At Origins this Weekend!
Originally published at Words and Thoughts. Please leave any comments there.
Wow - it’s been a dog’s age since I’ve posted anything here, but I figure sending a little note out before Origins would be good, so here I am.
I’ve been going to Origins and running LARPs for the better part of a decade at this point, though I had to give last year a miss due to an already overly busy and stressful summer LARP schedule. I’m happy to say that this year I’m back and running a couple of brand new things that I think are really exciting. Chronologically they are:
- Friday 3-5 PM: A Serpent of Ash (Event #2412)
- Saturday 2-4 PM: “There Are No Bad Players, Only Bad Games” (Event #9632)
- Saturday 6 PM - Midnight: Threads of Damocles: Los Angeles (Event #2613)
A Serpent of Ash is a work by J. Tuomas Harviainen that I ran at Intercon H this winter after failing to run it at Intercon Mid-Atlantic last fall. Serpent is a discourse-oriented piece for 6-12 players that centers on the meeting of several former religious cult members some years after the cult fell apart due to the death of its leader. This is kind of a hard event to sell for Origins as it is not a genre piece and many people would equate “dicourse-oriented” with “slow,” but I can honestly say that if you’re at Origins and you’re interested in LARP outside of the standard genre fare then you owe it to yourself to play in this event.
“There Are No Bad Players, Only Bad Games” is not actually my event, but is actually a panel being run by “Uncle” Don Ross about “conflicting player/gamemaster expectations” that I was asked to participate in. I imagine anyone who reads this blog has an idea that this is an area which interests me greatly, so I imagine this should be a very intriguing dicussion. It’s worth noting that most panels I’ve sat on at Origins have been small enough that they’re really closer to being round tables discussions, so don’t give it a miss because you think it’ll just be two hours of blowhards like myself telling you how right they are about everything.
Threads of Damocles: Los Angeles is a stand-alone event written by Gordon Olmstead-Dean, Colin Sandel, and myself and set in the Threads of Damocles universe. This is probably the biggest risk I’m taking at Origins; this is a relatively large event (Caps at 60, and runs best with at least 30) and isn’t tied to a recognized genre/system like World of Darkness or Call of Cthulhu. That being said we’ve run the event once before with a relatively low number of players and I still think it went quite well. This event is set at a rave that’s being run mostly as an excuse for the various disparate powers of a cyberpunk Los Angeles to be able to meet relatively informally. A large collection of characters from both the Corporate and Rave cultures are gathered together for the evening and could end up radically changing the future of Los Angeles. Threads is a lot closer to what is expected to run at Origins than Serpent is, though I still think it’s a bit deeper and more mature than a lot of the material that gets run there. At 6 hours, this is a bit longer than most of our events, but we want to give people time to dance, get into character and what not; this also means that we can take late comers pretty easily so come on out and play!
For reference the events are:
- Friday 3-5 PM: A Serpent of Ash (Event #2412)
- Saturday 2-4 PM: “There Are No Bad Players, Only Bad Games” (Event #9632)
- Saturday 6 PM - Midnight: Threads of Damocles: Los Angeles (Event #2613)
Finally - I’m getting into Columbus on Thursday afternoon and will be there through Sunday. Besides the events I’m running I don’t have any concrete plans for the weekend. If you know of an event I should be checking out then let me know. Also I managed get a suite at the Hampton Inn this year, so I imagine I’ll be hosting some hanging out and light carousing most nights if you’re into that sort of thing.
Think that’s about it for now - though for good measure I’m listing the events one last time:
- Friday 3-5 PM: A Serpent of Ash (Event #2412)
- Saturday 2-4 PM: “There Are No Bad Players, Only Bad Games” (Event #9632)
- Saturday 6 PM - Midnight: Threads of Damocles: Los Angeles (Event #2613)
See you at Origins!