speaking in tongues (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
xenoglossy) wrote2014-03-19 01:28 am
xenoglossy) wrote2014-03-19 01:28 am
It's beginning to look a lot like fish-men
Haha, wow, this post has been sitting here half-written for a super long time. I would just ditch it at this point, but I accidentally posted a half-finished version, uh, two weeks ago, so now I feel weirdly obligated to post the real thing even though it's a bit late for a con report and no one actually cares anyway. So here is my recent super thrilling LARP convention experience, for real this time.
So I went a couple of weeks ago to my very first Intercon, which is the big LARP convention in my area. I have known about its existence for the past two years, but never remembered about it in time to sign up. This year I managed to improve on that a little by remembering early enough to get a badge, but not early enough to actually have a shot at getting into many games. I ended up only signing up for two and planning my weekend around only being there for those two games; if I had realized that a lot of games end up needing people to fill in at the last minute and so I probably would be able to find things to do after all, I might've planned to stay for the whole weekend. (Then again, since I was starting a new job on Monday, it's just as well I had Sunday to recuperate.)
The last time I LARPed was in 2007, so I was very rusty and a bit nervous—I mean, I did do quite a bit of tabletop and some acting in the interim, which you'd think would make the prospect less intimidating, but it's kind of its own thing, I think.
Anyway, onto specifics:
My Friday night game was a 1920s noir murder mystery plus faeries, in which Titania and Oberon run a speakeasy-between-the-worlds and bring two human detectives in to solve a murder there. Well, by "solve" I mean "come up with an entertaining explanation"; they're not overly concerned with the truth of the matter. My character was a banshee/bar chanteuse who was sleeping with Oberon (because isn't everybody?) but secretly in love with the big dumb bouncer; I had little connection with the mystery plot except as a red herring, and spent most of the game sighing heavily and going "oh, but of course you don't want to hear about my problems!" in the hopes that someone would insist upon hearing about my problems. (Many people did, but this was probably because they were hoping said problems were somehow related to the murders.) Well, that and dropping anvil-sized hints on the dumb bouncer, who, alas, remained oblivious to my affections.
At the end the two detectives each gave their theories on what had happened, and the one whose story was determined to be less amusing was chosen as a tithe to Hell. It transpired, however, that the Morrigan had convinced this detective to promise his soul to her instead, so Hell couldn't have it. Thus they instead moved the entire bar and all its denizens from Faerie to Hell (also from Chicago to New Jersey, on the mortal-realm end). It also turned out that neither detective had actually succeeded in solving the mystery. Whoops! I'm not sure anyone actually succeeded in their character goals, although the Morrigan at least acquired a nice tasty soul for free.
It was a pretty fun game, and I loved the whole concept/atmosphere/worldbuilding of it. I did have one issue, though, which was that there were some information gaps going on. Like, I was supposed to be the one who discovered the bodies, so the detectives questioned me about when and how I found them, if I heard any screaming or sounds of a struggle, if the bodies had been moved at all since I found them, et cetera et cetera. I hadn't been informed of any of this, though, so I just had to make things up and hope no one was sitting on information that contradicted what I said. (When it was revealed that neither detective had gotten the murderer's identity right, a bunch of players then fingered me as the killer, and I can't help wondering if my awkwardness and vagueness in attempting to answer these questions was the reason.) Unrelated to the mystery, there was something on my sheet about a deal my character had going with another character that, when I tried to bring it up with the other character, I found the other player didn't know about. So that was a little frustrating, but I still really enjoyed myself, on the whole.
Also, one of the GMs turned out to be a person I used to know on the internet years ago, but had lost touch with. (I had met her in person at a convention once when I was in college, and that vague recognition plus her first name and where she was from rang enough bells that I decided it was worth asking if she was who I thought she was; fortunately I was right, since it would've been pretty awkward otherwise.) So we got to catch up a little after the game, which was nice! The world is bizarrely small sometimes.
My Saturday game was a Lovecraft-based game set in the 1890s at a gala fundraising event for an insane asylum whose head doctor claimed to be able to cure any mental illness through judicious use of sensory deprivation tanks. I was playing half of a sort of Bonnie and Clyde criminal duo who were at the event in the hopes of parting some of the rich guests from their money; the guy playing my husband and I established ahead of time that we'd go in pretending to be wealthy businesspeople (well, a wealthy businessman and his wife, anyway) and attempt to con people into investing money in a fake business scheme rather than just straight-up robbing the whole room at gunpoint. (The latter, we figured, would be 99.9% certain to result in our deaths, especially once we found out there were multiple police officers in attendance who were also armed.)
(For the purposes of my rich late-Victorian lady disguise, I had a gorgeous but highly impractical dress; I got many compliments, but also many people stepping on my skirt. Okay, by "many people" I mean "a few people and also, frequently, myself." I told myself, by way of consolation, that my character totally would not have had a lot of experience wearing dresses like that either. It was a character choice, okay. And so was awkwardly and uncomfortably shoving my gun down the front of my dress because I didn't have anywhere else to put it. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.)
It was a pretty eventful game and I won't try to summarize all of it, mostly because that would probably bore people. Long story short, it eventually transpired that the sensory deprivation tanks were full of ocean water from Innsmouth, which did cure all mental and physical ills, but at the expense of turning you into a brainwashed cultist of Dagon. So then a portal opened to Y'ha-nthlei and Deep Ones came out of it, at which point I finally got to shoot some things, which was exciting. The impractical dress situation was a lot worse when attempting to scramble around attacking/trying not to get attacked by Deep Ones, though, and finally I got fed up (I believe my exact words were "I am so done with this motherfucking skirt," which was totally also a character choice) and just took it off and ran around in my petticoat for the rest of the game. Which wasn't that much longer, because a couple of occultists convinced some poor clueless sods to participate in a ritual which turned out to be for the purpose of moving one end of the portal to Carcosa and summoning Hastur. So Hastur crashed the party and we all went insane and the world was doomed. Yaaaay.
This game was pretty well-run, especially considering that there were a lot of people involved (or a lot more than my other game, anyway) who all had their own things going on which overlapped in various ways and could've turned into an ungodly mess. The GMs did a good job building atmosphere with set pieces and props, too. I do wish I'd been a little more proactive in the game (and possibly even gone ahead with the attempting-to-rob-the-whole-room-at-gunpoint thing, despite the fact that it would have led to my near-certain demise, just because it might have been a more exciting way to go out and it would also amuse me if people's occult plans had been derailed by a totally mundane robbery), but ah well. Oh, also, the characters' skills were ranked on a scale of 1-5, and the GM said that hardly anyone would have a 5 in any skill and if you did you were probably one of the best out there at whatever it was. My character had a 5 in forgery, so apparently she was a goddamned wizard of forgery, but I never got to forge anything and I was so disappointed. I spent the whole game looking for an opportunity to do so, and everything!
(Slightly tangential side note: Being more used to somewhat longer-form RP, I always find one-shots vaguely unfulfilling somehow—I mean, I enjoy them, and it can let you play around and experiment with stuff character-wise and game-style-wise that you wouldn't want to commit to in the long term, but I always find it hard to let go of characters after a couple of hours or even a couple of days. I'm always like, "But I never got to do this, that, and the other thing! I could've done so much more!")
I was a little tempted to stay longer and try to get in on some other games, because I was having fun with both the games and the social aspects of the con (a lot of my friends were there, and it was a small enough con that I kept running into them without having to actually coordinate anything). But despite getting about as much sleep as I get on the average weeknight (i.e. less than I'd like to have in an ideal world but enough that I can usually function), I was so exhausted I was having trouble stringing together a coherent sentence and had bags under my eyes so huge I'd have to pay an oversized luggage fee to take them on an airplane, so in the end I just went home.
It was definitely a good time, though! Maybe next year I will even remember its existence more than a month in advance.
So I went a couple of weeks ago to my very first Intercon, which is the big LARP convention in my area. I have known about its existence for the past two years, but never remembered about it in time to sign up. This year I managed to improve on that a little by remembering early enough to get a badge, but not early enough to actually have a shot at getting into many games. I ended up only signing up for two and planning my weekend around only being there for those two games; if I had realized that a lot of games end up needing people to fill in at the last minute and so I probably would be able to find things to do after all, I might've planned to stay for the whole weekend. (Then again, since I was starting a new job on Monday, it's just as well I had Sunday to recuperate.)
The last time I LARPed was in 2007, so I was very rusty and a bit nervous—I mean, I did do quite a bit of tabletop and some acting in the interim, which you'd think would make the prospect less intimidating, but it's kind of its own thing, I think.
Anyway, onto specifics:
My Friday night game was a 1920s noir murder mystery plus faeries, in which Titania and Oberon run a speakeasy-between-the-worlds and bring two human detectives in to solve a murder there. Well, by "solve" I mean "come up with an entertaining explanation"; they're not overly concerned with the truth of the matter. My character was a banshee/bar chanteuse who was sleeping with Oberon (because isn't everybody?) but secretly in love with the big dumb bouncer; I had little connection with the mystery plot except as a red herring, and spent most of the game sighing heavily and going "oh, but of course you don't want to hear about my problems!" in the hopes that someone would insist upon hearing about my problems. (Many people did, but this was probably because they were hoping said problems were somehow related to the murders.) Well, that and dropping anvil-sized hints on the dumb bouncer, who, alas, remained oblivious to my affections.
At the end the two detectives each gave their theories on what had happened, and the one whose story was determined to be less amusing was chosen as a tithe to Hell. It transpired, however, that the Morrigan had convinced this detective to promise his soul to her instead, so Hell couldn't have it. Thus they instead moved the entire bar and all its denizens from Faerie to Hell (also from Chicago to New Jersey, on the mortal-realm end). It also turned out that neither detective had actually succeeded in solving the mystery. Whoops! I'm not sure anyone actually succeeded in their character goals, although the Morrigan at least acquired a nice tasty soul for free.
It was a pretty fun game, and I loved the whole concept/atmosphere/worldbuilding of it. I did have one issue, though, which was that there were some information gaps going on. Like, I was supposed to be the one who discovered the bodies, so the detectives questioned me about when and how I found them, if I heard any screaming or sounds of a struggle, if the bodies had been moved at all since I found them, et cetera et cetera. I hadn't been informed of any of this, though, so I just had to make things up and hope no one was sitting on information that contradicted what I said. (When it was revealed that neither detective had gotten the murderer's identity right, a bunch of players then fingered me as the killer, and I can't help wondering if my awkwardness and vagueness in attempting to answer these questions was the reason.) Unrelated to the mystery, there was something on my sheet about a deal my character had going with another character that, when I tried to bring it up with the other character, I found the other player didn't know about. So that was a little frustrating, but I still really enjoyed myself, on the whole.
Also, one of the GMs turned out to be a person I used to know on the internet years ago, but had lost touch with. (I had met her in person at a convention once when I was in college, and that vague recognition plus her first name and where she was from rang enough bells that I decided it was worth asking if she was who I thought she was; fortunately I was right, since it would've been pretty awkward otherwise.) So we got to catch up a little after the game, which was nice! The world is bizarrely small sometimes.
My Saturday game was a Lovecraft-based game set in the 1890s at a gala fundraising event for an insane asylum whose head doctor claimed to be able to cure any mental illness through judicious use of sensory deprivation tanks. I was playing half of a sort of Bonnie and Clyde criminal duo who were at the event in the hopes of parting some of the rich guests from their money; the guy playing my husband and I established ahead of time that we'd go in pretending to be wealthy businesspeople (well, a wealthy businessman and his wife, anyway) and attempt to con people into investing money in a fake business scheme rather than just straight-up robbing the whole room at gunpoint. (The latter, we figured, would be 99.9% certain to result in our deaths, especially once we found out there were multiple police officers in attendance who were also armed.)
(For the purposes of my rich late-Victorian lady disguise, I had a gorgeous but highly impractical dress; I got many compliments, but also many people stepping on my skirt. Okay, by "many people" I mean "a few people and also, frequently, myself." I told myself, by way of consolation, that my character totally would not have had a lot of experience wearing dresses like that either. It was a character choice, okay. And so was awkwardly and uncomfortably shoving my gun down the front of my dress because I didn't have anywhere else to put it. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.)
It was a pretty eventful game and I won't try to summarize all of it, mostly because that would probably bore people. Long story short, it eventually transpired that the sensory deprivation tanks were full of ocean water from Innsmouth, which did cure all mental and physical ills, but at the expense of turning you into a brainwashed cultist of Dagon. So then a portal opened to Y'ha-nthlei and Deep Ones came out of it, at which point I finally got to shoot some things, which was exciting. The impractical dress situation was a lot worse when attempting to scramble around attacking/trying not to get attacked by Deep Ones, though, and finally I got fed up (I believe my exact words were "I am so done with this motherfucking skirt," which was totally also a character choice) and just took it off and ran around in my petticoat for the rest of the game. Which wasn't that much longer, because a couple of occultists convinced some poor clueless sods to participate in a ritual which turned out to be for the purpose of moving one end of the portal to Carcosa and summoning Hastur. So Hastur crashed the party and we all went insane and the world was doomed. Yaaaay.
This game was pretty well-run, especially considering that there were a lot of people involved (or a lot more than my other game, anyway) who all had their own things going on which overlapped in various ways and could've turned into an ungodly mess. The GMs did a good job building atmosphere with set pieces and props, too. I do wish I'd been a little more proactive in the game (and possibly even gone ahead with the attempting-to-rob-the-whole-room-at-gunpoint thing, despite the fact that it would have led to my near-certain demise, just because it might have been a more exciting way to go out and it would also amuse me if people's occult plans had been derailed by a totally mundane robbery), but ah well. Oh, also, the characters' skills were ranked on a scale of 1-5, and the GM said that hardly anyone would have a 5 in any skill and if you did you were probably one of the best out there at whatever it was. My character had a 5 in forgery, so apparently she was a goddamned wizard of forgery, but I never got to forge anything and I was so disappointed. I spent the whole game looking for an opportunity to do so, and everything!
(Slightly tangential side note: Being more used to somewhat longer-form RP, I always find one-shots vaguely unfulfilling somehow—I mean, I enjoy them, and it can let you play around and experiment with stuff character-wise and game-style-wise that you wouldn't want to commit to in the long term, but I always find it hard to let go of characters after a couple of hours or even a couple of days. I'm always like, "But I never got to do this, that, and the other thing! I could've done so much more!")
I was a little tempted to stay longer and try to get in on some other games, because I was having fun with both the games and the social aspects of the con (a lot of my friends were there, and it was a small enough con that I kept running into them without having to actually coordinate anything). But despite getting about as much sleep as I get on the average weeknight (i.e. less than I'd like to have in an ideal world but enough that I can usually function), I was so exhausted I was having trouble stringing together a coherent sentence and had bags under my eyes so huge I'd have to pay an oversized luggage fee to take them on an airplane, so in the end I just went home.
It was definitely a good time, though! Maybe next year I will even remember its existence more than a month in advance.