Tuesday 29 September 2015

I say a Little Prayer

Please note that this is a description of my experience playing the LARP I say a little prayer. If you intend to play this Larp at any point I would recommend that you don’t read this review - there will be spoilers which could lessen the emotional intensity and overall experience of the game for you.

I say a little prayer is about the lives of 5 gay men living in the 1980s (we chose London as our location.) It was written by Tor Kjetil Edland and facilitated by Graham Warmsley. All the characters in the game were distinct and we were very lucky to have a great group of players who managed to bring out the key aspect of each character.

The characters were:

Daniel - Outgoing, with a tendency to speak his mind. Charge nurse by day and drag queen by night. 
Robert: (My character) An empathetic ballet dancer, idealistic and emotional,  Robert had met his true love, Jim a year ago.
Jim: A literature student and aspiring novelist. Impulsive and the way he was played (which worked well), dramatic and prone to exaggeration although easily giving into emotion. Jim is Robert’s love but unlike Robert believes in a non traditional family and non-monogamy. 
Tommy: Probably the most self destructive of the group - damaged but hopeful, oscillating from despair to euphoria.
Benny -  The new guy. Probably the most drama free of the group, he spoke his mind and was empathetic with a flair for performance.

Act 1


The LARP was set in two acts. The first acts began with spotlight scenes which were heavily scripted. I wasn’t sure at first it was necessary (I think I wanted to get onto the relationship drama), but actually each scene showed us a little bit about each character; Daniel’s on stage persona, Robert’s empathy, Jim struggling with being open about his sexuality, Tommy’s tendency to self destruction and Benny’s impulsive nature. That meant that the players could start the relationship scenes with an idea of the character already in their mind.

Then the relationship scenes began - in the first half there were a few poignant moments. I had a scene with Jim who wanted us to have an open relationship and confessed to sleeping with other men (later scenes showed this may or may not have been true).

I also had a meaningful scene with Tommy’s character, trying to persuade him to come him with me after he was drunk and behaving inappropriately at a nightclub. Following the directions both characters switched moods and attitudes but the scene ended in Tommy and Robert crying on each other’s shoulders. It was later implied that Robert slept with Tommy, partly out of anger at Jim, which became significant later.

Other scenes included an incredibly awkward one where Jim and Benny were checking out men at a club while the rest of us danced background characters, and a particularly meaningful interaction between Daniel and Benny.  

At the end of Act 1, one of the character’s fell ill and died of AIDs. Graham as the facilitator asked everyone to write their names on cards and put them facedown in a suitcase. You could choose between one and 5 cards depending on how high risk you felt your sexual activities had been. After taking a moment Graham announced that in 1983 Tommy fell ill with Aids and died. Tommy’s character then gave a monologue about what happened, when they were hospitalised and how they died. Each character took hold of Tommy. When the last character let go Tommy had died. 

Act 2


Act 2 began with the four remaining characters present and clearing out Tommy’s belongings. The scenes in act 2, after Tommy’s death were far more hard hitting as they dealt with grief and the feeling of a death sentence hanging over the group.

Tommy was present as a ghost, touching and moving among the other characters but mainly not being noticed. One of the things I really liked in this LARP was that there wasn’t a strict adherence to the rules. Although Tommy wasn’t supposed to be visible he appeared in a scene when Jim, who had started to become afraid of the life he was living, was applying for a job as a teacher, a job he adamantly hadn’t wanted previously. During the meeting with a prospective employee he saw someone who looked like Tommy who was reacting as if they were deathly ill, something which the employer didn’t see. It worked well as an improvisation, both in that it gave an insight into Jim’s grief and also that it illustrated the fear that was causing him to try to change his life.

Daniel also became more bitter, believing that in having slept with Tommy he had killed him. He appeared unafraid of his own suspected death sentence, although admitted that he was in a scene we had together where Robert was also afraid as he was the only other one who had slept with Tommy.

There were some real gut punch scenes for me. Daniel getting angry at a fan who wanted to have sex with him after he believed he had killed Tommy, Daniel getting angry at Robert for believing he had infected Tommy and Benny and Jim talking at the disco about Jim feeling like a coward and Jim telling Robert he was marrying Mary, a woman his parents had put pressure on him to propose to.

Then, another death lottery. This time I put 5 cards in figuring that Robert had a) slept with Tommy and b) had a lot of sex after Jim announced he was getting married.

Daniel died this time, which made sense in game. He gave a moving monologue which did make me feel quite emotional and then as before each person touched him and the last person to let go meant his death.

Then there was an epilogue where the survivors, Benny, Jim and Robert were lighting candles to float down the river in the memory of those we had lost. Again a poignant scene which ended in an unscripted group hug

-----------------------------

The game was heavily directed by the facilitator which was generally a positive. At first I was a bit sceptical about that approach as it cut off scenes and forced characters to answer questions. However, particularly in the second act it brought out the emotion more heavily in some scenes, for example, by asking characters to switch their focus from a loved one leaving them to a loved one dying. It also kept scenes short and significant. It reduced time players had to fully explore their characters but ensured that the majority of scenes ended on a hard hitting note, some which felt like an emotional punch. 

To play this Larp successfully you need a very engaged facilitator and an ability to be able to let go of yourself and step into the life of your character. Perhaps due to the directing this was surprisingly easy. The first act, with it’s tones of self exploration in both constructive and destructive ways allowed all the players to build up characters who learn how to function together as a family. The dynamics between some particular characters and even the group as a whole built everyone up and brought them together.

And then, when act 2 hit it was a shock, although it shouldn’t have been, although we knew we were playing gay characters at the start of the 1980s, although we knew AIDs was part of the plot. When we were waiting for the death lottery I wasn’t only nervous because I didn’t want my character to be the one picked, I didn’t want any characters to be picked. I had grown so close to 4 fictional people over the course of about 2 hours that I didn’t want anyone to ‘die’ in the game (and be fine two hours later). And this was, for gay men in the 1980s, a reality of life. That you would watch friends and partners slowly dying in front of you and know that you could be next. 

And when act 2 began everything had changed. All that had been built up was torn down again. There was guilt, grief and fear and little room for anything else. Even through this the characters processed their feelings in their own ways, staying consistent to their personalities. But there was also a thread running through act 2 about how death had changed everyone, and everyone was diminished by it. 

In the epilogue, the 5 characters standing in a group hug, an unscripted moment of hope felt like it could be a redemption. People break and then go on the best way they know how. And if they live then they change but they don’t stay broken forever.

Monday 28 September 2015

Let the World Burn

Written by Peter Fallesen and translated into English by Rasmus Husted LegĂȘne, Lizzie Stark and Peter Fallesen and pitched at London Indiemeet by Karolina Soltys


It has taken me a while to write up this game. To be honest it has taken me a while to make sense of it.

Let the World Burn is a beautiful story game (which can apparently also be run as a LARP) about a search for a lost love in a decaying world.

From the start the David Lynchesque nature of the game is very apparent. There are 5 characters in the game. The 3 ‘humans’ are male. They are P.E, the romantic, searching for his true love amid the ruins; C, a ghost represented in the form of a set of his teeth that P.E carries in his pocket, O.D, a self destructive wannabe nihilist who is searching for the one woman who he believed truly understood him. In addition to these characters are the spirits of Love and Destruction, influencing events around them but not being physical presences in the story.  

Over all this hovers the spectre Q, a woman about whom we learn very little.

During the game the 3 ‘human’ characters, influenced by love and destruction frame scenes around their relationships with Q in the past. Significantly Q is not in any of these scenes having just left or yet to arrive. All those scenes are framed in flashback and scenes with C are framed from when he was alive. Ultimately, at least in the game that we played, C was dull but stable, P.E. accepting, and O. D. destructive but lost.

In between these scenes the search for Q continues in various locations, in her apartment; at a wake; at a motel and throughout the city which is slowly degrading as characters begin destroying their parts of the city as a mechanic to win arguments.

We learnt that O.D had regular sex with Q in the alley behind the porn theatre, that P.E and Q had a dull sex life and a life devoid of adventure and O.D. certainly believed that she wasn’t the settling down type, although again Q only appeared through the character interpretations of her and wasn’t present at any time. We also learnt that C spent 3 weeks with her when she had temporarily split up from P.E and it had been the most meaningful 3 weeks of his life until she had just left. (‘No wonder you jumped in front of a bus’ Destruction said)

At the end of the game the characters have to decide whether their search for Q is driven by love or destruction. The answer then affects how the game ends.

The interesting thing about this game is that although it’s focussed around the search the ultimate mystery is not around what has happened to Q. It’s quite clear, following the wake scene, possibly even following the scene in P.E and Q’s apartment what has happened. The real mystery is around who Q is and how 3 people (influenced by Love and Destruction) see her as someone so different that they might as well be searching for 3 different women. Maybe this has something to say about the nature of love, that we can only understand aspects of others through our own view of the world. Thus Q is equally a devoted housewife, an impulsive exhibitionist lover and someone who is soft and tender enough to change someone’s world in 3 weeks.

Or perhaps Q is none of those things and has become a cipher for what the characters really want - someone like them. Perhaps Destruction could argue that love is always destructive because you’re taking a person with their own hopes and desires and moulding them into the image that you want them to fit. But Love could answer that maybe, even if you never know a whole person you can love the part that you do know with all your heart. And maybe the question of who Q really was is now unanswerable. Maybe it was always unanswerable. Maybe that was the point.

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Tuesday 22 September 2015

Why Indie gaming is great!

This is mostly a filler post. I have lots of things to write about but I have to think about the best way to go about it. So for now...



I got into gaming late, by gaming standards. I played my first game a year and a half ago, maybe a bit over. I never played Dungeons and Dragons and although I adore Cthulhu it is more for the absolute horror the GM can invoke than any strategic abilities on my part.  I can only really talk about Indie games.


I think since I started playing, gaming has changed something in me for the better. It seems a strange thing to talk about how sitting round the table changes things but for me it did:

  • You get to play pretend – obvious, but worth saying.
  • Conflict: I was incapable. I know this isn't universal by any means but I couldn't stand the thought of being disliked. Only somehow having survived the attentions of a ghoul in Monsterhearts and convincing someone in Fiasco to just put the gun down and we could talk and countless other 'encounters' – well I'm not completely cured but I'm much better at telling people to back off.
  • Lines and veils – I was hesitant to include this here but it fits. Lines and veils are the absolute no. If you have a trauma or a phobia or just don't want to play a game with a specific aspect in it then the GM and the other players better respect that. If they don't they are shitty human beings. So you learn to say no – this is enough. And for some people having that no respected without comment is life changing.
  • There is a community. At least, there is where I am which is admittedly London. But I have met and become close to some wonderful people and if there is any sort of roleplaying community in your area chances are you will too.
  • I started blogging. And then I started writing my own games.And then I started writing short stories.  And then I wrote a LARP.
  • You can experiment with aspects of yourself, self identity and aspects of situations that you don’t quite understand.
  • You can facilitate games without GMing - although as I have GMed a grand total of 2 games for people who were doing me a favour I really must get over that!
  • I lean towards playing heavier themed more immersive games, But I have also played games that have left me practically crying with laughter.
  • I can now improvise. I have also just qualified as a teacher. I have a feeling this is going to be a useful skill :)


A reminder that you can sign up to my mailing list here.

Tuesday 15 September 2015

Juggernaut review

It is July third, 1950. The Korean War is eight days old. National Security Council Report 68 is sitting on Harry Truman’s desk, a grim outline of the Cold War that is to enfold the world for the next 40 years. Alan Turing’s paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” is circulating for review. Cinderella is a box office sensation.And you have invented a computer that can see the future.Employing cutting-edge Ward-Takahashi identity derivations outside their quantum-theoretical framework, JUGGERNAUT processes enormous data sets, ostensibly in the service of code-breaking once the technology is proven and refined. The unstable geniuses behind the math have reached some curious conclusions that only experimental evidence can confirm. By the numbers, JUGGERNAUT —given enough resources— should be able to crack ciphers before they are even invented.


Juggernaut is a LARP for 4 - 6 characters who are testing the new machine - a computer that can supposedly see the future. All characters are pre-written and there are various reason why there might already be tension between them. Some are scientists and the character I played who worked building rockets under the Nazi regime before transferring to America (where we set the game) kept fighting with the military officer who had lost friends during the war. Other characters had equal reasons why there might be tension between them. In addition to personal reasons for strained relationships the game was set in an era of racism, xenophobia and McCarthyism so the atmosphere as the game began was one of tension and paranoia.


The contents of the game were a soundtrack to the machine working and a deck of 21 cards with different predictions on them. There were extra decks of cards that could replace cards in the original deck used to change some of the predictions so there is a re-playability value and I would be keen to play this game again, preferably as a different character.


The predictions themselves were unveiled when a character pressed play on the soundtrack and took a card when the soundtrack completed. The predictions began with relatively mundane events and political events in the future which our characters had no way of verifying. The challenge of the LARP was that all predictions about the team members on that day had to come true. The first card I drew was that I had lost a pen and would engage others in a search for it. Which I then had to do during the course of play.


I won’t go into details about the predictions. Discovering them and acting on them is the fun of the game. One of the players called Juggernaut an ‘improvised LARP’ and I think that’s a fair assessment. Every card you drew, you had to ensure that the events on it happened during the game and as the intensity of the cards increased it led to the team becoming increasingly paranoid, secretive and hostile towards one another.


  
As we started to get through cards and realised that some of the ‘predictions’ hadn’t been acted on one of the players had the idea of, in character, sorting the cards into verified (i.e. things that had occurred), unverified (i.e. things that were predicted to occur but that we hadn’t made happen yet) and unverifiable (things predicted for a future date.) This made it easier for players to see what actions their character’s still needed to complete by the end of the game.


The game lasted about 2 hours and was enjoyable. We did experience some issues of our character’s personalities altering as predictions came through in order to fit in with the predictions. However, there was some guidance given on each character and how they felt about the others so none of the alterations were incredibly drastic. It did make it difficult to play any of the characters in a nuanced way but in a 2 hour game this wasn’t a problem.


The game was partially immersive in an interesting way. On one hand I did feel the tension and paranoia increase with particular predictions, and in fact it was immersive to the point that I accidently opened the door a few times when I was pulling on it as hard as I could, forgetting that I wasn’t really locked in!


On the other hand I had to take a step back and work out how and when I could play out predictions and how I could give others an opportunity to play out their’s.


Overall if you get the opportunity to play this game, play it. I would advise that in addition to focusing on your character card and ensuring that your predictions play out you focus on your feelings towards the machine and how they change throughout the game depending on the predictions you receive. What happens if you are sceptical but the predictions, despite your best efforts come true? What happens if you start off believing in the maths but have a really, really vested interested in the machine being wrong? It would probably useful to have a brief understanding of the time period the game is set in to get the full experience of it.

This game strikes me as a very good beginner LARP that would work well for someone who wants to try out LARPing but hasn’t done it before.

Juggernaut can be purchased from Bully Pulpit Games

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Wednesday 9 September 2015

Social Issues in role-playing - London Seminar

I know a lot of people who follow me have probably already seen this information but I want to make sure everyone gets a chance to pitch something who wants to. We are particularly short on games for the evening. I think it would be interesting if we could make this happen and there seems to be a bit of interest.

The idea came from this article which was posted on Indie RPG but please don't feel limited to these options - please feel free to pitch a talk or game on anything that you're passionate about:

http://thebias.com/.../31/diversity-panels-id-like-to-see/
My suggestion for a format (which is completely open to change if people have any better suggestions) is that anyone who wants to talk about a subject pitches it and prepares 10 - 15 minutes of material to get the conversation started. Then we have about 45 minutes of group discussion. If we get enough pitches then we could run 2 or 3 at once and everyone would get chance to attend two or three over a couple of hours. 

Then in the evening we could run games and try to bring in the techniques we’ve learnt - perhaps playing a different type of character or using a different type of safety exercise. 

What I’d like to know is - is anyone interested in pitching a talk topic and what would you pitch? 

It can be anything that interests you around the theme of diversity and social issues in role-playing.Even if you don’t want to pitch is this something you’d want to attend? 

What do you think of the format proposed? Any thoughts / comments?

The dates proposed are the 17th or 31st October. Please can you complete this Doodle Poll - I'm leaning towards the 17th because it's not Halloween so it will probably be easier to book a venue but marginally more people seem to be able to make the 31st. 

Can you let me know if you can do either of the 17th or 31st October? I've attached a Doodle poll: 

http://doodle.com/poll/6nvc68vpnc299qde

The pitches we have so far are:

Talks / Discussions

Creating a safe space and dealing with triggers

Depictions of mental illness in story games 


Race and environment 

Playing people unlike yourself 

Conflating meta techniques and safety rules

Gender, queer theory or how to positively use sex in games

Historical queer identities 

How to encourage a positive gaming culture in role-playing groups

GM's responsibility for the atmosphere of the table

Games

Ehdrigohr: The Roleplaying Game