Party Games & Animal Ghosts

The Runnymede LARP weekend

We’ve got a long standing tradition in this neck of the woods for trying to cram as much LARP gaming into a single weekend as possible. This is partly because it makes it easier for folks from further afield to play in more than on game, and partly so we still have the other weekends in the month free for other things. Back in the heady days of yore, we’d have as many as four regular LARP games in a weekend, and I’d be involved in playing or running at least three of them. These days we only have two, and for a fair while I’ve only been involved in one of them. The other (which I used to co-run) came to a close in January, paving the way for an ongoing series of short-run games instead of one long running one.

In February 2010, the first of these started, and I’d decided to play in it as well as running my usual regular game. What follows is an account of that weekend.

Before the weekend

It had been a long week, and I was glad for it to be done so I could finally kick back and relax… Unfortunately, it was also a game weekend, so I knew I had a pile of preparation to get done and out of the way. My plan was to make some headway on that on Friday night. I will confess that this particular plan failed utterly due to a pronounced lack of willpower on my part. Instead, I crashed out in the front room, ordered pizza and watched some episodes of the truly awesome Pushing Daisies. With hindsight, I think this was a better option than my original plan. It meant I actually got some downtime and didn’t end up a burnt out wreck before even getting to the games.

Saturday

Planning for Mortals, Part One

Having failed to do any work the previous night, I decided to get up early and make a start on getting things ready for Sunday’s mortals game. Getting up at 8am on a Saturday morning to do game preparation isn’t my favourite thing in the world, but I’m usually a fairly early riser anyway. I could probably have done with another hour or so, but it wasn’t anything drastic. It meant I had an hour or so to pull together a to-do list for Sunday’s mortals game, and to make a start on it before heading out to the shops to buy props, costume and equipment.

For the uninitiated, “Mortals” may seem like an odd description for a game, but if you put it in context it makes sense. It shares a setting with a number other games where people play various supernatural beasties who pretty much treat the everyday folks as either cattle, toys or children whilst trying to stay hidden from them. The mortals game is the one in which you get to play those hapless human beings who are trying to make sense of that world. Folks who are just starting to brush up against the fact that there are things out there that are not human, and that may possibly not have your best interests at heart.

Myself and my Co-conspirator Ross run the local Mortals game once a month, and as such we provide the backdrop of events, conspiracies and general nastiness that the players get to experience. To prepare for this, we spend time deciding what the events will be that draw the players in to the game and let them do their thing. I spent a large chunk of my first waking hour on Saturday writing responses to actions my players had said they were taking between games (downtimes). It’s these responses that we use to feed new information into the game and try to nudge players to head in certain directions without it feeling like they’re being lead by the nose. It’s a difficult balance to strike.

Party Game Character / The Supply Run

But Mortals wasn’t the only game on this particular weekend. A slot on Saturday evening had recently become available, and a new game was starting up to fill it which I had decided to play in. It was to be an experimental game, about which all we knew was that we’d be playing people who were either going to, coming from or at a party in London. We could pick pretty much any kind of character, as long as we fit that bill.

I’d decided to play a chap called “Russel Eltham”, a circuit bending musician and not-quite-celebrity blogger, who was attending a party at a Hackspace in London… but not one for the normal Hackspace crowd. Instead, a trendy lifestyle magazine (the kind that Russel hates) is “borrowing” the space for the night to push it’s “geek-chic” ideals. They are making a significant donation to the space for the privilege, and Russel is along to help with the music and generally stop the fashion drones from doing lines of coke off the PCB lightbox, drinking the etching fluid or any other such stupidity. I’d decided that he wasn’t going to be socially inept, but wouldn’t fit at all with the crowd at the party. I’d also decided to base him loosely on a few hacker/maker stereotypes and real-life author/blogger/civ-lib campaigner Cory Doctorow.

For this, I needed costume and props. The first half of my Saturday morning shopping trip was focussed on getting together the costume to portray Russel effectively. For the first time in many years, I now own a pair of pale blue jeans. I also now own a red & white checked shirt. Combined with a waistcoat and a pair of black thick-rimmed glasses (cinema 3D glasses with the lenses pushed out) I had my costume. To complete the effect, I coupled this with a basic circuitbender’s supply kit in a small shoulderbag – basic soldering & reworking equipment, prescription safety goggles with LED lamps mounted on the frame, a laptop, an MP3 player and a few other bits and bobs.

The second half of the shopping trip involved buying supplies for the mortals game in the form of timber and a small speaker to be used with an MP3 player. I also picked up a 500w floodlight for a fiver, which I plan to experiment with for future use. If it passes the tests I have in mind for it, I may pick up a few more… £5 for a reasonably sturdy looking floodlight is pretty decent – especially if I can trick them into holding theatrical gels without catching fire (hence the testing).

Plots and Plans

Once I’d finished with the supply run, I moved on to the more physical job of building props and set components for the Mortals game. I’m generally keen to represent as much of the setting as possible with physical sets or props, as it makes things much more immersive. I hate having to slow things down by stopping to describe what people see, and props and set are a way to avoid having to do that. In this case, I needed to build some large animal cages. I already knew there were going to be four tables in the room we use for the game, so I figured out a way to build the cages by standing tables on top of each other and fixing simple flat fronts to them, and proceeded to build two basic rectangular wooden frames, which I then stapled chickenwire onto. I planned on setting these up in some way in the room, but stayed away from deciding exactly how and where to rig them until we were in the room. Doing things this way meant I could minimize the construction and also the amount I had to transport from my garage to the game venue, both of which are good ideas.

Next, the audio effects. I grabbed a bundle of animal sounds and started working on manipulating them on my PC – originally I was going to add echoes and distortion to them, but it didn’t really work. It seems that cat and dog noises become difficult to identify when there’s an echo on them, so in the end I just added 3 seconds of silence before and after them all to make them easier to work with in a live situation. I then tried to copy them onto one of my spare MP3 players that I keep around for this kind of thing… only to discover that the mp3 player in question had died. It still plays the MP3s that are already on it perfectly, but it won’t speak to a computer any more. I tried two, with two computers and two operating systems. No luck. In the end I had to put them onto my main MP3 player. They’re still on there now – I’ve not had time to take them off… which means I may end up surprised by a cat howl in my random playlist at some point.

The rest of the afternoon was spent finishing off the downtime responses and our plans for the game itself. I say finishing… but I think that’s stretching the word a bit when it came to the gameplan. We took the very vague ideas we’d already had and fleshed them out a bit… almost enough to call them a plan, in fact.

Because I thought it’d be bad form to collapse from malnutrition in the Party Game, I also found some time to fit in cooking and eating a steak and some veg. Ribeye steak, medium rare. Exactly what was needed at the time. This left me with about 15 minutes to get myself into costume, get my bag packed and drive to the game venue.

Party Games

It’s hard to say that a game wasn’t what you expected when nobody really knew what to expect… but this game managed it. In a good way. Initially, the rules were explained to us, such as they were… Stay IC, and if you need assistance from the ST, he’d be sat quietly behind a curtain reading a book. We were also told that at the start of the game, we would not have our personal belongings. Everybody was given a small sealable plastic bag with their name on it. Because the folks running the game knew I’d probably have a bit more stuff than most, they gave me two bags. All the loose stuff from my pockets just about fitted, but and the rest was already in a shoulder bag, so I just handed that over too.

Then the scene was set. We were all in a large, empty room with bright, unreachable and uncontrollable overhead lighting. We were also told that we would shortly be waking up on the seats that were fixed in place along the walls… and that our last memories would be of either going to, coming from or being at our respective parties. After a quick check, I discovered that not much time would have passed since our last memories… meaning that Russel (my character, in case you’d forgotten) would, in fact, still be more than a little drunk.

Rude Awakenings

Over the next few minutes all of the characters (probably around fourteen or so, at a guess) woke, and began trying to piece together where we were and what was going on. Not long after, the door opened and two men in suits entered. They introduced themselves as police officers and proceeded to explain that there had been an ‘incident’ and that we were being held until we could be processed, after which we would be released. They left us with a bundle of pens and forms, asking us to fill them in so they’d be able to contact us later. Since I was playing somebody who was drunk and a bit belligerent, I defaced my form with profanities rather than filling it in properly.

Over the next half an hour or so, it became apparent that there was no clock in the room, so none of us had any real idea how long we’d been there. For this reason, if I’m being vague about time from here on out, it’s because I have no idea how long things took. Various folks were being taken out and interviewed. They were coming back in with different stories about the interviews – but all of them had one thing in common: Nobody came back any wiser about what the “incident” had been. None of our questions were being answered.

What was slightly more disturbing was when they came to collect somebody for an interview without bringing the previous interviewee back. That was the start of things becoming more overtly dodgy… even more than the “police misuse their powers” kind of dodgy several of us were already certain was happening.

Most of us didn’t know what had been happening in the other room for most of the evening. In fact, most of the details wouldn’t come out until after the game. For most of us, the first hard evidence came quite late in the evening when one of the other characters (one half of a couple) was dragged back in bloodied and bruised. After that point, most of the people who came back were injured in some way. Our captors also dropped the facade of being police, started openly carrying guns and just wouldn’t tell us who they were.

Earlier in the evening, when we thought they were police, I’d been fairly pushy about things. I’d resisted giving personal information, and I’d argued, talked back and made demands for such things as food & coffee. By this point, not so much. Of course, I had also decided that I’d sobered up a fair bit by now, and was into the hangover instead.

Interviews Without Coffee

So it was at this point that I was taken out for my interview, along with two others. We were all made to stand in a stress position, and told that the first one to break position would be chosen. Since I was hungover and tired, I decided to break first, and fell back against a wall. I was then informed that being “chosen” meant I got to pick who was interrogated. Knowing that I wasn’t really making a choice at all – they’d take whoever they wanted, regardless – I decided to make a snap decision rather than letting them talk to me and build things up. I had a choice between a man and a woman, so I picked the man – an adult film director. Whilst I see Russel as a firm believer in equality and feminism, I also see him as the kind of guy who wouldn’t deliberately single a woman out to be tortured. So they took the man and sent us back in to the main room.

Not long after that, our captors enteres the holding cell and informed us that because we weren’t giving them the answers they were looking for, they didn’t think we were taking them seriously. So, as well as returning everyone they’d had hidden away to the holding cell, they shot the wife of the guy they’d beaten earlier in the head.

Then everything started to become a whole other kind of weird.

All of a sudden, there was a dog in the room, and it was talking to us with a woman’s voice. It gave us bizarre instructions, which most of us eventually chose to follow after a certain amount of bemused, astounded and disbelieving discussion. The instructions led to a portal appearing in one of the walls. The dog compelled us to hurry through the portal. Whilst not everyone went through at first, I’m pretty sure everybody did in the end… except for the dog. I don’t know exactly what happened after I’d gone through, but apparently something nasty happened behind us, and the dog didn’t make it.

…and that was the end of the first session. I’m still none the wiser about what’s actually happening, but it was certainly an intense game and I’m really looking forward to the second session… even if it’s just to see where it goes next!

Post game chat

Another grand tradition in these parts is the “de-role” (although we don’t really call it that these days), where after an intense game we all decend on some poor unsuspecting house (usually the House of Plot, in which I reside) to relax, chat and generally prove to each other that we’re not really torturers, we just play them at games.

This time, as well as the usual food and a couple of drinks, we also got to hear about what had really been going on in the other room. We were shown the blowtorch that had been held in front of people before they had their shirt opened, their head covered and their chest sprayed with freeze spray (which initially feels like a burn, apparently). We were shown the TENS machine that was used on people after they’d been shown a car battery and hooded. Most of us even got a demonstration.

Most of us got off easily in that other room, it seems.

Sunday

Preparing for Mortals, Part Two

I had planned to get up nice and early on sunday morning for the game. As it happens, plans and reality seldom meet. Thankfully there wasn’t much still left to do – just a few downtime responses to flesh out, a couple more props to make, some other paperwork to sort and, finally, printing everything out.

Thankfully the props were fairly easy to knock together.

Prop One: Take one bit of broomhandle, clad it in pipe-lagging. Cut the paws off a soft-toy rabbit, pad them with plenty of stuffing and gaffer them on to the ends of the padded stick, then use a gluegun to coat the pipelagging in fake fur. The result: The most disturbing prop known to man. A furry pawed prodding stick.

Prop Two: Take a leftover scraps of fake fur and cover their backs with gaffer tape. Spray the gaffer tape red, and then give it a light spraying over the top with black to make it a darker, mottled red. Voila! Scraps of furry animal skin!

In the end I even managed to fit in having a fryup before I needed to load everything into the car to drive up to the game venue.

Runnymede Mortals – The EBRFS

The game started in a fairly normal way with the usual combination of tea, biscuits and recrimination. Our players portray the mildly dysfunctional members of the Egham-by-Runnymede Fortean Society, a group of people who mostly joined up as a means of getting out of the house and meeting people… and somehow managed to get drawn in to a supernatural conspiracy that they now can’t get out of. This has lead to some interesting tensions in the group as it’s a bit mismatched in terms of social skills. In this particular instance we had a glorious demonstration of how much these people can be trusted with confidential information:

Thoroughly paraphrased for your enjoyment.
[Seth has previously resisted giving out his surname as he thinks people will mock him about it]
SETH: “Do we have to fill it in? You’ll laugh”
ENID: “Go on – you have to fill in your surname on the form. We won’t tell anyone. We won’t laugh.”
[Seth fills in the form]
[Enid laughs]

…and later…

[The group are discussing Seth’s friend Brian (who’s a wiccan and a furry)]
ENID: “Why don’t you bring him along? he could join the society!”
SETH: “He thinks it’s a bit geeky”
ENID: [Offended] “We’re not geeky”
SETH: “You like the X-Files… that’s a bit geeky.”
ENID: [Points at Seth, shouting] “His surname’s HEAP!”

Set Building

Eventually the discussion found its way back on to an even keel, and the group headed out for an investigation into a reputedly haunted basement at a local cats & dogs home. They talked to the manager for a while, but as usual I have no idea what happened then as I was too busy building the set in the main room. The animal cage fronts I’d put together were almost perfect, but were about a centimetre too tall to fit easily into the tables. So they had to be held in with gaffer tape. Ah, gaffer tape. It solves so many problems. The other problem I had with the set was a fairly simple one… Putting bedding into the cages. It takes a surprising amount of time to rip up that much newspaper. It also covers you in a surprising amount of black ink. Alas, those were not problems I could solve with Gaffer.

Cats, Dogs & …Cows?

When this had all been assembled and the room appropriately darkened, everyone came in to investigate. The cages caught peoples attention immediately, and they started rummaging around in them… which soon led them to find the fur scraps. They got an appropriately disgusted reaction.

I let the group mill around for a while longer before I hit them with anything more… but when I did, it certainly got noticed. The portable speaker I had hooked up to an MP3 player of animal noises certainly did the trick when held just behind an unsuspecting player’s ear when it played a cat howl. I’m pretty sure she nearly jumped out of her skin, which for me is a sign that I’ve done good!

Likewise, the furry probe (not a euphemism) got a good reaction. Pulled out of a corner unnoticed and gently dragged across the back of somebody’s neck, it’s surprisingly effective. Not immediately, mind you. It took a moment. First there’s the “what’s that?” look, immediately followed by the “Aiee! Something furry’s rubbing up against me” terror reaction. Even more impressively, I managed to hide the furry probe (still not a eupemism) away again before anyone saw it.

We gradually ramped up the frequency of the furry probings (not a eupemism, and Seth’s friend Brian is not involved at all) and the animal noises… and only lost the horror once. We lost it to total confusion when one of the players misheard a cat’s deep and angry growl as a cow’s moo. I’ll admit it’s an odd noise, and in a room with a lot of other noise you might not recognise it… but a cow’s moo? I’m sure I could find a way to make a moo seem horrific, but I’d have to work at it and it’d need some serious foreshadowing.

Eventually, one of the group started to get a bit distressed and moved to leave… and was scratched (as usual in this kind of game, we didn’t actually scratch anyone… we just tell them they’ve been scratched). This lead to everybody panicking and trying to leave in a hurry, which lead to more scratches and a couple of bites before everybody got out.

After a little more discussion, a couple of people went back in to look around in a little more detail… discovering that one of the walls was actually a walled up doorway, and that there were cracks in it. Further investigation revealed that water & rats were getting in through those cracks. Given that supernaturally tainted water has been an ongoing theme in these games, the water was actually the more distressing part.

More recriminations, Vicar?

The session came to a close back at the EBRFS’s original meeting place, where events were discussed. More biscuits were consumed, and arguments and recriminations took place… along with a couple of veiled threats and some unwitting serious insults. This lead up to the end of the game.

All back to the House of Plot

Once again, we all retreated to the house of plot for a bit of food and post game chat to close out the weekend.

All in all, exhausting, intense and stressful… but all good fun.

This post has been crossposted from eggbox.org.uk