As summer begins, Acata and Jeremy ran another game for the LRS – Neptune’s Ball. The story is inspired by Disney’s The Little Mermaid, but  is darker than the bright premise would suggest.

Although it may be the end of Spring, Acata and Jeremy ran “Sorrows of Winter” on May 12. The game brought players to a winter market where they played out the roles of changelings. It also provided an opportunity to learn more about the systems planned for the 2018 Grand LARP!

Last month, Amy ran Sign for us!  Here’s her discussion of how the game went.

Sign is a game about being understood. Its goal is to bring to life a new perspective and appreciation for both how planner normally communicate and build empathy for those who use different ways of communication. Sign follows the first steps of Nicaraguan children in the 1970s who are deaf and up to this point have not had access to other children like them. This group of 50 students was brought together to learn lip reading, but instead co-created the foundation of what would become Nicaraguan Sign. In this game, players were some of these children with rich complex backstories and over the course of the first few days of class had their first real chance to share. The game structure was four classes and three recesses with a debrief afterwards.

Players noted that it was easiest to talk about things that were more concrete or immediately present. For example, real world props were provided in the form of toys: balls, spy glass, pretty rock, and stuff animals. The sign for such toys was quickly free established and reinforced by what was present. Compared with more abstract concepts, such as over protective parents or a family illness, was much harder.  As the characters got to know each other, I could tell as an observer in the role of teacher that they greatly wanted to help each other and learn what the other person was trying to say.

The signs we came up with in class included their names which represented a part of their backstory, instead of the name their parents game them. Sign points out that their written names were just pictures something they never really heard and instead asked them to create a sign name for themselves. One player chose to have her name be raising both hand in the shape of claws and making a fierce face to show she really want to write a book about her dragon “T” we later learned. The second class students were given a list of words to choose from and the in the third class they were allowed to make any word. What’s interesting is to see the signs they made in recess without any ‘adult’ interference. A symbol for ‘bad’ was developed and grew to have two shapes: tisking or drumming the right index finger on the left one. As the teacher, I had not seen this happen so it was amusing when the students were complaining about me being ‘bad’ when I ended recess. The shape of signs over time chanced meaning and became faster as time went on.  Several players commented that it was easier than they thought to remember and use the signs that they came up with.

The game was not without its frustrations. Players wanted to share their stories but sometimes had to make compromise, which mimics what these children really went through as well. We began to appreciate more what line of sight does. If one character was not directly look at another then players had to get creative.

The game is played in silence for its majority and it is an interesting experience how quickly we adapted as a group. When the game ended and a I spoke the closing words before the debrief there was this moment where it took to have the atmosphere shift. It was something that I certainly felt and I believe the players did as well.

On February 25, Adrienne brought us another game from a convention – Better Living Through Robotics. This game takes place in the futuristic bio-dome where robots are staples of everyday life and occasionally act almost-human. But of course nothing is ever perfect in a LARP…

On October 21st, the LRS ran the first run ever of Mutually Assured Revelations – a science fiction LARP where the players are a mixed group of humans and aliens heading to their new homeworld. Though the journey and arrival didn’t quite go as planned, the LARP itself went well with 15 new and returning players. There were plenty of exciting moments ranging from debates over how to behave properly on a space station to dramatic deaths. We hope to run this game again soon for those who didn’t have a chance to play in the first run!

As part of our packed Summer LARP schedule, Acata ran Guild Camp this August/September.  Guild Camp is intended to be a workshop and writing intensive for new LARP writers, where a team of writers work together to learn how to write an Assassins’ Guild style LARP, then put one together and run it in about a month’s time.  This year’s team just ran their LARP a week or so ago.  It was great fun!  Betty, one of the GMs, wrote up a report.

The Luminary Role-play Society ran the newest Guild Camp game on a languid afternoon in Mitchell Park Library on Sunday, September 17th, 2017. Co-written by three first time writers Louis Wasserman, Amy Russo, and Betty Bong, “With Family Like This…” was an MIT-style three-hour one-shot no PvP-combat LARP for nine players. It was written at a breakneck pace in just over a month with the guidance of Zampolit Acata. The game was followed by the LRS Social event in the evening. 

In a universe where superpowered people are a fact of life, this game was set in a world reminiscent of those in films like the Incredibles or Sky High. A family of superpowered people vying for control over cities are called to their supervillainess matriarch’s table for a rare family dinner. 

If the goal was to explore family dynamics in a way that was both campy and poignant, it was incredibly successful. Even though there was little pregame work was involved for the cast, they were able to push the game off to a quick start at 2pm. Both new and experienced players were quick to slip into the familiarities of a family gathering. Organizers encouraged players to make up outlandish stories about their character’s siblings or children. GMs were heavily involved with mechanics and in some cases almost transcended their NPC roles. Although the game had a lot going on in the way of mechanics, the players were given the choice whether of not they had to interact with them.

”Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”. 

Tolstoy said it, so it must be true. Keep an eye out for future runs of this game early next year to experience the split-your-sides funny or snot-runningly weepy moments that define all complicated families.

Amy adds:

-Sarah, Historian Luminant

One of our GMs, Adrienne, goes to a lot of conventions, and often brings back to us the best of the LARPs she plays there.  The latest of these was a game called Inheritance, a family drama set in 10th century Denmark, involving the funeral of a patriarch and the return of an exiled son.  Our run of Inheritance happened in late July, although there will be a second run this month, because we had way more demand than we had available slots.

Inheritance was awesome.  It is a very tightly written game for 9 players, and exactly 9 players, all beautifully intertwined.  I was particularly impressed by how much the LARP author – veteran game designer Luke Crane – managed to convey with very short character sheets.  Although all the information we were given fit on a single sheet of paper, there was an enormous amount of tension and drama packed into each role, and all of us had interesting and important choices to make throughout the game.  All of us had our lives thrown into upheaval by the events of the game.  A few people tragically died.  The rest of us moved forward as best we could.  It was a richly emotional story, which I appreciated a great deal.  Afterwards Adrienne told us a bit about how the game had run at the convention where she’d first encountered it, and that run sounded like a very different, but equally compelling LARP.

As game is very much live, I’m not sure there’s more I can say, except that it was a wonderful time and I’m looking forward to hearing how our second run goes!

At some point, there will be blog posts about the June and July games, I swear!  But in the meantime, Hannah ran her new game, Blood and Iron, over the weekend.  Here’s her thoughts on the game:

This past weekend I GMed my first LARP, Blood and Iron, inspired by the book of the same name written by Elizabeth Bear. Blood and Iron is set on All Hallows Eve in New York City and in Faerie, as the Seelie and Unseelie Courts vie for dominance and survival and the Mages of the Prometheus Club prepare to take vengeance for slights against humanity both personal and historical.

There were a number of unique challenges that made running this game an especially interesting experience. In addition to being the first LARP I’ve run, this is also the first LARP I’ve written. Fawnn and Ted, my co-GMs, made invaluable contributions during the review phase of the process, but Fawnn had also never written a LARP and Ted, while an experienced GM, was new to LRS. Not content with doing something for the first time, I included a number of novel mechanics and that pertained to how the characters recognized one another in-game, moved through the physical space of the game, progressed towards their goals, and used their various magical and mundane abilities. The game was also written for a large cast and many of the players were completely new to LARPing. To top it all off, two players cancelled at the last minute.

Many of the novel mechanics worked very well. A few were confusing and I plan to redo them before running the game again. Fawnn has accused me of writing this LARP to get catharsis for how confused I was when reading the book, and while there may be some element of truth to that, there was more confusion going on than I’d intended. Some mechanical changes and more thorough demos should go a long way towards resolving most of the problems.

One of the novel aspects of the LARP that I was especially concerned about was the concept of cannon fodder characters – relatively powerless PCs who were likely to die near the beginning of the game and whose players had the choice to come back as a different PC, take over an NPC, or leave the game entirely. I’m happy to say that the cannon fodder players (all of whom volunteered for the role) appeared to have had a very good time. One particular college frat boy was enthralled by an Unseelie fae and swept away to Faerie, got ahold of a magical cup that was never empty of beer, and by all accounts was the most successful at accomplishing his goals of any character right up until he was slain in the final battle in the backlash of an attack aimed at someone else. Meanwhile, a character who had been expected to survive most of the game had some very poor luck and was killed early on. That player returned as an NPC whose story went a much different direction than I would have predicted.

The small interactions were some of my favorite parts. A disguised Mage flirting with a Lord of the Seelie Court. A minion getting around her Queen’s commands by recruiting someone else to do the thing she’d been told not to do. An eager college student interviewing his role model for a term paper, unaware that she was in the middle of much greater things. The Seelie Queen banishing an interloping Unseelie fae from her throne room with sheer force of personality. A bargain made for the completion of a task that, unbeknownst to one of the parties, was already done.

I’m excited to run this LARP again some time. With different casting, different interpretations of the character sheets, and different outcomes for some of the randomized mechanics, the plot will quite likely go in a very different direction.

Thanks, Hannah!

-Sarah, Historian Luminant

We’re trying to catch up a bit on the posts for games that ran earlier this year, and here is our first installment.  I sadly wasn’t able to make it to Titanic LARP.  But Acata was there, and has given me a report on the action:

Way back on April 2nd, the LRS hosted “The Titanic Game” written and GMed by Chris. The game is a great romp through an underwater hotel that has suffered some mysterious damage that caused it to be shut down within a week of its grand opening. The players were a mix of veterans and new players, and they were all fantastic. Creativity and ingenuity carried the day with regards to epic stories and daring rescues. Afterwards we all went out to eat, swap war stories, and hang out at a local restaurant. All in all, a grand success!

Sounds like a good time!

-Sarah, Historian Luminant

Despite the lack of new blog posts, we’ve been quite busy at the Luminary Roleplay Society lately! We’ve had two games, which will be documented here shortly, and another fun GM brunch.  We also have at least one event every month for the rest of the year, including our second Grand LARP, and a LARP-writing workshop for first time LARP writers.  Keep checking this space for all the latest news about our games and other events!