[PUBLIC] Festival 2011
This past weekend was Festival of the LARPS 2011. I ended up playing in two games, and running one. Despite being on-staff for Midsummer, Cold Flash is the first game I really felt like I was a proper writer of. So, quick review:
The Stand: Breaking Light's 2011 offering, this game ended up being a rather relaxed experience for me. I had fairly straight-forward goals, and was able to get cooperation from the people I needed, got all my affairs in order, and besides getting shot (non-fatally) and having my business burned down, I feel like I did pretty well. I found out post-game that a significant amount of my plot just failed to materialize, but so it goes. I had a good time, and the closing act made the game unique in my LARPing experience, and something I'll undoubtably remember for years to come. But that's not mine to announce.
Ruins of Grandeur: A fun, puzzle-based game about Egyptology in the mid-19th Century. There's actually a law now in Massachusetts stating that all LARP cons must have a certain percentage of games set in the 1800's. It is a follow-on to the 1995 Elder God Full Employment Act. That aside, the game was interesting if somewhat frenetically GM'd, and I had a good time. Also, about an hour before wrap, I got called up to kick the afterburners onto the plot. That was a lot of fun.
Cold Flash: The game that I wrote with Mike Hyde. A 1960's-era Cold War game with a huge technical element. The game went very well, better than I had hoped ahead of time. I was very fearful of technical problems crippling the game, but it ended up working, sufficiently that it may one day run again. Because of the amount of infrastructure I had to get working there, I learned a great deal about what to do and what not to do in future runs, and which elements produced effects worth the cost. In the end, my players told me we did a good job of producing an emotional experience similar to what they felt the Cold War must've been like to leaders in the middle of the kind of crisis they were dealing with, which I take to be a good sign. Shooting for a game which is not intrinsically funny, but is very serious throughout, and instilled fear and paranoia in a way that didn't seem farcical was a target I wasn't sure I was going to be able to hit, but now I feel that if I didn't do so, I at least landed close enough to justify making another try.
The Stand: Breaking Light's 2011 offering, this game ended up being a rather relaxed experience for me. I had fairly straight-forward goals, and was able to get cooperation from the people I needed, got all my affairs in order, and besides getting shot (non-fatally) and having my business burned down, I feel like I did pretty well. I found out post-game that a significant amount of my plot just failed to materialize, but so it goes. I had a good time, and the closing act made the game unique in my LARPing experience, and something I'll undoubtably remember for years to come. But that's not mine to announce.
Ruins of Grandeur: A fun, puzzle-based game about Egyptology in the mid-19th Century. There's actually a law now in Massachusetts stating that all LARP cons must have a certain percentage of games set in the 1800's. It is a follow-on to the 1995 Elder God Full Employment Act. That aside, the game was interesting if somewhat frenetically GM'd, and I had a good time. Also, about an hour before wrap, I got called up to kick the afterburners onto the plot. That was a lot of fun.
Cold Flash: The game that I wrote with Mike Hyde. A 1960's-era Cold War game with a huge technical element. The game went very well, better than I had hoped ahead of time. I was very fearful of technical problems crippling the game, but it ended up working, sufficiently that it may one day run again. Because of the amount of infrastructure I had to get working there, I learned a great deal about what to do and what not to do in future runs, and which elements produced effects worth the cost. In the end, my players told me we did a good job of producing an emotional experience similar to what they felt the Cold War must've been like to leaders in the middle of the kind of crisis they were dealing with, which I take to be a good sign. Shooting for a game which is not intrinsically funny, but is very serious throughout, and instilled fear and paranoia in a way that didn't seem farcical was a target I wasn't sure I was going to be able to hit, but now I feel that if I didn't do so, I at least landed close enough to justify making another try.