuck up? Last chronicle, the game had taken a very strange "Superfriends" vibe. These were people who joined together to do battle against evil...except they had arbitrarily declared himself "Good". That was boring, because what is the point of playing in the world of Darkness when everyone is playing the hero?

So, I reminded them of the problems of the soul. And corrupted ta number of them to the power of the Abyss. This chronicle, I'm building a setting where the enemies have taken over the City and the players need each other and the NPC factions to stamp them out. Power is not just who can use the biggest spell, it's how they're used. I drew a lot of inspiration for the Seers of the Throne, the mega conspiracy that attempts to rule mundane and magical societies, from the Syndicate, the conspiracy in the X-Files. These are men that may never be seen or heard from the players, but their agents and influence are always felt.

I also, personally, find the nature of the soul a fascinating and key topic for the venue, especially when most of the threats to Mages are often ones that seek to eat/corrupt/control their souls. I tend to find the esoteric discussions of Ghost in the Shell (both movie and the Stand Alone Complex Series) as well as the Matrix Series (minus Keanu 'I know kung fu' Reeves) as good examples of this. Mage deals with the concepts of Reality, Perception. There are no hard truths except the ones we make, how do we deal with that when it is shown that we can be wrong about how we see the world? These sources are actually listed in the core book of the game as being inspiration.

So what am I saying with all of this? Be mindful of the genre in which you are playing, discern and parse through it. Does this mean that those wanting to use Zombieland to psyche up for DR? Or Chinese Wuxia for Mage? Hell no, you add to the palette and sandbox of the game. However, always be aware of what the game is at it's core. This runs the risk of lockout or hijacking a game.

But more on that in another post.

Later

If you liked this article, disagree with it, or just wish to throw your love and devotion (or even your hatemail) comment down below. If you have a topic, or would like me to follow up, shoot me a comment here as well. - Craig