Leaving Mundania

by Lizzie Stark

  James had invited me to his apartment to get the scoop on Knight Realms’ origins. After I’d gotten the surprisingly scenic house tour, we sat down in his office to talk about the game and about James. For starters, he hasn’t always had that hair. Before he owned and operated Knight Realms, he was a self-described nerd. Like many larpers, his first exposure to the world of gaming was through the tabletop game Dungeons & Dragons, which his older brother would run for the eight-year-old James and his friends. His father, like many parents of the era, thought the game had ties to Satanism and hid James’s first box set edition of Dungeons & Dragons to prevent him from playing, to no avail. James remained a daydreaming, gaming nerd, who in un-nerdy fashion did poorly in school. As a teen, he played D&D and painted models for it, enjoyed early video games, and dreamt of being a police officer—he even went to police academy camp one summer when he was about sixteen, before discovering that his thick glasses meant that if he entered the force, he’d have to have a desk job. Years later, he would undergo eye surgery to correct his vision. In high school he began growing out his hair, and at the tender age of fourteen the movie Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves changed his life. At the theater, James saw a series of makeshift posters advertising something called NERO. On the posters and at the theater’s ticket booth there were little tri-folded black and white pamphlets advertising the game. James picked one up and ended up going to some events, once by himself and once with his older friend Rob Bean, a man who’d joined his gaming group after meeting a mutual friend at one of Double Exposure’s gaming conventions.

  At their local NERO chapter, James played a roguish jack-of-all-trades while Rob played a sorcerer, and they quickly became close friends. A few years after they joined NERO, it became a new game called LAIRE, which, like its predecessor, used boffers to resolve combat. After playing LAIRE for a couple years, Rob and James helped a friend create an offshoot of LAIRE called FX. Soon, the pair began to think about starting their own game. At first it was a joke between the two of them, but over the next year or two, James, who was in his late teens, Rob, who was in his mid-twenties, and a couple of their friends began to write and test the rules for their new game. They collected costuming, masks, and props. James spent his paycheck from managing a bookstore to help purchase everything they’d need. They differentiated their game from both LAIRE and FX by offering a wide variety of classes—almost forty—for players to choose from. A character class is essentially a profession, or perhaps, more accurately, a character’s identity, representing a character’s natural type of skills and abilities. At the time, medieval larps in the area offered a much smaller variety of classes, on the order of five, professions that almost always included warrior, rogue, healer, and mage (magic-user). James is particularly proud of the wide range of so-called “support classes” that his team wrote. Support classes are classes of character that don’t have fighting as their primary skill but have skills that benefit other players, for example, healers, alchemists, bards, priests, and scholars. The Knight Realms team also distinguished their game from others at the time by including a full pantheon of good, evil, and neutral deities. Many contemporary role-playing games, both tabletop and live action, did not allow in-game religion, since evangelical groups of the time accused role-playing gamers of recruiting children for Satanic cults through witchcraft. Although now it’s not unusual to find in-game religions in a larp, at the time, Knight Realms’ set-up was rare.

  As for James, he tells me that he is religious, that he’s convinced that there’s a God or that at a minimum, he must have saved a busload of nuns in a former life, since he’s one lucky son-of-a-gun. In addition to running a successful game, he says, he’s got a smart, beautiful, and rich girlfriend, Misha, a lawyer to whom he’s been affianced for more than a decade. He can’t tell me how lucky he is, he says, shaking his head and smiling. After all, he had the chance to buy land, the pipe dream of anyone who runs a long-time larp.

  The wide range of classes and the availability of in-game religion distinguished Knight Realms in its early days, but not all of James and Rob’s innovations were so successful. The director of a larp often plays the king of town, the uppermost noble, in a move that sometimes feels like a director making him-or herself a literal fiefdom. Rob and James didn’t want to do this; they wanted the in-game social structure to be composed entirely of players, creating, essentially, an in-game meritocracy. Like most utopian dreams, this one worked better in theory than in practice. In a medieval game, nobility has a key role in communicating plot to players and in helping create solutions to plot. At a minimum, nobles serve an important role in crowd control. They can herd players toward plot points, either directly (“I need you to go take care of the goblins I’ve heard about on the edge of town.”) or indirectly (“The baron tells me a strange old house has appeared in the woods.”). As high-ranking characters, nobles can serve as the origin point for a plot (“Oh no! The baron’s been kidnapped! We have to find him.”) and as the solution to plot points, with the power to corral troops to fight an invading army or to launch a diplomatic mission. The problem with player nobility is that even the most dedicated player periodically misses events, and if there is no baron, duke, or lord in town, the storytellers have a problem. To compensate, Rob and James began to play certain key members of the nobility as a safeguard. Over time, a compromise between the two extremes—a player-driven nobility and a staff-driven nobility—evolved. Travance, the barony where Knight Realms takes place, has four lands (Alisandria, Drega’Mire, Kaladonia, and Pendarvin), each one headed by a lord, who in turn are ruled by the baron. In addition, the Count of Winterdark, who rules a different territory but has stewardship over the land surrounding Travance, is often in town and has his own separate court with named knights, a parallel court that can create political conflict with the barony. James plays the count while various players step in and out of the four lord and baron roles. In order for a player to become a lord, he or she must go through in-game and out-of-game channels. In game, a player has to maneuver his or her character into a position to inherit the title, usually by becoming a knight of one of the four lands. Out-of-game, the player must prove to James that he or she is reliable and is going to show up to most events. In general, this means that many of the nobility are also members of the Knight Realms staff, although holding a staff position is not necessary to gain an in-game title.

  During the early years of Knight Realms, James and Rob tweaked the rules repeatedly based on feedback from their players. Over time, they created new races and pared down the list of character classes. Presently, new players can choose from thirty-four professions, from acrobat to witch hunter, and twenty-four races, from barbarian to sylph. Early on, James dealt mostly with storylines while Rob, the social butterfly, dealt with logistics and was the public face of the game, persuading camp owners to let a group of fifty-plus adults behave in silly fashion on their property. If parents had doubts about letting their kids attend the game, Rob would set up a face-to-face meeting to explain what the game was about and allay concerns. So when Rob tragically and suddenly died two years into the life of Knight Realms, many players felt devastated. They channeled their grief into keeping Rob’s baby, Knight Realms, alive.

  James’s bedroom is visible from his study through a large doorway. It holds a four-poster bed with a dark red bedspread on it and a dark brown wingback chair. Sconces on either side of the bed hold battery-powered pillar candles, and a circular light fixture of what looks like thick, grayish metal hangs from the ceiling, with fake pillar candles concealing the light bulbs. The flat-screen in his bedroom is permanently tuned to Fox News. While we talk, he at his desk, I in a heavy chair across from him, we laugh about his conservatism. He says that although he’s a small business owner, people expect someone with his hair to be some sort of liberal hippie.

  James’s apartment is conservative, solemn, and theatrical. He’s even painted the wainscoting and the trim around the doors dark brown to resemb
le old, varnished wood. The only items that truly break the medieval aura are the gigantic flat-screen in the bedroom, the desktop computer in the study, and the modern conveniences that fill his kitchen, like his fancy coffee machine, which turns out single-serving cups of coffee that James goops up with flavored cream. The apartment is as out-of-time as his hair—both are hewing toward a certain aesthetic, one that does not represent any one place or time but suggests a sort of fantastic, vague, hyperreal past in which people read leather-bound books and stood, heroically brooding, over their vintage mantelpieces.

  Clearly, for James, the appearance of something has the ability to create a certain mood, a belief that has made Knight Realms the premiere larp in the tri-state area. Many players say that the game’s stagecraft and its ability to make the game feel real keep them coming back. James is as careful about Knight Realms’ setting as he is about his apartment decor. The game has a collection of spare costuming for the NPCs, or nonplayer characters. NPCs can be anything from attacking monsters to random commoners who have recently escaped slavery to traveling masseuses. Essentially the purpose of an NPC is to engage the players by fighting them or through role-play that confronts players with information or puzzles or adds to the atmosphere of the game, making the world seem more real. Unlike player characters, NPCs aren’t trying to figure things out. In a video game, they’d be the monsters a player kills, the local barkeep who passes on a crucial rumor, and the princess who gets saved in the endgame. More impressively, the Knight Realms’ NPCs aren’t just costumed, they’re armed with expensive cast foam-latex weapons that look uncannily real compared to homemade duct-taped boffers. In-game areas such as the Dragon’s Claw Inn, the monastery, and the count’s manor are dressed with props such as fur pelts, plastic ivy and grapes, bleached animal skulls, fake candles, leather-bound books, black and red bedsheets, paintings, and tchotchkes such as small wooden chests to help players suspend their disbelief and feel in-scene. Many players decorate their personal cabins with similar props, and every month a contest is run to determine whose decorations are the best.

  In addition to being a boffer-style game, Knight Realms is also a campaign larp, meaning that the plot continues from one session to another, running continuously since 1997. Some players have been embodying the same characters for all that time. The game meets roughly once a month over a weekend, lasting from Friday evening through Sunday afternoon, nights included, and takes place at one of several Boy and Girl Scout camps that James has scoped out in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Knight Realms’ setting is medieval fantasy, the universe of Lord of the Rings or King Arthur as reimagined by James. The game is set in Travance Proper, a frontier town named for the barony that contains it, on the edge of the sprawling nation of Kormyre, a town separated from the rest of the country by a mysterious magical rift. Travance sits close to a deeply evil inverted tower of unknown depth that attracts beasts, evil geniuses, and vampire overlords like James’s hair attracts compliments.

  As a campaign larp, each monthly event builds on the last, representing the next installment in Travance’s history. In between events, time passes at the same rate that it passes in the real world, so characters visit the town of Travance once per month, during a “Baronial Feast”—the in-game reason to gather. The year in Travance is the current year minus eight hundred. So if it’s 2010 in the real world, it’s 1210 in Travance.

  After thirteen years of running the game, the staff has its method of operation down. Generally, the same things happen every weekend. Players show up on Friday. Those who arrive early help decorate common spaces with the usual props. People claim bunks and decorate their own cabins. Around 5:00 PM, Logistics opens. The Logistics cabin is where anything that must happen out-of-game happens throughout the weekend. It houses the costumes and makeup that the NPCs will use to transform themselves into monsters, and on Friday evening, it’s where check-in is held. Players line up, pay James the base rate of forty-five dollars for the weekend or fifty-five dollars if they want an extra point of build, which allows them to advance their characters slightly faster. In return, players receive a character card, a sheet of thick fake parchment that lists everything a player needs to know about his or her character. The Knight Realms character sheet shows how much gold a character has in the bank, the special skills a character can perform, such as prayers, defenses, and special attacks, and a series of statistics including health points, career points, and available build. Health points represent how tough a character is and how much damage he or she can take before death. Knight Realms has several different kinds of career points, but roughly, they are a measure of mental energy and dictate how many spells or prayers a character can cast before becoming exhausted. Build is Knight Realms’ way of keeping track of levels. A character that has spent ten build points is level 1, while a character who has spent five hundred build points is level 50. Build is the raw stuff of character creation, and players can decide how to spend it. Build may be invested into learning new skills or may be used to raise a character’s health or career points. The reverse of the character sheet contains a schedule. Every twelve hours during the game, career points refresh. If a character is down to one magic point at 5:59 AM on Saturday morning, at 6:00 AM, he’s back to having his maximum. Players are expected to keep track of their health and career points and to record any “buffs”—spells that bolster a character’s skills or stats—that another player might cast on them. In addition to receiving character cards at check-in, each player also selects a mandatory four-hour NPC shift, during which time they will report to Logistics in nondescript clothing and get sent out as monsters, wandering merchants, or any other character that might entertain the rest of the player characters, or PCs.

  Around 9:00 or 10:00 PM on Friday, James gathers everyone at the central building with a kitchen that doubles, in-game, as the Dragon’s Claw Inn. He makes a few safety announcements about bears and dehydration, and calls lay-on, which officially starts the game. Anyone who is not in costume leaves to change. For ten minutes, the inn area, always an oblong room studded with tables and benches, is full of people in corsets, armor, and body paint walking with purpose or meandering deliberately, greeting one another and imparting any burning information they’ve discovered between events through the use of the “inn wall,” an online bulletin board that is in-game, or through personal messages—in-game letters sent via the Knight Realms website. Soon thereafter, the weekend plot begins, introduced by a set of NPCs on the first shift. In addition to lay-on, there are three other fixed events during the weekend. On Saturday afternoon, there’s a bazaar in the inn called Market Faire, where players may sell real food and crafts; Saturday evening, someone cooks a three-course hot meal for everyone in the game called Feast; and usually a giant battle that will involve the whole town, dubbed “main mod,” the biggest module of the weekend, occurs on Saturday night. Sunday, around noon, James calls the cleanup hold, and everyone cleans up and goes home, perhaps stopping at a local diner on the way to kvetch about the weekend’s events.

  The framework is simple, but what happens between lay-on and the cleanup hold is action-packed and complex. Running a larp every month is a little like directing a stage production: the framework is the same from production to production, but you don’t know any of the scene runtimes or how the play will end. The preparation for such an event can take months.

  The planning begins when a player or group of players come up with a weekend plot idea and send it to Knight Realms’ staff of Storytellers. Perhaps Travance’s sworn enemy, the vampire Pesmerga, is loose again and bent on revenge; perhaps the dark elves have surfaced from the Underdark to attack the town for some purpose; perhaps some wandering scholar of dubious origins has arrived with dread rumors of a powerful undead sorcerer enslaving nearby towns. Ten to fifteen experienced GMs sit on the storytelling committee, and they read through the plot ideas and comment on them digitally, through the Knight Realms website. Plots that involve the end of the world a
re generally deep-sixed, since in any main plot characters must have the chance to fail or succeed, and if characters fail and the world ends, well, that’s a problem for the game. After some back-and-forth between the authors and the committee, the plot is approved and scheduled. Some of the storytellers write up stats for the main weekend monsters, while whoever is running the plot casts any important NPCs—usually including the arch-villain for the weekend—and assembles necessary props.

  The weekend’s main plot is split into a number of smaller encounters called modules or “mods.” On Friday night, generally speaking, whoever is running the weekend plot introduces it by sending one or more NPCs into town for several small introductory encounters. Players often spend Saturday trying to track down mystical objects. Perhaps the town must collect components for a ritual to banish that pesky undead sorcerer, or maybe some powerful arch-demon needs a set of magic gems to establish his evil reign, and the town wants to find them first. The plot reaches a crescendo on Saturday night around 10:00 PM, with main mod, a giant, spectacular battle in the woods or in an open field against the weekend’s chief enemy, typically one or more powerful NPCs, played by the same people throughout the weekend, and a rotating cast of henchman, portrayed by other players during their mandatory NPC shift. Perhaps Pesmerga is raising an undead army to attack the town; perhaps the enslaved fairies must be freed by battling their captors; perhaps the town must hold off hordes of necromancers while performing a ritual to ensure that one of the Gods of Light is able to regain her full strength. Main mod is set up so that everyone in town—usually some one hundred people—can participate in the brawl, which often rages for an hour or more. Saturday night, there is a denouement, and by Sunday, the main weekend plot is generally complete.