Crossover thoughts, or: the weightlessness of us as things around begin to shift
Originally published at Lise Fracalossi. You can comment here or there.
Credit: crossfox.us (although they appear to no longer be selling this item on their site - I found it on Pinterest)
Crossover, a new Accelerant LARP starting in spring 2016, is now accepting character concepts.
I alluded else-web to having hesitations about playing, and I wanted to elaborate on that a bit.
To be clear, my hesitations have very little to do with the game itself. By all accounts the staff is experienced and talented, and this will be a great game.
What is - currently - keeping me from playing is a bevy of personal issues.
So here are my hesitations:
1. Do I even have time for another boffer larp?
Right now I only PC one boffer larp (5G Silverfire). Which, yes, is fewer games per year than most Accelerant larps.
But I have perm NPC commitments to Shadows of Amun and Cottington Woods. I also have promised to generally show up and NPC 5G Wrathborn games.
Shadows and Cottington are ending, but not until Crossover has already started. Which means that if I played XO, I’d have NO FREE WEEKENDS AT ALL OMG next spring.
I like free weekends. I like them a lot. I’d go so far as to say they are necessary to my physical and mental health. Last spring, I got very ill before I was supposed to NPC for Wrathborn 1, which was pretty much my body telling me “slow the fuck down, Lise.” Also I just begin to hate myself and the world and everybody else in it. So, you know. NBD.
It’s not just the larp weekends themselves, even. There are all the other weekends and week nights where I sacrifice whatever else I want to do (writing, playing ESO, reading, dicking around on the internet, getting drunk, whatever) to prep for the games. Writing character histories. Making costuming. Reading rules docs and generating a character. Memorizing calls and incants. Sparring/fight practice. NPCing other games to get CP.
I realize time is wibbly-wobbly, and to some extent it’s a question of priority. But that’s something only I can decide.
2. I’m not sure how well my character concept fits in the world.
See, I do have a character concept. I even have an entire Pinterest board for a character who may never exist.
Almost a year ago now, I saw the Faithful of the Moon theme and zeroed in on it. I decided I wanted to make some sort of elvish rogue, inspired partially by Warcraft’s night elves, partially by the Elder Scrolls Dunmer. Like the Dunmer’s Morag Tong, she was going to be from a culture that practiced sanctioned, legal assassination… until suddenly it wasn’t acceptable, and she was left holding the bag, banished from her homeland to make an example for the benefit of outsiders.
I did talk to Kat D, one of the staff, about my concept yesterday, and she seemed to think this was an idea that can fit in well as a native of Ariath - there are elves, there is a region which is, at the start of game, basically a mass of small warring countries that would be perfect for her to be from, and the concept would not need to be as melee-dependent as I feared. (I suck at melee).
So that was encouraging.
Then I went home and had CRAZY IDEAS and suddenly I was awake at 2am writing a character history for her. (Feel free to read, if you don’t mind being spoiled if I do play. It is… very rough, and everything you would expect from my 2am brain).
I still have hesitations - I think I am too much the writer, and not sure this character and culture I’ve created have a place in Ariath. I don’t love the name I’ve given her - it is quite literally the name of the nelf rogue I used to play in WoW.
But.
In the process of writing this, I came up with a concept which could get around my hesitation #3:
3. Other people
L’enfer, c’est les autres, eh?
This is not a slight on any of my MANY friends who are playing. It’s just… they’re all way more into this than I am?
The folks who are playing the faun race, the Hindren, have literally been planning this for two years now. They have all their ties already set up, already know their builds, already have their team. This is true of other, less furry groups, too.
Crossover already feels very cliqueish to me - not that I want to be part of any particular group I know exists. But I’m worried I’m always going to be on the outside looking in.
But if I have a character who has given up everything she has ever known, and who must build her life all over again… well, then it makes sense starting game with no more than weak ties to other characters. It will be challenging, but instead of a social challenge for Lise-the-player, it becomes an RP challenge. How does she fit in here, how does she show her value?
Relatedly, I just read a book which mentioned the story of a Dutch trader in the 17th century who was shipwrecked in Korea, and was forced to spend the rest of his life there, by edict of the king at the time. Quite unpredictably, he thrived; he became a gunsmith for the royal armory, married a Korean woman, and had two sons. When other Dutch showed up thirty years later, he could barely speak his native tongue any more. That second batch were held to the same edict; most of them tried to escape and were generally pretty unhappy there.
Which got me to thinking: what is it like to never be able to go home? What makes some people thrive in that situation, and others founder?
Having lived abroad, I know exactly how bewildering that first month, three months, a year are. I remember thinking, in my first weeks in France, how different everything was; how it was like learning to live again.
That’s the kind of feeling I want to capture with Melesarla - a native of Ariath, but still an outsider.
If I play.
Which I still don’t know
How about you? Are you playing? Will you try to sway me one way or another? 😉