Leaving Mundania (10 page)

James's bedroom is visible from his study through a large doorway. It holds a four-poster bed with a dark red bedspread on it and a dark brown wingback chair. Sconces on either side of the bed hold battery-powered pillar candles, and a circular light fixture of what looks like thick, grayish metal hangs from the ceiling, with fake pillar candles concealing the light bulbs. The flat-screen in his bedroom is permanently tuned to Fox News. While we talk, he at his desk, I in a heavy chair across from him, we laugh about his conservatism. He says that although he's a small business owner, people expect someone with his hair to be some sort of liberal hippie.

James's apartment is conservative, solemn, and theatrical. He's even painted the wainscoting and the trim around the doors dark brown to resemble old, varnished wood. The only items that truly break the medieval aura are the gigantic flat-screen in the bedroom, the desktop computer in the study, and the modern conveniences that fill his kitchen, like his fancy coffee machine, which turns out single-serving cups of coffee that James goops up with flavored cream. The apartment is as out-of-time as his hair—both are hewing toward a certain aesthetic, one that does not represent any one place or time but suggests a sort of fantastic, vague, hyperreal past in which people read leather-bound books and stood, heroically brooding, over their vintage mantelpieces.

Clearly, for James, the appearance of something has the ability to create a certain mood, a belief that has made Knight Realms the premiere larp in the tri-state area. Many players say that the game's stagecraft and its ability to make the game feel real keep them coming back. James is as careful about Knight Realms' setting as he is about his apartment decor. The game has a collection of spare costuming for the NPCs, or nonplayer characters. NPCs can be anything from attacking monsters to random commoners who have recently escaped slavery to traveling masseuses. Essentially the purpose of an NPC is to engage the players by fighting them or through role-play that confronts players with information or puzzles or adds to the atmosphere of the game, making the world seem more real. Unlike
player characters, NPCs aren't trying to figure things out. In a video game, they'd be the monsters a player kills, the local barkeep who passes on a crucial rumor, and the princess who gets saved in the endgame. More impressively, the Knight Realms' NPCs aren't just costumed, they're armed with expensive cast foam-latex weapons that look uncannily real compared to homemade duct-taped boffers. In-game areas such as the Dragon's Claw Inn, the monastery, and the count's manor are dressed with props such as fur pelts, plastic ivy and grapes, bleached animal skulls, fake candles, leather-bound books, black and red bedsheets, paintings, and tchotchkes such as small wooden chests to help players suspend their disbelief and feel in-scene. Many players decorate their personal cabins with similar props, and every month a contest is run to determine whose decorations are the best.

In addition to being a boffer-style game, Knight Realms is also a campaign larp, meaning that the plot continues from one session to another, running continuously since 1997. Some players have been embodying the same characters for all that time. The game meets roughly once a month over a weekend, lasting from Friday evening through Sunday afternoon, nights included, and takes place at one of several Boy and Girl Scout camps that James has scoped out in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Knight Realms' setting is medieval fantasy, the universe of
Lord of the Rings
or King Arthur as reimagined by James. The game is set in Travance Proper, a frontier town named for the barony that contains it, on the edge of the sprawling nation of Kormyre, a town separated from the rest of the country by a mysterious magical rift. Travance sits close to a deeply evil inverted tower of unknown depth that attracts beasts, evil geniuses, and vampire overlords like James's hair attracts compliments.

As a campaign larp, each monthly event builds on the last, representing the next installment in Travance's history. In between events, time passes at the same rate that it passes in the real world, so characters visit the town of Travance once per month, during a “Baronial Feast”—the in-game reason to gather. The year in Travance is the current year minus eight hundred. So if it's 2010 in the real world, it's 1210 in Travance.

After thirteen years of running the game, the staff has its method of operation down. Generally, the same things happen every weekend. Players show up on Friday. Those who arrive early help decorate common spaces with the usual props. People claim bunks and decorate their own cabins. Around 5:00
PM
, Logistics opens. The Logistics cabin is where anything that must happen out-of-game happens throughout the weekend. It houses the costumes and makeup that the NPCs will use to transform themselves into monsters, and on Friday evening, it's where check-in is held. Players line up, pay James the base rate of forty-five dollars for the weekend or fifty-five dollars if they want an extra point of build, which allows them to advance their characters slightly faster. In return, players receive a character card, a sheet of thick fake parchment that lists everything a player needs to know about his or her character. The Knight Realms character sheet shows how much gold a character has in the bank, the special skills a character can perform, such as prayers, defenses, and special attacks, and a series of statistics including health points, career points, and available build. Health points represent how tough a character is and how much damage he or she can take before death. Knight Realms has several different kinds of career points, but roughly, they are a measure of mental energy and dictate how many spells or prayers a character can cast before becoming exhausted. Build is Knight Realms' way of keeping track of levels. A character that has spent ten build points is level 1, while a character who has spent five hundred build points is level 50. Build is the raw stuff of character creation, and players can decide how to spend it. Build may be invested into learning new skills or may be used to raise a character's health or career points. The reverse of the character sheet contains a schedule. Every twelve hours during the game, career points refresh. If a character is down to one magic point at 5:59
AM
on Saturday morning, at 6:00
AM,
he's back to having his maximum. Players are expected to keep track of their health and career points and to record any “buffs”—spells that bolster a character's skills or stats—that another player might cast on them. In addition to receiving character cards at check-in, each player also selects a mandatory four-hour NPC shift, during which time they will report to Logistics in nondescript clothing and get sent out
as monsters, wandering merchants, or any other character that might entertain the rest of the player characters, or PCs.

Around 9:00 or 10:00
PM
on Friday, James gathers everyone at the central building with a kitchen that doubles, in-game, as the Dragon's Claw Inn. He makes a few safety announcements about bears and dehydration, and calls lay-on, which officially starts the game. Anyone who is not in costume leaves to change. For ten minutes, the inn area, always an oblong room studded with tables and benches, is full of people in corsets, armor, and body paint walking with purpose or meandering deliberately, greeting one another and imparting any burning information they've discovered between events through the use of the “inn wall,” an online bulletin board that is in-game, or through personal messages—in-game letters sent via the Knight Realms website. Soon thereafter, the weekend plot begins, introduced by a set of NPCs on the first shift. In addition to lay-on, there are three other fixed events during the weekend. On Saturday afternoon, there's a bazaar in the inn called Market Faire, where players may sell real food and crafts; Saturday evening, someone cooks a three-course hot meal for everyone in the game called Feast; and usually a giant battle that will involve the whole town, dubbed “main mod,” the biggest module of the weekend, occurs on Saturday night. Sunday, around noon, James calls the clean-up hold, and everyone cleans up and goes home, perhaps stopping at a local diner on the way to kvetch about the weekend's events.

The framework is simple, but what happens between lay-on and the clean-up hold is action-packed and complex. Running a larp every month is a little like directing a stage production: the framework is the same from production to production, but you don't know any of the scene runtimes or how the play will end. The preparation for such an event can take months.

The planning begins when a player or group of players come up with a weekend plot idea and send it to Knight Realms' staff of Storytellers. Perhaps Travance's sworn enemy, the vampire Pesmerga, is loose again and bent on revenge; perhaps the dark elves have surfaced from the Underdark to attack the town for some purpose; perhaps some wandering scholar of dubious origins has arrived with dread
rumors of a powerful undead sorcerer enslaving nearby towns. Ten to fifteen experienced GMs sit on the storytelling committee, and they read through the plot ideas and comment on them digitally, through the Knight Realms website. Plots that involve the end of the world are generally deep-sixed, since in any main plot characters must have the chance to fail or succeed, and if characters fail and the world ends, well, that's a problem for the game. After some back-and-forth between the authors and the committee, the plot is approved and scheduled. Some of the storytellers write up stats for the main weekend monsters, while whoever is running the plot casts any important NPCs—usually including the arch-villain for the weekend—and assembles necessary props.

The weekend's main plot is split into a number of smaller encounters called modules or “mods.” On Friday night, generally speaking, whoever is running the weekend plot introduces it by sending one or more NPCs into town for several small introductory encounters. Players often spend Saturday trying to track down mystical objects. Perhaps the town must collect components for a ritual to banish that pesky undead sorcerer, or maybe some powerful arch-demon needs a set of magic gems to establish his evil reign, and the town wants to find them first. The plot reaches a crescendo on Saturday night around 10:00
PM
, with main mod, a giant, spectacular battle in the woods or in an open field against the weekend's chief enemy, typically one or more powerful NPCs, played by the same people throughout the weekend, and a rotating cast of henchman, portrayed by other players during their mandatory NPC shift. Perhaps Pesmerga is raising an undead army to attack the town; perhaps the enslaved fairies must be freed by battling their captors; perhaps the town must hold off hordes of necromancers while performing a ritual to ensure that one of the Gods of Light is able to regain her full strength. Main mod is set up so that everyone in town—usually some one hundred people—can participate in the brawl, which often rages for an hour or more. Saturday night, there is a
denouement,
and by Sunday, the main weekend plot is generally complete.

This main plot is designed so that any character in town, regardless of level, can participate if they so choose. It is far from the only
plot offered. Open-ended plots continue across many events at a slow burn: a daimyo from the East Asian-inspired Khitan is in town for several moons and his intentions are unclear; a pesky group of Londwynians is trashing a local forest and the druids are up in arms about it; the node that enables the town healers to do their work is being overloaded with energy. These plots build gradually, offering one or two modules per weekend, and may eventually end up as a weekend plot. These plots often target a group of players, but anyone can join. For example, the other Khitanians in town will be interested in finding out more about the daimyo, as will the lord of the land where the daimyo has docked his ship. Members of the storytelling team organize and run some of the open-ended plots, and players who want to take a stab at storytelling without running a whole weekend also propose and run shorter mods, sometimes only once but sometimes across several events.

Invite-only modules run each weekend as well. Thieves and racketeers meet up with the Fence to do jobs for the Rogues' Guild or to eliminate non-guild members who are horning in on Travance's territory with non-guild-sanctioned stealing, but in order to participate in this plot, a character has to be a member of the Rogues' Guild. Team Good, a group of players who are good aligned, mostly deal in epic storylines based around ancient orders of good doers. For example, they might seek to redeem ancient knights of untold power who have been corrupted. Neutral-aligned characters pretty much go their separate ways. Evil characters have been inducted into a dark secret society by one of James's NPCs, a group known by the moniker Team Evil. Team Evil is sent on missions to fulfill their own selfish, dark aims, to collect all twelve shards of an ancient evil blade, for example.

The creation of Team Evil, James says, was born out of necessity. Over time, he noticed that evil characters left to their own devices will engage in PvP, player-versus-player combat, out of boredom; they'll kill other player characters. Not all games allow evil characters or PvP. Permitting PvP has its up- and downsides. To ban it strains credulity—people do fight each other sometimes, even in the real world. If I'm drinking “beer” (represented by Kool-Aid, for liability reasons and because many sites do not permit alcohol on the premises) with
my buddy at the Dragon's Claw Inn, and we can't get into a friendly bar brawl, where's the fun in that? However, PvP can also lead to bad feelings between players, which can damage the community and are therefore bad for business. It's one thing to die fighting a random monster like a phase spider, but to be ganked by a fellow character who is exercising malice and forethought, that can suck, especially if one has invested a lot of time and money into a character via costuming and event attendance over the course of years. At Knight Realms, a character is allowed five “deaths” before he or she is permanently gone.