LARP Report #2
Also two weeks ago, I played in the third of Shifting Forest's Parlor Larps that I'd been exposed to. I had played in one of these -- Queen of Spades -- run by J Li at Dundracon in February. At that time, I bought five of the published booklets. Just after Dundracon, I went to Knutepunkt in Norway, where I ran (under difficult conditions) the Hamlet larp with a bunch of the guys there. We had some discussion of it. To them, the larp system was very mechanics-heavy, but they were good sports about trying it out. (You can read more in my Knutepunkt 2005 Report.) Two weeks ago, I encountered J Li again at Albert Andersen's Kabuki larp. She invited me to another of the parlor larps two days later -- a modern supernatural horror game called "All Saint's Eve."
I came to the event on the Stanford campus at a dorm lounge. Socially, I was being introduced to a fairly tight-knit group of college students. Though I had been a graduate student for a long time, I am now 35, and married with a kid. It felt a little awkward to me, but the group were open and friendly. From the game description, I had come expecting to play a debauched rich suburban teenager, and had dressing the part. However, I have a wide comfort range in PCs. So during character selection, I opted to go for whoever was least wanted by other players. This turned out to be an 11-year-old abused lower-class kid, Ariel Thompson.
For me, the game was mostly about impotent rage. Ariel hated most of the people in the room -- the mean teenagers and the even nastier adults. His goal was to get his friend Jenny Carter to run away with him. He was extremely resilient and strong-willed, but he was essentially powerless. This was actually fairly cool to me. I think other people avoided the 11-year-old for just this reason, that it is liable to be powerless. J played Ariel's 11-year-old best friend, Jenny. I think it was no coincidence that she was an organizer who had been involved in making this, and took the less attractive "weak" role. Socially, it's worth noting the disjuncture that while the characters are 11-year-olds, I'm sitting and holding hands with J -- but this actually wasn't awkward at all. I think we were both very used to larps and had clear lines of what is in-game.
I spent much of the game sitting in a corner with Jenny, or trying to protect her from whatever was around, by running interference and standing by to take draw attention away from her. At several points, I found myself just sort of standing fixed still, arms at my sides, twitching with anger and wishing I had a gun or something to shoot someone. However, he didn't have any supernatural powers or expert skills, and acting violent would just have brought adult wrath down on him. I considered lying to cause dissent or to frame one of the adults I disliked, but I didn't have enough secret information to make it plausible.
The one point where I was really on the line was when a spirit had possessed Jenny's father momentarily, and it/he tried to shoot Jenny's brother. I was on the edge of rushing forwards to stab him at that point -- not to defend myself or Jenny, but to take advantage of his physical and social weak moment. Since he had just acted evil via possession, I could probably have gotten away with it to the others, though on the other hand I doubt I could have done much damage to him.
Ariel did have something of a dramatic arc, from my point of view. In the original description I wrote of him, I said that he wanted Jenny to run away with him because he wanted her to keep him sane, not out of any feeling for her. He would, after all, be dragging her away from a rich life much better than his own. However, by the end of it, he threw himself in the path of a bullet meant for her. I'm not sure how anyone else saw Ariel -- he was generally pretty sullen and annoying.
Another interesting point was that I made a bit of a point about Ariel being Jewish, in response to various questions about Christianity that came up during the game. It wasn't mentioned in the background, I was just improvising based on his first name. But it added a small bit to the cosmological/spiritual issues which came up in the game, I think.
In the broader game, there was the usual issue in larps of social hierarchy and positioning. On a social level, the two players of the adult fathers were vying for dominance of everyone else. They were joined by the players of one of the teenagers, Lars, who managed to get the gun and hold everyone else at gunpoint. Still, the other four kept active to a fair degree -- though this was more myself and J. The player of the secretly-guilty party remained pretty isolated and quiet most of the time, not wanting to draw suspicion, I suspect. And one character was killed about two-thirds of the way through, leaving the player lying down and out of it for over an hour until the end.
Overall, though, it was a good setup for dramatic tension between all the characters. I had a good time with my character, and I thought the story was engaging for most people there.
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jhkimrpg) wrote,
