Triskaidekafestival Con Report
Another lovely Festival of the Larps has concluded at Brandeis. This con is one of my favorite weekends a year, so I am always delighted when it goes so well.
Friday night I helped run The Prince Comes of Age, personally my favorite game that morethings5 lightgamer and Bernie have ever written. I NPCed a guard outside the archives who'd had a really bad couple of weeks, who more often than not players bribed with cake. Not exactly complaining. This was an odd run; while players seemed busy and like were they happy and engaged, they did not seem to get as far along in their plots as I expected. In a game with three or so "climaxes" written in, I think we only saw one actually come about. Still, I thought the player interactions were interesting and fun. I was particularly happy that Sam and Aaron, two of our newest larpers, did so well. Aaron in particular was really cunning and came up with some great strategies in game, which is one of my favorite things to see in a larp. Other highlights included nennivian as the prince's closest friend, nobly sacrificing her own hopes to be with in for the good of the nation, and the epic battle with the dire magpie on the palace balcony.
Saturday morning was the second run of our third-place-winning Iron GM game, Agent Bobo of the Resistance. This game went a bit differently than the first run. We designed it so that players would spend some time identifying the issues at hand (as in, those of the little boy that they, the toys, belonged to), then making a plan to address them. This run had things be a little more amorphous, and it struck me more as a series of individual interpretations and ideas coming together rather than a totally collaborative effort. But the majority of the players seemed to be engaged in the concept, particularly the childlike fun moments, and I am always amazed at how many people are enthusiastic about this idea of this game, so I'll say it was a success.
In the afternoon I helped natbudin run the newest AE Game, A Garden of Forking Paths. I loved this game when I played it at Intercon this past March, so I wanted to help if only to watch it run and see what happened. It is a very simple, human, emotionally compelling story that the players went with nicely, and it seemed that they even followed tracks that were not usually chosen in previous runs of the game. There's a lot I love about this game, particularly watching people play their characters at different life stages, and I enjoyed the GM's eye view of seeing all the possible destinations of the story from behind the scenes and comparing how they worked. I also like how the player of the mother character eventually becomes her own granddaughter over the course of time, that speaks to something in me.
Saturday evening was hanging out, eating cupcakes, chatting with friends. Also, londo demonstrated one of the reasons I love larpers and larp, when he approached me to ask if I could help him look more genderqueer and wrap him in a cocoon.
Sunday was Break a Leg, and it was as silly and crazy as I'd hoped. This was the first run to include the new characters of the Writer and the Ingenue. I think they worked, although they had one or two consequences I hadn't planned on. I will need to test them in at least one more run before I can determine if those consequences are an issue or not. Of course, since this was admitted students' weekend at Brandeis, we had tour groups walking through our gamespace. If it hadn't been such a silly game, I would have been bugged, but as it was, whatever. I wished they had all walked through shadowravyn's Sailor Moon game instead, seeing as they were about half of them men in Japanese schoolgirl uniforms, but it turned out that a few of them had asked for pictures with the players!
This was also the best Dead Dog festival ever had. lightgamer organized a buffet at New Mother India, which had good food, plenty of space, and no stupid "no-speech-making" rules like the Chateau did. :-P Congrats to him as con chair, and congrats to inwaterwrit for getting to head up Festival next year!