LARP report
That larp I'd been working on? Awesome. The game worked out really, really well. So very many awesome bits happened in the game.
The lookalikes, and the human virus lookalike who turned other people into lookalikes, worked great. They created lots of confusion and entertaining situations. Lots of comical wearing of fake mustaches, too. I was worried when writing the game that the human virus would turn everyone into Dravo clones, but instead they just nearly overwhelmed the cast of characters, but never succeeded in infecting everyone. That was a near perfect result on that front. Having Dan arrive to the game late actually worked out really well, sinc ehe was "patient zero" of the human virus. The larp kind of had an initial low key, scheming sort of phase, then once Dan started infecting people, it totally kicked into high gear and things went nuts. Just as I had hoped.
In my mind, the game had been called "The Last Man in Europe" (that was the working title for 1984), but never told anyone that. I thought there was a good chance Dravo's clone would be that man, but instead it was Jurgen, the writer who from the start was suspected of treason. I never would have anticipated that result, or wouldn't have if I gave it to someone who wasn't Adam. That casting decision rested on the assumption Adam could find his way out of dire circumstances that I wouldn't hand to anyone else.
Cool bits of the game included all sorts of people claiming to be the real Dravo, spontaneous singing and marching of a large group of Dravo clones, a situation where the interrogators interrogated three lookalikes in a row, and never got a straight answer from any of them (two of them escaped rather than talking). Early on, Amber's mom as the Power Behind the Throne was barking orders to lookalikes, then turning to other lookalikes and demanding why they weren't fulfilling those orders.
Finally, as the game built toward a climax, the spy from another country holed up in the filming studio with a few non-clones, claimed to be the real Dravo, and used the studio's video equipment to broadcast his speech. In the middle of his speech, a horde of clones rushed the studio and havoc erupted live on the air.
Shortly thereafter, a group of non-clones coordinated a failed attempt to blow up the Ministry where the Larp happened, then succeeded on the second try. The first try failed due to one of the agents in the plot defecting.
Since it was a Larp, I probably missed two thirds of the cool stuff that happened, but what I did see entertained me to now end.
Audiovisually, I didn't get as much editing done as I would have liked (see the post on Frustration, earlier, for reasons why). But I got enough done, so that in the end we had: a speech from Aleksander dravo (played by Remi Treuer) playing simultaneously downstairs in the filming studio and upstairs int he living room, the nightly agricultural report (with Jason Morningstar) playing on a loop on five TVs clustered on the snacks table, an introductory Powerpoint file explaining setting and rules, and pictures of our Glorious Dictator replacing every photograph in our house. The original plan had called for one more TV showing Dravo's speech, but Dan's laptop couldn't handle Quicktime well enough, and an interrogation mini-game based on Powerpoint and the classical psychological experiments. This latter failed when our backup PC would boot into Windows, so we created some interrogation rules on the fly, which worked just fine.
I'm going to try to get the Dravo speech and agricutltural report up on Youtube, but had problems with that plan earlier. I might just put all the character sheets in a .zip file and host it on Googlepages, so anyone can read all the information if they want. There was also talk about running the game for Origins, which seems like a good idea: many hours of writing, editing, filming and editing went into the game, so it would be a good use of labor to get more than three hours of play out of that effort.
We also had a very nice after larp cool down session, laughing about what was good in the game and discussing rules variations, and from there veering into all sorts of other territory (the previous post on race and geekdom, science fiction as futurism, interesting stuff). A very good evening. I'll be finding playing cards in weird places for many months to come, no doubt.
The lookalikes, and the human virus lookalike who turned other people into lookalikes, worked great. They created lots of confusion and entertaining situations. Lots of comical wearing of fake mustaches, too. I was worried when writing the game that the human virus would turn everyone into Dravo clones, but instead they just nearly overwhelmed the cast of characters, but never succeeded in infecting everyone. That was a near perfect result on that front. Having Dan arrive to the game late actually worked out really well, sinc ehe was "patient zero" of the human virus. The larp kind of had an initial low key, scheming sort of phase, then once Dan started infecting people, it totally kicked into high gear and things went nuts. Just as I had hoped.
In my mind, the game had been called "The Last Man in Europe" (that was the working title for 1984), but never told anyone that. I thought there was a good chance Dravo's clone would be that man, but instead it was Jurgen, the writer who from the start was suspected of treason. I never would have anticipated that result, or wouldn't have if I gave it to someone who wasn't Adam. That casting decision rested on the assumption Adam could find his way out of dire circumstances that I wouldn't hand to anyone else.
Cool bits of the game included all sorts of people claiming to be the real Dravo, spontaneous singing and marching of a large group of Dravo clones, a situation where the interrogators interrogated three lookalikes in a row, and never got a straight answer from any of them (two of them escaped rather than talking). Early on, Amber's mom as the Power Behind the Throne was barking orders to lookalikes, then turning to other lookalikes and demanding why they weren't fulfilling those orders.
Finally, as the game built toward a climax, the spy from another country holed up in the filming studio with a few non-clones, claimed to be the real Dravo, and used the studio's video equipment to broadcast his speech. In the middle of his speech, a horde of clones rushed the studio and havoc erupted live on the air.
Shortly thereafter, a group of non-clones coordinated a failed attempt to blow up the Ministry where the Larp happened, then succeeded on the second try. The first try failed due to one of the agents in the plot defecting.
Since it was a Larp, I probably missed two thirds of the cool stuff that happened, but what I did see entertained me to now end.
Audiovisually, I didn't get as much editing done as I would have liked (see the post on Frustration, earlier, for reasons why). But I got enough done, so that in the end we had: a speech from Aleksander dravo (played by Remi Treuer) playing simultaneously downstairs in the filming studio and upstairs int he living room, the nightly agricultural report (with Jason Morningstar) playing on a loop on five TVs clustered on the snacks table, an introductory Powerpoint file explaining setting and rules, and pictures of our Glorious Dictator replacing every photograph in our house. The original plan had called for one more TV showing Dravo's speech, but Dan's laptop couldn't handle Quicktime well enough, and an interrogation mini-game based on Powerpoint and the classical psychological experiments. This latter failed when our backup PC would boot into Windows, so we created some interrogation rules on the fly, which worked just fine.
I'm going to try to get the Dravo speech and agricutltural report up on Youtube, but had problems with that plan earlier. I might just put all the character sheets in a .zip file and host it on Googlepages, so anyone can read all the information if they want. There was also talk about running the game for Origins, which seems like a good idea: many hours of writing, editing, filming and editing went into the game, so it would be a good use of labor to get more than three hours of play out of that effort.
We also had a very nice after larp cool down session, laughing about what was good in the game and discussing rules variations, and from there veering into all sorts of other territory (the previous post on race and geekdom, science fiction as futurism, interesting stuff). A very good evening. I'll be finding playing cards in weird places for many months to come, no doubt.