As mentioned, the March game happened over the weekend. It seemed to me to be more low-key than the last one, though player comments indicate the opposite. The February one seemed to me as GM crazy and hyper-kinetic, whereas this one seemed a more subtle game. But players said that they had chunks where they weren't doing anything in February, but were constantly busy in March. This seems interesting to me, though I wonder about the phenomenon. Is it just a difference in my perspective as GM versus their perspective as players? Could I in some way control the flow of play to keep people constantly active? It always seems to me that once play begins I as GM have very little control over what happens (which is a good thing).

Actually, it's possible that this game was more predictable and according-to-plan than previous games. Like things happened as we expected them to, rather than veering off in unexpected ways. Except when the alien in a space-time vortex got stuck inside Josh's brain. That was unexpected, which meant we didn't have the proper character sheet prepared. But lots of other things happened very much as I had hoped they would, from Josh's crazed, bestial survivor interacting with the PCs to the conflict between military and scientists to the final reunion between Rachel Gaumata and Manassah Rayburn in his proper body. This was good, since it meant the game went mostly as we planned for, though it also meant there weren't as many moments where I as GM was amazed by the player's awesome creativity in solutions.

At times I was amazed at how fast the players figured stuff out. The puzzle for the door to upstairs was solved in like five minutes, and the captain's safe didn't take much longer to open. By the end of the game, they had figured out much of the mystery, though they became more distracted by events on the station while they were there. Between that and not asking the space/time vortex/alien the right questions, they never got quite the entire story what happened previously. But they got a good chunk, and possibly could get more from alien minds stored in crystals.

There were a lot of props in this game. An entire trunkful, and I think they did their job very well. It was a game about exploration and the external environment, so the larger number of props helped the players focus outwardly rather than on PC interactions (though there were plenty of those as well). While I was GMing, I saw Wendy playing a drug addict totally miss the drugs she was seeking because of all the other props in the medical kit. And the security badge prop helped the PCs solve how to open the captain's safe in a way a simple card or something wouldn't have. And Cheyenne as a corporate stooge was apparently hoarding crystals the entire game, an awesome use of props right there.

The science fiction background I had come up with seemed to work out pretty well. It threaded in and out of character backgrounds and documents, so that the station being on a distant outpost seemed fairly real. I will have to think more about how to best use setting information in a LARP.

What would I do differently if I ran it again? Write up a sheet for the time/space vortex alien, firstly. Possibly write up an entry for Hong Jacobson, too, so the PCs might find him and he might lie to them about what happened. There needed to be a bit more information about what happened right before the station stopped communicating, and Hong could give some of it. The alien could give more, but in both cases the difficulty would be in getting that information out of them. Scatter Dr. Koop's notes across more of the station.

I did have a couple moments of filling in additional details on the background, after the game was over. One thought was a different explanation of why there were only two military characters. Another explained why Lt. Washington didn't recognize Manassah Rayburn. Neither of these ideas is really very useful to me any more, but they would have been good a few days ago.


Regardless, this game worked out very well. I personally liked giving all the characters names assembled at random from the "Space Cowboy" entry in the Story Games Name Project. Then again, I always have enjoyed giving character ridiculously elaborate names, as my D&D character If-Not-for-The-Grace-Of-The-Gods-Above-Thou-Hadst-Been-Damned Varnamo. (He's named after a historical Puritan. And a piece of furniture from Ikea.)

I will attempt to write up directions for running the LARP, though we'll see how long that would go. If the last month's instructions went nine pages long, how long would this month's instructions be? We may find out, in another post.

How To Run February's LARP

Is apparently a lot of information. I tried to write up what was going on behind the scenes, which wound up being nearly as much information as was given to the players in the first place. Hopefully, by reading this document someone else could create a similarly entertaining evening for their friends.

Even those not interested in running the game might be interested in the "behind the scenes" thinking going on in the game. I tried to explain my decision making process as GM, and why and how some things were done. I didn't delve to much into why some characters are written the way they are, but you get a little sense of that in the casting section. It still didn't cover, say, why so many character had few actual demonstrable superpowers (so that they might be suspected of being Brainjack) and similar issues. Perhaps that might be fodder for a future blog post.

February LARP report

Despite my total failure at logistics, the game went really well. I though some of the time I had scheduled for 7:30, when I in fact scheduled for 7:00, so we wound up even later than I though we were. Then when we got there, I realized I had everything except the character sheets. Which are, you know, the most important part. So Amber had to drive back to our house to get them, then return.

But that meant that I had half and hour or so to explain to everyone the situation, spell out what each room meant in game, point out the props, etc. And each player had the chance to see what everyone else’s name badges (which we had) and get a little idea of the other character (and a bit about themselves, too).

The Davis family costume trunk served very well for this game. The Bank Robbery game in January had little costuming involved, but everyone had at least a bit to make them look superheroic. Seaman wore a cape, which I thought got the right useless superhero vibe: how do you swim underwater while wearing a cape? Warning Sean ahead of time that he was playing a Viking meant he had some Nero gear, including a vest of chainmail, so his costume was awesome. Hopefully Amber will post some pictures of the game soon so other people can see how it all looked.

Once we got character sheets, everything got going smoothly. The really basic conflict system seemed to work very well, and it seemed to encourage the behavior I wanted to encourage. Actually, it’s surprising how many of my plans actually went as planned, like Copycat not having any powers but always avoiding having to show off his powers (which then put some suspicion on him as the game went on).

Lots of spontaneously entertaining things happened in game. Bjorn Yesterday wound up worshipping Detachable Head as a god, because he saw the Head detach and was confused and terrified. Powerbroker initially tried to explain this as a demon, then magic, but both those encouraged Bjorn to attack, so eventually the only excuse he’d accept was the Head was a god and that was a miracle. Bjorn then followed the Head around and gave him presents and things.

Copycat at one point was cornered by Powerbroker, who wanted to see Copycat’s (nonexistent) ability to duplicate superpowers in action. This was to prove Copycat wasn’t the villainous Brainjack. Using her ability to speak any language, she said something in Swedish about Ikea, so Copycat seized on the only word he recognized and said (in English) “I love Ikea!”. Powerbroker, revising the experiment, tried to have Nestor talk to Copycat in Swedish, but Copycat distracted Nestor by asking or an autograph and asking about stories from back in Nestor’s heyday. By the time the story was done, Nestor’s senile brain had forgotten about the Swedish conversation.

At one point, Nestor determined that maybe Seaman’s true power would only show up under great duress, so he encouraged Seaman to endanger himself or stop drinking water constantly. Seaman didn’t like this plan (what if Nestor was wrong and it just killed him?). So we never got to test it, but I would have gone along with it, because I though it was funny.

There was a lot of good stuff going on in the LARP. I had a lot of fun watching it, and I think everyone else did, too. I think it was more successful than the Bank Robbery larp, overall. Let’s hope next month will be even better than this one. Most of the LARP documents are online, though I'm trying to write up a document about "How to run this game" that might make more stuff clear.

LARP style

LARPing is not really my normal playstyle. Most of my gaming is of face-to-face tabletop roleplaying games (like, you know, Dungeons and Dragons or Polaris or Traveller or something). Why I chose to write a dozen LARPs is therefore an interesting question which I might explore later on at some point. But I mention this for a reason:

It often happens that I am sitting around talking to some guy that I know in a tabletop game that I mention LARPing. And they say something about how they don't like LARPing. Which seems weird to me, since they're already sitting around a table talking in a funny voice pretending to be an elven necromancer or whatever. How is it any different to do it while standing up?

So I pry into this (or sometimes my wife pries into this in my stead). And it almost always turns out that the person's live action roleplaying experience comes down to one of A) NERO, B) The Society for Creative Anachronism or C) White Wolf LARPing.


I'm not going to talk shit about any of these groups, though none of them are hobbies I personally enjoy. But it seems to me that these and similar entities represent the primary Gateway Games into LARPing. You know, the games that introduce people to the general idea of LARPing, from which they can then find other LARPs they might like better. And they are notably bad at it, since every one of the aforementioned tabletop only players who has attended one of our games enjoyed it and is willing to attend more of the LARPs I have done in the past.



But the fact of the matter is that "LARPing" as a hobby contains a huge variety of possible pursuits. The three big things linked above are all very distinct from one another. Beyond these there's a variety of other possible forms LARP could take, ranging from crazy Scandinavian "Jeepform" games to historical reenactment to who knows what else.



So what, specifically, am I interested in? While LARPing is a big field, and i am interested in exploring it more thoroughly over the course of the year, I have a history of running self-contained oneshot LARPs for 7-15 people, with varying amount of rules involved. Generally, all the conflict has been between player characters, and NPCs have been all-but-nonexistent (the hostage negotiator showed up for perhaps five minutes in the bank robbery, for example). In fact, my ideal so far has been to have the GM be largely superfluous once the game starts: the situation is wound tight enough that the character just interacting with each other will create a memorable evening. No NPCs or other outside help required.

Rules structures used vary considerably, ranging from the complete Unknown Armies rules to published LARP rules to stuff I made up to nothing more than "If someone shoots you, decide if your character died. Otherwise, LARP it out."

Costuming and props have been encouraged, but decidedly optional. This is largely a practicality matter: among other things, I am reluctant to hand out characters until the day of the LARP, in case someone's availability changes and I have to recast key parts. Boffer weapons and physical fighting haven't been featured at all.

The best examples would be to either A) read the information from the Bank Robbery LARP, or B) see some similar games: in the past we ran multiple events published by Interactivities Ink, or used the Unknown Armies scenario Jailbreak!. Those are the games most directly comparable to what I am trying to make: several player characters, in conflict with one another, with secrets and varying motivations. The situation is simply wound tight enough that letting the player characters interact will inevitably make fun things happen.


No idea how much of that will be true across all the LARPs I write this year. I might try selectively violating these rules for each game as we get to them. But so far those guidelines have been true most of the time in most of the events I have run or written.

So maybe you have some idea what I mean when I talk about LARPing.