Well, that's the last time I ever compose a post in livejournal's own system. (I just lost 30+ minutes of writeup to an accidental touch of the control + back keys. Firefox saved my subject line and nothing else. A basic text editor's got to be safer.
Anyway, I'm back from
Intercon H (theme: Heaven and Hell) from this weekend. I returned Sunday night and reading other people's livejournals about Intercon inspired me to return (after >2 years) to posting something.
I had a good intercon. I ran
Ghost Fu: The Jade Emperor's Celestial Tournament with
crash_mccormick ,
jlighton ,
mnemex , and
drcpunk . The Ghost Fu game rocked -- I'm still bubbling. And we've already talking about polishing it, preparing to ask our players what they liked and what we should have done differently (unless
drcpunk has already sent the email, but I think that was just to our list so that someone with a Unix box could use programming fu to do a mass email.)
I think the single thing that really helped this run of Ghost Fu the most was the game blurb we posted to the Intercon H website:
Twelve years ago the great Kung Fu tournament was just starting when the participants were murdered. Some contestants went to the Afterlife, but others found themselves with unfinished business. In the best tradition of Hong Kong movies, the contestants now return to finish the tournament.
You want to move on, but important questions remain unanswered:
- Who has the mightiest Kung Fu?
- Who will win the tournament?
- Who will marry the ghost bride and give her a burial place?
- How can you help your living relatives?
- How can one avenge a father after someone poisoned his killer?
- Who killed you, anyway?
We had a LARP full of enthusiastic players, many of them wonderfully over-the-top, some of them interestingly innovative. Oh - I think we gave them a fairly solid LARP structure to work from, but our players made it into something wonderful. It was great.
Sometime on Sunday (or was it Saturday night?),
crash_mccormick mentioned he had bid both Jamais Vu and Presque Vu for
Intercon I (theme: Intergalactic.) This evening over dinner I got an email from him saying that both
We've been meaning to finish boxing Jamais Vu for a while -
Foam Brain Productions ran it once and helped us box it by asking us questions. But there are a couple things they had to improvise, and we need to nail those. Running it again should help.
As for Presque Vu -- well, we figured out the game premise on the drive back. (We knew the game had to be at one of two different points in the world timeline; we figured out which one, and fleshed out the situation into the beginnings of a game background.) Interesting game premise.
jlighton took notes on his Sidekick and emailed them out: I've already added the LARP to our wiki and the notes - with a few additions - to that section.
I'd already done some brainstorming on a different (unnamed) amnesia larp with
jlighton Saturday afternoon when neither of us scheduled games. Running a successful larp gives an amazing larp-writing charge.