Leaving Mundania (9 page)

While Dagorhir isn't quite larp—the emphasis is on the sport of fighting and tactics rather than on advancement of one's character—it does represent an important point in the origins of larp, notable for its early use of boffers and for its marginal emphasis on role-playing, costuming, and alter egos. While the idea of Dagorhir spread across the country, thanks to
PM Magazine,
role-play-hungry citizens were left to work out their own rules for pretend, which may have contributed to the diverse regional character of the US larp scene.

From there, the history of larp becomes so disparate that to trace every lineage and chronicle the many smaller local scenes would fill any number of books. However, there are a few games that impacted the national scene as a whole. The New England Role Playing Organization, NERO, was founded out of a gaming shop in Arlington, Massachusetts, in the late 1980s. NERO combined boffer fighting and adventure with the puzzles of D&D and influenced the larp scene because it was franchised. According to the NERO website, the game currently has nearly fifty chapters across the country, and players may take their characters with them if they travel to a new area to play. It is the granddaddy of most of the medieval boffer-style larps in the New Jersey area, although it now faces stiff competition from its small-scale progeny, games such as LAIRE and Knight Realms, the latter a game I attended for two years.

A parallel sort of larp, sometimes called theater-style larp or parlor larp, evolved in Boston in the 1980s, at science fiction fandom conventions and through two university societies, the Harvard Society for Interactive Literature (SIL), founded in 1982, and the MIT Assassins' Guild, organized in 1983, both of which ran live action games at conventions and on campus. In boffer games, as in Dungeons & Dragons, combat is a central activity; encounters or plots often end in violence. SIL and the Assassins' Guild focused instead on games that were based on puzzle solving and politicking, games that sometimes allowed violence but did not necessarily place it at the center of the story.

Finally, gaming company White Wolf's World of Darkness games have impacted the US larp market. Its flagship game, Vampire: The Masquerade, released in 1991, was a popular pen-and-paper tabletop
role-playing game, and soon after White Wolf introduced the Mind's Eye Theatre system, which allowed Vampire: The Masquerade to go from tabletop to live action. That system replaced dice rolls with weighted games of rock-paper-scissors as a method of resolving disputes between characters. The rules spawned scores of chapters of live action Vampire: The Masquerade across the country, some sharing a core world mythology.

Larp continues to evolve. There are e-mail listservs focused around the development of larp as an art, geared toward figuring out the underlying aesthetic principles behind how larp works and ought to work. An organization spun off of the Society for Interactive Literature called the Live Action Role Playing Association, or LARPA, runs a series of conventions called Intercons dedicated to theatrical-style larp. New games are starting as long-time larpers put their own ideas into action; for example, a zombie apocalypse boffer larp called Dystopia Rising has sprung up in the Connecticut-New Jersey area. In Europe, the northern countries hold a gaming convention each year that examines avant-garde larp. And if Queen Elizabeth II or the president of the United States hasn't freed the Lady of the Lake from bondage, well, there's still time yet.

J
ames C. Kimball has serious hair, a thick, straight light-brown mane that falls to the middle of his back. It's the hair a shampoo commercial wishes it had, it's hair that says, “I am not your ordinary man,” that screams “vive la différence,” hair that seems vaguely 1980s when paired with his typical tidy uniform of a button-down tucked into jeans, worn with a blazer and swashbuckler boots. It's serious hair but hair that doesn't take itself too seriously. It's hair that his friends and players mention when they impersonate him, ribbing he takes in good spirit. It's hair that he himself jokes about, shaking it when it's mentioned or mocking the fact, for example, that his hair gel happens to contain pheromones to “up his game.” It's Antonio Banderas hair, Brad Pitt in
Interview with the Vampire
hair, Fabio hair. Most of all, it's hair from another era.

James keeps his hair immaculate, gelling the top bit to keep it out of his face or gathering it into a low ponytail. Despite the new-fangled hair products he uses, this hair is hair from some unspecified time and place in the past, hair that doesn't make precise sense unless James is wearing one of his many medieval costumes. When I first met James, he was leaning out of a clapboard shack at a Boy Scout campground in a national park. He wore a pirate coat in blue and silver with large cuffs and big shiny buttons on it, and his long hair streamed behind him. The hair and the medieval coat went together, giving him the air of a serious knight, transforming him, as one of his players put it, into “a sexy pirate.”

When I visit James's apartment, inside a large old house in a small Pennsylvania town, I discover that his hair isn't his only anachronism. The interior of his apartment resembles the restricted section of the Hogwarts library. In his study, a large stained glass window, rippled with age, sits above his desk, which is a glossy wooden table with curved legs, lion-claw footed. Though James would have preferred a wood-burning fireplace he settled for a gas one. It runs along one side of the room, covered by a wrought-iron screen. The rest of the room is strewn with antiques or things that simply appear antique. A stand containing a beige globe with charmingly inaccurate outlines of the continents opens up to reveal a cache of liquor bottles. A small table holds a variety of leather-bound books, some of them real antiques—such as the 1750 edition of a German Bible, part of his stash of old Bibles—and some of them
New York Times
bestsellers, such as
Air Frame
by Michael Crichton, that have been rebound in leather, purchased from a website that specializes in decorative leather books.

James had invited me to his apartment to get the scoop on Knight Realms' origins. After I'd gotten the surprisingly scenic house tour, we sat down in his office to talk about the game and about James. For starters, he hasn't always had that hair. Before he owned and operated Knight Realms, he was a self-described nerd. Like many larpers, his first exposure to the world of gaming was through the tabletop game Dungeons & Dragons, which his older brother would run for the eight-year-old James and his friends. His father, like many parents of the era, thought the game had ties to Satanism and hid James's first
box set edition of Dungeons & Dragons to prevent him from playing, to no avail. James remained a daydreaming, gaming nerd, who in un-nerdy fashion did poorly in school. As a teen, he played D&D and painted models for it, enjoyed early video games, and dreamt of being a police officer—he even went to police academy camp one summer when he was about sixteen, before discovering that his thick glasses meant that if he entered the force, he'd have to have a desk job. Years later, he would undergo eye surgery to correct his vision. In high school he began growing out his hair, and at the tender age of fourteen the movie
Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves
changed his life. At the theater, James saw a series of makeshift posters advertising something called NERO. On the posters and at the theater's ticket booth there were little tri-folded black and white pamphlets advertising the game. James picked one up and ended up going to some events, once by himself and once with his older friend Rob Bean, a man who'd joined his gaming group after meeting a mutual friend at one of Double Exposure's gaming conventions.

At their local NERO chapter, James played a roguish jack-of-all-trades while Rob played a sorcerer, and they quickly became close friends. A few years after they joined NERO, it became a new game called LAIRE, which, like its predecessor, used boffers to resolve combat. After playing LAIRE for a couple years, Rob and James helped a friend create an offshoot of LAIRE called FX. Soon, the pair began to think about starting their own game. At first it was a joke between the two of them, but over the next year or two, James, who was in his late teens, Rob, who was in his mid-twenties, and a couple of their friends began to write and test the rules for their new game. They collected costuming, masks, and props. James spent his paycheck from managing a bookstore to help purchase everything they'd need. They differentiated their game from both LAIRE and FX by offering a wide variety of classes—almost forty—for players to choose from. A character class is essentially a profession, or perhaps, more accurately, a character's identity, representing a character's natural type of skills and abilities. At the time, medieval larps in the area offered a much smaller variety of classes, on the order of five, professions that almost always included warrior, rogue, healer,
and mage (magic-user). James is particularly proud of the wide range of so-called “support classes” that his team wrote. Support classes are classes of character that don't have fighting as their primary skill but have skills that benefit other players, for example, healers, alchemists, bards, priests, and scholars. The Knight Realms team also distinguished their game from others at the time by including a full pantheon of good, evil, and neutral deities. Many contemporary role-playing games, both tabletop and live action, did not allow in-game religion, since evangelical groups of the time accused role-playing gamers of recruiting children for Satanic cults through witchcraft. Although now it's not unusual to find in-game religions in a larp, at the time, Knight Realms' set-up was rare.

As for James, he tells me that he is religious, that he's convinced that there's a God or that at a minimum, he must have saved a busload of nuns in a former life, since he's one lucky son-of-a-gun. In addition to running a successful game, he says, he's got a smart, beautiful, and rich girlfriend, Misha, a lawyer to whom he's been affianced for more than a decade. He can't tell me how lucky he is, he says, shaking his head and smiling. After all, he had the chance to buy land, the pipe dream of anyone who runs a long-time larp.

The wide range of classes and the availability of in-game religion distinguished Knight Realms in its early days, but not all of James and Rob's innovations were so successful. The director of a larp often plays the king of town, the uppermost noble, in a move that sometimes feels like a director making him- or herself a literal fiefdom. Rob and James didn't want to do this; they wanted the in-game social structure to be composed entirely of players, creating, essentially, an in-game meritocracy. Like most utopian dreams, this one worked better in theory than in practice. In a medieval game, nobility has a key role in communicating plot to players and in helping create solutions to plot. At a minimum, nobles serve an important role in crowd control. They can herd players toward plot points, either directly (“I need you to go take care of the goblins I've heard about on the edge of town.”) or indirectly (“The baron tells me a strange old house has appeared in the woods.”). As high-ranking characters, nobles can serve as the origin point for a plot (“Oh no! The baron's been kidnapped!
We have to find him.”) and as the solution to plot points, with the power to corral troops to fight an invading army or to launch a diplomatic mission. The problem with player nobility is that even the most dedicated player periodically misses events, and if there is no baron, duke, or lord in town, the storytellers have a problem. To compensate, Rob and James began to play certain key members of the nobility as a safeguard. Over time, a compromise between the two extremes—a player-driven nobility and a staff-driven nobility—evolved. Travance, the barony where Knight Realms takes place, has four lands (Alisandria, Drega'Mire, Kaladonia, and Pendarvin), each one headed by a lord, who in turn are ruled by the baron. In addition, the Count of Winterdark, who rules a different territory but has stewardship over the land surrounding Travance, is often in town and has his own separate court with named knights, a parallel court that can create political conflict with the barony. James plays the count while various players step in and out of the four lord and baron roles. In order for a player to become a lord, he or she must go through in-game and out-of-game channels. In game, a player has to maneuver his or her character into a position to inherit the title, usually by becoming a knight of one of the four lands. Out-of-game, the player must prove to James that he or she is reliable and is going to show up to most events. In general, this means that many of the nobility are also members of the Knight Realms staff, although holding a staff position is not necessary to gain an in-game title.

During the early years of Knight Realms, James and Rob tweaked the rules repeatedly based on feedback from their players. Over time, they created new races and pared down the list of character classes. Presently, new players can choose from thirty-four professions, from acrobat to witch hunter, and twenty-four races, from barbarian to sylph. Early on, James dealt mostly with storylines while Rob, the social butterfly, dealt with logistics and was the public face of the game, persuading camp owners to let a group of fifty-plus adults behave in silly fashion on their property. If parents had doubts about letting their kids attend the game, Rob would set up a face-to-face meeting to explain what the game was about and allay concerns. So when Rob tragically and suddenly died two years into the life of
Knight Realms, many players felt devastated. They channeled their grief into keeping Rob's baby, Knight Realms, alive.