Impressions of the Intercon L schedule

The schedule of games for Intercon L is now available for viewing. I'm on bid com, so I knew all of these things were going to run already, but now the schedule is available for everyone to see. As is my custom at this stage of con preparation, I will now go over my current thoughts for what my signup plan shall be.

Friday night I think my preference is for Feast of the Minotaur. It's written by Andandi Gandolfi, who has an excellent track record, and I like the Ancient Greek mythology setting based around the myth of Theseus. Also interesting to me is Colonel Sebastian T. Rawhide's Circus of the Spectacular, which is a classic I've heard very good things about. I've already played in House of the Rising Sun and I highly recommend it to those of you who are pondering your own options for Friday night. Venezia will probably have a test run at Brandeis before Intercon rolls around, and I will try it then.

Saturday morning, I'd go for Garden of Forking Paths. This is the work of my sometime coauthors emp42ress*, natbudin*, and simplewordsmith* taking the "your choices affect the nature of your game" concept touched on in Resonance to an even greater extreme, with simultaneous runs of the same scenario affecting where everyone else's scenario ends up. I'm not sure how it's going to work exactly, but I know this group does amazing, envelope-pushing work and I'm always game to play something they've written. Failing that, I still haven't gotten into a run of Concordance Station written by readerofposts*, or if all else fails I could always sleep in.

Saturday afternoon the options are not leaping out at me. I would probably go for An Evening Aboard the HMS Eden. It sounds interesting, being a pastiche of Victorian literary characters aboard a cruise ship, and even so Jared thinks he's going to sign up for it, and it would be nice for us to have a game together. I confess I'm curious about Nat and Vik's Harmony Quest, despite the fact that I've technically been spoiled on it and when I first heard about it I was certain it wouldn't be my kind of game. Still, there's a morbid streak in me that wants to know just how uncomfortable I'd be. Also I've heard it's well done for the style of game it is, and as was said by at least five members of bid com, I trust Nat. Probably won't go for it, but the thought has crossed my mind. I also have some curiosity as to how The Linfarn Run is, being an intimate Brit game, though I'm not really interested in Firefly.

Saturday evening I will be running Resonance with the aforementioned writers from Alleged Entertainment. We're quite proud of this unusual sort of game, so if you haven't played yet it might be worth your while. Of the games going up concurrently with it, I'm quite sorry I won't be able to play in Port Hidalgo, a well-regarded pirate adventure, and I've heard good things about Roanoke, a game about the Sir Walter Raleigh's colony in Virginia. I tend to like period games.

Sunday morning the only thing that particularly interested me I've already played (GM Space) and so will be observing my usual Sunday-of-the-con tradition of collapsing in an exhausted heap. I do recommend GM Space as probably the funniest larp I've ever played, however, so keep it in mind if you've never been in it.

And that's my plan. Not sure what my first signup will be; logic dictates that Garden, as the game with the fewest number of slots, should be my first choice, so probably I'll go for that. Feast is the other possibility, because although it's large I'm very excited to play it. First round signups open November 2nd, so put it on your calendars, everyone.

SLAW 2010 Report

Am now back from my lovely weekend of larping at SLAW. This was kind of my weekend of "games I am not sure about," since in an effort to expand my larping horizons I signed up for all games that were not to my typical inclining. By and large this tactic was a success, and I had a very good weekend overall.

Friday night Charlotte, April, and I all played in Martha Stewart's Guide to Interdimensional Summoning (and Basting a Turkey.) Fortunately Charlotte had reminded me just before the game that it actually took place at a party and not at a business conference like I originally assumed, so at the last minute I changed my costuming plan. I thought I looked quite nice, wearing my black asymmetric cocktail dress with my white gold anniversary necklace, the nearly-matching silver infinity earrings, silver pumps with the perfectly-matching silver bag, and my silver-gray pashmina over my shoulders. Though I had a good time in it, this game was not to my taste. It was a game purely about schmoozing, with most interactions conducted solely for their own sake, which is totally fine, I just tend to prefer a little bit more plot. I did end up bonding with the demon who had been my childhood imaginary friend, but I did it mostly as a favor to him-- he needed it and I didn't, which I think may have been a common thing about demons and humans in the game. Glad I tried the game, had a nice time, but it was not exactly what I was hoping for.

Saturday morning I drove Charlotte and Ryan in early so that they could play in their morning games. I had nothing in that slot, so I decided to go cruise a nearby thrift store. It was a very nice, well-organized Goodwill, and there were lots of stuff to choose from. Unfortunately most of the things that caught my eye weren't in my size, but I find it amusing how often even in the thrift stores my eye is drawn to items from Express. Very frequently I see something I like the cut and styling of among lots of random pieces on the rack, and when I check the tag, Express is the maker with surprising frequency. I ended up taking home a fantastic black sweater with a drapey fold-over collar, two dressy knee-length skirts, one with an orange and white cloudy pattern and the other with swirls in various shades of red, and the neatest thing of all, a low-sided oval pan with a copper bottom and a stainless steel interior. It needs polishing, but this pan that looks just like it is selling for hundreds of dollars, and I snagged this one for four. Score! I'm not sure what you would call such a thing-- it's oval kind of like a gratin pan but only has one long handle, and the sides are too low for a saute pan --but I look forward to shining it up and cooking with it, which will promptly require shining it again. :-)

Pleased with my haul, I returned to WPI to grab lunch and get into costume for The Sound of Drums. I wasn't sure if it was going to be my cup of tea, and I was fairly certain I would like Two Hours in London, but natbudin* had highly recommended it and I trust the man's judgment. So, in the spirit of the Try New Games weekend, I went for it. My costume wasn't terrible, but it was weaker than my usual standard. Despite playing a sixty-plus-year-old, I did end up wearing my brown tribal-looking bikini with my brown pashmina tied around my waist like a skirt, and Charlotte kindly lent me her huge patterned green scarf to wrap around my shoulders. This mostly concealed all the decidedly-not-sixty-year-old body in the bikini, and I made some attempt to paint age makeup on my face, but I didn't white my hair and overall looked pretty much like the vain twenty-something I am. Also, I think I lost my brown and white headband scarf at the gamespace afterward, which I am annoyed with myself about.

But the game itself was excellent. The world is very full and well-thought-out. I loved my character and was incredibly busy throughout the whole game. I also had great interactions with Susan, who was my brilliant-but-mad younger sister, and Ryan, who was the troubled outsider with the haunting in his soul. I even got to use my badass spiritual strength to beat up a fallen god! It was awesome. The culture they built, with its ways and its norms that were so different and unusual, was really well-made. There was one small instance of "Christianity as the great bogeyman of non-mainstream living" that irked me, but otherwise I thought they did a really nice job of establishing the foreign people. There was also lots of interesting story told, which pretty much makes any game for me. Overall, I think this was my favorite larp of the weekend, and the one I was most glad that I took a chance on. Congrats to Tory and Lily for making it!

Saturday night was Clarence. By this point I was really dragging, energy-wise. This weekend marks the third week in a row of little sleep and poor eating, and I think I am reaching my limit. Luckily for me, Clarence is a game that is impossible to screw up, and I was playing an AGM so I could afford to be reactive rather than active. Fortunately, others were doing a fantastic job of pushing the game along. This run was blackbagged and carried off over the shoulder by electric_d_monk*, whose portrayal of the fanatically German-nationalist GM Bucher drove the events by sheer force of personality. By the end of the run, we had vampires passing on their nationalities as well as their vampirism, resulting in bronzite*'s General and rigel*'s Carmilla being determined to be genetically perfect Aryans who of course must then go on to spawn the Master Race. With the use of the time accelerator to hasten their growth, soon we had six little Ubermensches prancing about named after the Von Trapp children singing songs from The Sound of Music. And naturally, these unstoppable German supermen went on to take over the world and some surrounding planets, leaving Brewer as Kaiser of the Earth and Mars. It was a typically insane run, but the birth of the Master Race, I think, was a uniquely amusing touch.

"Allow me to explain zee rules of Der Kriegspiel."

Sunday lightgamer* was nice enough to let me ride over with him and twilighttremolo*. I was signed up for In the Jungle that day, the final game of the sort I wasn't sure what I'd think of. But I like the work of emp42ress* and simplewordsmith*, so I wanted to see what it was like. My costume was like most of my others this weekend was a little half-assed, since I tend not to keep worn-out clothes around, but I settled on an outfit that when my parents last saw me in it told me I looked like a bum. I figured that would work. It is a game about hobos, a pure conversation exercise where we do nothing more than talk to each other in character. The game was at bare minimum cast, but it was a good one, including myself, natbudin*, rigel*, nyren*, beholdsa*, and electric_d_monk*. Being in it with such good larpers helped a lot, keeping the converstion interesting and helping ease some of the awkwardness I was feeling about just having to spitball. Not something I'm certain I want to do again any time soon, but I enjoyed the experiment in this instance and I'm glad I decided to give it a try.

Now I am exhausted. I have been going at a breakneck pace for the last three weeks and I simply can't go any more. I have been kind of hoping that if I have one day where I sleep really well and eat properly it will fix my weariness and the mess my digestive system has been in, but I think I need a more consistent effort to really fix things up. Wednesday I will be going home for Thanksgiving with my brother, and I'm hoping to reset myself over that break with healthy eating and enough rest. I have things I need to get done in the near future, such as writing more Resonance characters and getting out the casting questionnaire for The Stand, but as cool as my activites have been, I think my body needs a bit more of a break before it will feel back to normal again.

Repost: Next Labor Wars run

Repost from emp42ress*:

Now that we've had some time to recover and think about the last run, we're ready to start planning another run of Labor Wars. This means we are looking for a house to host it in. We are planning for some weekend in November. The exact weekend can be worked out with our hosts. If you think you might be interested in hosting, let us know.

Benefits of hosting:
- You get guaranteed slots in the run.
- We cook a feast in your kitchen. With warning, you are welcome to eat even if not playing.
- We will coordinate run dates with you, so we can guarantee a weekend you will be able to play.

Requirements:
- A place we can host dinner for 17 people. We can probably arrange for extra folding tables, chairs, etc, but we do need a room big enough to set them up.
- A room in which 17 people can sit relatively comfortably, while not at tables. Preferably this is not the same space as the dinner location.
- At least two (and preferably 3 or 4) other rooms that can be used for separate conferences. These can include walk-in closets, basement space, enclosed porches, etc. Anywhere that is big enough for 2-5 people to have a private discussion. At least two of these should fit 5 people in relative comfort. Bedrooms are fine if you are willing to have people LARPing in your bedroom.
- A kitchen in which two people can work in relative comfort, with a fair amount of fridge space (if you can, for example clear us 1/3-1/2 of a normal full sized fridge, this would be fine, as would be providing a dorm fridge). It does not need to be well-stocked: we can bring cookware and spices, we'll just coordinate with you about what we need to bring.
- We have a strong preference for locations near one of the LARPer concentrations: Somerville, Waltham, and Worcester regions are all open for consideration. If someone in the RPI crowd wants to convince us to run there, we're also willing to talk about that. Anywhere on the T or a good and consistent bus line is also probably fine.

Larp brain dump

There is something on my mind right now that I do not feel comfortable talking about, but am feeling very anxious to deal with with the person in question. But I'm not sure what the most appropriate way to do it is. Phone, IM, in person? I don't know yet. At the very least, I must set up an appointment of some kind to do so, and soon. So you get random thoughts from a slightly distracted brain.

I'm so honored to have been asked by Nat, Susan, and Vito to help write the first Alleged Entertainment weekend-long game. I am now officially a member of Alleged Entertainment. I feel good about that.

I now have four games to my credit. Alice and Oz, both four-hours, I wrote by myself, under my own banner, Breaking Light. Paranoia: Research and Dismemberment, another four-hour, was written with Bernie Gabin, Joe Gabin, Matt Kamm, and Mac Magruder, under the banner of Will Not Be Denied, a reference I commend you if you get. And now one weekend-long with Alleged. I am proud of this.

I am surprised to find that in Labor Wars I was actually hoping that some of the replacement characters would be needed. I never felt that way before.

We had some fantastic players in this run. I am amused at how frequently in larps bronzite* is either the one holding back the oncoming tide of darkness, or the one bringing it. I thought londo* was going to be screwed, but he ended up more successful than almost anyone. One person I met this weekend, Shoshana, was a last-minute drop replacement who turned out to be fantastic in the part. I was so pleased with so many.

There are pictures of varying quality now up on Facebook. We should be having another run this coming fall, for those of you interested in playing.

Now I want to write another game. :-)

The Labor Wars, accomplished

At long last, The Labor Wars has come into being as a game. The journey from Nat asking me in Chad’s kitchen if I wanted to help write a game has culminated in a satisfactory run this past weekend.

Overall, I feel the game went well. Players enjoyed it on the whole, and the concepts we put into place worked fairly well. If there was a major issue, it was that conflict was dealt with too easily. We wanted a major source of it to be with people with different interests, alliances, and prejudices wrangling over a limited pool of economic resources/. I believe we established proof of concept by the fact that the mechanic for determining the workings of it was very functional, but we are going to have to make some adjustments to the amount of accessible resources. It was too easy for everyone to secure exactly what they wanted, without having to fight for it with other factions or make compromises in order to gain anything. Also, I was surprised at how much players were willing to work together to come up with arrangements that were agreeable to everyone. I walked around muttering, “Fuckin’ Brandeisians,” given our circle’s tendency toward such kind and gentle play style, but then I noticed there wasn’t any actual Brandeisian in the game! Still, they were mostly part of the extended Brandeis larp circle, and they very much had that kind of larp culture. Indeed, zrealm* coined the term “to Brandeis” a game, meaning to neutralize all the conflict through a tendency to compromise and work together.

We compensated for the lower than expected amount of conflict by throwing lots of events in the world that the players could affect and be affected by. I was actually extremely proud of our GM team for handling this; we came up with a lot of really good material, totally on the fly, that not only amped up the in-game struggle, it gelled with the direction that the players were taking the story, AND it felt like there was a living complete outside world that was active and reactive, and not just a series of crises that the GMs were throwing to trip up the players. They actually really surprised us with the direction they took things, necessitating us to make up so much on the fly, but we rolled with it and generated a series of events that remained true to the spirit while still meeting the players halfway.

We’ll need to make some edits, that’s for sure. Resources definitely need to be scarer. Anything to ramp up the conflict. One character may need to be completely overhauled. But we wrote a brand-new weekend long game, one of the first in this area in ten years, and it didn’t run half badly. I’m incredibly grateful to Nat, Susan, and Vito for inviting me to be part of this really cool project that they came up with.

We’ll have to get it in shape for a second run!

Labor Wars tonight!

Labor Wars starts tonight, Labor Wars starts tonight! Our brand-new weekend-long game debuts tonight! Yaaaaay!

I helped emp42ress* with the advance cooking for the game yesterday afternoon. We picked up an enormous load of groceries including the makings of a number of delicious dishes and snacks that will be provided for the lucky players. As I told Susan, it was nice to be the helper in the kitchen for once rather than the person running it. She could be the one with the plan, who had to go to the effort of having all the necessary steps plotted out and ready in her head, and I could just be the eager kitchen monkey who does useful things when asked. :-) It was a relaxing change. Also, I really admire her ability to plan an elaborate dinner for a huge group of people, both culinarily and logistically. Usually the reason I insist on doing that job myself is because I know so few other people who can really manage it properly, and Susan is definitely great at it. It's going to be an impressive spread, and you have her to thank for it.

Stuffing later that evening was probably the easiest I've ever been to for a game. The game doesn't have lots of little bits and pieces, just paper packets beautifully designed by natbudin*, and so even with a few printing snags here and there, it was a remarkably simple game to put together. I was expecting the many-hour process that is typical of previous games I've run, but this was pleasantly quick.

All that remains is for me to assemble the pieces of my costume. We are in fact going to be semi-in character as house servants during the run, and I had to scramble to figure out what a maidservant would wear in roughly the post-Civil War South. I bought a floor-length black skirt, easily the longest skirt I've ever owned, and plan to wear that with an admittedly slightly-too-current-looking white button up blouse. It has an Asian collar and short sleeves, but it will serve. Over that I want to wear my blue-toile apron. I also have this swath of white lace that I always wanted to find an excuse to use as a shawl. It's a bit too grandma-y for normal wear and so kind of fits the style of the time, though it might be too fancy for a maid. Ah, well, we'll see. It's not going to be the best costume I ever put together, but I'm a GM and playing a house servant to boot-- I'm supposed to fade into the background!

*bounces* Just a few more hours until game!

Two weeks until Labor Wars!

At last the hives have abated. The antihistimine I took seemed to clear things up within a few hours, and I managed to actually not rend every last shred of dermis from my body in the interim. Here's hoping this is the end of it. In the meantime I'm going to be avoiding acorn squash, just to be on the safe side.

Yesterday was a very good day. Yesterday marked the first day I fully incorporated every step of my new summer self-care routine, including genuine intense exercise, proper nutrition, proper hydration, and skin care. My not feeling so great emotionally lately has led to my not taking very good care of myself, which leads to my not feeling so great physically, which in turn makes me feel worse emotionally. This is my effort to end that cycle, and though it's certainly going to require a lot of work on my part to break out of this inertia I've been buried in, I felt pretty damn good after accomplishing it yesterday. One day at a time, I suppose.

Had an excellent Labor Wars meeting last night. We are down to the final two weeks or so before the game debuts, and we are, in my opinion, in very good shape. We finalized a few more public pieces of information last night, as well as figured out some important mechanics, made both an in-game and out-of-game schedule, and made some plans for the dinner that we'll be serving Saturday night. I always wanted to put on a game that had a dinner served within it! I am excited to help emp42ress* with the cooking. I feel like we're in a really good place with where we are with this game, so I have every hope that the inaugural run will go well.

Happy birthday Erik!

I want to wish a fantastic birthday to flyingstalins*, not only a remarkable and amazing human being, but the wonderful friend who hooked me up with Muppety goodness! Hope you have a wonderful day! :-)

I just finished writing one of the two replacement characters I have been assigned for Labor Wars, and I'm feeling pretty good about it. Replacement characters are a tricky proposition, in my opinion, but I'm quite proud of the way we're handling them here. There's a lot to recommend using them, of course. The Labor Wars is a weekend-long game with at least some possibility of character death, and nobody wants to be cut out of the game way way early because they got killed. So replacement characters are a way of getting those players back in the game so they don't miss out. But they can have problems. They are often much thinner than full characters, so I've encountered people getting back in the game and finding that they don't have much to do with their new role. Depending on when the second-run character gets into the game, the plots they're supposed to follow may have already resolved, or gone on in such a way as to make it impossible for them to get into those plots. And you can never predict when someone's going to die, so you can't predict when the new character's going to get into the game. Another issue is with information/knowledge management. You might get a second run character who doesn't know things that you already knew in your first character, so you're put under enormous difficulty to not metagame.

In Labor Wars, however, we've done a lot of planning to circumvent these issues as best we can. We are writing the replacements to be each tailored to a particular first-run character. So, if you're cast as X and you get killed, your replacement character will always be Y, whereas if you were cast as A, your replacement will always be B. The replacement is designated as your first character's lieutenant, to whom you've been reporting the goings-on of the game, who is ready to step in for you in the event that something happens to you. This helps make the transition smooth from one, by making character goals stem from the same stuff (if not necessarily consistent!) and by giving a reason for in-game knowledge to be consistent. Your replacement knows everything your original character knew because they are understood to have been informed of everything you learned. And usually you can pick up some aspect of your old plots, if not exactly in the same way to allow you to still have plot when you re-enter the game. It's an incredibly clever design on the parts of emp42ress*, natbudin*, and simplewordsmith*. In the past I have tended to not like replacement characters because of the issues stated above, but their implementation of the concept in this game makes me feel really good about them.

One more to go. Here's off to do it justice.

Balancing out

Okay, so there's some positive stuff going on with me too, to compensate for how off I'm feeling today. My new rain boots came in a couple of days ago, and I absolutely adore them. They're Sudini Minnas, gorgeous walking boots made of waterproof leather that you can behold in all their glory here, though I got them in black rather than the admittedly equally lovely chocolate. And since I bought them on eBay, I paid a fraction of their retail value. Oh, eBay, how I love you. The hours I spent scouring the Internet really paid off. These boots are beautiful as well as comfortable, and they've held up admirably to the wet of this rainy morning. I am incredibly pleased, so expect to see them often.

Last night there was a GM meeting for The Labors Wars, which went very well and confirmed my enthusiasm for working on this project with this team. I really admire the way Alleged Entertainment builds a framework for the writing process that schedules regular meetings and due dates for when various components need to be written. If I'm ever in charge of organizing a larp writing team, I definitely plan to take a leaf out of their book. The sense of accountability alone it creates is so useful. Particularly since I'm the New Kid writing an AE game, and the least experienced larper/larp writer, I know I certainly don't want to let anyone down. We assigned bluesheet writing last night which is due in two weeks, and I intend to get an early start.

Also, this awesome exchange occurred, about a particularly ornery character:
Me: "I take it that's your pet character?"
Susan: "Yeah, she's my baby."
Pause.
Nat: "Your baby's ugly, Susan."

I heart natbudin.

Finally, youareverysmall's lovely boyfriend Dan is in the area on a bike tour, and he is staying at Elsinore for a few days. The timing is unfortunately pretty terrible, as all the days he's in town I'm booked for ten million prior committments and don't have much in the way of time to hang out with him when he's available. I feel like a lousy host and it's kind of stressing me out. I just hope he's comfortable and has a good time seeing the sights.