Kensei: A Boffer LARP in the making

The conversation began when my friend Kat mentioned he would rather go to a totally combat oriented LARP if it was well executed over a poorly executed Nordic LARP. This sparked in my head an idea. I've always love the stories behind tournaments. We've seen them all the time. Most of these are Martial Arts movies, Bruce Lee in Enter the Dragon, Van Damme in Bloodsport, The Championships in the Karate Kid. Anime like Dragonball had the Tankaichi Budokai, and there were numerous Tournaments in Yu Yu Hakusho. Hell, movies like Dodgeball and Balls of Fury(which is ripped straight from Enter the Dragon) all share the tournament style story telling.

What about this makes it so appealing? Mostly, it's the use of the tournament bracket system to build suspense and tension. It allows casts of characters to be in the same place at the same time and see which ones would/could/and should clash with each other. It's a time for deals to be struck, alliances to be made, and rivalries to be forged/ended/continued. Tournaments are breeding grounds for interactions on multiple levels.

One of the most popular examples of this bracket is Bruce Lee's Enter the Dragon. In truth, their tournament was never described in terms of actual organization. It was clearly a MacGuffin to get Bruce Lee to his revenge and interact with hustler John Saxon and bad mothafucka Jim Kelly. But let's look at this clip:

In this clip we have Lee versus O'Hara. We as the audience realize that O'Hara is responsible for the death of Lee's sister and she responsible for his scar. There is no dialogue or pithy exchanges during their match. They know what is at stake here. In the background you have the other fighters watching, with the Tournament Organizer holding Court and shaming his fallen minion and leaving with his entourage and setting up for the next intrigue.

My thinking started going: Well, why can't we make this into a LARP? A Boffer LARP, for sure, but one that is designed to enhance and highlight the emotional drama inherent in these genres of films. Why are these people here? What is at stake for them? What are the consequences of their winning? Their Losing? What are they willing to risk?

I was also thinking to my Theatre LARP friends. There are a lot of opportunities in a setting like this. Social Opportunities, Support Opportunities. Just because it's a tournament doesn't mean the only Combat is physical. There is a competition of politics, of social ladders and skills that require. Why should the drama be restricted to the ring?

And thus, the Kensei was born.

The Kensei is a LARP set about a generation into the future. Reality TV and Internet Media has become the main opiate for the masses. Presidential Regimes are toppled with a blog post, new starlets are made with nothing more than a camera and a night on the town when you've forgotten to your underwear. While not overtly stated in society, sensitivity to Sex and Violence have declined. Out of the Internet fighting pits came a man known only as Honor Reigns. Reigns had the right set of martial skill, honest charm and business savvy. With it, he made his image and technique into a house hold name, creating a martial arts boom. Soon, other schools began to form, and a whole new subculture took hold.

It's been 10 years since the rise of Honor Reigns Empire. Rich, famous and arguably The First Authority on Martial Arts in the last three generations, Honor has decided to hold a Martial Arts Tournament to decide who the best in the world is. He named the tournament Kensei, after the japanese word. Depending on the characters used, it means Saint of the Sword or Saint of the Fist. Honor Reigns has found the middle ground and declared it to mean the Saint of Combat. Many media outlets and schools question Reigns motives for holding the tournament. Some believe that Honor is planning to retire or has become ill, others see it merely as a publicity stunt to take Honor Media over it's financial plateau, some think Reigns wishes to use this as a personal spring board to something much larger than running a top Five Media Group.

Whatever the reasons, the tournament has brought forth fighters from various schools, both major and minor and those who hold no ties to any school. They have also brough workers, crafters, doctors and medics to make a name for themselves and their skills, it has also brought the managers, the gamblers, and of course the reporters to vie and barter with currencies real and esoteric. Alliances form, rivalries forged, and the fighting in the ring.

So far a handful of us have been going over surface material, possible "Races" of Fighters, Classes of Crafters and Social Classes. We've looked a lot to DR for influences in combat while looking at New World of Darkness for Social Considerations (Ie; the Harpies of Vampire the Requiem are the Media Class). I want this to be something that, even if you aren't a combat player, you could be important in. Dystopia Rising has something like this, but even the most skilled politicians in game most likely have some proficiency in weaponry. What if the lines are a lot clearer, what happens then?

I want to explore themes around competition. Corruption, Cheating, Politics, Fame, Infamy, Violence, Sex. All the things we know are going on behind the scenes in sports and entertainment, but we never see happen. I also want to do something that hasn't been done so far as I've seen: Use Media to record the LARP in real time. Media Class players must Vlog, Blog, or stream the event live and in character. That is an ambitious statement, but one that is interesting.

So far, we're at the Logistics section, how do we do this? We'd need space, possible sleeping areas for multiple days, internet access, and the like. It's not so much the problems we see but what we don't see that worries me.

That is why I'd like to bring this to your attention, my readers and friends. I'd love to get my friends in on this and make this a thing. So I'd love your input.

Later.

The End Was Nigh 3: Jacob Rude Against the World Crime League

Well, after six months of waiting and bashing my head in trying to get it out of my system. Scheduling with Camarilla/MES stuff conflicted with their schedules and this was the first time I could make it since Janurary. First up, thank you to Ericka for being awesome and giving me a ride, honestly, you are my LARP mentor.

For those of you who just went through the mods she through out this weekend, that last statement should scare the shit out of you.

So we got to game, and I set my gear down in the Barn. The Barn was empty for the most part. Since the Original Sin club moved/closed down, it's been something of a ramshackle for squatters without a place to live. I liked it, it was a lot less crowded than the shanty town. The problem I had was that the power was off (In Game, all essential areas had emergency red lights on), and since the Barn was so low priority that when it became pitch black out, so did the interior of the Barn. It sucked because someone placed a bench right infront of the bunk room door and I nearly went flying through the curtain. I have an idea for this in the future of the Barn isn't going to get used (maybe someone else can use it in my stead)

"I'm making a face at you right now, and you can't see it"
(Photo By Katherine Chartier)

Anyway, this was the first game where I finally got to play Jacob 'Rude' (not his real name). Jacob is a Retrograde, a mutation of humanity ('actual' humans are rare, and possibly villains) who were raised too close to radiation. They look ghoulish, almost zombie like, so they wear decorated masks to distinguish themselves. Their favorite phrase (or at least their most used) is "Don't shoot, I'm alive". They're pretty cool at handling radiation, halving damage from it. Rude is from the Brokelands, the remains of outer Old York (New York got bombed out and flooded). Like most people who grew up in Old York, Rude has a general "fuck you" attitude. In short, I play him like he has the Common Sense Merit from New World of Darkness, he looks around and goes "Are you fucking kidding me?" He's a Tinker, a builder of weapons and armor and carries with him a giant combat wrench (tm) he calls The Fix.

In game, Rude came in with a Caravan lead by Brock (played by fellow LARP buddy Ryan) who immediately set to get people to teach him his required skills. Five minutes in, he runs into Wulfram (played by my friend Kat). Wulf and Rude are friends from the Brokelands, with Wulf the Scavenger and Rude the Tinker. They immediately hit it off and decide to work together.

Of course that's where things went south.

It seems that someone was messing with Psionics (Psychics, basically DR's version of Mages). One of them created a Maelstrom of 30 Damage Fire that cleared out the area, with Wulf and Rude just barely outside of his periphery. Settling that, a bunch of us were tasked to help dig trenches to make sure radiation fallout didn't seep into the ground water. We ran through the forest searching for three sources of concentrated fallout, fighting through waves of Shamblers and Diggers, Basic Zed and Zed that can burrow through the ground, respectively. This was the part where being a Retro was cool, because every so often, everyone in the area got blasted with radiation damage. Rude got half of that damage. However, by the end of the run, everyone was declared to have radiation poisoning. That meant roleplaying vomitting, bloody eyes and ears. So I went to the Ops booth and dabbed some prop blood (I'm assuming, DR NJ tends to go balls out with these things), making sure I dribbled it on my mask to make it look like Rude was crying from his eyes.

We went back into town to get healed. Wulf and Rude both calling for healers. No one was available, so for nearly two hours, Kat and I played sick and dying in the main hall. The problem, the radiation took a point of health for every hour it wasn't healed. Rude had 1 point of health left on the sheet. So of course, that was obvious. Rude and Wulf started laughing. They were going to die. Rude, who was a fucking Retro was going to die of RADIATION SICKNESS. He was seriously pissed at this notion. At the last 15 minutes, someone showed up and did the required procedure. It was already late into the evening, and Rude had just had enough. So that was Friday.

Saturday began with Raider O'Clock. That point in the ass crack of the morning when the NPC shifts start and send out parties to attack the cabins and sleeping areas. My Raiders were Dread Surgeons, and their first trick was to gas the room (in real life, they shouted out the command. Anyone within earshot was subject to it's effects). Rude, a Retro, was immune mostly save for some grogginess. For the record, I'm not a morning person in real life. So I was groggy in real life as well. Next thing I know, someone (Ericka, who was Storyteller in charge that weekend) bound my hands while I was still getting my bearings and then proceeded to cut out one of Rude's kidneys. She was kind and did patch him up, but that was the start of the day.

Bitch.

So the hunt for Kidneys started. They caught the culprit but Rude never got his back. He fine with that though, though he was peeing in odd colors later on.

After that was the NPC shift. These are always fun, and this month was no different. It was also a change for me to get some color out in the sun. The ST on call was Ericka, and her first mod she had me go on was to roleplay with a group as a swarm of Cicadas. Cicadas in game are hard to kill and could eat through everything. They were noted by their buzzing sound, created through Kazoos. I didn't have one, so I started making the sound with my lips. We made a circuit around camp, which lead to people fleeing in droves as the buzzing got closer and closer. The lakefront area emptied out quickly, and then we found ourselves converging on the Double Tap, the main bar and meeting area for Characters. Many of them ran in to the bar and closed the doors, while some formed a literal shieldwall. What they didn't realize was that Cicadas could get around shields, and we did. They panicked and backed off, leaving the door open. Everyone filed right out of the building. In a game where Zombies, Raiders, and unspeakable horrors are out to get you, people ran shitless from swarms of cicadas.

The next Mod was a Raider mod, moving through the camp as a roving pack of hockey mask wearing Raiders. We had a good run, got killed a bunch of times by one concentrated group of skilled players. But that went south the moment they ran into another group of Super Raiders, soon the entire area was a warzone. At one point, I spawned (NPCs can respawn like in video games) and hid in a set of bushes. A pair of non combatant PCs showed up and I came out, scaring them. It's part of the job, harry the fighters, scare the townsfolk. Do not think you're safe in these woods.

The next module was an RolePlay mod, I was to give out the town's first Newspaper. I was a Newsie, so long as I didn't have to sing Carrying the Banner again (don't ask) I was okay. The module kinda went flat. I'll admit, I was pretty low on spoons at that point. Two travel and combat heavy modules in 80+ degree weather will wipe you out. The body was hydrated and the spirit willing, but there was no umph. I also picked a bad time to stop by the Double Tap. For those of you who don't play DR, Literacy isn't a given. In fact it's a skill you have to purchase in game. So many people couldn't read, and at 2 Credits a pop, it was a bit of a bitch to shell out for. Eventually, ST staff did it again and got better results. So I'm going to call that one on me.

My final mod was a Slaver Module. I played a part of a group of Slavers who set a honey trap for the towns folk to try and capture and enslave them. We put a bunch of the slave NPCs out in a field and had them screaming for help while others ran to town. When they came back with people, we sprang out of the nearby tents and towns and proceeded to lay siege on the players. We had about four or five PCs captured and tied up and ready to go. One escaped and got reinforcements, so we set up another ambush. This one turned into a battle, one we couldn't win. We had gotten a number of the PCs into a Wagon and were "ready to go" when the battle hit a pitch. A bunch of us decided to cut our losses and Fair Escaped on out. Those that remained fought well, and died. One of the PCs was killed in the fray.

After that, my shift was done, and I was pretty low on spoons. I ate some soup I brought with me and napped...for about two hours. I got up at a crawl and attempted to finish out the night. This was the night I got to Do Shit. Rude is a Tinker, that means Repairs mostly for him. He set up shop at a work bench and started bang away on peoples stuff to fix them, making him a nice pile of credits. He also stopped by a fight against Raiders and Chopped the NPCs broken weapons, getting him nice pieces of scrap for future building/possible trading. Barring the work, I socialized a bit, got to know the towns people. I saw a drag show in character and witness two weddings, one intentional and charming, the other unintentional, and psychotic. When the "presiding priest" is Nacho Man Randy Salvage, and his nuptials was a long winded diatribe  filled with ooh yeah, dig it, and ended with "And now by the power invested in me, I now pronounce you man and wife, dig it!" it was needless to say a whirlwind of emotion.

Of course, as the night rolled on, so did the terror. People died, and as they died they came out of the ground again. Death is not singular in Dystopia Rising. I mentioned earlier that the PCs are mutated strains of humanity. That mutation is in part connected to fact that everyone carries the Zombie Infection. It's what allows us to heal over time, our powers. However, once we're killed, the infection takes hold a little bit. Each  Strain/Race has a different number of times they can  be killed, some are 2 times, others are much higher. When those run out, you come back as a Zed. When you die before that, you go through the Gravemind, the hyper conscious mass that speaks to the Zed. It tortures you a little, and you come back relatively in tact, but slightly less than yourself and a bit crazier. 14 people died this month, which in a game of hundreds isn't a bad thing in a game. In a LARP though, it doesn't matter. These were now over a dozen people closer to their last ride when they'd come back and try to eat the ones they love.

Ericka, who plays Commissioner Rosemary Van Buren in the game, went to the Morgue to see if the rumors were true and her friend Daisy had been killed. Rude knew Rosemary (whom he called Rose) and went to support her. He also did it for another reason. It's not approved yet by the Storytellers, but Jacob Rude has a Fascination with Death. Retrogrades, when their Infection takes hold, they come back as any number of truly advanced and dangerous forms of Zed. Everyone knows it, and Rude is intimately aware of what will happen. He knows, with unyielding certainty, that someday he'll come out of a Morgue as something that may potentially kill the ones he legit loves, and they may have to be the ones they put down.

Soon, others joined the small 'party' at the morgue, awaiting loved ones who may have fallen. Some were only rumored to have died and resurfaced, some did not. No one came back as a Zed, so silent celebrations were had. Rosemary went to the Tap to make sure Daisy was okay, Rude went to inform her of the new "re-arrivals". While no one saw it, in the darkness between the Morgue and the Tap, Rude cried. I did that scene because, frankly, that is as much me living out his story than me living out his story for other people. It'll be revealed why that happened, but it was something I needed to experience personally. It worked.

Shortly after, I called it a night. I did not play Rude on sunday, instead opting to clean up the Barn early to get out and food after game early. If anyone asked, Rude left on the next Caravan out Saturday night.

In the end, I enjoyed the game very well. I have to admit that I got hit very hard and got tapped of energy. Sunday was murder for me to get up and get moving. I also felt like, despite knowing a fair chunk of the players and their PCs, I wasn't tied to anyone and I missed out. This was a sort of ennui and disconnection which probably added to my like of motivation. I'm not pinning that on anyone other than myself. That's my personality being inept with reaching out to others. I was almost happy in my little dark private barn (though for the love of god I'd have killed for a match in there) and just the quiet of screaming players and raiding Zed, but it also lead to a lot of what felt like me walking around witnessing other people, instead of taking place. That's a weakness I have to deal with in my gaming, and I'm glad I got to explore/discover that.

As for the future, well, Rude was a lot more fun to play than my first one. I can't guarantee every month. I'm unemployed and it costs to go to and fro from games. So I promise to come back. I want to thank Ericka, Allie, Shoshana, Bartosz, Alex, Kat, Ryan, Jason, Jester, Robin and Taran and a crew of others who made me feel welcome in game. Also like to thank Michael Pucci for building this fucked up nightmare circus of a game and Peter Woodworth, whose DR-centric novel "Dead Heroes: Runner" made me love Old York even more and I got to meet this month. You folks gave me a whole new kind of world to play in, and a whole new style of gaming to think about. I've got ideas, and you've only yourselves to blame.

So in the end, Jacob Rude will return. And so will his looney toons player too.

Later, and keep on swinging

Nordic LARP

A few weeks ago, I was introduced to The Monitor Celestra. Celestra is a game setting place in the Revised Battlestar Galactica on a ship of the same name. Located in Sweden, the game took place OOCly on a decommissioned Cold War era ship, which is in keeping with the aesthetic of the TV series. It's a game of politics, survival, interpersonal conflict. With the threat of Cylons looming over them, humans trapped in claustrophobic halls of steel are the biggest threat.

There's videos of it on youtube. It looked and felt like an episode of BSG. Those weren't actors doing scenes, those were LARPers enacting their roles. There was high tension and drama, with standoffs and political jeering in a way that felt like a bleed in between reality and fiction.

And apparently, it's coming to the States.

So yes, I made Seal Noises. I like the concept, and I would love to play in there. I even have the idea of playing a Colonial Priest, as Religion was very much a factor of the show and my love of the Hellenic Mythology is known. I would like to explore the nature of the gods and faith in such a chaotic nature, and as my friend Sarah mentioned, I could have or create myself a copy of the Sacred Scrolls.

So as I began my research, I learned that the Monitor Celestra was a Nordic LARP. Most people would go "Well, yes. The game was run by Swedish gamers." However, I've heard the term before. Nordic LARPs are experimental games developed from the ground up. Their main focus is primarily immersion. You aren't a PC with Stats, you're a character living out these lives. Through my studies and watching videos in Youtube (Look up: NordicLarpTalks) I saw games that had players as mental patients, and the marshals did contradictory things to give the impression that the players were perceiving reality in a distorted way. I saw a video about a LARP where the developers had created a space where not only did they simulate a desert region, they could control the lighting to set up an 18 hour day/night cycle. The theme of this LARP was not "We have powers and therefore let's see what we can do" it was an exploration of Love and Intimacy when things like biological gender are not the social norms for relationships.

Most of these games are one-shots, meant only for a few days. The players and devs set up before hand with workshops to get them prepared for their roles and exploration. Where most Larps are interested in rules, mechanics and errata, Nordic Larp do workshops to explore the culture of their people. From how they live to how to translate things like Sex and Violence into LARP. One Nordic LARP developer even commented that in most LARPs it is oddly more likely to die than have sex. Where most games are escapist in nature, these games seem mostly geared towards exploration and delving into themes.


This is what strikes me most. LARPing in the Nordic countries doesn't seem like a dorky way of playing games, not entirely. They're exploring themes and learning. They're discussing using LARPs as teaching exercises. Culture, social norms, languages, conflict resolution, and god knows what else. This is a burgeoning field  of interactive education and counseling.

I was blessed with an internship under a Drama Therapist. She taught me about putting on external roles to explore and juxtapose with internal ones or to express the conflict between them. For some of the patients, it worked and they got some insight. For others, it was at the very least fun to explore and play and forget their situations for an hour. I say I was blessed because in most other careers, my hobbies of pretendy fun times would lead to me being committed more often than not being treated like someone with a mental disorder than treating someone with a mental disorder.

A lot of the work we did in my internship started with warm up practices, exercises, practices, then a debriefing at the end to see where everyone is at the end and to help them come out of their roles (a key thing, if you've been in a particularly long and/or strong session). This is the same thing as what is going on during preparation for these Nordic Style LARPs. What would happen if my supervisor had access to this system? What if the psychology field saw benefit from it and wished to explore?

Nordic LARPing strikes me on the fact that it's an all or nothing thing. You're in there the whole time, minimal breaks if any. You're in the world, fully immersed. I see a lot of this being used in boffer LARPs like Dystopia Rising, whose staff often use their plots as messages, social experiments and examinations of character. Considering some of the staff for DR, who are in ways associated or also keeping tabs on the Monitor Celestra coming to America, it doesn't surprise me that their game is more than just an excuse to go out into the woods to club one another with foam.

In the end, I find myself drawn to Nordic style. I'm too much character driven narrativist. I enjoy having myself taken out of myself and made to view things differently. With projects like Celestra and others coming through the pipeline, hopefully I'll be able to partake.

Or hell, I'll make one myself.

Later