by Lizzie Stark
Events quickly unspooled after the portal group returned. The mystic and the nun powered up the statue, with Sarah, who played the mystic, breaking out some chants she knew from yoga. One of the businessmen bartered away his hand in exchange for a ritual implement needed for the good ritual. The mobster, turned evil by the doctor, had to shoot one of his prostitutes in order to get an implement that Team Evil needed for its ritual. She survived, and he blamed her injuries on the zombies that happened to attack at that moment. When the doctor attempted to revive her and remove her heart, something went awry, and she was able to remember what had happened to her and tell the others. As Liz “killed” her boyfriend in retaliation for his corpse-animating ways, a series of fish-demons stormed the house, killing Team Evil in mid-ritual and disrupting Team Good’s subsequent attempt to bar Cthulhu from this world. Jeramy described the carnage as Cthulhu created a swirling vortex that destroyed much of the house, killing those inside. The final round of sanity checks, as Cthulhu began emerging from the center of the ritual circle made in the backyard, left nearly every character insane. At the last minute, Dieter the mobster, hewing to his backstory as a devout Catholic, broke through the evil doctor’s hold on his soul and gave up the statue. An angered Cthulhu ate him, but with the statue in hand, the remaining good characters were able to close the vortex.
With that, the game ended, and we all headed into the living room for debriefing. We went around in a circle, talking about what had happened to each of us during the game. George thought it was funny that while Cthulhu was sucking everyone into his tentacly mouth, the big game hunter walked into the vortex to retrieve her gun but failed to retrieve George’s unconscious body. The shady businesswoman was delighted to have sold her whaling company to the dilettante, the mystic liked being the unofficial leader of Team Good, the precog artist liked drawing the “visions” the GMs gave her, and the nun liked retrieving the skull of St. Catherine she’d been sent to locate, even though her character died. As we went around the room, it was plain that almost everyone had had a good time. Jeramy said it was the most smoothly run game he’d seen. Even the NPCs seemed to have enjoyed donning latex prosthetics and scaring the bejeezus out of the players. I was so relieved it was over that I almost threw up.
We spent the rest of the evening getting to know each other out-of-character and kvetching over all the things that had happened in-game.
My inbox filled up with post-game questionnaires in the following weeks, and a number of common experiences emerged. I felt nervous to read the questionnaires, since I had encouraged the players to write scathing criticisms, but as it turned out most people enjoyed the game, and their writing articulated a number of key truths about the hobby, impressions that reinforced my own. For starters, most everyone felt surprised that larp was so fun. Though he had never larped before, Chip immediately connected larp with childhood pretend, echoing a typical explanation of the hobby, that it is cops and robbers for adults. He wrote:
I was surprised, really, by how absorbing the experience was; it was like playing make-believe when I was a child, and having no sense of passing time. I expected it to be more awkward, that we’d spend a lot of time giggling at ourselves and that we’d eventually fall out-of-character completely and the whole thing would descend into chaos. But no: within minutes I felt transported, simply by putting on the trappings—the clothes, the mannerisms, the motivations—of someone I was not, and it was surprisingly easy to fall into that role and be there for an extended time. Time passed very swiftly and I hardly noticed that the sun had set. I think it had to do not only with playing a role, but playing that role with some goal in mind, a motivation—the game element of it. It was a quest, full of intrigue, danger, shotguns, whispered asides, hidden nooks, tight stairwells, people you couldn’t trust—it was surprisingly absorbing and one of the most fun weekends I’ve had in a long time. It was also utterly exhausting—I was surprised by that.
As a new larper, I’d had trouble really getting into character and out of my awkward self, so I’d tried to help my players by providing longer, interlocked backstories, costuming tips, and realistic props, and by bringing in role-play veterans to model game behavior. Still, before the game I’d been anxious that my rookies wouldn’t play through the awkwardness and into their characters, something I was rarely able to do even after a couple of years on the scene. As it turned out, in many ways, my efforts paid off. As John, a physicist who played a wealthy businessman put it, “I thought things would be a little more awkward, but when everyone around you is doing their best, then it puts pressure on you to keep up your own character as well. Acting in-character was another thing that I thought might feel sort of weird, but it was surprisingly natural.”
Not everyone found it so simple to get into character. Several players definitely felt self-conscious, like Jenn, Jeramy’s girlfriend and our precognitive artist, who cleverly figured out how to keep that awkwardness in-game. She wrote, “As the game went on, I noticed I wasn’t the only one who was having trouble not laughing sometimes … but that could easily be passed off in-character as insanity eking through.” For many players, the role-playing breakthrough came when they realized they didn’t have to perform the character as if it were Shakespeare but could relax and let some of their own personality come through. August, a physicist who played the mob boss, explained, “Rather rapidly, the character just devolved into me being me. Once I started yelling, telling jokes, and directly engaged in all affairs, I was simply acting in the way I would if I were put in that situation (and happened to have a criminal history). A fifty-year-old, brutal, German, mob boss would never be that loud and engaged in a room with strangers.”
My cousin Phoebe and Daniel the web designer, both tabletop role-players, found that playing in a larp changed their geek-on-geek prejudices about the hobby. Daniel wrote, “Like many other role-players (and probably the rest of the world at large) I’d always secretly looked down my nose at the activity…. But I also think I secretly felt that I was going to love it.” Phoebe came from a similar place. She wrote, “Having previously developed a pretty negative opinion of larping and larpers through my self-perceived placement in the geek hierarchy, I was most surprised by how much fun I had…. It really did feel like a natural next step in gaming for me, combining my beloved tabletop with my hobby of costuming. Larping was exactly what I expected it to be: people in costumes running around killing things and solving mysteries almost completely in real time. I guess I’ve moved to a lower level in the geek power rankings now.”
Not everyone loved the game—one of the players, a mathematician, said that the game caused her to realize that “Larp is not for me…. I couldn’t get into my character at all; I didn’t know what she should be doing. And since everybody else was really into it, I felt strange…. For me, at least, a lot of things just felt like ‘milling around.’” I hadn’t avoided dull cocktail party syndrome completely.
The larp also evoked feelings in the players that lingered after the game ended. Sarah, for example, who played the mystic and unofficial leader of Team Good, felt betrayed by Daniel, who had been turned evil toward the end of the game. As she put it, “I felt so much closer to everyone after [the game]! I’d never met Daniel, but talked to him Friday and then we ended up on the same ‘team’ in game. When I found out after it was over that he’d been turned to the dark side right at the end, I felt totally betrayed and the game was over already!” To me, the fact that Sarah couldn’t shake the feeling of betrayal meant the game had been successful in forcing her to invest emotionally in her character.
Although the game had ended, several players weren’t ready to let it go. The return to normal life from this metaphoric vacation was difficult for August, who felt “a jumble of emotions days afterward that took some time to weed through,” adding that the event had been “a whole day of being bawdy, violent, aggressive, powerful, well-dressed, and deeply engaged in life and death situations. The following day I had to go ba
ck to worrying about pleasing a potential advisor.” Vijay, a mathematician who played the detective, had to leave early the next morning to get to an event with his advisor and wished he had more time to spend with the other players out-of-game. His early departure left him with “this strange empty feeling,” because “I had spent a lot of time with many really cool people the previous day, but I didn’t know their names or anything about them and didn’t even say goodbye to most of them. I would have at least liked an extra day to hang out with them in real life!” In other words: larp can create a yearning for out-of-game social contact.
Nearly everyone felt the game had brought them closer to their fellow players. After the game, Daniel felt like he’d known some players for a long time and that he “could strike up a conversation with them without fear because, after all, we faced the hideous unknown together,” and said that the game worked as an icebreaker. Jenn found it easier to socialize in-character, because “I didn’t have to worry about being awkward or making a good impression,” but after the game was over, she felt that it was “a common experience we could all relate to.” Chip said simply, “I loved my fellow gamers. We were an amazing group of people.” John felt that the experience “was somehow more intimate than, say, going camping for the weekend.”
So what was the verdict? Of the fifteen new larpers who tried Cthulhu Live, thirteen said they’d try larp again, given similar circumstances and a similar group of people. Several people expressed concerns about larping regularly, worrying that the game might take on an inappropriate level of importance in their lives, since it was so absorbing.
The lingering effects of the game were more substantial than I expected. The game drew people together and bonded them, serving as the core topic of conversation for the rest of the evening. Afterward, Team Good met up for drinks in Boston a couple times. A month after the game, when George and I went to a gathering where many of the physicist and mathematician gamers were present, we talked about the game for nearly two hours, boring those who hadn’t been there.
It is hard to explain the bonds that a larp can set into place. As one of the Cthulhu players put it, “No one else will get it when you talk about it later” because larp is a strictly “you had to be there” kind of event. Although I hadn’t really played this game, afterward I felt a deep fondness for everyone who had contributed to the game and helped me run it. I had needed the larp community’s help, and they had turned up with latex wounds, fake blood, boffers, and imaginations ready to help me give the experience of larping to people none of them had met before. There is no way I could have put on a larp without them. The players had faced death together and come out on the other side, a bond between them that won’t be easily forgotten. Brendan, Jeramy, Gene, Liz, and I had faced a possible real-life disaster together, and they had come through for me, like friends do, filling in for my ineptitudes. We had been a true team, with each person’s best qualities shining through. Mine were planning and organization, theirs were skills at improv, plotting, and aesthetics. Larp itself created the bond among us, and one that has proven enduring. Cthulhu may have destroyed the house, killed most of the characters, and driven the rest insane, but this vortex of horror had only confirmed the bonds of friendship and mutual interest within the GM team.
* A phrase Cthulhu cultists chant in Lovecraftian tales, possibly meaning “Cthulhu waits.” It is an abbreviation of “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn,” which means, “In his house at R’lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.”
12
A Week in Denmark
A few months after Cthulhu fhtagn-ed in Cape May, I hopped a plane to Copenhagen to attend Knudepunkt, a yearly gaming convention focused on arty larp that rotates its way around Denmark, Sweden (Knutpunkt), Finland (Solmukohta), and Norway (Knutepunkt), changing its name according to the local language. Literally, Knudepunkt translates to “nodal point” or “knot point” though it means something like “hub” or “junction.” Lucky for me, at the actual convention everyone speaks English.
When I left New Jersey, I wasn’t feeling particularly adventurous. In fact, after a couple years studying the stateside larp scene, I felt jaded, doubtful that I’d learn anything new abroad. And yet here I was, humoring myself, curious about the famous Nordic avant-garde scene. I’d heard all sorts of rumors about Scandinavian larp, that the gamers were crazy hard-core, ran games that lasted for an entire week, built working medieval villages, and shunned those who wore machine-made moccasins or elasticized underpants. I’d heard that larp wasn’t stigmatized abroad, that shockingly, larpers managed to get government funding for games. And I’d heard that the games themselves weren’t even fun, that this scene was so avant-garde that, for example, getting some people together to act out the final hours before an alcoholic’s death wasn’t unheard of. It turned out that the rumors had some truth to them. After spending some time reading up on the Nordic scene I concluded that to high-art larpers, my Cthulhu Live game might be considered cute. If my game were a fluffy bunny, arty Nordic larp would be the secret policeman executing your first-born—but for artistic reasons. Discovering the Nordic scene felt like reading James Joyce or Gertrude Stein after spending a lifetime on fairy tales. The arty Nordic games can be seriously high-concept. If stateside larp is Lord of the Rings, Nancy Drew, and Star Wars, then Nordic larp is Mrs. Dalloway, 120 Days in Sodom (I am not kidding; some Nordic gamers once ran a game based on this), and Schindler’s List. The Nordic scene is proof that fun is not a necessary or essential component of larp, proof that the hobby can sustain high-art aspirations.*
I spent nine days in Denmark learning about Nordic larp culture. Before Knudepunkt officially started, I participated in A Week in Denmark, six days of organized games, touristing, and parties that convention organizers ran to acclimate out-of-towners to local gaming culture. My Nordic larp adventure began with a six-hour tango lesson I attended mere hours after my jet-lagged self touched down in Copenhagen. I had signed up for a game called In Fair Verona, which required its players to attend a workshop before the game in typical Nordic fashion. In Verona, characters used dance, not boffers or card pulls, to interact with one another, and so at the workshop, we learned how to tango and used it to develop characters.1
About twenty of us, half women and half men, met with GMs Tue Beck Saarie and Jesper Bruun in an oblong dance studio. They warmed us up with some silly games and then taught us the moves. At first, we moved in couples, walking side-by-side, and from there we graduated to dance steps performed in a variety of embraces, swapping partners with each song. As we learned the steps, Tue and Jesper talked to us about how physicality could convey character personality. We practiced dancing lightly and heavily, as if we were slump-shouldered introverts and extroverts cruising for a new date. The studio dance floor was partitioned with masking tape, creating a five-foot-wide aisle on either side of the studio’s long sides, aisles which were, in turn, partitioned into a number of smaller “rooms,” representing the game’s setting, a street in New York City’s Little Italy ghetto of the 1920s. We practiced dancing up and down the length of the studio and also inside the small, masking-tape rooms.
With the dance moves somewhat under our control, we moved into character creation, a process that involved neither a thousand-page-long rule book nor any set of statistics. Each player had brought one or two period-appropriate props from home, which were laid out on a table. I had brought a lacy black scarf, but there were also hats with black netting, a rosary, a gun, a top hat that could be compressed to flatness, an exotic necklace, and a wooden fan, among many other items. Each of us selected a prop from the table as inspiration. The character description, Tue and Jesper told us, didn’t have to be a history but could be a list of key words or a drawing of how we thought the character might look. We repeated the procedure with a second prop. Next, we paired up a couple times, talking about the characters and swapping away one of our sheets until everyone had a role they were happy with. I e
nded up with a matchmaker I’d written based on a tiny glass bottle of perfume I’d snagged from the table. It looked like a love potion to me. As a professional observer, I find it difficult to invest myself into the moment, and since the theme of In Fair Verona was love, I thought that casting myself as a matchmaker would give me plenty of reason to interact with others during the game.
Next, our GMs poured many slips of paper onto the ground and told us each to take one. The slips had character dilemmas written on them, coupled with two outcomes, a positive outcome—what would happen if your character overcame the dilemma—and a negative outcome—what would happen if your character failed to change. We split into groups to discuss how to integrate these dilemmas into the characters we’d written and then repeated the procedure with a second slip of paper, choosing the dilemma that fit best. My character’s flaw was that she thought her view of the world was correct and preached about it to others. If she overcame this flaw, she’d be open to new relationships, but if she didn’t, she’d become irrelevant.
