I'm working with Stephen Tihor and Erik Hanson on a larp that we're running next week. Everyone's got amnesia at the start. It's a 4 hour larp.

Plus, I was so impressed when I heard about a larp where -all- the PCs had gender neutral names that I insisted we do likewise. This plus the amneisa factor means anyone can be cast as anyone, and we can shift things around right up till game start, and no one will know we didn't plan it that way all along.

Choosing 15-25 gender neutral names isn't that tricky. Writing character sheets for when memories return that don't involve the 3rd person singular is tough. Doable, but hard work. You can use 2nd person for the PC itself, but not for the individuals the PC knows. First names and titles are your friends.

As for the memories, Stephen had two questions in mind that he repeated back when we first created the PCs.

1. If the PCs never get their memories back, does the game still work?
2. If the PCs get their memories back in the first hour (1/4 of the game), do they still have enough to do for the rest of the game?

We're doing fine tuning of character and blue sheets now, and have a lot of mechanics thingies and index cards to prep next. A lot. Oy.

April 25, we run it.

-Lisa

Enjoy the burn. :) Even when we carefully schedule a LARP well in advance, so we'll have time to prep everything well ahead, the last week or so still turns into crunch time to get everything ready! :)

Please post up how it goes.

Remember, no matter how busy you get with prepraration, be careful of your health. Make sure to eat three square meals and get eight hours of sleep, sometime between now and the game. (Sorry, old LARP organizers' joke.)

The gender-neutral writing gets easier with practice, because it forces gradual changes in the way you habitually structure sentences. For instances, possessives are a problem: "The Captain looked at the Captain's watch" doesn't work, but you can write "The Captain checked the time" or "The Captain looked at the clock on the wall," or "The Captain asked for a look at your watch." This brings back memories of writing second-person gender-neutral love scenes for the Star Saga computer games.

This plus the amneisa factor means anyone can be cast as anyone, and we can shift things around right up till game start, and no one will know we didn't plan it that way all along.

Alot of "New" names are gender neutral. Tyler. Dakota. Kansas. Kennedy.
Not sure if you needed help with that or not.

JamesSterrett wrote: Enjoy the burn. :) Even when we carefully schedule a LARP well in advance, so we'll have time to prep everything well ahead, the last week or so still turns into crunch time to get everything ready! :)

Please post up how it goes.

Walt Freitag wrote: Remember, no matter how busy you get with prepraration, be careful of your health. Make sure to eat three square meals and get eight hours of sleep, sometime between now and the game. (Sorry, old LARP organizers' joke.)

"The Captain looked at the Captain's watch" doesn't work, but you can write "The Captain checked the time" or "The Captain looked at the clock on the wall," or "The Captain asked for a look at your watch." This brings back memories of writing second-person gender-neutral love scenes for the Star Saga computer games.

Actually, depending on what clues about characters' identities the players start with, you might be able to shift things around after the game start, right up until the point when characters get their memories back. Not that you'd likely want to do that, but subtly getting players to do their own casting via play is an intriguing possibility for an amnesia scenario.

What James said, please post how it goes! Best of luck.

sirogit wrote: Alot of "New" names are gender neutral. Tyler. Dakota. Kansas. Kennedy.
Not sure if you needed help with that or not.

Seem to have survived. Will collate player comments when have recovered. Seems to have been enjoyable.

-Lisa

Lisa Padol wrote: Seems to have been enjoyable.

Something of both. Did a lot of sleeping. Got some nice orange juice today. Starting to write stuff.

-Lisa

Only mild, because I will edit this. You see, we plan to run the game again, in July, at Dexcon. I don't actually know how much of this will be about the game per se.

Our GMs: Stephen Tihor (primary author), Lisa Padol (co-author), Erik Hanson (Official Nitpicker), and Matt Stevens (Last minute invaluable help actually running the game). At Dexcon, we expect it'll be me, Steven, Joshua Kronengold (who played), and Elizabeth Bartley (ditto).

Prelude to a Larp

Many years ago, Joshua Kronengold, Batya Levin, Merav Hoffman, and myself decided to write a larp. Current working title is Dark of the Moon, and I won't give specifics. Since then, Batya married Alexander Wittenberg and Merav moved in with Jon Lennox. Both gents joined the team. And Josh and I became domestic partners.

Some years after we began, I mentioned the project to Michael McAfee at Arisa. He suggested, gently, that it would be a really, really good idea to try something smaller than the 60+ person, all weekend larp we had in mind. Like, say, a 4 hour mini-larp.

I forget exactly how it came to pass that I was the only member of the DotM team involved in Jamais Vu, but however it was, Erik Hanson and I received an apprenticeship in the creation of larps from Stephen Tihor. He said we'd do an amnesia larp, like the original Tabula Rasa larp, and our working title was Tabula Rasa II. This was about 3, maybe 4, years ago.

Stephen jotted down plot threads and diagrams on a whiteboard in his house. The plots and original characters were all his. Then, he created the spreadsheet, demonstrating what's really important. Sure, the DotM idea of a matrix showing what every character thinks of every other is useful, but there are other critical areas that should be filled in first.

At this point, I was the person who pushed until meetings happened. Stephen did most of the writing. Erik was designated the Official Nitpicker. He has had amazingly bad luck at every larp he's been in, and has decided he has more fun helping run them than playing in them. And he is very good at spotting consistency problems and places where more clarity is useful.

I had this bad habit of zonking out completely at the meetings I'd pushed for. Then, there was a period where I was having medical and job hunting issues that were sapping my energy. Stephen had to deal with health issues, his father's death, selling his father's apartment, selling his own, moving, and a job hunt. So, for several months, we did nothing.

Well, not nothing. Stephen mulled over systems in his head, constantly making them simpler. Josh and I actually got larp running, if not writing, experience. We ran Mike Young's Miskatonic Archaeological Expedition with Batya, Alex, Jon, Merav, and Eugene Reynolds coming in to be the Research GM. The joke was that Jon and Merav were the calm GMs, Josh and Batya were the bouncing off the walls GMs, Eugene was the Research GM, and I was the GM losing a SAN point every 5 minutes, and I'd started off down several from the night before.

Eugene was amazing. He made stuff up out of whole cloth when folks researched stuff that just wasn't in the notes. I learned an important lesson. When working with the DotM team, before the larp begins, I am in charge. After, Josh is in charge. I would have been much happier if I'd realized I wasn't in charge once the larp began.

The next larp Josh and I ran was Appalachian Wedding. We ran it with Ben Llewellyn, who wrote it (and whose name I hope I am not misspelling). Or, more accurately, he ran it with us as assistants. It's a good game, but we learned that certain things work less well with the folks we get at the larps we hold at Columbia than they do at Intercons. And there were certain casting decisions that didn't quite work -- Ben was leaving the casting decisions to us, as we knew the group.

Next was Marie Celeste. I played in that one. Josh GM'd it with Dave Siegel and Lee Painton. They learned one important lesson: It is not cool for GMs to clump around one small part of the game, even if they know something really nifty will happen there soon and they want to see it. Other than that, it went well, at least from my point of view.

Then, Dave Storrs ran something. I forget the name, but it was a fantasy setting. He wrote it, and I think he was sole GM. It went pretty well.

Next, Josh ran Marin County. I forget who helped. Likely Dave Siegel. I played the role Josh had played in his run, Inspector Mudd. Anyone familiar with the game knows that this was perfect for my two goals: A role where any knowledge I had of the game from Josh's reports when he played it wouldn't matter, and a role where I didn't have to think.

By now, we were tapped out on larps. And Columbia University wanted more. I told Stephen that I just couldn't get my part on Tabula Rasa done in time. He said we could knock a larp together in a month, and started tossing concepts at Josh. The one that they liked was DIY Mad Scientists. People submitted their own characters. These could be Mad Scientists, Heroes, Sidekicks, Minions, whathaveyou. We were thinking Girl Genius at first, but dropped that, as most folks didn't submit ideas that were especially tied in to that universe.

At meetings, I slept. Josh and Stephen bounced ideas around with enough energy that we speculated that I had become a larp battery. Stephen wrote 80-90% of the game, as Josh and I had booked up all our weekends. And Stephen lost a day for a very good reason: Job prospects that panned out.

But the game ran well. Josh was Lab GM. Stephen may also have been Lab GM, but he was doing other things too. Erik and Matt Stevens played walk on roles. I did floor GMing, and eventually attached myself to Julian Lighton, playing the substitute secretary for his Dean. Julian was one of two players who asked to be assigned a PC, and I thought making him the person the Mad Scientists needed stuff from (jobs, funding, mcguffins) would help get him in the thick of things. Josh explained to me afterwards that it was clear, to him, at least, that all the goals involving the Dean would go on hold halfway through the game. Whoops.

The game was popular enough that folks are eager for a sequel, working title Science Slaves of Mars. I plan to play in that one. But by now, we're up to last Fall, and Stephen is asking pointed questions about Tabula Rasa.

So, I started going over the 15 character sheets, to get them to 2nd draft stage. This worked. I took them to sf conventions and worked on one or two at filksings. Michael McAfee told me that there was already a Tabula Rasa 2, so we changed the name to Jamais Vu, as we aren't the TR folks, merely inspired by them.

Second drafts got done, and I met with Stephen, staying conscious and putting in a genuine 8 hours of work, including some teleconferencing with Erik, who had graduated from law school a couple years back, and was on call for work that weekend. Erik asked questions and made notes. I started on 3rd drafts and blue sheet revisions. Stephen simplified the systems yet again.

Our working date was April 18 for runtime, chosen to avoid Jewish holidays, Saturdays, and exams. Then, we found out that April 18 was Holocaust Memorial Day. I asked our university contact how firmly our space was reserved for that day. Well, the good news: We could change the day. The bad news: Nothing was reserved at all, at all, and he was having a very hard time finding space. At first, he thought we could get the Black Box Theater, a cool space, though we worried about echoes. Then, we couldn't. But, he got us the John Jay student lounge, which was at least a goodly size.

So, the weekend of the 18th, we did some good work. On Friday, Erik and I went over character sheets. Saturday, I got a later start that I ought to have, costing us about 2 hours worth of work time. We worked from about 7 until midnight. Sunday, I set an alarm, and we worked about 6 or 7 more hours together. Then, Stephen worked more, while Erik and I took a Kill Bill Vol. 2 break.

The weekend of the game, I made two errors. One was to assume that when I said to Stephen on Thursday that it would be helpful if he printed out the character sheets for us to stuff into envelopes on Friday (my printer seems to be broken) a) that he would do it that evening, when in fact it required him to come home from work on Friday, argue with the printer, and generally screw up what was supposed to be unwinding time on Friday and b) that he would read my mind and realize that I didn't know what I was asking and that, while useful, having the character sheets a day early wasn't critical. I could still have done the envelopes.

The other mistake was one of coordination: At around midnight on Saturday, I somehow managed the feat of putting a PCMCA card into a floppy disc slot. Stephen got it out with thin screwdrivers, but we agreed that it would be best if I didn't try touching the laptop again at that point. (For those wondering how I managed the feat: Lack of coordination due to exhaustion plus the drives were on top of each other.)

One thing we all agreed needed to be done asap, and which did not get done until about 1 am Saturday/Sunday, was a comprehensive item list, done as an Excel spreadsheet. The problem was that certain other things needed to be done first, specifically, enough of character sheets for last minute characters to know what everyone had on their person, and a list of what people had in their rooms. The room descriptions were done by about 11:30/midnight, I think -- this was a task we'd agreed Erik should do, and he took an opera break to see a friend in Don Giovanni.

This wasn't a major problem, but it was symptomatic of something I finally put my finger on. I'm not bad at figuring out what needs to be done. I'm not that good at guessing the priorities. I think I could have re-ordered things somehow for greater efficiency.

Sunday morning, I felt crappy, but Stephen was syked. This was good, and I could use his energy lift to sort of bootstrap myself. He did last minute character sheets. I thought there was no way I could do any of the packing, but managed to get some of it done through a combination of having laid things out sensibly before crashing earlier that morning and moving a pile, walking away, coming back, moving another, and gradually getting enough away that Stephen could do the rest in no time. We got a cab at about 11 or so.

So, How Did It Go?

Er, well, I think. We arrived to see that the food had been divided into hekshered and non-hekshered (i.e., stuff that our Orthodox Jewish contingent could eat and stuff that it, well, couldn't), Atkins and non-Atkins safe. There was some 70% chocolate, which Erik detested, but Stephen and I thought had a pleasant kick. And we had our own food, which we put in the GM area.

Note for next time: There should be more liquids. There should be stuff other than salmon that is Atkins safe.

Matt Stevens was there as well, having decided that yes, he would help us GM if we told him what to do. He was put in charge of the alien space ship expeditions, which worked really well. It let him do purple prose.

Folks drifted in. The last to arrive was my SO, Josh, who was not actually running late -- the trains decided not to run up to Columbia, so he'd walked 20 blocks (about a mile). I'd started doing the things I hadn't gotten to the previous evening, but this had to be cut short so that the game could run.

This meant that Stephen had to write a few skill cards. It meant that the various skill cards were never stuck into envelopes, leading to Josh's surprise after the game, when he discovered that his PC had had some extra skills he'd never learned about. An extra half hour would probably have cured those ills -- we had the materials on hand.

This wasn't a disaster. As Stephen pointed out, he was the GM stationed at the area "where people went to do things with that chunk of unstuffed skills." So, as they showed up and tried to do things that needed those skills, Stephen handed the skill cards out as appropriate.

Stephen notes: "The game implication was people did not try and use the system because they had the skills. It just happened they realized they had the skills when they tried to do things."

We posed people and handed them a 3 word catch phrase describing their PC. We also handed them each an envelope to open ten minutes into the game. Naturally, once things started, I ran around so much that I lost track of time in the first ten minutes. Fortunately, Alex reminded me at exactly the ten minute mark, at which point, I told everyone to open the appropriate envelopes.

The 10 minute envelope we gave people had a catch phrase for their PC and something else. There was one PC who had the ability to make a good first impression, so we wanted to reflect that, as this PC was meeting everyone for the first time, again. But we didn't want to make it obvious that this was what was happening. This lead to the creation of first impressions for everyone of about 4 or 5 other PCs, and that was put the an envelope to be opened 10 minutes after game start. This proved useful, although it did increase paranoia.

We also handed people name tags to put on, identifying them by first name. Being sadistic bastards, when they found a list of people, it identified everyone by last name.

We also stuffed pregenerated combat envelopes, using Combat Value plus (d6-1). In combat, both parties open an envelope. High number wins. Ties mean neither party can attack the other for five minutes. Very simple. We stuffed 10 envelopes per player, handed out 5 each, and never had to hand out more, as we'd hoped. There were a few combats, but blessedly few.

People pooled information very quickly and far more cooperatively than I'd expected. Stephen was impressed that one item that helped in this stayed put exactly where it was, and that no one walked off with it. Not a problem, just impressive. I had an early kick when someone who'd been given a leadership role read off everyone's names in a commanding tone.

People explored some rooms which were simulated by envelopes containing descriptions. Next time, we want to add item cards and to tape the envelopes to something. Folks developed a bad habit of walking off with rooms, and we had to chase them down.

Another amusing moment: One player was about to learn something about her PC.

Lisa: Come here, and I'll tell you privately.

Daniel: I'm looking over her shoulder.

Batya: Yes, he's looking over my shoulder.

Lisa (shrugging): Okay, both of you come here, and I'll tell you.

(Lisa reveals secret info)

Batya: Um. I probably shouldn't have let him look over my shoulder.

We had one method of letting people get memories back that we practically had to cram down people's throats. No surprise there -- I'd expected the players to be very suspicious. And we had to think fast to keep them from sabotaging it without realizing what they were doing.

Why not let them do it? Because they would have more fun getting the memories back, and we didn't have quite enough ways to do that. But once they caught on, one of the leader folks pointed the few who hadn't used it at the mcguffin. This was cool: The players were doing our work for us.

We did have at least 2 other mcguffins, which was good, as there were 3 pieces of memories, and folks could only use a given technique once. Ah yes, note for next time: When a player gets the second memory dump, the old sheet with the first dump should be replaced with one that has first and second. When the third bit of memory is recovered, the sheet should be replaced with the complete sheet. Easier on everyone. Less for the player to keep track of.

Our emergency backup plan: At hour 2, everyone gets memory 1. At hour 3, they get the 2nd memory. at 3.5, they get it all. Game ends at hour 4. Not everyone's memory comes back in the right order.

Note for next time: We need to tweak the memory order in a few cases. Default should be Long-Medium-Short or Medium-Long-Short, but not Short-Medium-Long as originally planned. Long gave context. Medium had the most useful overview of the setting. Short tended to be of little immediate use. Now, there were exceptions. Some folks needed a particular order, and that was fine.

Other note for next time: The general background information sheets should be available ahead of time. There's no reason folks can't know the basics. It makes it easier for them to click into character, as they learn who their characters are.

Two players I thought might well click did so, and a scene we'd half set up came into being. That was nice. Byplay between two players who'd quickly figured out their relationship was also lovely. No one did go for unplanned romance, and, with one odd exception, we didn't plan any romance. All the characters had gender neutral names.

I ran around with the list of official in games items. Note: Next time, we need multiple copies for all GMs. I played a bunch of NPCs. That was fun. Mostly, they got turned into item cards when I was done. One NPC was basically a Random Monster. It was brought down, but not before one PC threw herself in front of it to defend it from the rest. That was unexpected and amusing.

Various plots were made, carried through, or foiled, as the case may be. At the end, we were all exhausted.

And we're going to do it all again in July, at Dexcon, after tweaking things a bit.

And I'm back to working on Dark of the Moon, at least a little.

Lisa Padol wrote:

Our GMs: Stephen Tihor (primary author), Lisa Padol (co-author), Erik Hanson (Official Nitpicker), and Matt Stevens (Last minute invaluable help actually running the game). At Dexcon, we expect it'll be me, Steven, Joshua Kronengold (who played), and Elizabeth Bartley (ditto).

<snip>

We ran Mike Young's Miskatonic Archaeological Expedition...

The next larp Josh and I ran was Appalachian Wedding. We ran it with Ben Llewellyn, who wrote it (and whose name I hope I am not misspelling). Or, more accurately, he ran it with us as assistants...

<snip>

Er, well, I think. We arrived to see that the food had been divided into hekshered and non-hekshered (i.e., stuff that our Orthodox Jewish contingent could eat and stuff that it, well, couldn't), Atkins and non-Atkins safe. There was some 70% chocolate, which Erik detested, but Stephen and I thought had a pleasant kick. And we had our own food, which we put in the GM area.

Note for next time: There should be more liquids. There should be stuff other than salmon that is Atkins safe.

Helvetian wrote: First, we're definitely looking forward to having you join us for DEXCON. :)

<snip>

Should I try to arrange services for Friday evening at the convention? I was looking into finding out how many people attending would like one. Also, we will certainly have Atkins friendly food, but we haven't arranged specifically for any level of kosher. I can try to ensure we pick up some things?

Please let me know.

Rebecca Badurina

Lisa Padol wrote: Beth is on Atkins, but may go off for the duration. Stephen is on something Atkins like -- I've emailed them with your msg.

Josh and I are omniverous predators -- meat good, sugar good.

If a chair that will actually be comfortable for Stephen can be obtained, that would be great.

Thanks again.

-Lisa