Leaving Mundania (26 page)

Larpers from different games crowded the hallway outside the divided ballrooms. Vampire players dressed in black malingered at the entrance, waiting for their game to go off in one of the rooms. A little farther onward, toward the room where Sleeping: The LARP had been, people dressed as cowboys, football players, pop culture icons, and everything in between milled around two tables where several people with nasty skin abrasions sat, preparing for Dystopia Rising's zombie apocalypse event. All the way at the end of the hallway, I could see the brilliantly costumed Cthulhu players standing: men in half-capes and white jackets with goggles around their necks, women in ball gowns or pantaloons and corsets wearing pins shaped
into cogs or trilobites, and a French maid and a man in a suit with a towel over his arm, like a butler.

I received my character history and a small character card divided into three panels. One panel bore a rainbow of colors, one displayed my character name, and one contained a list of abilities and stats. Inside the game room, we all sat down, and for the first time at this convention, I had the rules explained to me. The character card was designed to be folded into thirds and clipped onto our convention badges so that our nametags would be visible to everyone else. There were no card pulls, dice rolls, or rock-paper-scissors games involved in this larp, only stat comparisons. The rainbow on one side of the card was for a sanity check. My rainbow had Xs in the orange portion. When something horrible happened, the GM, called a Keeper in this game, would order a sanity check and name a color. If he named a color that was above orange on my card, then I would downgrade my sanity, according to the list of adjectives written below the rainbow. If I passed three sanity checks in a row, I would downgrade my sanity anyway, to represent the fact that in this universe, no one is immune to the horror of the surroundings. The Keeper asked if there were any new players in the audience, and I raised my hand. I was one of two. He walked us through a combat scenario in front of everyone, using a couple seasoned players in the demonstration. Combat occurred when someone declared it by saying, “Combat.” Next, we all looked at our constitution stats. He named numbers, beginning at one and moving upward. When your number was called, you declared what action you were going to take. When he got to the top number, he counted backward. When your number came up again, you physically took your action. When he got back to one he asked, “Does anyone wish combat to continue?” and since the answer, for purposes of the demonstration, was no, we stopped.

I was reasonably clear on the rules for perhaps the first time ever. With our demonstration over, we all left the room to reenter it in-character.

We'd all been invited to the Adventurers' Guild that evening for a soiree during which a mysterious machine would be unveiled. The room was decorated with pots of six-foot-tall bamboo and organized
around a set of L-shaped tables that held anachronistic gadgets. One section had a large pyramidal piece of glass set on top of what might have been an ancient record turntable. The other main part of the machine held a disk that radiated light—it had a piece of fool's gold atop it and about six wooden dowels stuck straight up around it. The whole thing screamed mad science. A footman served us hors d'oeuvres (peanut butter crackers) from a silver platter and champagne (water in Styrofoam cups). I introduced Madame Blavatsky to an archeologist attempting to fund an expedition to the center of the earth aimed at proving that the planet was, in fact, hollow. I spoke with the head of the Adventurers' Guild, the historical personage Nicola Tesla, and a young ingenue who had stolen her overprotective father's invitation to this event and broken out of the house.

The machine, as it turned out, was a time machine, and predictably, it didn't work as intended. The young man we sent into the future to retrieve a newspaper returned through the giant octagonal portal as a mere collection of organs and bones, represented by plastic props the GMs threw out onto us. We all did a sanity check. As the evening progressed, I tried out my skills. I used my mysticism and occult skill to determine that the crystal powering the machine was in fact a summoning crystal. I psychically scrutinized one of the scientists' pasts and discovered that his intention was true. I decided to bury the hatchet with my old nemesis Aleister Crowley, who discovered that the crystal in the machine had been switched out for another. Around us, chaos erupted—a woman had died in the backroom, a monster came out of the portal, people were running around in the dark. The swami I'd been studying with in India arrived, played by the man who had previously been the butler. The action reached a fever pitch. I went into the back room to conduct a séance for a woman who had died. Her husband pulled out a chair for me and executed a surprise attack, shooting the base of my skull with two fingers. Since Lizzie was genuinely surprised, Madame Blavatsky died. As I fell to the floor, I could hear the swami pounding on the door, yelling, “Blaa-vaaaa-tsky! Blaaa-vaaaaa-tsky!”

And at that moment of high drama, the game ended, and for the first time, I fiercely wished that it had not, so that I could learn what
it is possible to do with a dead body in Cthulhu, so that Madame Blavatsky's story could continue. The lights came on, and everyone pulled chairs into a circle. Over the course of an hour, all thirty of us briefly explained what had happened to our characters. The intrigue and variety of plots given to the group amazed me.

Jack the Ripper was there, undercover, along with the policeman who had sworn to catch him. Several secret devotees to the Great Old Ones had slipped potions to various members of the group in order to convert them. One woman was trying to use the dimensional portal to become a god. The manservant belonged to the Assassins' Guild and had been hired to take this woman's necklace and then stab her. He did this after the head of the Adventurers' Guild had knocked her and her husband unconscious for occupying his office. After accomplishing his mission, the manservant left and was sent in as a different character, my swami. The dead woman and her husband, as it turned out, were vampires responsible for the death of Kaiser Wilhelm II. They were trying to resuscitate the Ukrainian nation, although she spent the game dead and he spent it trying to lure someone into the back room in order to kill them and suck their soul into his wife's body, reviving her. I had fallen for that one. The plots went on and on, each person gaining a small moment in the spotlight.

The Keepers had written interlocking backstories that immediately immersed the players in a plot. Because all of us were “new to town,” there were no in-game cliques to exclude people. The minimal rules were simple enough that even I could understand them. The setting of this game was oriented toward investigation and role-play, and that is exactly what I enjoy in a game, as it turns out.

I had played in six larps over three days at this convention, and finally, in my last open slot, I found the game that fit me as a player. No one I knew had attended this larp, but I'd managed to have a good time anyway. I had been completely immersed in the game for its entire duration, about three hours.

The Cthulhu game succeeded for several reasons. The prewritten characters, complete with backstories, gave each player some minor goals to accomplish over the course of the evening, in addition to reacting to the major plot. The plot hook—the faulty time machine—
had been accessible to every player and had immediately gone wrong, which provided intrigue early on in the game. The elaborate set and costuming had helped transform the beige function room into a swanky private club, and the vast amount of private plots seeded in our backstories meant that at least a few came to fruition, adding extra drama. Furthermore, the poorly functioning time machine gave the Keepers the opportunity to introduce monsters or other alien beings whenever a lull in the action presented itself. And finally, the clarity with which the minimal rules were explained meant that everyone was clear on how to affect the game's environment.

The only distraction from the game itself was the noise from Michael's zombie apocalypse larp running next door, across the thin ballroom barrier. We could hear the noise of the flesh-eating undead being vanquished with foam bats.

I would use the knowledge I'd gleaned at Larpapalooza to run my own game for a set of non-gamers. Since I'd liked Cthulhu so much, I'd run Cthulhu, and Jeramy, Gene, and Brendan would help me.

I
am not qualified to run a larp. Sure, by the time I ran Cthulhu, I'd been larping and researching the hobby for three years, but that didn't mean I knew how to run a game. After all, I've watched thousands of movies over the course of my life but have no idea how to direct a film. As a novice GM, I faced an overwhelming number of responsibilities: I had to create a plot interesting enough to grab my players, gather props, find NPCs, and, horror of horrors, learn the rules. On top of all that, I'd decided to conduct an experiment. I wanted to see if larp could bring any old group of people together as a community; I wanted to test its universal appeal, to check my
reactions to the hobby against a third party. I'd decided to run a game for non-larpers.

As a rookie GM, I immediately established a team of qualified experts to help me with the game. Gene, a gamer from the cradle, was my first addition. He had a knack for explaining rules systems to other players, especially to, ahem, reporters in need of help. Among his friends, he was the planner—even when he wasn't going to Knight Realms, he'd arrange rides for everyone, including me, and I knew I could rely on him to work hard prepping for the game. His large, boisterous personality matched his physique—he was a big guy—and usually he wore a little ponytail at the top of his head, which gave him the appearance of a samurai with a topknot. He kept the top of his hair chin-length but kept the sides shaved, sometimes buzzing designs into them. As a GM, Gene excelled at creating scenes and plot challenges on the fly. I knew, for example, that a character once derailed the main Deadlands plot within the first five minutes of a FishDevil game, and that Gene and the team worked together to create a new plot, written on the spur of the moment, that occupied their players for the next eight hours. Gene firmly believed that in larp, a player ought to be able to do anything, even if it made more work for the GM. I liked that player-centric attitude and knew that if I collapsed in a quivering ball of stress during the game, Gene would be able to carry on.

Brendan and Jeramy had loads of individual experience gaming, but they also worked well as a team. Brendan had been the new player officer at Knight Realms for several years. He was responsible for running the rules and safety demonstration for new players before each game. He often ran low-level mods at Knight Realms to entertain newbies, and he'd run several weekend plots with Jeramy. Jeramy spent several years as the planning officer at Knight Realms, essentially filling in any gaps left by other staff members, and he'd run a lot of weekend plots and individual mods during his tenure. Together, Brendan and Jeramy were working on a sci-fi larp of their own invention, called Doomsday. Brendan was a lot of fun. He was the kind of guy you wanted to keep in your coat closet, retrieving him each day for a beer on the couch and some amusing banter. He
seemed like the kind of person who would be comfortable anywhere, the sort of person who always knew what to say to a group of people to ease the tension and let others in on the joke. If Brendan could blend, Jeramy really stood out. Jeramy is weird, and he doesn't hide it, but his weird is a weird that invites people in, particularly if they happen to be standing a few feet away from the crowd, from normal, on the fringes. And although he is a creative dresser, his inventiveness extends beyond his surface. He was writing a zombie novel, and as a GM, he described scenes to players with colorful details and unexpected outcomes.

As a team, Brendan and Jeramy were full of laughter and 1980s references, playing off each other as the jokes escalated. They worked well together. As role-players, I thought they were planet-class. Their enthusiasm and commitment to their characters felt infectious, and I wanted them in my game, in part to emulate good role-playing for my newbies.

With my GM team and my flavor of game selected, I needed players, a location, and a firm date. The location was easiest—I had access to a hundred-year-old house in the old Victorian beach town of Cape May, New Jersey, a three-story pink monstrosity with a dusty basement ideal for hiding serial murderers and external decks with stairs that connected all three floors, which would provide excellent egress during chase scenes. The five-bedroom house had bed space for twelve, plus a couch, but everyone else would have to sleep on the floor. Best of all, it belonged to my parents, so I wouldn't have to pay for larp space, so long as the fake blood we used didn't stain the carpet.

My husband and I scared up a collection of some twenty players for our game from among our friends, many of whom were curious about my book topic. Our old roommate, Chip, a fiction writer I'd gone to grad school with, agreed to come down from Boston, along with a couple buddies I'd met through my work on the small literary journal
Fringe.
A friend who worked over at the
Today
show agreed to come as well. Then there were the scientists. My husband was studying for a PhD in physics at Rutgers and a slew of his peers—mostly physicists, with an astronomer and a mathematician thrown in for
good measure—agreed to come. One of my younger cousins flew in from Tennessee. Unbeknownst to me, she'd been into cosplay, or costume play, for some years. (Cosplay is a hobby and subculture in which participants carefully replicate the outfit of a figure from anime or popular culture and wear that outfit to conventions.)