by Lizzie Stark
Dungeons & Dragons, now published by Wizards of the Coast, is based around statistics generated with dice. Players use dice to generate a list of numbers that provide numerical values for different character attributes. For example, a character with an intelligence of 6 is dumb, a character with an intelligence of 14 is smart, and a character with an intelligence of 20 is a genius. Some larps use the same technique to generate character statistics, occasionally substituting cards for dice, while others give players a set number of points to allocate among different statistics or use another technique. A referee runs the game, which may take place over the course of a single session or in multiple sessions that can run years—a “campaign.” The referee, or game master (GM), has different names depending upon which tabletop role-playing game a group is playing. In Dungeons & Dragons, the GM is called a Dungeon Master or DM; in Chaosium’s Call of Cthulhu, the GM is called the Keeper; and in several games, most notably in White Wolf’s Vampire: The Masquerade, the GM is called a Storyteller or ST. During a game session, the GM describes a setting to the group of characters: “You wake up in a muggy, poorly lit dungeon. There is a door at one end of the room.” The players, in turn, describe their actions to the GM, for example, “I walk over to the door and try to open it.” If the door is locked, game mechanics happen. If a thief wants to pick the lock, he rolls a specific set of dice to generate a random number and then adds that number to the relevant stat on his card. That number is checked against the numerical difficulty of the lock, which is assigned by the GM, either in advance or on the spot. If the thief’s number is larger, the attempt to pick the lock succeeds. In a fight between a character and a monster, the mechanic is more difficult. First, players and monsters roll dice to determine the order in which they may take their turns, an action called “rolling initiative.” During each turn, a character or monster who wants to attack rolls a twenty-sided die to determine whether he or she hits the target and then rolls a collection of one or more dice to determine how much damage that hit does. For example, in Dungeons & Dragons, if I am a warrior with a basic long sword who has hit a monster, I roll an eight-sided die, also known as a d8, and add it to my strength modifier to determine how many points of damage I do. If I were wielding a mace instead, I would roll a six-sided die, or a d6. In a video game, the computer does all of this random number generation and checks the numbers against one another.
The basic idea behind D&D, that character stats plus a random element can determine an end result, is central not just to the mass of role-playing games that came out after Dungeons & Dragons but to the way larp functions. Larps typically simplify the mechanic, but different larps do this in different ways. Some of them replace dice with easier-to-hold cards and use card pulls from a small stacked deck, while some use rock-paper-scissors instead. Some larps say that in order for my character to hit your character I have to hit you with a beanbag or touch you with the foam-padded weapon I’m carrying. Some larps do away with the random element entirely by allowing different sets of stats to be directly compared to one another. For example, if my character wants to pin another character to the ground, instead of pulling cards or rolling dice and adding them to our strength stat, we might simply compare our strength stats. If mine is higher, I succeed, and if my opponent’s stat is higher, my attempt fails. The way such issues get resolved depends on the type of rules system used and the game.
Dungeons & Dragons was not the only role-play-based subculture that reared its head in the 1970s. A few years earlier, in 1966, a group of friends gathered in Berkeley, California, to have a party. The invitation to this gathering announced that it was a tournament and ordered “all knights to defend in single combat the title of ‘fairest’ for their ladies.”24 Everyone enjoyed the event so much that they decided to get together again, and the Society for Creative Anachronism was born. News of the SCA spread by word of mouth and through science-fiction fandom. In 2010, the group had more than 31,000 paying members on five continents, though it’s likely that more people participate in the many SCA events held each year.
The SCA is dedicated to the reenactment of the medieval world as it never was. Participants take on a persona situated in history, for example, a fifteenth-century British peasant or a thirteenth-century Chinese monk, and costume that character. Unlike in larp, in the SCA there is a premium on historical accuracy, on doing and wearing things in the same way that they were done in a particular medieval era. On a metalevel, however, the community doesn’t precisely replicate medieval life, since the SCA doesn’t hew to a particular medieval time and place—characters from different medieval places and times mingle. While actual medieval societies were full of lots of peasants and a few rich and noble gentles, SCA personas tend to be nobles rather than commoners. The SCA has many guilds and other groups dedicated to specific facets of medieval culture, such as dancing, calligraphy, heraldry, brewing, and music, all done in the old way. SCA members fight with rattan (wooden) weapons, and participants can gain status within the community by excelling on the battlefield, earning titles such as lord, prince, and even king. The “known world” of the SCA is divided into kingdoms, each with a king and queen, and from there into principalities, baronies, shires, cantons, and so on.
While the SCA and larp both involve taking on a persona, the two groups have very different aims. In the SCA, staying in character is only minimally required, while in a larp taking on a character, playing that character, developing that character’s story, and leveling up one’s character is the ultimate aim. Leveling up entails attaining enough experience points, which are doled out for successful adventuring, to increase one’s statistics, number of skills, or skill proficiencies. The real point of the SCA is to find community while learning about and practicing past ways of living. The SCA has different sizes of event, from grand festivals such as the yearly Pennsic War, a multi-week camping trip that draws tens of thousands of participants and features combat and culture, to smaller local events, a medieval dancing class, for example, with as few as five to ten participants. At the end of an SCA event, a member may have defended a title on the battlefield, milled around in a pretty costume, or learned how to create an illuminated manuscript or brew beer at home. Ideally, her real-life knowledge has been improved, taught, or at least practiced. In contrast, at the end of a larp, ideally, my character has developed further—maybe that character’s long-lost mother has returned to town for an emotional scene, maybe someone taught that character how to throw fireballs and there is a new skill on my character card, or maybe I’ve simply hung out in a costume and had a good time with my friends. Members of the SCA, or SCAdians (pronounced “SKAY-dee-ens”), as they’re sometimes called, can win honor and titles inside the organization by demonstrating excellence or persistence in a real medieval skill, sort of the way that Boy or Girl Scouts earn badges. In a larp, a lord character might bestow a title on another character, not because that player is good at fighting but because it’s politically expedient or because on some quest that character picked up a mystical sword of awesomeness that could be useful to the lord. In short, while the SCA is geared toward doing real-life things in the old-world way while in unusual outfits, larp is geared toward building an imaginary life, also in unusual outfits. The SCA is bound by history and medieval code, but larps are bound only by the rules of the game and the imagination of their players.
The 1970s gave birth to an early larp called Dagorhir, an ongoing medieval fantasy game founded in Maryland in 1977 by Brian Wiese. Toward the end of high school, Wiese developed an obsession with everything medieval. He spent hours with his parents’ old books, poring over illustrations of medieval battles and of ancient Romans and Celts. He devoured the Lord of the Rings series and checked out numerous books on the medieval era from the library. He saw every medieval movie he could, including The Lion in Winter (1968) with Katharine Hepburn and Robin and Marian (1976) with Sean Connery and Audrey Hepburn.
After his freshman year at Montgomery Communit
y College in Maryland, Wiese acted in a play called Hagar’s Children that proved so successful that a New York producer decided to bring it and its cast to the Big Apple for a spring run of shows. Wiese went with the production, living with one of his fellow cast members in a tiny apartment on the Lower East Side, next to a burned-out building they raided for scrap wood to burn in their fireplace. That spring in 1977, Wiese and his roommate spent their evenings drinking beer, smoking pot, and reading favorite passages out of Lord of the Rings by candlelight. They talked about the books’ epic battles and began to discuss how they might re-create similar fights. Brian decided to make the dream a reality—he’d have a pseudo-Lord of the Rings battle in the woods with some of his backpacker buddies, combining hunting orcs, acting, and capture the flag. From there, the idea snowballed.
Brian dubbed his venture the Hobbit War and invited friends. When he returned to DC from New York, he met up with the interested parties, and they devised appropriate weaponry through experimentation. They sandwiched tree branches between couch cushion foam and secured it with glue and duct tape. They took children’s fiberglass bows and modified real wooden arrows by cutting off the metal tips and wrapping a cylinder of duct tape around them, about a half-inch in diameter, and then attached chunks of foam to that base with duct tape. The result was arrows tipped by foam and duct tape as big as a light bulb. Being hit with one felt like being pegged with a tennis ball.
The first battle took place in October 1977 on a farm in Montgomery County, Maryland, that belonged to the parents of one of the boys who came to fight. It ended up sort of like a high school keg party; people who weren’t friends with Wiese showed up—about twenty-five boys and girls from the local high school in all, mostly ones who knew Wiese or his girlfriend’s younger sister from school. They divided the players into two armies, a red army and a blue army. Wiese and his friends had made extra weapons for people to fight with, but there weren’t enough for everyone. They’d invited people to bring their own combat-safe weapons to the battle, with the advice to test all weapons on themselves. The ad-hoc weapons included a foam-wrapped pool cue and a foam-wrapped fiberglass bicycle flagpole. One guy rolled up with a baseball bat wrapped in T-shirts and was sent packing. They came, they fought, they had fun.
The following March, Brian decided to have another battle and recruit more people. After this one, he realized that local high school kids looking for a keg party weren’t the kind of people he wanted, so he advertised on a local commercial-free radio station, the kind of station that ran want ads for bassists and rock singers. His ad simply said that he was looking for actors and warriors to participate in a Hobbit War and included his phone number. Wiese also advertised at gaming shops and at a Tolkien festival. Forty people showed up for the third battle in June 1978, including some people Wiese is still friends with.
By the spring of 1979, Wiese had dubbed the group Dagorhir. The rules had evolved considerably. Weapons were checked for safety, costumes became a requirement, and people selected “battle names” like Grimbold, Haldor, and Turgon, names mostly derived from J. R. R. Tolkien’s Elvish dictionary. Players tried to weed out twentieth-century lingo while on the field of battle to help create a more medieval atmosphere. The organization bought a dedicated answering machine to handle all its incoming calls and to announce upcoming battles so that Wiese wouldn’t have to call fifty people to tell them about each new event. Soon two armies faced each other on the field of battle about once a month, and a hundred people were showing up for the battles, which were organized around units. A group of friends formed a unit, and two team captains selected units for their teams in secrecy, so no one would know who was chosen last, and the battle commenced. The hobby truly exploded once PM Magazine, a documentary TV show on a local DC station, did a segment on the game. When PM Magazine became syndicated across the United States, letters to Brian Wiese poured in, although he was afraid to answer any of them for fear that he might be held liable for injuries in other states that occurred while using Dagorhir rules. Wiese couldn’t inspect weapons in Seattle or Minnesota, after all, and although the head was forbidden as a target in-game, accidents still happened. In the early days of Dagorhir, when weapons were cruder, black eyes and bloody lips weren’t unusual, and more than one person ended up in the emergency room for stitches. The Dagorhir crew had quickly realized that shield backs needed foam on them, so a player didn’t brain himself, and that unpadded sword pommels could graze someone’s head accidentally and make it bleed.
While Dagorhir isn’t quite larp—the emphasis is on the sport of fighting and tactics rather than on advancement of one’s character—it does represent an important point in the origins of larp, notable for its early use of boffers and for its marginal emphasis on role-playing, costuming, and alter egos. While the idea of Dagorhir spread across the country, thanks to PM Magazine, role-play-hungry citizens were left to work out their own rules for pretend, which may have contributed to the diverse regional character of the US larp scene.
From there, the history of larp becomes so disparate that to trace every lineage and chronicle the many smaller local scenes would fill any number of books. However, there are a few games that impacted the national scene as a whole. The New England Role Playing Organization, NERO, was founded out of a gaming shop in Arlington, Massachusetts, in the late 1980s. NERO combined boffer fighting and adventure with the puzzles of D&D and influenced the larp scene because it was franchised. According to the NERO website, the game currently has nearly fifty chapters across the country, and players may take their characters with them if they travel to a new area to play. It is the granddaddy of most of the medieval boffer-style larps in the New Jersey area, although it now faces stiff competition from its small-scale progeny, games such as LAIRE and Knight Realms, the latter a game I attended for two years.
A parallel sort of larp, sometimes called theater-style larp or parlor larp, evolved in Boston in the 1980s, at science fiction fandom conventions and through two university societies, the Harvard Society for Interactive Literature (SIL), founded in 1982, and the MIT Assassins’ Guild, organized in 1983, both of which ran live action games at conventions and on campus. In boffer games, as in Dungeons & Dragons, combat is a central activity; encounters or plots often end in violence. SIL and the Assassins’ Guild focused instead on games that were based on puzzle solving and politicking, games that sometimes allowed violence but did not necessarily place it at the center of the story.
Finally, gaming company White Wolf’s World of Darkness games have impacted the US larp market. Its flagship game, Vampire: The Masquerade, released in 1991, was a popular pen-and-paper tabletop role-playing game, and soon after White Wolf introduced the Mind’s Eye Theatre system, which allowed Vampire: The Masquerade to go from tabletop to live action. That system replaced dice rolls with weighted games of rock-paper-scissors as a method of resolving disputes between characters. The rules spawned scores of chapters of live action Vampire: The Masquerade across the country, some sharing a core world mythology.
Larp continues to evolve. There are e-mail listservs focused around the development of larp as an art, geared toward figuring out the underlying aesthetic principles behind how larp works and ought to work. An organization spun off of the Society for Interactive Literature called the Live Action Role Playing Association, or LARPA, runs a series of conventions called Intercons dedicated to theatrical-style larp. New games are starting as long-time larpers put their own ideas into action; for example, a zombie apocalypse boffer larp called Dystopia Rising has sprung up in the Connecticut-New Jersey area. In Europe, the northern countries hold a gaming convention each year that examines avant-garde larp. And if Queen Elizabeth II or the president of the United States hasn’t freed the Lady of the Lake from bondage, well, there’s still time yet.
4
The King of Make-Believe
James C. Kimball has serious hair, a thick, straight light-brown mane that falls to the middle of his back. It’s the
hair a shampoo commercial wishes it had, it’s hair that says, “I am not your ordinary man,” that screams “vive la différence,” hair that seems vaguely 1980s when paired with his typical tidy uniform of a button-down tucked into jeans, worn with a blazer and swashbuckler boots. It’s serious hair but hair that doesn’t take itself too seriously. It’s hair that his friends and players mention when they impersonate him, ribbing he takes in good spirit. It’s hair that he himself jokes about, shaking it when it’s mentioned or mocking the fact, for example, that his hair gel happens to contain pheromones to “up his game.” It’s Antonio Banderas hair, Brad Pitt in Interview with the Vampire hair, Fabio hair. Most of all, it’s hair from another era.
James keeps his hair immaculate, gelling the top bit to keep it out of his face or gathering it into a low ponytail. Despite the new-fangled hair products he uses, this hair is hair from some unspecified time and place in the past, hair that doesn’t make precise sense unless James is wearing one of his many medieval costumes. When I first met James, he was leaning out of a clapboard shack at a Boy Scout campground in a national park. He wore a pirate coat in blue and silver with large cuffs and big shiny buttons on it, and his long hair streamed behind him. The hair and the medieval coat went together, giving him the air of a serious knight, transforming him, as one of his players put it, into “a sexy pirate.”
When I visit James’s apartment, inside a large old house in a small Pennsylvania town, I discover that his hair isn’t his only anachronism. The interior of his apartment resembles the restricted section of the Hogwarts library. In his study, a large stained glass window, rippled with age, sits above his desk, which is a glossy wooden table with curved legs, lion-claw footed. Though James would have preferred a wood-burning fireplace he settled for a gas one. It runs along one side of the room, covered by a wrought-iron screen. The rest of the room is strewn with antiques or things that simply appear antique. A stand containing a beige globe with charmingly inaccurate outlines of the continents opens up to reveal a cache of liquor bottles. A small table holds a variety of leather-bound books, some of them real antiques—such as the 1750 edition of a German Bible, part of his stash of old Bibles—and some of them New York Times bestsellers, such as Air Frame by Michael Crichton, that have been rebound in leather, purchased from a website that specializes in decorative leather books.
