Leaving Mundania

by Lizzie Stark

  During a trip to Manhattan in search of the fabled mentalist ear-slug, he met Duchess Ermengarde of Zutphen, a medium, and the two struck up a correspondence that has lasted for several years. The Duchess’s companion, the hunter Josephine Kensington Phillips, is interested in tracking and killing new animals, and Stephen’s letter to the Duchess about the fish men has brought them both to Cape May.

  I handed the character histories and my rule book over to Gene, who had generously agreed to create statistics and skills for each of them according to the mechanics of the rules, a time-consuming technical exercise. In the meantime, I had a list of props to gather and create. Chief among these were ten realistic human hearts, five of them for use in the good-guy ritual, the hearts of the house, which would be hidden around the Salty Dog for the players to find. The other five hearts would stand in for the human hearts of characters—if Brendan’s doctor successfully performed a ceremony on an unconscious person, he would be able to “remove” his or her heart for use in the evil ritual. Fine art is not my forte, and I didn’t have a lot of money to spend on props. I cruised eBay until I found a heart-shaped Jell-O mold, which I promptly ordered for experimentation. I soon discovered that while cherry Jell-O mixed with cocoa powder makes a nauseating heart, the vomitous thing wasn’t firm enough for players to toss around during a game. Instead I turned to an old grade school favorite: salt dough, a bakeable dough made from flour, salt, and water. I added red food coloring, which turned it the shade of brick. I molded, unmolded, and baked five of those to serve as the hearts of the house. Then I was out of food coloring. I made the next five hearts out of plain white dough, and George, who paints for fun, washed them with different shades of red until they looked drippy and gross.

  I also needed to produce two pieces of paper, one written as a letter, the other ripped from a book, that would contain the instructions for each of the rituals. I wanted these sheets to look browned, crackly, and old. After a little searching on the Internet, I had a variety of techniques at my fingertips. Paper could be crinkled and then made flat, dipped into tea or espresso and dried out in the oven, rubbed with lemon juice and then heated over a candle. Its edges could be carefully wet and then burned in a controlled way, creating an interesting texture. I tried some of my good resume paper and some plain printer paper, experimenting on small swatches. Finally, I had a kitchen full of browned scraps and my final method. I wrote the rituals for Team Good and Team Evil on two pieces of paper and treated them. The resulting paper, brittle, spotty with water stains, and a deep brown, seemed ancient. At Gene’s suggestion, I brought my yellowed sample scraps with me to leave around the house as red herrings.

  The best prop, however, was not of my making. Jeramy’s girlfriend, Jenn, who would be playing the artist Genevieve Hudson in-game, is an accomplished artist in real life and made a gorgeous statue of Cthulhu, perhaps five inches tall. I could only ogle his perfection, his squiddy tentacled mouth, his long baleful claws, and his abominable dragon wings. She painted it a mottled green all over. Both rituals used the statue, which the GMs hoped would get the two teams to work together when it came time to power up the statue before its use in either ritual.

  As the day of the larp approached, my blood pressure spiked from uncertainty. A larp has a great many moving parts, and of course, the actions of the players determine the outcome, like a Choose Your Own Adventure story, so I couldn’t plan everything down to the last detail. What if my players ended up hating larp, as my husband had? I had brought George to a Knight Realms event and to a Dystopia Rising game, and he’d struggled with boredom and suffered from the overwhelming expectation he put on himself to behave in a theatrical manner. What if my gamers suffered the same fate? Aside from the boredom, I had put plenty of duties in other people’s hands—Gene was recruiting his own NPCs and writing stats, Jeramy and Brendan would create backstories for their NPCs, plus Brendan and Liz were arranging a clock-chiming noise that we’d play, since we intended something creepy to happen at the top of every hour. The worst thing that could happen, I thought, would be boredom on the part of the players. Or if they hated it. Or too much plot. Or not enough to last a whole day. Or a logistical failure. My co-GMs told me I was feeling the typical new GM jitters, and in the week before the game, they took turns, as they put it, “sanity-check-ing” me.

  With the food purchased, the props accounted for, more or less, the characters built, and my sanity still minimally intact, all of us headed down to Cape May for the weekend. Gene brought four friends with him, our volunteer NPCs, and after a few last-minute cancellations that got my nerves fired up, we had fifteen players, plus Liz, George, the three GMs, and the four NPCs—twenty-four people in all.

  Everyone arrived on Friday, coming from Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, and Boston. Brendan and Liz brought their rule book, and I brought mine, from which Gene had copied quick-reference sections for the GM team to carry. We split our group of players into two. One stayed on the first floor of the house, which contained a kitchen and dining room, a bathroom, and a sort of parlor area around a fireplace. The second group went up to the attic, which had a weird kitchenette with a large area around it that would serve as camp NPC, as well as a large, in-game bedroom. Downstairs, Gene explained the rules to half the players, while upstairs, Ian and I explained them to our half.

  Although he’s in his early twenties, Ian resembles a grumpy old man. Perhaps it’s that he wears overalls on occasion or that his long, curly hair, gathered in a ponytail, seems to belong on a southern gentleman or underneath a cowboy hat. Ian was Gene’s best friend from high school, one who served, good-naturedly, as the butt of his jokes. I knew Ian well. He’d driven me to Knight Realms many times over the course of my research. He preferred to play sidekick characters that made other people laugh, and this was certainly true at Knight Realms, where he played the genial Hamish, a simple-minded Celtic bard who was the sidekick to Gene’s Billiam. Hamish’s simplicity belied Ian’s intelligence. To play a stupid character well, you have to be smart. Hamish once told Billiam that in order to romance a woman, he’d heard you had to build her a ship, a courtship.

  Ian brilliantly helped answer the players’ many questions about the basics, explaining concepts like character statistics with the practiced air of someone who had dealt with newbies before. We ran the players through several rounds of combat, just as I’d been run through combat at DEXCON.

  After explaining combat, Ian and I made sure to point out that what makes the game is the realistic reactions of your fellow players. If I knife Ian and he says, “Oh, I’m dead,” it’s lame. If I knife him and he staggers back, holding his ribs and gasping, that is much more fun.

  We fielded a few questions about specific skills, and with that, the two groups rejoined downstairs. In true larp fashion, we stayed up quite late talking and drinking, and after a very brief GM meeting, the remaining stragglers went to bed. The game would begin the following morning after breakfast.

  At the crack of nine, I paired up with one of the NPCs. He and I hid the hearts of the house in different locations—one outside in the barbecue, two in the basement, one inside the fuse box, and one in a drawer on the second floor. Gene had had the brilliant idea of scattering red herrings around the house. He and the other NPCs wrote on my scraps of parchment—grocery lists, old notes, creepy, maddened sayings—and strewed them around the house. Gene had also brought what seemed like his entire stash of weapons—canes for walking, baseball bats, boffers, coils of rope, toy guns—and we attached item cards to each of them and put them in random places around the house, some of them behind “locks,” indicated with a card stating the lock’s level. One of the NPCs was Vince Antignani, a Knight Realms player whose character was a prominent member of the Rogues’ Guild and a well-known Chroniclerite. We’d shared many scenes in-game. When he first joined Knight Realms, Vince spent a few years NPCing exclusively, with no real character; he was a master NPC. True to his roguish expertise, he brought real padlo
cks to the game, which we taped to some of the lock cards. Vince also owned a set of metal lock picks, which he had brought to give to whichever character had the highest skill level in lock picking, in this case, the detective Jerome. I set up a small museum with a couple of objects, marked with cards, in one of the bedrooms. The good and evil players each needed a set of bones, which they’d find in this room.

  Downstairs, my players had gotten into costume. For a group of novices, they certainly looked impressive. My cousin Phoebe Hill had one of the best. She was playing a bodyguard who was part of an elite and secret religious order, and she looked like a member of the Swiss Guard. She wore red and black striped pants tucked into high boots and a sort of red tabard that hung between her legs with a smart military vest buttoned over it. A rosary hung from her belt. Jeramy’s girlfriend, Jenn, wore a long skirt with a fusty blouse, a gold pin at its neck, and a suit jacket. Cheri, a friend I’d met working on my literary journal, was playing a big-game hunter and wore khaki pants tucked into riding boots and a beige cap and came armed to the teeth with a faux rifle and a hunting knife that caused her some consternation on the way home, when airport security questioned her about the weapons in her checked luggage. Brendan and Liz wore their Deadlands costumes. Everyone looked great.

  With little fanfare, we called lay-on, and immediately the room filled with people talking loudly and animatedly. After about fifteen or twenty minutes, there was a lull. I noticed that no one had picked up anything, not the scraps of paper lying around, not the weapons, and I had a moment of panic. What if they didn’t search the oversized dictionary and find the scrap of paper with the good ritual written on it? What then? I bonged the chime to indicate that it was noon and led some players on an expedition to see the house. We discovered Liz’s character in one of the rooms, the first creepy thing of the day. She’d done her makeup very pale, and we found her lying unconscious on a bed. We led her downstairs, where the lull continued.

  Gene came to the rescue. After I bonged the chime again, for 1:00 PM, a horde of zombies appeared out of nowhere to attack the players. Our first combat went somewhat slowly, as everyone was still getting used to the rules, but from then on, the larp went off without a hitch. In the compressed time frame of a larp, when a new GM is hyped up on adrenaline, much of the experience blurs, although for me a few select scenes stuck in my brain. I spent a lot of time marshalling various skills challenges, primarily lock-picking challenges. I and the other GMs had to prod players to get them to use their skills at first. When someone brought a locked book to me and said they wanted to open it, I asked, “What skill are you calling?” to help them along. It worked, and as the game progressed the players became increasingly willing to call skills off their character cards and role-play their actions. When players wanted to do research in the library, I told them what information they were able to find out. I spent a lot of time walking from the first floor to the third floor to coordinate the bonging of the hourly chime and the NPCs. Jeramy and Brendan were very much in the game. Brendan’s character summoned a beasty in the first hour of the game to create dead bodies. When injured players were brought to his room, he Kali-Ma’d out their hearts á la Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Team Evil acquired several members. By midday, the players had what Gene called “a case of the larps.” They had picked the house dry, opened every lock, taken every weapon, and snatched up anything that seemed remotely useable. I was surprised that nearly all of the players were so into the game. The NPCs donned fake gunshot wounds and painted themselves white or green or blood red, depending on what the situation called for. The players politicked among themselves, and Team Good had officially formed up, helmed by a mystic, played by my friend Sarah, who had originally introduced me to the concept of larp. Jeramy, in his capacity as insane but good homeless guy, was able to psychically communicate with her and in doing so, eased the plot along. Freaky things happened every time our in-game chimes bonged. Dead bodies hanging down in the basement, dead Jeramy in the tub upstairs, creepy reanimated corpses in the living room. Zombies and more zombies.

  While I spent most of the larp out-of-game, ferrying information among the GM team and answering player questions, the moments I got to play Ophelia were the most fun. I had a great scene with August, a physicist who worked with my husband and played Dieter the mob boss, in which we traded barbs and established that I was probably paying him protection money. As Ophelia, I also sold off an ancient artifact to Amruta, an astronomer who was playing our head nun, a member of a secret order. I also got to yell at a variety of people—Ophelia kept freaking out as players continuously picked the lock leading into her room and stole objects from her private museum.

  My favorite moment occurred after lunch, when Gene sent a horde of powerful monsters to storm the first floor of the house. My former roommate Chip, who was playing a paleontologist, and I were attempting to escape from zombies by fleeing up the stairs, when Gene appeared above us, wearing armor made of skulls and armed with a large club. He nearly dropped my health points to zero, and he downed Chip, who bled out on the stairs. Gene brushed by us to engage other players. I fled into a coat closet, and while a crowd of characters rushed out the front door, I made it over to the stairs and managed to grab Chip. He, I, and three more players traveled down into the basement and out into the backyard, where the zombies flanked us. We fled up the back deck stairs into the second floor in an attempt to get our wounded selves and the dying Chip to the doctor, who had set himself up in a nearby bedroom. With four people to heal, Brendan, as the doctor, went to work. What should happen next but more zombies? They came up the stairs inside the house, chasing a collection of players. We shut the door to the room, so that our motions could be outside of the combat count. As we locked the door, we heard Gene’s voice calling out the numbers, going up and down. Silence fell. Then it rose again—another zombie was attacking characters in the hallway, and the counting started once more. The battle had been raging for more than half an hour. Finally, silence fell. I heard one of George’s colleagues say, “Does anyone want to continue combat?” and everyone inside the doctor’s room, all five of us, plus everyone in the hallway, dead monsters and players included, broke out in hysterical laughter. “Ah, gamer humor,” Brendan said. “It’s universal.”

  He doctored each of the four of us in turn, using a fascinating set of old medical equipment that Liz had purchased for use as her doctor character at Knight Realms. The kit featured small bottles, bowls, and a terrifyingly large syringe. Brendan mimed bleeding each of us as part of his process of healing. Chip lay on the bed, eyes staring up at the ceiling, dead. After everyone else was healed, Brendan remained in the room along with me, although I was out-of-game because I wanted to see what was about to occur. Brendan set a cloth and a bowl on top of Chip’s chest and began chanting in a strange language. Just as he Kali-Ma’d out Chip’s heart, using a handy heart prop, an injured detective Jerome picked the lock on the door and fell into the room. Lucky for Brendan, a reanimated but now heart-less Chip was up and evil.

  The whole scene, running from Gene’s demon and being made evil, was a highlight for Chip, whose experience seemed to echo my own feelings—excitement, fear, and hilarity—about the first big battle I faced at Knight Realms.

  I died almost instantly, and as I lay there on the stairs being dead, I could hear the carnage throughout the house—in the form of demons counting, people shouting their actions (“One! Two! Three—Evade! Four! …”), people role-playing their injuries, the noises coming from the kitchen, the dining room, outside, the battle splitting into branches—all I could do was hear it, and I was surprised at how totally exciting it was, and how the combat procedures of the game, regulated though they are, created a simulation of chaos, exactly like a battle but in very slow motion. And then I was carried up to the Doctor’s room, and lay there in triage until he operated on me, took out my heart, and turned me evil. And still as I lay on the bed in his room I could hear battles outside, cha
racters good and bad trying to get inside. It was terribly exciting. It showed how completely this game, when acted out and taken seriously by a large group of people, can turn into an experience very realistically heart-pounding.

  Daniel, a web designer from Boston who played a cryptozoologist connected to Chip’s character, thought that the big brawl helped unify Team Good. He remembered, “Everyone was on the brink of death; there were undead chasing us from every direction.” After he helped drag the dead upstairs, “the wounded characters bounded together to regroup and confront it [Gene]. It was a compelling, almost epic moment because at that point everyone was working together to fight the same thing—we had the nun’s paladin wielding the holy sword we’d acquired earlier and a slew of characters gunning it out on the stairs uncertain as to whether we’d survive. And we did, because we were awesome.”

  The players’ highlights weren’t all action oriented. Aatish, a physicist who played an undercover member of the Knights Templar, really got into the role-play. Later, he explained, “The moment when I woke up in the doctor’s office and was staring at the ceiling, having just been chloroformed was a real in-character moment for me. The doctor played his character so well that I really found my sense of out-of-game reality sort of melt away and became increasingly convinced by the reality of what was happening in-game. I started getting stressed out by my conflicting allegiances, which I think is hilarious. That incredible moment of suspension of the disbelief was definitely the high point of my experience.”

  I missed what was, perhaps, the most memorable scene of the game. Both the evil and good rituals required a statue from another place, through a portal to another dimension. Gene had decided that the players would get the statue from a being who is part of the Cthulhu oeuvre, a demony creature named Nyarlathotep, essentially a standin for the devil. He decided that the NPCs would portray the seven deadly sins when the players entered and asked my permission to run a scene that had what could kindly be called “mature” themes. He warned everyone going on this mission out-of-game before they went down the stairs into the basement. No one will ever forget the sight. Two male NPCs unwillingly coupled on the floor, leaving a stream of fake blood below them. One of Gene’s NPCs force-fed him cookies, beer, and cream puffs, personifying gluttony. Three months later, Gene said the thought of sugar cookies still made him sick. For the characters, the commitment of the NPCs to terrifying them raised the level of the game. The detective bartered away his skill at lock picking—to such an extent that he was unable to use doors at all afterward—in exchange for the statue the team so needed, and everyone returned to the house, their sanity levels a little lower after the numerous checks performed in the portal.