by Lizzie Stark
I would use the knowledge I’d gleaned at Larpapalooza to run my own game for a set of non-gamers. Since I’d liked Cthulhu so much, I’d run Cthulhu, and Jeramy, Gene, and Brendan would help me.
11
Cthulhu Fhtagn!*
I am not qualified to run a larp. Sure, by the time I ran Cthulhu, I’d been larping and researching the hobby for three years, but that didn’t mean I knew how to run a game. After all, I’ve watched thousands of movies over the course of my life but have no idea how to direct a film. As a novice GM, I faced an overwhelming number of responsibilities: I had to create a plot interesting enough to grab my players, gather props, find NPCs, and, horror of horrors, learn the rules. On top of all that, I’d decided to conduct an experiment. I wanted to see if larp could bring any old group of people together as a community; I wanted to test its universal appeal, to check my reactions to the hobby against a third party. I’d decided to run a game for non-larpers.
As a rookie GM, I immediately established a team of qualified experts to help me with the game. Gene, a gamer from the cradle, was my first addition. He had a knack for explaining rules systems to other players, especially to, ahem, reporters in need of help. Among his friends, he was the planner—even when he wasn’t going to Knight Realms, he’d arrange rides for everyone, including me, and I knew I could rely on him to work hard prepping for the game. His large, boisterous personality matched his physique—he was a big guy—and usually he wore a little ponytail at the top of his head, which gave him the appearance of a samurai with a topknot. He kept the top of his hair chin-length but kept the sides shaved, sometimes buzzing designs into them. As a GM, Gene excelled at creating scenes and plot challenges on the fly. I knew, for example, that a character once derailed the main Deadlands plot within the first five minutes of a FishDevil game, and that Gene and the team worked together to create a new plot, written on the spur of the moment, that occupied their players for the next eight hours. Gene firmly believed that in larp, a player ought to be able to do anything, even if it made more work for the GM. I liked that player-centric attitude and knew that if I collapsed in a quivering ball of stress during the game, Gene would be able to carry on.
Brendan and Jeramy had loads of individual experience gaming, but they also worked well as a team. Brendan had been the new player officer at Knight Realms for several years. He was responsible for running the rules and safety demonstration for new players before each game. He often ran low-level mods at Knight Realms to entertain newbies, and he’d run several weekend plots with Jeramy. Jeramy spent several years as the planning officer at Knight Realms, essentially filling in any gaps left by other staff members, and he’d run a lot of weekend plots and individual mods during his tenure. Together, Brendan and Jeramy were working on a sci-fi larp of their own invention, called Doomsday. Brendan was a lot of fun. He was the kind of guy you wanted to keep in your coat closet, retrieving him each day for a beer on the couch and some amusing banter. He seemed like the kind of person who would be comfortable anywhere, the sort of person who always knew what to say to a group of people to ease the tension and let others in on the joke. If Brendan could blend, Jeramy really stood out. Jeramy is weird, and he doesn’t hide it, but his weird is a weird that invites people in, particularly if they happen to be standing a few feet away from the crowd, from normal, on the fringes. And although he is a creative dresser, his inventiveness extends beyond his surface. He was writing a zombie novel, and as a GM, he described scenes to players with colorful details and unexpected outcomes.
As a team, Brendan and Jeramy were full of laughter and 1980s references, playing off each other as the jokes escalated. They worked well together. As role-players, I thought they were planet-class. Their enthusiasm and commitment to their characters felt infectious, and I wanted them in my game, in part to emulate good role-playing for my newbies.
With my GM team and my flavor of game selected, I needed players, a location, and a firm date. The location was easiest—I had access to a hundred-year-old house in the old Victorian beach town of Cape May, New Jersey, a three-story pink monstrosity with a dusty basement ideal for hiding serial murderers and external decks with stairs that connected all three floors, which would provide excellent egress during chase scenes. The five-bedroom house had bed space for twelve, plus a couch, but everyone else would have to sleep on the floor. Best of all, it belonged to my parents, so I wouldn’t have to pay for larp space, so long as the fake blood we used didn’t stain the carpet.
My husband and I scared up a collection of some twenty players for our game from among our friends, many of whom were curious about my book topic. Our old roommate, Chip, a fiction writer I’d gone to grad school with, agreed to come down from Boston, along with a couple buddies I’d met through my work on the small literary journal Fringe. A friend who worked over at the Today show agreed to come as well. Then there were the scientists. My husband was studying for a PhD in physics at Rutgers and a slew of his peers—mostly physicists, with an astronomer and a mathematician thrown in for good measure—agreed to come. One of my younger cousins flew in from Tennessee. Unbeknownst to me, she’d been into cosplay, or costume play, for some years. (Cosplay is a hobby and subculture in which participants carefully replicate the outfit of a figure from anime or popular culture and wear that outfit to conventions.)
A flurry of e-mails and a handy web widget decided the date for us, a weekend at the beginning of October. With the logistical necessaries in place, I began to plan.
My husband, George, and I talked plot as we cooked dinner over a series of weeks. We’d run a short-lived Dungeons & Dragons campaign once, and we loved making up stories together. George was particularly interested in forcing players to make difficult decisions, and so we talked about having a band of good guys in-game who would have to do something horrible, like sacrifice a virgin or a hand in order to get a necessary something. The idea wasn’t more concrete than that at first.
I had decided on a published rules system rather than writing my own rules, because it was simpler and I wanted to worry about plot, not reinventing the wheel. Writing a rules set can take weeks, months, or, in the case of large boffer larps, years of preparation and play-testing. I thought I had enough on my plate just running an event, so I had decided to use Cthulhu Live, the same system that the Cthulhu game I’d played during Larpapalooza had used. The rules were simple for a larp, and I hoped the non-contact combat would minimize breakage inside my parents’ beach house.
Early in the process, Brendan sent me a series of exploratory questions: Did I want the players to feel scared? Did I want the atmosphere to be horrific or more neutral? Would I let the players write their own characters? I wanted this game to evoke the same excitement and drama I’d felt at Larpapalooza when my swami colleague had banged on the office door yelling my name, and I wanted it to evoke the atmosphere of its source text, the stories of H. P. Lovecraft and his followers, their horror and mystery. I decided to work with the basic premise of the Cthulhu mythos, the idea that powerful alien beings called the Great Old Ones exist between dimensions but can enter this world when the stars are aligned. Humans are simply the house pets who have run amok while their evil and powerful masters are away on vacation.
Two months before the event, we had our first informal GM meeting when Brendan and Jeramy and their girlfriends visited the space down in Cape May. The visit prompted many discussions of cool, scary scenes that we could stage in the house. The basement held particular interest for Brendan and Jeramy. It had a cement floor, exposed wooden pillars that supported a low ceiling, and several stubby doors with tiny windows that led underneath the front porch. Wouldn’t it be cool, Brendan said, if someone looked through one of those little windows and saw a dead body laid out? We talked about drawing in chalk on the basement floor, to make some sort of ritual inscription. We counted the number of ways to enter or exit the house. There were six doors, excellent for the NPCs to surprise the players. Jeramy thought it’d
be spooky if an NPC died in the bathtub on the second floor and then came through the front door a few hours later, as if nothing had happened. We immediately nominated him for that job. Although we bounced around a few plot ideas, nothing stuck. Finally, after an hour of discussion Jeramy said, essentially, that this plot didn’t have to be Shakespeare. After all, we could just do the Knight Realms thing and have a couple of competing rituals. That settled it in my mind. I’d run a basic plot at my first game. After all, there were only five conflicts in literature—man versus man, man versus himself, man versus nature, man versus society, and man versus machine—but the variations were infinite.
Two weeks later, George and I sat down and brainstormed over a bottle of wine. The house would double as the Salty Dog, a boarding house in 1890s Cape May. As the stars aligned, the barrier between our world and the world of the Great Old Ones would weaken and become porous. The bad guys would do a ritual to help Cthulhu cross the barrier, while the good guys would do a ritual to strengthen that barrier and keep him out.
Over the next few weeks, I fleshed out the plot in meetings with Jeramy and Brendan and over a series of lunches with Gene. We carved out roles for each of the GMs. Brendan would play an evil doctor who wanted to raise Cthulhu using human hearts, which he would remove from the chests of the still living, turning them into evil cultists. Essentially, he would lead Team Evil and help minimize in-game death. Jeramy would play a troubled transient man with psychic powers who knew that Cthulhu was coming and wanted to warn the guests. Essentially, he was the NPC contact for Team Good. I would play Ophelia, the owner of the Salty Dog, and I’d serve as a floating GM, available for skills challenges. George, a confirmed non-larper, would play my chef and would handle the food for all of us. Liz, Brendan’s girlfriend and a hard-core larper, would wear her fabulous Victorian gown and play a reanimated woman, modeling role-play for the novices, and she could also help run some skills challenges, since she knew the rules. Gene would run camp NPC from the attic, sending monsters out from a portal located somewhere in the house, which would periodically vomit beasties until the players figured out how to close it.
I’d decided to write character backgrounds for my players for several reasons. I worried that the main plot wouldn’t be enough to keep the characters busy and wanted to seed secondary plots into the backstories. As a new larper, I’d also found it easier to portray a prewritten character with quirks, like Madame Blavatsky, than to create my own. Somehow, writing up a character for myself to play had felt too high stakes, like I personally was on the line, and I wanted my players to feel they were portraying someone else. At Knight Realms, it had taken me months of role-playing to come up with character quirks, but my game would run for one day only, not nearly enough time for my players to really build out their backstories. Finally, I wanted to give the players immediate reasons to interact with one another, and I knew that interlocking backstories would help make, for example, the local mobster talk to the man he was blackmailing.
Writing the backstories took me more time than anything else did. Everyone got a good, single-spaced page explaining who they were and why they were at the Salty Dog on this particular weekend. I began with ordinary characters: dilettante sons, shady businessmen, mobsters, feminist big game hunters, and detectives. The more I wrote, the crazier my backstories became, as I strove to keep myself interested and ran out of stock ideas. There was the cryptozoologist whose fiancée had been killed by Bigfoot; the nun who was a member of the order of Hypatia, a secret, sacred sisterhood trying to take down the Vatican; her bodyguard, a woman who single-handedly found her way out of the African jungle as a kid. I suppose I really jumped the shark when I wrote about the poor girl who had been blown from Canada to Maine by a hurricane and then forced into prostitution. Every character had a connection to other characters. The nun had her bodyguard, the mobster extorted money from a number of people, and the precognitive artist’s dead prostitute sister had been friends with the Canadian prostitute. The players and I wrote one another e-mails about character histories, and I sent tips on how to assemble a costume from one’s closet and thrift stores. I encouraged players to aim at a Victorian steampunk style, although the game world didn’t quite fit the genre.
CTHULHU CHARACTERS:
Genevieve Hudson, 27, artist
Genevieve was born to a middle-class Bostonian family, the oldest of five sisters, and had a close relationship with her next-youngest sister, Hortense. The five sisters went to private school where they learned to be pure, pious, domestic, and submissive (although the last lesson never stuck). They also became conversant in literature, history, geography, drawing, and music. Hortense excelled at the latter, learning to play and sing beautifully, while Genevieve became an accomplished painter and artist.
When Genevieve and Hortense were seventeen and sixteen, respectively, their father died after a fall off a horse. Oddly, Genevieve had drawn a picture of her father doing this after a strange dream the week before. After Dad’s death, the family became nearly destitute, left with nothing more than their gable house and a tiny pension.
As the eldest daughters, Genevieve and Hortense found employment. Genevieve moved to Manhattan as a governess for a wealthy family, while Hortense moved to Cape May, New Jersey, to serve as a companion to an elderly aunt fond of music.
Genevieve’s life in New York was difficult at first. She missed her family dreadfully. But she had the weekends to herself to paint and draw. She worked for Horace Astor, an art collector with a magnificent collection in his uptown mansion. Her big break came when he chanced across some drawings she had made illustrating architecture for the children. Recognizing her talent, Horace introduced her to other local collectors, and her work began to sell, first in a trickle but then in a steady stream. Genevieve left employment with the Astors and set up her own studio. Henry Wellington, the prominent businessman’s son, was among her chief supporters.
Genevieve keeps a private set of paintings drawn from her own dreams. The queer set of images has predicted future events, among them the great blizzard of 1888 that killed so many in the Manhattan streets and a freak flood that killed hundreds in Pennsylvania the following year. Lately, her private paintings have taken a dark, sinister turn….
While Genevieve’s career flourished in New York, Hortense fell on hard times. Within a year of her arrival in Cape May, her aunt passed away, leaving all her worldly possessions to the church. Without enough money for a train ticket to New York, Hortense took a job as a maid at a local resort but found she could make more playing piano and singing in a burlesque show at a local house of ill repute. From there, it was a short fall into infamy, which she tried to hide from her sister. Recently, she was found murdered in the whorehouse, her heart cut out, and one of her fellow prostitutes sent a telegram to Genevieve, notifying her of the circumstances.
Genevieve has come to Cape May to pay for a grave for Hortense and to sort through her sister’s meager belongings. She feels guilty that she couldn’t help her proud sister and responsible for the murder. Perhaps that is why, for the last few weeks, the pictures painted on the underside of her eyeballs are horrible, slimy, tentacled things that fill her with regret and fear….
Dr. Stephen Rowe, 35, cryptozoologist
Dr. Stephen Rowe is the only son of a Cleveland cooper and his wife. Though his father was not educated, soaring demand for barrels at this stop on the frontier propelled the Rowe family to middle class wealth, and Stephen was able to attend the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where he majored in zoology and received his doctorate with flying colors. Soon after graduation, he accepted a professorship at the nascent Cleveland University.
Unfortunately, a mountaineering trip to Washington State with several of his good friends derailed his promising career. One night, a rustling outside his tent woke Rowe. Across the moonlit clearing, he saw a stooped figure, standing on two legs, naked, and covered with hair. The creature looked quite savage. It had a prominent brow and a
n elongated jaw and appeared to be sniffing at their clothing, which they’d hung out to dry on a line. Rowe remained silent and still, not knowing how to approach the creature. When the beast loped off into the woods, Rowe followed it, afire with curiosity, his head filled with visions of the awards he’d win when it was announced that he had discovered a new species. Stephen lost the beast and his way back to camp in the dark. When the sun rose again, he finally backtracked to the tent where his anxious companions awaited.
His friends only laughed at his fantastic tale the more he insisted that he’d seen the absurd beast. Stephen’s pride was hurt. The following night, he heard the rustling again, and again the beast appeared in the clearing. This time, it bared its three-inch-long fangs at him. Stephen fled into the forest, running for his life. The following morning, the sun rose, and he made his way to camp again. His fiancée, Elizabeth, and his best friend and colleague, Dr. Matthew Jameson, were mauled and dying. Stephen remains haunted by Matthew’s last words, which were an unintelligible forewarning of some grave horror that he apparently witnessed during the encounter. When Stephen made his way to town, no one believed his incredible story, explaining it away as a mangy bear grown skinny and insane with hunger, seen through the eyes of a man awash with fear.
But Rowe knew what he had seen. Stephen carries Matthew’s broken pocket watch, which retains the exact time when the slaughter occurred. From that moment forward, he was obsessed with finding out more about this beast and others like it. Over the last five years, he has made several trips: to Vermont to research sightings of the savage men who populate the forest of the Green Mountains; to New Mexico in search of rocs, the long-taloned birds represented on totem poles; to the Missouri River in search of carnivorous mermaids; to Mexico to see the chupacabras; and now, to Cape May after receiving reports of giant fish men.
