LARP Time in the Fall, and I get Taken to School
When Seven Virtues got proposed a little more than two years ago I thought it was an interesting idea for a game. I signed up for all the mailing lists and watched it pretty closely as it developed, and even participated a little bit in some of the rules and design discussions. But when the game finally launched I decided that I just couldn’t justify adding on another four 10+ hr trips to a LARP in New England each year. I told myself that I would find a chance to come up and NPC an event at least once, though.
It took a bit longer for that chance to arrive than I first imagined. Most of the previous events in the campaign fell on a weekend that I had another LARP to attend or some other commitment. But I noticed the last event of this year fell neatly in a small gap in an otherwise busy fall LARP season for me. I decided to jump on this event while I had the chance since who knows what next year’s schedule was going to be like.
There are a few other folks here in Virginia who occasionally NPC Seven Virtues and I happened to know that some of them were attending the event. I went ahead and signed up to NPC, filled out all the forms and questionnaires and sent in all the information they asked for and got all lined up to attend, and then I talked to the local folks to see if I could coordinate the ride north with them. It turns out I should have done that in the opposite order. All the local folks who were heading north had made plans to fly in to the event. Oh well, looks like another solo drive.
The ride this time could have been better, but it wasn’t too bad. I managed to get everything packed up and ready to go and I got out of bed on time Friday to leave. Then as I was pulling out of the driveway I discovered my front tire had a screw in it and it was completely flat. I considered just throwing on the spare and leaving, but I didn’t want to make the long drive on that little donut tire. So I pulled off the tire, yanked the screw out, and got the tire patched using a small patch kit I carry for emergencies. Of course right in the middle of this it started pouring down rain on top of me.
Between the flat tire and the periodic torrential rain I got a pretty slow start on the trip. The weather finally clear when I crossed into Delaware and was pleasant for most of the rest of the way. I finally trundled across the bridge and pulled up into the campsite around 9:00PM on Friday. My first challenge was to find someone who could direct me to NPC housing that wasn’t already full. Eventually I found a half empty cabin halfway up the hill and got all my gear and the gear I was bringing for other people stowed away, and then it was time to go staff mods.
I spent a far greater amount of time doing story based speaking roles than I was originally expecting. A few days prior to the event I was sent a spreadsheet which listed the names, times and locations of the roles I was assigned. Most of them looked like fairly straightforward town fights and combat mods. For instance, one of the things I was supposed to do Friday night was called simply “Crossroads”. Okay, I suspect that probably means I’ll be fighting as a bandit off on a road in the woods somewhere or something similar. A few days later all the mod writeups start trickling in to me, and I discover that several of the mods I had thought to be fights were in fact not. Oh, so the Crossroads is a bar. Imagine that.
Friday night I staffed only two mods, but the game got such a late start there was barely time to fit those in. Both mods were in the dining hall, so I didn’t cover a whole lot of ground that night. I played a flunkie for the first mod, and after that one ended we turned the dining hall into the Crossroads and I staffed that for the rest of the night.
The Aetherial NPC I played for the Crossroads, which had a repeat performance at the Carnival, was the only one I was stressing for the weekend. That was really the only role I had with the potential for lasting plot harm if I screwed it up or ad libbed inappropriately. Luckily I managed to anticipate one complication and asked staff before the mod what I should do if by some small chance X should happen. They assured me X would never happen, but if it did this is what you need to know. And of course X happened, and I was kind of pleased with myself to be ready for it.
Saturday morning I got up a little earlier than I probably should have considering how late I got to bed. But I wanted to take some time to explore the site in daylight so I would be able to find things later on. One of the perverse incentives I had for NPC’ing this event was to finally see this dreadful hill which figures so prominently in practically every livejournal entry I’ve ever read about a 7V or Aralis event. I half expected its slopes to be strewn with the bleached bones of collapsed LARPers.
I visited the Murder Shack and watched some of the other early risers who were there setting up a trap mod. I considered helping out since I like setting up that kind of stuff, but they already had enough hands and were nearly done, and I figured I would probably just end up being the way. I walked up the hill and checked out the Great Tree and explored the various large fields. I took a quick peek in the Library and the Reliquary, and took a bunch of pictures of stuff while there weren’t any PC’s to see me. I finally looped through the Pine Side cabins, but there I started running into PC’s who were asking me if I needed any help with anything. Not wanting to get caught off the reservation without a briefing I decided it was time to head back to monster camp to get ready for my mods.
I spent most of the morning playing a spear carrier for the Hero Queen and watching her get snakebit and cough up blood and other horrible things. After I hauled her horribly poisoned carcass down the hill and back to monster camp I did a couple of simple combat mods. One was a standard melee role, but the other one let me shoot arrows for a solid half an hour, which was really fun.
I spent the afternoon playing a small series of connected roles as an Aetherial that first got chased around by some PC’s and later on did a little fighting with another group of PC’s. Those were simple little scenes which were fun except for the brief rain shower that soaked us during the first part. In a weird bit of irony for the second part I played a combat role down in the corral where I was statted with a little bit of called damage that was “by Thorns”. Right at the beginning of the mod I nicked my ear on a briar bush over by the fence, and by the end of the fight I had to step out briefly because blood just kept pouring out of that little scratch.
Then it was dinner time, and then it was time for the Carnival. I’ve spoken to a couple of PC’s and NPC’s about the carnival, and nearly all of us had the same reaction. I honestly thought it was going to end up being really corny and lame, but was quite surprised at how fun it turned out to be. The look was especially impressive. Someone in monster camp assigned a few people to decorate the field, and I saw them schlep a couple of boxes and extension cords outside. When I finally got all my costume and makeup on and went out to see it I wasn’t expecting to find what looked like a theme park with all the lights and games.
I staffed the Carnival as my Aetherial I had played the previous night at the Crossroads. I had originally intended to just wander around and socialize and do my little bit of plot with a particular PC that had business with me. But at the last second I ended up getting handed the “Guess How Many Souls are in the Jar” game. That turned out to be a lot of fun until the very end when it came time to decide the winner and I realized no one had told me what the correct answer was. I ran into monster camp prepared to dump out the jar and count them all myself when I luckily found the NPC who knew the correct answer.
After the carnival it was time to take off all the goofy costuming and silly makeup and grab some claws and fight! I really enjoyed running all around the field chasing and being chased during the summoning. I was a little surprised at how successful we were at first in getting the Chorus of Creepy Singers (aka Maurhiem Steamroller) up the hill to disrupt the ritual. My concern about that was probably a little different than most people’s. I knew that the singers were slowing down the summoning, and I also knew that Raulin (kumir_k9) was hiding in the back of the library. I was afraid that if things drug out too long kumir_k9 was going to fall asleep and miss his cue to appear when the ritual finally completed.
I was scheduled for one other mod that night but it got cancelled. I saw a bunch of NPC’s with dark hoods and weapons loitering around and so I grabbed some claws and a hood and followed. That ended up being the Midnight Horde battle. I could tell from the beginning that was going to be a frustrating fight for the PC’s, especially given the location and late hour in general. The first part of the fight where both sides had a very narrow frontage was pretty easy to keep in control. But when we got to the top of the hill and things opened up the battle dissolved into a crazy formless melee. I concentrated extra hard to slow myself down a bit since the last thing I needed to do was to smash into somebody running around on that slippery hill.
I thought I was done for the night after that, but they wanted to run the Lotus bar and they were short NPC’s. I volunteered for it, grabbed a fast costume, and ran down to the dining hall to set it up. I thought we did a pretty bang up job getting the place set up in the short amount of time we had. When everything was in place and all the NPC’s were there ryxander gave us a quick briefing and then sent out the hook. The hook walked outside, and then walked back inside, and said the PC’s were standing outside the door waiting. Showtime!
Luckily there weren’t a huge amount of PC’s there for that mod since we only had a few NPC’s to go around. As it turned out two people paired off with their assigned NPC and the rest of us were able to juggle the people the were left back and forth between us. We managed to keep people busy and entertained without there being a bunch of people standing around bored waiting for their turn with the NPC’s. The guy running the bar in particular was quite adroit at occupying a bunch of people at once.
After that it was sleepy time, and then it was time for the final day. I staffed one small talky mod in the morning down at the Murder Shack which turned out to be a little bit more involved than I was expecting. The PC’s didn’t approach the mod the way I thought they would (shocker!) and I had a little trouble in the beginning figuring out precisely what they were doing and how to react. This should not be surprising since the entire premise of the mod was for the PC’s to fake and bluff their way through it, so the confusion was as much method as it was a problem.
And then things ended with the big fat final fight. Two claws! Running around! 3 damage by Darkness! Sucking up massive amounts of Virtue damage as the PC’s dump their stats on the final fight! Whee!
Since I was one of the new guys at the event I had several people all throughout the event asking me if I was enjoying myself. I could honestly reply that I was. I liked the roles that I had, and I came away from most of the encounters feeling like I personally and directly impacted the success and enjoyment felt by the players. Everyone kept telling me going into the event that I would probably end up with a fair amount of talking roles but I still found myself surprised at the amount of time I spent standing around PC’s and not hitting them with weapons.
Another thing I kept getting asked was whether the 7V NPC experience is what I expected. For the most part it was. All LARP’s of course have their own personality and character, but a lot of what I saw and experienced were variations of the typical tropes and stereotypes. There was the everything starts late trope, and the having to constantly send someone into town to drag the roleplaying NPC away from the players so they could come back and run their mod trope. There were a couple of episodes of NPC’s coming back from this INCREDIBLE mod and all business in monster camp grinding to a halt while all the staff members crowd around this person to hear them tell about it. All these things I’m fairly familiar with.
The number and involvement of NPC’s was probably the biggest difference to me. I’ve NPC’d a few Endgame events towards the beginning of that game where there were similar numbers of NPC’s, but in that case the vast majority of them were there just to crunch and staff mods as monsters. This was my first experience where I saw the roleplay and character load spread out so broadly. In many LARP’s I’ve been to there might by 10 or 20 NPC’s, but only the three or four core staff members ever play any of the face roles. That meant of course whenever you saw a bunch of NPC’s you could always pick out the one or two that really mattered.
I was a bit surprised at myself for having a little bit of trouble playing a Consumed and other small combat roles. I kept getting tripped up on defenses. I’m used to only going out with either a Shield Mental, a Shield Elemental or maybe an avoid/elude. Several times during the event I was statted with a Shield Magic, which my highly NERO conditioned mind kept wanting to translate to “Shield vs first spell thingee that hits you”. So I ended up erroneously calling that shield against Hexes and other non Magic trait attacks. I am also not used to playing a monster that gets attacked by Bane traits, and I kept having to correct myself after calling my Avoid against “to Maorhi” or “to Marked”.
All told the entire trip taken as a whole was a pretty good experience. I experienced a wide variety of roles and tasks and got to interact with a pretty varied group of both PC’s and NPC’s. I felt like my contribution mattered and were appreciated. The informal feedback I got seemed fairly positive so I guess I didn’t screw up anything too badly. I even got a bit more enjoyment than normal out of a lot of the fighting roles I had since this was my first experience with some of the wacky 7V headers. Several times during the event a PC would spot me and press there palms together and start some sort of weird yoga performance art, or start monolguing at me, or something similar. A few times I found myself thinking “I should really trot up there whack that guy one time, but I’m kind of interested to see what happens when he finishes”.
And of course, above all else, I saw a whole bunch of stuff and idea and props and mod mechanics that I plan to shamelessly rip off to use for the LARP’s I’m running these next few weeks. Not that this was my reason for attending of course. I did it all for the players. Really.
It took a bit longer for that chance to arrive than I first imagined. Most of the previous events in the campaign fell on a weekend that I had another LARP to attend or some other commitment. But I noticed the last event of this year fell neatly in a small gap in an otherwise busy fall LARP season for me. I decided to jump on this event while I had the chance since who knows what next year’s schedule was going to be like.
There are a few other folks here in Virginia who occasionally NPC Seven Virtues and I happened to know that some of them were attending the event. I went ahead and signed up to NPC, filled out all the forms and questionnaires and sent in all the information they asked for and got all lined up to attend, and then I talked to the local folks to see if I could coordinate the ride north with them. It turns out I should have done that in the opposite order. All the local folks who were heading north had made plans to fly in to the event. Oh well, looks like another solo drive.
The ride this time could have been better, but it wasn’t too bad. I managed to get everything packed up and ready to go and I got out of bed on time Friday to leave. Then as I was pulling out of the driveway I discovered my front tire had a screw in it and it was completely flat. I considered just throwing on the spare and leaving, but I didn’t want to make the long drive on that little donut tire. So I pulled off the tire, yanked the screw out, and got the tire patched using a small patch kit I carry for emergencies. Of course right in the middle of this it started pouring down rain on top of me.
Between the flat tire and the periodic torrential rain I got a pretty slow start on the trip. The weather finally clear when I crossed into Delaware and was pleasant for most of the rest of the way. I finally trundled across the bridge and pulled up into the campsite around 9:00PM on Friday. My first challenge was to find someone who could direct me to NPC housing that wasn’t already full. Eventually I found a half empty cabin halfway up the hill and got all my gear and the gear I was bringing for other people stowed away, and then it was time to go staff mods.
I spent a far greater amount of time doing story based speaking roles than I was originally expecting. A few days prior to the event I was sent a spreadsheet which listed the names, times and locations of the roles I was assigned. Most of them looked like fairly straightforward town fights and combat mods. For instance, one of the things I was supposed to do Friday night was called simply “Crossroads”. Okay, I suspect that probably means I’ll be fighting as a bandit off on a road in the woods somewhere or something similar. A few days later all the mod writeups start trickling in to me, and I discover that several of the mods I had thought to be fights were in fact not. Oh, so the Crossroads is a bar. Imagine that.
Friday night I staffed only two mods, but the game got such a late start there was barely time to fit those in. Both mods were in the dining hall, so I didn’t cover a whole lot of ground that night. I played a flunkie for the first mod, and after that one ended we turned the dining hall into the Crossroads and I staffed that for the rest of the night.
The Aetherial NPC I played for the Crossroads, which had a repeat performance at the Carnival, was the only one I was stressing for the weekend. That was really the only role I had with the potential for lasting plot harm if I screwed it up or ad libbed inappropriately. Luckily I managed to anticipate one complication and asked staff before the mod what I should do if by some small chance X should happen. They assured me X would never happen, but if it did this is what you need to know. And of course X happened, and I was kind of pleased with myself to be ready for it.
Saturday morning I got up a little earlier than I probably should have considering how late I got to bed. But I wanted to take some time to explore the site in daylight so I would be able to find things later on. One of the perverse incentives I had for NPC’ing this event was to finally see this dreadful hill which figures so prominently in practically every livejournal entry I’ve ever read about a 7V or Aralis event. I half expected its slopes to be strewn with the bleached bones of collapsed LARPers.
I visited the Murder Shack and watched some of the other early risers who were there setting up a trap mod. I considered helping out since I like setting up that kind of stuff, but they already had enough hands and were nearly done, and I figured I would probably just end up being the way. I walked up the hill and checked out the Great Tree and explored the various large fields. I took a quick peek in the Library and the Reliquary, and took a bunch of pictures of stuff while there weren’t any PC’s to see me. I finally looped through the Pine Side cabins, but there I started running into PC’s who were asking me if I needed any help with anything. Not wanting to get caught off the reservation without a briefing I decided it was time to head back to monster camp to get ready for my mods.
I spent most of the morning playing a spear carrier for the Hero Queen and watching her get snakebit and cough up blood and other horrible things. After I hauled her horribly poisoned carcass down the hill and back to monster camp I did a couple of simple combat mods. One was a standard melee role, but the other one let me shoot arrows for a solid half an hour, which was really fun.
I spent the afternoon playing a small series of connected roles as an Aetherial that first got chased around by some PC’s and later on did a little fighting with another group of PC’s. Those were simple little scenes which were fun except for the brief rain shower that soaked us during the first part. In a weird bit of irony for the second part I played a combat role down in the corral where I was statted with a little bit of called damage that was “by Thorns”. Right at the beginning of the mod I nicked my ear on a briar bush over by the fence, and by the end of the fight I had to step out briefly because blood just kept pouring out of that little scratch.
Then it was dinner time, and then it was time for the Carnival. I’ve spoken to a couple of PC’s and NPC’s about the carnival, and nearly all of us had the same reaction. I honestly thought it was going to end up being really corny and lame, but was quite surprised at how fun it turned out to be. The look was especially impressive. Someone in monster camp assigned a few people to decorate the field, and I saw them schlep a couple of boxes and extension cords outside. When I finally got all my costume and makeup on and went out to see it I wasn’t expecting to find what looked like a theme park with all the lights and games.
I staffed the Carnival as my Aetherial I had played the previous night at the Crossroads. I had originally intended to just wander around and socialize and do my little bit of plot with a particular PC that had business with me. But at the last second I ended up getting handed the “Guess How Many Souls are in the Jar” game. That turned out to be a lot of fun until the very end when it came time to decide the winner and I realized no one had told me what the correct answer was. I ran into monster camp prepared to dump out the jar and count them all myself when I luckily found the NPC who knew the correct answer.
After the carnival it was time to take off all the goofy costuming and silly makeup and grab some claws and fight! I really enjoyed running all around the field chasing and being chased during the summoning. I was a little surprised at how successful we were at first in getting the Chorus of Creepy Singers (aka Maurhiem Steamroller) up the hill to disrupt the ritual. My concern about that was probably a little different than most people’s. I knew that the singers were slowing down the summoning, and I also knew that Raulin (kumir_k9) was hiding in the back of the library. I was afraid that if things drug out too long kumir_k9 was going to fall asleep and miss his cue to appear when the ritual finally completed.
I was scheduled for one other mod that night but it got cancelled. I saw a bunch of NPC’s with dark hoods and weapons loitering around and so I grabbed some claws and a hood and followed. That ended up being the Midnight Horde battle. I could tell from the beginning that was going to be a frustrating fight for the PC’s, especially given the location and late hour in general. The first part of the fight where both sides had a very narrow frontage was pretty easy to keep in control. But when we got to the top of the hill and things opened up the battle dissolved into a crazy formless melee. I concentrated extra hard to slow myself down a bit since the last thing I needed to do was to smash into somebody running around on that slippery hill.
I thought I was done for the night after that, but they wanted to run the Lotus bar and they were short NPC’s. I volunteered for it, grabbed a fast costume, and ran down to the dining hall to set it up. I thought we did a pretty bang up job getting the place set up in the short amount of time we had. When everything was in place and all the NPC’s were there ryxander gave us a quick briefing and then sent out the hook. The hook walked outside, and then walked back inside, and said the PC’s were standing outside the door waiting. Showtime!
Luckily there weren’t a huge amount of PC’s there for that mod since we only had a few NPC’s to go around. As it turned out two people paired off with their assigned NPC and the rest of us were able to juggle the people the were left back and forth between us. We managed to keep people busy and entertained without there being a bunch of people standing around bored waiting for their turn with the NPC’s. The guy running the bar in particular was quite adroit at occupying a bunch of people at once.
After that it was sleepy time, and then it was time for the final day. I staffed one small talky mod in the morning down at the Murder Shack which turned out to be a little bit more involved than I was expecting. The PC’s didn’t approach the mod the way I thought they would (shocker!) and I had a little trouble in the beginning figuring out precisely what they were doing and how to react. This should not be surprising since the entire premise of the mod was for the PC’s to fake and bluff their way through it, so the confusion was as much method as it was a problem.
And then things ended with the big fat final fight. Two claws! Running around! 3 damage by Darkness! Sucking up massive amounts of Virtue damage as the PC’s dump their stats on the final fight! Whee!
Since I was one of the new guys at the event I had several people all throughout the event asking me if I was enjoying myself. I could honestly reply that I was. I liked the roles that I had, and I came away from most of the encounters feeling like I personally and directly impacted the success and enjoyment felt by the players. Everyone kept telling me going into the event that I would probably end up with a fair amount of talking roles but I still found myself surprised at the amount of time I spent standing around PC’s and not hitting them with weapons.
Another thing I kept getting asked was whether the 7V NPC experience is what I expected. For the most part it was. All LARP’s of course have their own personality and character, but a lot of what I saw and experienced were variations of the typical tropes and stereotypes. There was the everything starts late trope, and the having to constantly send someone into town to drag the roleplaying NPC away from the players so they could come back and run their mod trope. There were a couple of episodes of NPC’s coming back from this INCREDIBLE mod and all business in monster camp grinding to a halt while all the staff members crowd around this person to hear them tell about it. All these things I’m fairly familiar with.
The number and involvement of NPC’s was probably the biggest difference to me. I’ve NPC’d a few Endgame events towards the beginning of that game where there were similar numbers of NPC’s, but in that case the vast majority of them were there just to crunch and staff mods as monsters. This was my first experience where I saw the roleplay and character load spread out so broadly. In many LARP’s I’ve been to there might by 10 or 20 NPC’s, but only the three or four core staff members ever play any of the face roles. That meant of course whenever you saw a bunch of NPC’s you could always pick out the one or two that really mattered.
I was a bit surprised at myself for having a little bit of trouble playing a Consumed and other small combat roles. I kept getting tripped up on defenses. I’m used to only going out with either a Shield Mental, a Shield Elemental or maybe an avoid/elude. Several times during the event I was statted with a Shield Magic, which my highly NERO conditioned mind kept wanting to translate to “Shield vs first spell thingee that hits you”. So I ended up erroneously calling that shield against Hexes and other non Magic trait attacks. I am also not used to playing a monster that gets attacked by Bane traits, and I kept having to correct myself after calling my Avoid against “to Maorhi” or “to Marked”.
All told the entire trip taken as a whole was a pretty good experience. I experienced a wide variety of roles and tasks and got to interact with a pretty varied group of both PC’s and NPC’s. I felt like my contribution mattered and were appreciated. The informal feedback I got seemed fairly positive so I guess I didn’t screw up anything too badly. I even got a bit more enjoyment than normal out of a lot of the fighting roles I had since this was my first experience with some of the wacky 7V headers. Several times during the event a PC would spot me and press there palms together and start some sort of weird yoga performance art, or start monolguing at me, or something similar. A few times I found myself thinking “I should really trot up there whack that guy one time, but I’m kind of interested to see what happens when he finishes”.
And of course, above all else, I saw a whole bunch of stuff and idea and props and mod mechanics that I plan to shamelessly rip off to use for the LARP’s I’m running these next few weeks. Not that this was my reason for attending of course. I did it all for the players. Really.