I am not qualified to run a larp. Sure, by the time I ran Cthulhu, I’d been larping and researching the hobby for three years, but that didn’t mean I knew how to run a game. After all, I’ve watched thousands of movies over the course of my life but have no idea how to direct a film. As a novice GM, I faced an overwhelming number of responsibilities: I had to create a plot interesting enough to grab my players, gather props, find NPCs, and, horror of horrors, learn the rules. On top of all that, I’d decided to conduct an experiment. I wanted to see if larp could bring any old group of people together as a community; I wanted to test its universal appeal, to check my reactions to the hobby against a third party. I’d decided to run a game for non-larpers.
As a rookie GM, I immediately established a team of qualified experts to help me with the game. Gene, a gamer from the cradle, was my first addition. He had a knack for explaining rules systems to other players, especially to, ahem, reporters in need of help. Among his friends, he was the planner—even when he wasn’t going to Knight Realms, he’d arrange rides for everyone, including me, and I knew I could rely on him to work hard prepping for the game. His large, boisterous personality matched his physique—he was a big guy—and usually he wore a little ponytail at the top of his head, which gave him the appearance of a samurai with a topknot. He kept the top of his hair chin-length but kept the sides shaved, sometimes buzzing designs into them. As a GM, Gene excelled at creating scenes and plot challenges on the fly. I knew, for example, that a character once derailed the main Deadlands plot within the first five minutes of a FishDevil game, and that Gene and the team worked together to create a new plot, written on the spur of the moment, that occupied their players for the next eight hours. Gene firmly believed that in larp, a player ought to be able to do anything, even if it made more work for the GM. I liked that player-centric attitude and knew that if I collapsed in a quivering ball of stress during the game, Gene would be able to carry on.
Brendan and Jeramy had loads of individual experience gaming, but they also worked well as a team. Brendan had been the new player officer at Knight Realms for several years. He was responsible for running the rules and safety demonstration for new players before each game. He often ran low-level mods at Knight Realms to entertain newbies, and he’d run several weekend plots with Jeramy. Jeramy spent several years as the planning officer at Knight Realms, essentially filling in any gaps left by other staff members, and he’d run a lot of weekend plots and individual mods during his tenure. Together, Brendan and Jeramy were working on a sci-fi larp of their own invention, called Doomsday. Brendan was a lot of fun. He was the kind of guy you wanted to keep in your coat closet, retrieving him each day for a beer on the couch and some amusing banter. He seemed like the kind of person who would be comfortable anywhere, the sort of person who always knew what to say to a group of people to ease the tension and let others in on the joke. If Brendan could blend, Jeramy really stood out. Jeramy is weird, and he doesn’t hide it, but his weird is a weird that invites people in, particularly if they happen to be standing a few feet away from the crowd, from normal, on the fringes. And although he is a creative dresser, his inventiveness extends beyond his surface. He was writing a zombie novel, and as a GM, he described scenes to players with colorful details and unexpected outcomes.
As a team, Brendan and Jeramy were full of laughter and 1980s references, playing off each other as the jokes escalated. They worked well together. As role-players, I thought they were planet-class. Their enthusiasm and commitment to their characters felt infectious, and I wanted them in my game, in part to emulate good role-playing for my newbies.
With my GM team and my flavor of game selected, I needed players, a location, and a firm date. The location was easiest—I had access to a hundred-year-old house in the old Victorian beach town of Cape May, New Jersey, a three-story pink monstrosity with a dusty basement ideal for hiding serial murderers and external decks with stairs that connected all three floors, which would provide excellent egress during chase scenes. The five-bedroom house had bed space for twelve, plus a couch, but everyone else would have to sleep on the floor. Best of all, it belonged to my parents, so I wouldn’t have to pay for larp space, so long as the fake blood we used didn’t stain the carpet.
My husband and I scared up a collection of some twenty players for our game from among our friends, many of whom were curious about my book topic. Our old roommate, Chip, a fiction writer I’d gone to grad school with, agreed to come down from Boston, along with a couple buddies I’d met through my work on the small literary journal Fringe. A friend who worked over at the Today show agreed to come as well. Then there were the scientists. My husband was studying for a PhD in physics at Rutgers and a slew of his peers—mostly physicists, with an astronomer and a mathematician thrown in for good measure—agreed to come. One of my younger cousins flew in from Tennessee. Unbeknownst to me, she’d been into cosplay, or costume play, for some years. (Cosplay is a hobby and subculture in which participants carefully replicate the outfit of a figure from anime or popular culture and wear that outfit to conventions.)
A flurry of e-mails and a handy web widget decided the date for us, a weekend at the beginning of October. With the logistical necessaries in place, I began to plan.
My husband, George, and I talked plot as we cooked dinner over a series of weeks. We’d run a short-lived Dungeons & Dragons campaign once, and we loved making up stories together. George was particularly interested in forcing players to make difficult decisions, and so we talked about having a band of good guys in-game who would have to do something horrible, like sacrifice a virgin or a hand in order to get a necessary something. The idea wasn’t more concrete than that at first.
I had decided on a published rules system rather than writing my own rules, because it was simpler and I wanted to worry about plot, not reinventing the wheel. Writing a rules set can take weeks, months, or, in the case of large boffer larps, years of preparation and play-testing. I thought I had enough on my plate just running an event, so I had decided to use Cthulhu Live, the same system that the Cthulhu game I’d played during Larpapalooza had used. The rules were simple for a larp, and I hoped the non-contact combat would minimize breakage inside my parents’ beach house.
Early in the process, Brendan sent me a series of exploratory questions: Did I want the players to feel scared? Did I want the atmosphere to be horrific or more neutral? Would I let the players write their own characters? I wanted this game to evoke the same excitement and drama I’d felt at Larpapalooza when my swami colleague had banged on the office door yelling my name, and I wanted it to evoke the atmosphere of its source text, the stories of H. P. Lovecraft and his followers, their horror and mystery. I decided to work with the basic premise of the Cthulhu mythos, the idea that powerful alien beings called the Great Old Ones exist between dimensions but can enter this world when the stars are aligned. Humans are simply the house pets who have run amok while their evil and powerful masters are away on vacation.
Two months before the event, we had our first informal GM meeting when Brendan and Jeramy and their girlfriends visited the space down in Cape May. The visit prompted many discussions of cool, scary scenes that we could stage in the house. The basement held particular interest for Brendan and Jeramy. It had a cement floor, exposed wooden pillars that supported a low ceiling, and several stubby doors with tiny windows that led underneath the front porch. Wouldn’t it be cool, Brendan said, if someone looked through one of those little windows and saw a dead body laid out? We talked about drawing in chalk on the basement floor, to make some sort of ritual inscription. We counted the number of ways to enter or exit the house. There were six doors, excellent for the NPCs to surprise the players. Jeramy thought it’d be spooky if an NPC died in the bathtub on the second floor and then came through the front door a few hours later, as if nothing had happened. We immediately nominated him for that job. Although we bounced around a few plot ideas, nothing stuck. Finally, after an hour of discussion Jeramy said, essentially, that this plot didn’t have to be Shakespeare. After all, we could just do the Knight Realms thing and have a couple of competing rituals. That settled it in my mind. I’d run a basic plot at my first game. After all, there were only five conflicts in literature—man versus man, man versus himself, man versus nature, man versus society, and man versus machine—but the variations were infinite.
Two weeks later, George and I sat down and brainstormed over a bottle of wine. The house would double as the Salty Dog, a boarding house in 1890s Cape May. As the stars aligned, the barrier between our world and the world of the Great Old Ones would weaken and become porous. The bad guys would do a ritual to help Cthulhu cross the barrier, while the good guys would do a ritual to strengthen that barrier and keep him out.
Over the next few weeks, I fleshed out the plot in meetings with Jeramy and Brendan and over a series of lunches with Gene. We carved out roles for each of the GMs. Brendan would play an evil doctor who wanted to raise Cthulhu using human hearts, which he would remove from the chests of the still living, turning them into evil cultists. Essentially, he would lead Team Evil and help minimize in-game death. Jeramy would play a troubled transient man with psychic powers who knew that Cthulhu was coming and wanted to warn the guests. Essentially, he was the NPC contact for Team Good. I would play Ophelia, the owner of the Salty Dog, and I’d serve as a floating GM, available for skills challenges. George, a confirmed non-larper, would play my chef and would handle the food for all of us. Liz, Brendan’s girlfriend and a hard-core larper, would wear her fabulous Victorian gown and play a reanimated woman, modeling role-play for the novices, and she could also help run some skills challenges, since she knew the rules. Gene would run camp NPC from the attic, sending monsters out from a portal located somewhere in the house, which would periodically vomit beasties until the players figured out how to close it.
I’d decided to write character backgrounds for my players for several reasons. I worried that the main plot wouldn’t be enough to keep the characters busy and wanted to seed secondary plots into the backstories. As a new larper, I’d also found it easier to portray a prewritten character with quirks, like Madame Blavatsky, than to create my own. Somehow, writing up a character for myself to play had felt too high stakes, like I personally was on the line, and I wanted my players to feel they were portraying someone else. At Knight Realms, it had taken me months of role-playing to come up with character quirks, but my game would run for one day only, not nearly enough time for my players to really build out their backstories. Finally, I wanted to give the players immediate reasons to interact with one another, and I knew that interlocking backstories would help make, for example, the local mobster talk to the man he was blackmailing.
Writing the backstories took me more time than anything else did. Everyone got a good, single-spaced page explaining who they were and why they were at the Salty Dog on this particular weekend. I began with ordinary characters: dilettante sons, shady businessmen, mobsters, feminist big game hunters, and detectives. The more I wrote, the crazier my backstories became, as I strove to keep myself interested and ran out of stock ideas. There was the cryptozoologist whose fiancée had been killed by Bigfoot; the nun who was a member of the order of Hypatia, a secret, sacred sisterhood trying to take down the Vatican; her bodyguard, a woman who single-handedly found her way out of the African jungle as a kid. I suppose I really jumped the shark when I wrote about the poor girl who had been blown from Canada to Maine by a hurricane and then forced into prostitution. Every character had a connection to other characters. The nun had her bodyguard, the mobster extorted money from a number of people, and the precognitive artist’s dead prostitute sister had been friends with the Canadian prostitute. The players and I wrote one another e-mails about character histories, and I sent tips on how to assemble a costume from one’s closet and thrift stores. I encouraged players to aim at a Victorian steampunk style, although the game world didn’t quite fit the genre.
Genevieve was born to a middle-class Bostonian family, the oldest of five sisters, and had a close relationship with her next-youngest sister, Hortense. The five sisters went to private school where they learned to be pure, pious, domestic, and submissive (although the last lesson never stuck). They also became conversant in literature, history, geography, drawing, and music. Hortense excelled at the latter, learning to play and sing beautifully, while Genevieve became an accomplished painter and artist.
When Genevieve and Hortense were seventeen and sixteen, respectively, their father died after a fall off a horse. Oddly, Genevieve had drawn a picture of her father doing this after a strange dream the week before. After Dad’s death, the family became nearly destitute, left with nothing more than their gable house and a tiny pension.
As the eldest daughters, Genevieve and Hortense found employment. Genevieve moved to Manhattan as a governess for a wealthy family, while Hortense moved to Cape May, New Jersey, to serve as a companion to an elderly aunt fond of music.
Genevieve’s life in New York was difficult at first. She missed her family dreadfully. But she had the weekends to herself to paint and draw. She worked for Horace Astor, an art collector with a magnificent collection in his uptown mansion. Her big break came when he chanced across some drawings she had made illustrating architecture for the children. Recognizing her talent, Horace introduced her to other local collectors, and her work began to sell, first in a trickle but then in a steady stream. Genevieve left employment with the Astors and set up her own studio. Henry Wellington, the prominent businessman’s son, was among her chief supporters.
Genevieve keeps a private set of paintings drawn from her own dreams. The queer set of images has predicted future events, among them the great blizzard of 1888 that killed so many in the Manhattan streets and a freak flood that killed hundreds in Pennsylvania the following year. Lately, her private paintings have taken a dark, sinister turn….
While Genevieve’s career flourished in New York, Hortense fell on hard times. Within a year of her arrival in Cape May, her aunt passed away, leaving all her worldly possessions to the church. Without enough money for a train ticket to New York, Hortense took a job as a maid at a local resort but found she could make more playing piano and singing in a burlesque show at a local house of ill repute. From there, it was a short fall into infamy, which she tried to hide from her sister. Recently, she was found murdered in the whorehouse, her heart cut out, and one of her fellow prostitutes sent a telegram to Genevieve, notifying her of the circumstances.
Genevieve has come to Cape May to pay for a grave for Hortense and to sort through her sister’s meager belongings. She feels guilty that she couldn’t help her proud sister and responsible for the murder. Perhaps that is why, for the last few weeks, the pictures painted on the underside of her eyeballs are horrible, slimy, tentacled things that fill her with regret and fear….
Dr. Stephen Rowe is the only son of a Cleveland cooper and his wife. Though his father was not educated, soaring demand for barrels at this stop on the frontier propelled the Rowe family to middle class wealth, and Stephen was able to attend the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where he majored in zoology and received his doctorate with flying colors. Soon after graduation, he accepted a professorship at the nascent Cleveland University.
Unfortunately, a mountaineering trip to Washington State with several of his good friends derailed his promising career. One night, a rustling outside his tent woke Rowe. Across the moonlit clearing, he saw a stooped figure, standing on two legs, naked, and covered with hair. The creature looked quite savage. It had a prominent brow and an elongated jaw and appeared to be sniffing at their clothing, which they’d hung out to dry on a line. Rowe remained silent and still, not knowing how to approach the creature. When the beast loped off into the woods, Rowe followed it, afire with curiosity, his head filled with visions of the awards he’d win when it was announced that he had discovered a new species. Stephen lost the beast and his way back to camp in the dark. When the sun rose again, he finally backtracked to the tent where his anxious companions awaited.
His friends only laughed at his fantastic tale the more he insisted that he’d seen the absurd beast. Stephen’s pride was hurt. The following night, he heard the rustling again, and again the beast appeared in the clearing. This time, it bared its three-inch-long fangs at him. Stephen fled into the forest, running for his life. The following morning, the sun rose, and he made his way to camp again. His fiancée, Elizabeth, and his best friend and colleague, Dr. Matthew Jameson, were mauled and dying. Stephen remains haunted by Matthew’s last words, which were an unintelligible forewarning of some grave horror that he apparently witnessed during the encounter. When Stephen made his way to town, no one believed his incredible story, explaining it away as a mangy bear grown skinny and insane with hunger, seen through the eyes of a man awash with fear.
But Rowe knew what he had seen. Stephen carries Matthew’s broken pocket watch, which retains the exact time when the slaughter occurred. From that moment forward, he was obsessed with finding out more about this beast and others like it. Over the last five years, he has made several trips: to Vermont to research sightings of the savage men who populate the forest of the Green Mountains; to New Mexico in search of rocs, the long-taloned birds represented on totem poles; to the Missouri River in search of carnivorous mermaids; to Mexico to see the chupacabras; and now, to Cape May after receiving reports of giant fish men.
During a trip to Manhattan in search of the fabled mentalist ear-slug, he met Duchess Ermengarde of Zutphen, a medium, and the two struck up a correspondence that has lasted for several years. The Duchess’s companion, the hunter Josephine Kensington Phillips, is interested in tracking and killing new animals, and Stephen’s letter to the Duchess about the fish men has brought them both to Cape May.
I handed the character histories and my rule book over to Gene, who had generously agreed to create statistics and skills for each of them according to the mechanics of the rules, a time-consuming technical exercise. In the meantime, I had a list of props to gather and create. Chief among these were ten realistic human hearts, five of them for use in the good-guy ritual, the hearts of the house, which would be hidden around the Salty Dog for the players to find. The other five hearts would stand in for the human hearts of characters—if Brendan’s doctor successfully performed a ceremony on an unconscious person, he would be able to “remove” his or her heart for use in the evil ritual. Fine art is not my forte, and I didn’t have a lot of money to spend on props. I cruised eBay until I found a heart-shaped Jell-O mold, which I promptly ordered for experimentation. I soon discovered that while cherry Jell-O mixed with cocoa powder makes a nauseating heart, the vomitous thing wasn’t firm enough for players to toss around during a game. Instead I turned to an old grade school favorite: salt dough, a bakeable dough made from flour, salt, and water. I added red food coloring, which turned it the shade of brick. I molded, unmolded, and baked five of those to serve as the hearts of the house. Then I was out of food coloring. I made the next five hearts out of plain white dough, and George, who paints for fun, washed them with different shades of red until they looked drippy and gross.
I also needed to produce two pieces of paper, one written as a letter, the other ripped from a book, that would contain the instructions for each of the rituals. I wanted these sheets to look browned, crackly, and old. After a little searching on the Internet, I had a variety of techniques at my fingertips. Paper could be crinkled and then made flat, dipped into tea or espresso and dried out in the oven, rubbed with lemon juice and then heated over a candle. Its edges could be carefully wet and then burned in a controlled way, creating an interesting texture. I tried some of my good resume paper and some plain printer paper, experimenting on small swatches. Finally, I had a kitchen full of browned scraps and my final method. I wrote the rituals for Team Good and Team Evil on two pieces of paper and treated them. The resulting paper, brittle, spotty with water stains, and a deep brown, seemed ancient. At Gene’s suggestion, I brought my yellowed sample scraps with me to leave around the house as red herrings.
The best prop, however, was not of my making. Jeramy’s girlfriend, Jenn, who would be playing the artist Genevieve Hudson in-game, is an accomplished artist in real life and made a gorgeous statue of Cthulhu, perhaps five inches tall. I could only ogle his perfection, his squiddy tentacled mouth, his long baleful claws, and his abominable dragon wings. She painted it a mottled green all over. Both rituals used the statue, which the GMs hoped would get the two teams to work together when it came time to power up the statue before its use in either ritual.
As the day of the larp approached, my blood pressure spiked from uncertainty. A larp has a great many moving parts, and of course, the actions of the players determine the outcome, like a Choose Your Own Adventure story, so I couldn’t plan everything down to the last detail. What if my players ended up hating larp, as my husband had? I had brought George to a Knight Realms event and to a Dystopia Rising game, and he’d struggled with boredom and suffered from the overwhelming expectation he put on himself to behave in a theatrical manner. What if my gamers suffered the same fate? Aside from the boredom, I had put plenty of duties in other people’s hands—Gene was recruiting his own NPCs and writing stats, Jeramy and Brendan would create backstories for their NPCs, plus Brendan and Liz were arranging a clock-chiming noise that we’d play, since we intended something creepy to happen at the top of every hour. The worst thing that could happen, I thought, would be boredom on the part of the players. Or if they hated it. Or too much plot. Or not enough to last a whole day. Or a logistical failure. My co-GMs told me I was feeling the typical new GM jitters, and in the week before the game, they took turns, as they put it, “sanity-check-ing” me.
With the food purchased, the props accounted for, more or less, the characters built, and my sanity still minimally intact, all of us headed down to Cape May for the weekend. Gene brought four friends with him, our volunteer NPCs, and after a few last-minute cancellations that got my nerves fired up, we had fifteen players, plus Liz, George, the three GMs, and the four NPCs—twenty-four people in all.
Everyone arrived on Friday, coming from Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, and Boston. Brendan and Liz brought their rule book, and I brought mine, from which Gene had copied quick-reference sections for the GM team to carry. We split our group of players into two. One stayed on the first floor of the house, which contained a kitchen and dining room, a bathroom, and a sort of parlor area around a fireplace. The second group went up to the attic, which had a weird kitchenette with a large area around it that would serve as camp NPC, as well as a large, in-game bedroom. Downstairs, Gene explained the rules to half the players, while upstairs, Ian and I explained them to our half.
Although he’s in his early twenties, Ian resembles a grumpy old man. Perhaps it’s that he wears overalls on occasion or that his long, curly hair, gathered in a ponytail, seems to belong on a southern gentleman or underneath a cowboy hat. Ian was Gene’s best friend from high school, one who served, good-naturedly, as the butt of his jokes. I knew Ian well. He’d driven me to Knight Realms many times over the course of my research. He preferred to play sidekick characters that made other people laugh, and this was certainly true at Knight Realms, where he played the genial Hamish, a simple-minded Celtic bard who was the sidekick to Gene’s Billiam. Hamish’s simplicity belied Ian’s intelligence. To play a stupid character well, you have to be smart. Hamish once told Billiam that in order to romance a woman, he’d heard you had to build her a ship, a courtship.
Ian brilliantly helped answer the players’ many questions about the basics, explaining concepts like character statistics with the practiced air of someone who had dealt with newbies before. We ran the players through several rounds of combat, just as I’d been run through combat at DEXCON.
After explaining combat, Ian and I made sure to point out that what makes the game is the realistic reactions of your fellow players. If I knife Ian and he says, “Oh, I’m dead,” it’s lame. If I knife him and he staggers back, holding his ribs and gasping, that is much more fun.
We fielded a few questions about specific skills, and with that, the two groups rejoined downstairs. In true larp fashion, we stayed up quite late talking and drinking, and after a very brief GM meeting, the remaining stragglers went to bed. The game would begin the following morning after breakfast.
At the crack of nine, I paired up with one of the NPCs. He and I hid the hearts of the house in different locations—one outside in the barbecue, two in the basement, one inside the fuse box, and one in a drawer on the second floor. Gene had had the brilliant idea of scattering red herrings around the house. He and the other NPCs wrote on my scraps of parchment—grocery lists, old notes, creepy, maddened sayings—and strewed them around the house. Gene had also brought what seemed like his entire stash of weapons—canes for walking, baseball bats, boffers, coils of rope, toy guns—and we attached item cards to each of them and put them in random places around the house, some of them behind “locks,” indicated with a card stating the lock’s level. One of the NPCs was Vince Antignani, a Knight Realms player whose character was a prominent member of the Rogues’ Guild and a well-known Chroniclerite. We’d shared many scenes in-game. When he first joined Knight Realms, Vince spent a few years NPCing exclusively, with no real character; he was a master NPC. True to his roguish expertise, he brought real padlocks to the game, which we taped to some of the lock cards. Vince also owned a set of metal lock picks, which he had brought to give to whichever character had the highest skill level in lock picking, in this case, the detective Jerome. I set up a small museum with a couple of objects, marked with cards, in one of the bedrooms. The good and evil players each needed a set of bones, which they’d find in this room.
Downstairs, my players had gotten into costume. For a group of novices, they certainly looked impressive. My cousin Phoebe Hill had one of the best. She was playing a bodyguard who was part of an elite and secret religious order, and she looked like a member of the Swiss Guard. She wore red and black striped pants tucked into high boots and a sort of red tabard that hung between her legs with a smart military vest buttoned over it. A rosary hung from her belt. Jeramy’s girlfriend, Jenn, wore a long skirt with a fusty blouse, a gold pin at its neck, and a suit jacket. Cheri, a friend I’d met working on my literary journal, was playing a big-game hunter and wore khaki pants tucked into riding boots and a beige cap and came armed to the teeth with a faux rifle and a hunting knife that caused her some consternation on the way home, when airport security questioned her about the weapons in her checked luggage. Brendan and Liz wore their Deadlands costumes. Everyone looked great.
With little fanfare, we called lay-on, and immediately the room filled with people talking loudly and animatedly. After about fifteen or twenty minutes, there was a lull. I noticed that no one had picked up anything, not the scraps of paper lying around, not the weapons, and I had a moment of panic. What if they didn’t search the oversized dictionary and find the scrap of paper with the good ritual written on it? What then? I bonged the chime to indicate that it was noon and led some players on an expedition to see the house. We discovered Liz’s character in one of the rooms, the first creepy thing of the day. She’d done her makeup very pale, and we found her lying unconscious on a bed. We led her downstairs, where the lull continued.
Gene came to the rescue. After I bonged the chime again, for 1:00 PM, a horde of zombies appeared out of nowhere to attack the players. Our first combat went somewhat slowly, as everyone was still getting used to the rules, but from then on, the larp went off without a hitch. In the compressed time frame of a larp, when a new GM is hyped up on adrenaline, much of the experience blurs, although for me a few select scenes stuck in my brain. I spent a lot of time marshalling various skills challenges, primarily lock-picking challenges. I and the other GMs had to prod players to get them to use their skills at first. When someone brought a locked book to me and said they wanted to open it, I asked, “What skill are you calling?” to help them along. It worked, and as the game progressed the players became increasingly willing to call skills off their character cards and role-play their actions. When players wanted to do research in the library, I told them what information they were able to find out. I spent a lot of time walking from the first floor to the third floor to coordinate the bonging of the hourly chime and the NPCs. Jeramy and Brendan were very much in the game. Brendan’s character summoned a beasty in the first hour of the game to create dead bodies. When injured players were brought to his room, he Kali-Ma’d out their hearts á la Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Team Evil acquired several members. By midday, the players had what Gene called “a case of the larps.” They had picked the house dry, opened every lock, taken every weapon, and snatched up anything that seemed remotely useable. I was surprised that nearly all of the players were so into the game. The NPCs donned fake gunshot wounds and painted themselves white or green or blood red, depending on what the situation called for. The players politicked among themselves, and Team Good had officially formed up, helmed by a mystic, played by my friend Sarah, who had originally introduced me to the concept of larp. Jeramy, in his capacity as insane but good homeless guy, was able to psychically communicate with her and in doing so, eased the plot along. Freaky things happened every time our in-game chimes bonged. Dead bodies hanging down in the basement, dead Jeramy in the tub upstairs, creepy reanimated corpses in the living room. Zombies and more zombies.
While I spent most of the larp out-of-game, ferrying information among the GM team and answering player questions, the moments I got to play Ophelia were the most fun. I had a great scene with August, a physicist who worked with my husband and played Dieter the mob boss, in which we traded barbs and established that I was probably paying him protection money. As Ophelia, I also sold off an ancient artifact to Amruta, an astronomer who was playing our head nun, a member of a secret order. I also got to yell at a variety of people—Ophelia kept freaking out as players continuously picked the lock leading into her room and stole objects from her private museum.
My favorite moment occurred after lunch, when Gene sent a horde of powerful monsters to storm the first floor of the house. My former roommate Chip, who was playing a paleontologist, and I were attempting to escape from zombies by fleeing up the stairs, when Gene appeared above us, wearing armor made of skulls and armed with a large club. He nearly dropped my health points to zero, and he downed Chip, who bled out on the stairs. Gene brushed by us to engage other players. I fled into a coat closet, and while a crowd of characters rushed out the front door, I made it over to the stairs and managed to grab Chip. He, I, and three more players traveled down into the basement and out into the backyard, where the zombies flanked us. We fled up the back deck stairs into the second floor in an attempt to get our wounded selves and the dying Chip to the doctor, who had set himself up in a nearby bedroom. With four people to heal, Brendan, as the doctor, went to work. What should happen next but more zombies? They came up the stairs inside the house, chasing a collection of players. We shut the door to the room, so that our motions could be outside of the combat count. As we locked the door, we heard Gene’s voice calling out the numbers, going up and down. Silence fell. Then it rose again—another zombie was attacking characters in the hallway, and the counting started once more. The battle had been raging for more than half an hour. Finally, silence fell. I heard one of George’s colleagues say, “Does anyone want to continue combat?” and everyone inside the doctor’s room, all five of us, plus everyone in the hallway, dead monsters and players included, broke out in hysterical laughter. “Ah, gamer humor,” Brendan said. “It’s universal.”
He doctored each of the four of us in turn, using a fascinating set of old medical equipment that Liz had purchased for use as her doctor character at Knight Realms. The kit featured small bottles, bowls, and a terrifyingly large syringe. Brendan mimed bleeding each of us as part of his process of healing. Chip lay on the bed, eyes staring up at the ceiling, dead. After everyone else was healed, Brendan remained in the room along with me, although I was out-of-game because I wanted to see what was about to occur. Brendan set a cloth and a bowl on top of Chip’s chest and began chanting in a strange language. Just as he Kali-Ma’d out Chip’s heart, using a handy heart prop, an injured detective Jerome picked the lock on the door and fell into the room. Lucky for Brendan, a reanimated but now heart-less Chip was up and evil.
The whole scene, running from Gene’s demon and being made evil, was a highlight for Chip, whose experience seemed to echo my own feelings—excitement, fear, and hilarity—about the first big battle I faced at Knight Realms.
I died almost instantly, and as I lay there on the stairs being dead, I could hear the carnage throughout the house—in the form of demons counting, people shouting their actions (“One! Two! Three—Evade! Four! …”), people role-playing their injuries, the noises coming from the kitchen, the dining room, outside, the battle splitting into branches—all I could do was hear it, and I was surprised at how totally exciting it was, and how the combat procedures of the game, regulated though they are, created a simulation of chaos, exactly like a battle but in very slow motion. And then I was carried up to the Doctor’s room, and lay there in triage until he operated on me, took out my heart, and turned me evil. And still as I lay on the bed in his room I could hear battles outside, characters good and bad trying to get inside. It was terribly exciting. It showed how completely this game, when acted out and taken seriously by a large group of people, can turn into an experience very realistically heart-pounding.
Daniel, a web designer from Boston who played a cryptozoologist connected to Chip’s character, thought that the big brawl helped unify Team Good. He remembered, “Everyone was on the brink of death; there were undead chasing us from every direction.” After he helped drag the dead upstairs, “the wounded characters bounded together to regroup and confront it [Gene]. It was a compelling, almost epic moment because at that point everyone was working together to fight the same thing—we had the nun’s paladin wielding the holy sword we’d acquired earlier and a slew of characters gunning it out on the stairs uncertain as to whether we’d survive. And we did, because we were awesome.”
The players’ highlights weren’t all action oriented. Aatish, a physicist who played an undercover member of the Knights Templar, really got into the role-play. Later, he explained, “The moment when I woke up in the doctor’s office and was staring at the ceiling, having just been chloroformed was a real in-character moment for me. The doctor played his character so well that I really found my sense of out-of-game reality sort of melt away and became increasingly convinced by the reality of what was happening in-game. I started getting stressed out by my conflicting allegiances, which I think is hilarious. That incredible moment of suspension of the disbelief was definitely the high point of my experience.”
I missed what was, perhaps, the most memorable scene of the game. Both the evil and good rituals required a statue from another place, through a portal to another dimension. Gene had decided that the players would get the statue from a being who is part of the Cthulhu oeuvre, a demony creature named Nyarlathotep, essentially a stand-in for the devil. He decided that the NPCs would portray the seven deadly sins when the players entered and asked my permission to run a scene that had what could kindly be called “mature” themes. He warned everyone going on this mission out-of-game before they went down the stairs into the basement. No one will ever forget the sight. Two male NPCs unwillingly coupled on the floor, leaving a stream of fake blood below them. One of Gene’s NPCs force-fed him cookies, beer, and cream puffs, personifying gluttony. Three months later, Gene said the thought of sugar cookies still made him sick. For the characters, the commitment of the NPCs to terrifying them raised the level of the game. The detective bartered away his skill at lock picking—to such an extent that he was unable to use doors at all afterward—in exchange for the statue the team so needed, and everyone returned to the house, their sanity levels a little lower after the numerous checks performed in the portal.
Events quickly unspooled after the portal group returned. The mystic and the nun powered up the statue, with Sarah, who played the mystic, breaking out some chants she knew from yoga. One of the businessmen bartered away his hand in exchange for a ritual implement needed for the good ritual. The mobster, turned evil by the doctor, had to shoot one of his prostitutes in order to get an implement that Team Evil needed for its ritual. She survived, and he blamed her injuries on the zombies that happened to attack at that moment. When the doctor attempted to revive her and remove her heart, something went awry, and she was able to remember what had happened to her and tell the others. As Liz “killed” her boyfriend in retaliation for his corpse-animating ways, a series of fish-demons stormed the house, killing Team Evil in mid-ritual and disrupting Team Good’s subsequent attempt to bar Cthulhu from this world. Jeramy described the carnage as Cthulhu created a swirling vortex that destroyed much of the house, killing those inside. The final round of sanity checks, as Cthulhu began emerging from the center of the ritual circle made in the backyard, left nearly every character insane. At the last minute, Dieter the mobster, hewing to his backstory as a devout Catholic, broke through the evil doctor’s hold on his soul and gave up the statue. An angered Cthulhu ate him, but with the statue in hand, the remaining good characters were able to close the vortex.
With that, the game ended, and we all headed into the living room for debriefing. We went around in a circle, talking about what had happened to each of us during the game. George thought it was funny that while Cthulhu was sucking everyone into his tentacly mouth, the big game hunter walked into the vortex to retrieve her gun but failed to retrieve George’s unconscious body. The shady businesswoman was delighted to have sold her whaling company to the dilettante, the mystic liked being the unofficial leader of Team Good, the precog artist liked drawing the “visions” the GMs gave her, and the nun liked retrieving the skull of St. Catherine she’d been sent to locate, even though her character died. As we went around the room, it was plain that almost everyone had had a good time. Jeramy said it was the most smoothly run game he’d seen. Even the NPCs seemed to have enjoyed donning latex prosthetics and scaring the bejeezus out of the players. I was so relieved it was over that I almost threw up.
We spent the rest of the evening getting to know each other out-of-character and kvetching over all the things that had happened in-game.
My inbox filled up with post-game questionnaires in the following weeks, and a number of common experiences emerged. I felt nervous to read the questionnaires, since I had encouraged the players to write scathing criticisms, but as it turned out most people enjoyed the game, and their writing articulated a number of key truths about the hobby, impressions that reinforced my own. For starters, most everyone felt surprised that larp was so fun. Though he had never larped before, Chip immediately connected larp with childhood pretend, echoing a typical explanation of the hobby, that it is cops and robbers for adults. He wrote:
I was surprised, really, by how absorbing the experience was; it was like playing make-believe when I was a child, and having no sense of passing time. I expected it to be more awkward, that we’d spend a lot of time giggling at ourselves and that we’d eventually fall out-of-character completely and the whole thing would descend into chaos. But no: within minutes I felt transported, simply by putting on the trappings—the clothes, the mannerisms, the motivations—of someone I was not, and it was surprisingly easy to fall into that role and be there for an extended time. Time passed very swiftly and I hardly noticed that the sun had set. I think it had to do not only with playing a role, but playing that role with some goal in mind, a motivation—the game element of it. It was a quest, full of intrigue, danger, shotguns, whispered asides, hidden nooks, tight stairwells, people you couldn’t trust—it was surprisingly absorbing and one of the most fun weekends I’ve had in a long time. It was also utterly exhausting—I was surprised by that.
As a new larper, I’d had trouble really getting into character and out of my awkward self, so I’d tried to help my players by providing longer, interlocked backstories, costuming tips, and realistic props, and by bringing in role-play veterans to model game behavior. Still, before the game I’d been anxious that my rookies wouldn’t play through the awkwardness and into their characters, something I was rarely able to do even after a couple of years on the scene. As it turned out, in many ways, my efforts paid off. As John, a physicist who played a wealthy businessman put it, “I thought things would be a little more awkward, but when everyone around you is doing their best, then it puts pressure on you to keep up your own character as well. Acting in-character was another thing that I thought might feel sort of weird, but it was surprisingly natural.”
Not everyone found it so simple to get into character. Several players definitely felt self-conscious, like Jenn, Jeramy’s girlfriend and our precognitive artist, who cleverly figured out how to keep that awkwardness in-game. She wrote, “As the game went on, I noticed I wasn’t the only one who was having trouble not laughing sometimes … but that could easily be passed off in-character as insanity eking through.” For many players, the role-playing breakthrough came when they realized they didn’t have to perform the character as if it were Shakespeare but could relax and let some of their own personality come through. August, a physicist who played the mob boss, explained, “Rather rapidly, the character just devolved into me being me. Once I started yelling, telling jokes, and directly engaged in all affairs, I was simply acting in the way I would if I were put in that situation (and happened to have a criminal history). A fifty-year-old, brutal, German, mob boss would never be that loud and engaged in a room with strangers.”
My cousin Phoebe and Daniel the web designer, both tabletop role-players, found that playing in a larp changed their geek-on-geek prejudices about the hobby. Daniel wrote, “Like many other role-players (and probably the rest of the world at large) I’d always secretly looked down my nose at the activity…. But I also think I secretly felt that I was going to love it.” Phoebe came from a similar place. She wrote, “Having previously developed a pretty negative opinion of larping and larpers through my self-perceived placement in the geek hierarchy, I was most surprised by how much fun I had…. It really did feel like a natural next step in gaming for me, combining my beloved tabletop with my hobby of costuming. Larping was exactly what I expected it to be: people in costumes running around killing things and solving mysteries almost completely in real time. I guess I’ve moved to a lower level in the geek power rankings now.”
Not everyone loved the game—one of the players, a mathematician, said that the game caused her to realize that “Larp is not for me…. I couldn’t get into my character at all; I didn’t know what she should be doing. And since everybody else was really into it, I felt strange…. For me, at least, a lot of things just felt like ‘milling around.’” I hadn’t avoided dull cocktail party syndrome completely.
The larp also evoked feelings in the players that lingered after the game ended. Sarah, for example, who played the mystic and unofficial leader of Team Good, felt betrayed by Daniel, who had been turned evil toward the end of the game. As she put it, “I felt so much closer to everyone after [the game]! I’d never met Daniel, but talked to him Friday and then we ended up on the same ‘team’ in game. When I found out after it was over that he’d been turned to the dark side right at the end, I felt totally betrayed and the game was over already!” To me, the fact that Sarah couldn’t shake the feeling of betrayal meant the game had been successful in forcing her to invest emotionally in her character.
Although the game had ended, several players weren’t ready to let it go. The return to normal life from this metaphoric vacation was difficult for August, who felt “a jumble of emotions days afterward that took some time to weed through,” adding that the event had been “a whole day of being bawdy, violent, aggressive, powerful, well-dressed, and deeply engaged in life and death situations. The following day I had to go back to worrying about pleasing a potential advisor.” Vijay, a mathematician who played the detective, had to leave early the next morning to get to an event with his advisor and wished he had more time to spend with the other players out-of-game. His early departure left him with “this strange empty feeling,” because “I had spent a lot of time with many really cool people the previous day, but I didn’t know their names or anything about them and didn’t even say goodbye to most of them. I would have at least liked an extra day to hang out with them in real life!” In other words: larp can create a yearning for out-of-game social contact.
Nearly everyone felt the game had brought them closer to their fellow players. After the game, Daniel felt like he’d known some players for a long time and that he “could strike up a conversation with them without fear because, after all, we faced the hideous unknown together,” and said that the game worked as an icebreaker. Jenn found it easier to socialize in-character, because “I didn’t have to worry about being awkward or making a good impression,” but after the game was over, she felt that it was “a common experience we could all relate to.” Chip said simply, “I loved my fellow gamers. We were an amazing group of people.” John felt that the experience “was somehow more intimate than, say, going camping for the weekend.”
So what was the verdict? Of the fifteen new larpers who tried Cthulhu Live, thirteen said they’d try larp again, given similar circumstances and a similar group of people. Several people expressed concerns about larping regularly, worrying that the game might take on an inappropriate level of importance in their lives, since it was so absorbing.
The lingering effects of the game were more substantial than I expected. The game drew people together and bonded them, serving as the core topic of conversation for the rest of the evening. Afterward, Team Good met up for drinks in Boston a couple times. A month after the game, when George and I went to a gathering where many of the physicist and mathematician gamers were present, we talked about the game for nearly two hours, boring those who hadn’t been there.
It is hard to explain the bonds that a larp can set into place. As one of the Cthulhu players put it, “No one else will get it when you talk about it later” because larp is a strictly “you had to be there” kind of event. Although I hadn’t really played this game, afterward I felt a deep fondness for everyone who had contributed to the game and helped me run it. I had needed the larp community’s help, and they had turned up with latex wounds, fake blood, boffers, and imaginations ready to help me give the experience of larping to people none of them had met before. There is no way I could have put on a larp without them. The players had faced death together and come out on the other side, a bond between them that won’t be easily forgotten. Brendan, Jeramy, Gene, Liz, and I had faced a possible real-life disaster together, and they had come through for me, like friends do, filling in for my ineptitudes. We had been a true team, with each person’s best qualities shining through. Mine were planning and organization, theirs were skills at improv, plotting, and aesthetics. Larp itself created the bond among us, and one that has proven enduring. Cthulhu may have destroyed the house, killed most of the characters, and driven the rest insane, but this vortex of horror had only confirmed the bonds of friendship and mutual interest within the GM team.
* A phrase Cthulhu cultists chant in Lovecraftian tales, possibly meaning “Cthulhu waits.” It is an abbreviation of “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn,” which means, “In his house at R’lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.”