by Lizzie Stark
Around midnight, and three hours into the game, I was bored of Eloise. My horrific French accent, so amusing to attempt for the first hour or so, had grown exhausting to keep up. I had learned to play poker and blackjack in-character, both games I hadn’t remembered how to play in real life, because I actually prefer not to play them. I also met an art expert and made cursory small talk with a bunch of characters whose players I knew out-of-game. I was beginning to feel as if four hours of convention larping was about all I could muster. As I prepared to slink off to bed, Eloise was sucked through a portal and into a desert near Cairo, Egypt. The six of us, including Brendan and Liz, banded together and killed two large bulls, which were really demons. Sure enough, the GM supervising our party, combined with my peers, managed to teach me which numbers to add to what type of card pull to determine whether I actually hit the bull with my cleaver. We didn’t act out the fight; rather, we verbally described what we were doing, as tabletop players do, while sitting in the hotel lobby. After helping defeat the bulls and returning to the town of Cairo, Illinois, I felt I’d had enough larp for the day; it was half-past beer o’clock, in my opinion.
The strength of Deadlands, Michael said, was its immersive setting—the game space didn’t feel like a hotel function room but a thriving casino, thanks to the FishDevils’ decorations. Furthermore, the world of Deadlands felt as though it extended beyond the immediate realm of the game, it felt substantial, thanks to its campaign setting. After years of game play, the GMs had explored different facets of the world and of the town, which had its own history, a history remembered by the established characters that populated its landscape. Similarly, players had developed and deepened their characters over time. Players with established characters were also more likely to invest in costuming for them, as Liz and Brendan had, which added to the overall atmosphere. In contrast, Shattered didn’t have this feeling of a concrete and complete world because it was a new game with all-new characters; many players of Shattered cobbled costuming together from their suitcases and rolled up a character a half hour before the game started.
The thickness and clarity of the Deadlands world made it harder to arrive as a newbie, though. I’d created my chef, but she didn’t have enough depth or substance to play for more than a few hours. And whether it’s school, a workplace, or an in-game community of larpers, it’s always difficult to fit in as a new kid. Michael also pointed out that Deadlands’s plot hooks were hard for players to pick up on. Both he and I were new to town, and both of us spent most of our game experience gambling, unaware of whether there was a plot or how we might involve ourselves in it. The difference was that he was able to find his own character goal (bankrupt the bank) while I failed to make my own fun and simply wandered around. Neither of us lasted till the end of the game.
Around one in the morning, I returned to my room to find that Jeramy, in all his faux-David Bowie glory, was already there and preparing himself for the sort of bizarrely costumed convention-ramble that so many people enjoy. You could wear whatever outrageous thing you damned well pleased around the floor at a convention like this, and people would smile, high-five you, and tell you that you looked awesome. Sometimes it happened unintentionally. Once, I’d been wearing a white shirt, black pants, and red lipstick, and some guy had taken my picture on the convention floor because he thought I was dressed up as Uma Thurman’s character from Pulp Fiction. A great number of people in wacky outfits perpetually wandered the convention floor. I’d seen a older man with a stuffed dragon eternally on his shoulder, a guy wearing a captain’s hat and a long leather jacket strutting about with a cane, a gentleman in a black and purple suit and top hat circa 1890s England, women in full Renaissance wear or wearing jeans with corsets or gypsy bangles around their waists and ten-gallon swashbuckler hats dripping with feathers. Goth kids with stringy hair and faces full of metal skulked across the lobby, while hipsters in brightly colored leather jackets hunched in their shoulders and darted glances at the strange accessories on display—tiny hats, angel wings, and spirit-gummed devil horns. Jeramy was in full effect tonight. He often purchased odd things from the estate sales that he and his girlfriend frequented—a bomber jacket made out of a bath towel emblazoned with an ad for the film Gone with the Wind, a cheesy framed poster of a tiger that he gave to Brendan and Liz when Liz bought a house, an absurd number of cigars he’d acquired at a steep discount. He and his girlfriend, Jenn, a graphic designer, loved stuff that looked theatrical, particularly if it was from the 1980s, and if it was awesomely tacky, cheesy, and over-the-top, so much the better. Currently, Jeramy was hunting for a keytar, a handheld piano in the shape of a guitar that hailed from his favorite decade. When I opened the door to our hotel room, Jeramy towered before me in an electric, Elmo-red flannel jumpsuit with a zipper up the front. It covered him from the neck all the way down to the soles of his feet. I realized he was wearing footie pajamas. They even had a buttoned up butt-hatch. His reddish hair, curly and shoulder-length, billowed behind him in a cloud. In one hand, he held a bottle of rum. We both began laughing hysterically, me at his bizarre, oh-so-Jeramy outfit, him at my reaction, which was pretty much the reason to wear footie pajamas in the first place—to get a laugh out of folks. We had a drink and then wandered down to the mostly deserted convention floor, in search of adventure. Since we didn’t find it down there, we climbed the staircase to the ballroom level, which had been sectioned off into four different areas used for larps.
The far room had had a Cthulhu larp, a horror larp, in it; the middle room gave off the fading sounds of battle; and when I opened the door to the third room, a woman in a sleeping bag fell out of it. We had found Sleeping: The LARP, a joke made flesh. Sleeping: The LARP was part of a trend of gamers laughing at their own hobby, using it as a bald-faced excuse to hang out. After all, any social event could be transformed into a larp. There was also Bar Crawl: The LARP running at this convention. I wasn’t able to attend, but at the previous convention, DREAMATION, I had gone. We had drunk in bars while only minimally following the scavenger hunt rules, chief among them “pics, or it didn’t happen.” The mock-event Sleeping: The LARP had this description in the convention schedule.
“Sleeping: The LARP.” Our master of dreams, none other than Mr. Sleep himself, will run this fantastic action-packed larp filled with emotion, anxiety, drama and … snoring. Yes, that’s right, each player will have an exhaustive list of no goals whatsoever other than to sleep as peacefully as he or she can. An incredible level of interactivity consisting of slumber in near proximity to other participants will surely make this an experience you won’t ever forget. Players are encouraged to bring their own sleeping bags, pillows, air mattresses and Ambien. Friday, 12:00AM - 4:00AM; One Round; Bring Your Own Materials. Experts ONLY; Very Serious, All Ages.
There were perhaps five people sleeping near the door, which was opposite the wall that concealed the still-going boffer battle. As the sleeping-bagged woman explained where we were to us in hushed tones, we backed away slowly, and returned to our room, one last tipple, and sleep.
Before I’d arrived at DEXCON, I’d registered for a Cthulhu larp. The Cthulhu games, loosely based on the writing of H. P. Lovecraft and his followers, focused on investigating the Elder gods, dark monsters from the abyss that could crush humanity with a mere thought. The more you learned about them, the less sane you became. A Cthulhu game generally featured characters such as mad scientists, adventurers, mystics, nobility, and professors of the arcane. The games could be set in any historical period but typically had only one ending: everyone dies or is driven insane from facing the hideous unknown, filled with super-powerful alien beings, some of them tentacled, who will one day return to rule the earth and crush humanity like the bugs we are.
The gaming group PST Productions generally ran four or five Cthulhu games at each Double Exposure convention and had a devoted following of players that I hadn’t met, primarily because they rarely ventured out to play other larps—they were all Ct
hulhu all the time. PST’s cult following meant that it was impossible to casually show up to a game—all the slots would already be filled. So I made sure to sign up for the hotly anticipated premiere of their steampunk Cthulhu setting as soon as I had registered for the convention. I was rewarded with a detailed character history that arrived via e-mail. I would be playing Madame Blavatsky, a historical character and self-professed medium, one of the founders of new-age spiritualism who helped create the Theosophical Society, an association based on the belief that all world religions espouse the same set of core truths but that the practicum of these beliefs, the trappings in which each religion clothes those truths, differs from faith to faith and is potentially destructive.
That Saturday evening, I attempted a steampunk costume. Steampunk is a genre that grew in popularity in the early 2000s, attaining its own lifestyle conventions and forming its own subculture. Think steam power and the Victorian age, and then mix in the idea of magic as elaborate technology. Think zeppelins, gears, The League of Extraordinary Gentleman, 2000 Leagues Under the Sea, Nicola Tesla, mad scientists, and Journey to the Center of the Earth (or bottom of the ocean). The symbol of steampunk culture is a pair of brass goggles or a bare watch gear. I threw on a dress over some baggy pants and boots, laced a recently purchased corset over it, added several necklaces, threw a black scarf over my head to suggest my “mystic” bent, and borrowed a cane with a compass in the handle from Jeramy to help me role-play Blavatsky’s bum leg. Not the most steampunk costume ever, but I thought I’d pass.
Larpers from different games crowded the hallway outside the divided ballrooms. Vampire players dressed in black malingered at the entrance, waiting for their game to go off in one of the rooms. A little farther onward, toward the room where Sleeping: The LARP had been, people dressed as cowboys, football players, pop culture icons, and everything in between milled around two tables where several people with nasty skin abrasions sat, preparing for Dystopia Rising’s zombie apocalypse event. All the way at the end of the hallway, I could see the brilliantly costumed Cthulhu players standing: men in half-capes and white jackets with goggles around their necks, women in ball gowns or pantaloons and corsets wearing pins shaped into cogs or trilobites, and a French maid and a man in a suit with a towel over his arm, like a butler.
I received my character history and a small character card divided into three panels. One panel bore a rainbow of colors, one displayed my character name, and one contained a list of abilities and stats. Inside the game room, we all sat down, and for the first time at this convention, I had the rules explained to me. The character card was designed to be folded into thirds and clipped onto our convention badges so that our nametags would be visible to everyone else. There were no card pulls, dice rolls, or rock-paper-scissors games involved in this larp, only stat comparisons. The rainbow on one side of the card was for a sanity check. My rainbow had Xs in the orange portion. When something horrible happened, the GM, called a Keeper in this game, would order a sanity check and name a color. If he named a color that was above orange on my card, then I would downgrade my sanity, according to the list of adjectives written below the rainbow. If I passed three sanity checks in a row, I would downgrade my sanity anyway, to represent the fact that in this universe, no one is immune to the horror of the surroundings. The Keeper asked if there were any new players in the audience, and I raised my hand. I was one of two. He walked us through a combat scenario in front of everyone, using a couple seasoned players in the demonstration. Combat occurred when someone declared it by saying, “Combat.” Next, we all looked at our constitution stats. He named numbers, beginning at one and moving upward. When your number was called, you declared what action you were going to take. When he got to the top number, he counted backward. When your number came up again, you physically took your action. When he got back to one he asked, “Does anyone wish combat to continue?” and since the answer, for purposes of the demonstration, was no, we stopped.
I was reasonably clear on the rules for perhaps the first time ever. With our demonstration over, we all left the room to reenter it in-character.
We’d all been invited to the Adventurers’ Guild that evening for a soiree during which a mysterious machine would be unveiled. The room was decorated with pots of six-foot-tall bamboo and organized around a set of L-shaped tables that held anachronistic gadgets. One section had a large pyramidal piece of glass set on top of what might have been an ancient record turntable. The other main part of the machine held a disk that radiated light—it had a piece of fool’s gold atop it and about six wooden dowels stuck straight up around it. The whole thing screamed mad science. A footman served us hors d’oeuvres (peanut butter crackers) from a silver platter and champagne (water in Styrofoam cups). I introduced Madame Blavatsky to an archeologist attempting to fund an expedition to the center of the earth aimed at proving that the planet was, in fact, hollow. I spoke with the head of the Adventurers’ Guild, the historical personage Nicola Tesla, and a young ingenue who had stolen her overprotective father’s invitation to this event and broken out of the house.
The machine, as it turned out, was a time machine, and predictably, it didn’t work as intended. The young man we sent into the future to retrieve a newspaper returned through the giant octagonal portal as a mere collection of organs and bones, represented by plastic props the GMs threw out onto us. We all did a sanity check. As the evening progressed, I tried out my skills. I used my mysticism and occult skill to determine that the crystal powering the machine was in fact a summoning crystal. I psychically scrutinized one of the scientists’ pasts and discovered that his intention was true. I decided to bury the hatchet with my old nemesis Aleister Crowley, who discovered that the crystal in the machine had been switched out for another. Around us, chaos erupted—a woman had died in the backroom, a monster came out of the portal, people were running around in the dark. The swami I’d been studying with in India arrived, played by the man who had previously been the butler. The action reached a fever pitch. I went into the back room to conduct a séance for a woman who had died. Her husband pulled out a chair for me and executed a surprise attack, shooting the base of my skull with two fingers. Since Lizzie was genuinely surprised, Madame Blavatsky died. As I fell to the floor, I could hear the swami pounding on the door, yelling, “Blaa-vaaaa-tsky! Blaaa-vaaaaa-tsky!”
And at that moment of high drama, the game ended, and for the first time, I fiercely wished that it had not, so that I could learn what it is possible to do with a dead body in Cthulhu, so that Madame Blavatsky’s story could continue. The lights came on, and everyone pulled chairs into a circle. Over the course of an hour, all thirty of us briefly explained what had happened to our characters. The intrigue and variety of plots given to the group amazed me.
Jack the Ripper was there, undercover, along with the policeman who had sworn to catch him. Several secret devotees to the Great Old Ones had slipped potions to various members of the group in order to convert them. One woman was trying to use the dimensional portal to become a god. The manservant belonged to the Assassins’ Guild and had been hired to take this woman’s necklace and then stab her. He did this after the head of the Adventurers’ Guild had knocked her and her husband unconscious for occupying his office. After accomplishing his mission, the manservant left and was sent in as a different character, my swami. The dead woman and her husband, as it turned out, were vampires responsible for the death of Kaiser Wilhelm II. They were trying to resuscitate the Ukrainian nation, although she spent the game dead and he spent it trying to lure someone into the back room in order to kill them and suck their soul into his wife’s body, reviving her. I had fallen for that one. The plots went on and on, each person gaining a small moment in the spotlight.
The Keepers had written interlocking backstories that immediately immersed the players in a plot. Because all of us were “new to town,” there were no in-game cliques to exclude people. The minimal rules were simple enough that even I could understan
d them. The setting of this game was oriented toward investigation and role-play, and that is exactly what I enjoy in a game, as it turns out.
I had played in six larps over three days at this convention, and finally, in my last open slot, I found the game that fit me as a player. No one I knew had attended this larp, but I’d managed to have a good time anyway. I had been completely immersed in the game for its entire duration, about three hours.
The Cthulhu game succeeded for several reasons. The prewritten characters, complete with backstories, gave each player some minor goals to accomplish over the course of the evening, in addition to reacting to the major plot. The plot hook—the faulty time machine—had been accessible to every player and had immediately gone wrong, which provided intrigue early on in the game. The elaborate set and costuming had helped transform the beige function room into a swanky private club, and the vast amount of private plots seeded in our backstories meant that at least a few came to fruition, adding extra drama. Furthermore, the poorly functioning time machine gave the Keepers the opportunity to introduce monsters or other alien beings whenever a lull in the action presented itself. And finally, the clarity with which the minimal rules were explained meant that everyone was clear on how to affect the game’s environment.
The only distraction from the game itself was the noise from Michael’s zombie apocalypse larp running next door, across the thin ballroom barrier. We could hear the noise of the flesh-eating undead being vanquished with foam bats.
