Lost Angeles: L.A.cuna at orccon

I ran a 6 player convention game of lacuna on Sunday. The concept was that it had stopped raining in the blue city and that the history, landscapes and myths of the los angeles region were somehow infecting the blue city. The agents would be pursuing a 71 year old male hostile personality and so cal native who had confessed to a hit and run fatality & possibly had triggered the southern californication of the blue city while on the slab for treatment. (The alternative theory presented in the briefing session was that a cultural/demographic shift in our world had permanently altered the mythic geography of the blue city)

The prep

I decided to weave a few themes into the game, each linked to one or more of four locales I prepped & to four real quotations that I would place in the game as texts that the characters would hopefully decipher. The themes, which were as much for color as any deep meaning, were:
• Competing images of post-war suburbs as the heart of the American dream or sterile wastelands
• Los angeles as a western landscape incorporating the cultural/political assumptions of that film genre
• Demographic transformations framed from a vantage point when L.A. was still majority white
• Seedy outlying towns
• {there are a zillion other myths I could have used but even four may have been too many}

The four set locations were:
• the house of the HP’s brother (a hoarder) in Lakewood ca
• a party and fundraiser at the shadow hills home of a retired actor who had been on-screen sidekick to a 1950s singing cowboy star
• a junkyard in Fontana in the shadow of the Kaiser steel mill
• a Pomona bungalow surrounded by overgrown lemon groves, home of a woman the HP had loved

main threats/conflicts
• in Lakewood, sanitation officials and cops trying to get the HP’s brother to clear off his property
• at the party, the El Paso kid as jealous husband and a rogue agent also after the HP
• at the junkyard, the Fontana/san berdoo 1 percenters (a cycle gang riding something strange but I hadn’t quite figured out what)
• at the farmhouse, the HP manifesting as an expanding human paper doll

The four quotes are pasted in full at the end of this post, they are from:
• Holy Land, about the suburban grid & living in Lakewood
• Mental Hygiene, about classroom films
• City of Quartz, about Fontana as a junkyard of dreams
• Ovid’s metamorphosis, on the goddess Pomona

The play

I’m lame for not writing down the names of the players, but the 6 characters were agents trotter, parker, inman, cleaver, page and day. I think Day volunteered as team leader.
• In Lakewood, they noticed boys collecting deformed frogs, were confronted at a park by worried suburban moms, did a great job tricking the authorities that the occupant had some communicable disease, and learned that the HP had stopped by to pick up a scrapbook and old baseball trophy
• At the party, they learned that the HP had gone to a junkyard to reclaim a car used in teenage driving films, got into a gunfight with the rogue agent, and knocked out the shotgun wielding cowboy actor with a beer bottle
• At the junkyard, they discovered two bodies with fang punctures ( I forgot to introduce the cycle gang, and may not have had time anyway)
• At the farmhouse, the HP unfolded to 23 men linked at the arms, the character, slammed the door halfway along the line, separated the copies outside with gardening shears then lured them into the street with the scrapbook and ran them down with a car, gunned down most of the copies stuck inside and brained the last one with the HP’s own trophy. Unfortunately team leader Day was caught in the coils of the writhing HP copies, failed his eject roll, and died on the slab
• We decided to end the game before revealing if the elimination of the HP returned the blue city to its usual state.

Thoughts:

I had fun prepping the game some misgivings over how I ran it:
• If I were to control again, I would not plan less but choose the opening location and some motifs and let the game flow from there
• Because I ran the game with traditional gm/player division of labor, it was heavy on investigation and was railroady, sort of like a call of cthulhu session with escalating heartbeat rather than falling sanity. (by the way, I like CoC just fine).
• I saw my role as contol/gm as throwing lots of potential conflicts and uncertainties at the players so that they would roll a lot and raise their heartbeats. At times the players were over cautious, which makes sense since they didn’t know each other and were trying a new system.
• I was heavy on the historical/geographical feel of the game and didn’t throw in enough weird stuff.
• The players had some nice musing about whether its ok to kill personalities
• When it came time to confront the HP, we wondered how the hell agents could eliminate HPs. One of the players had run Lacuna before and remembered that in the first edition/attempt, you pinned the HP. But we were using 2nd attempt, which didn’t specify, so I said that they had to kill an Hp in a manner befitting its revealed form. They did this in spades, both for its physical manifestation and utilizing the guilt/crimes/momentos of the HP. This was cool.
• I thought the heartbeat mechanic worked well, once players were in the zone they rolled bunches of dice and were soon ejected out
• If I run the game again I would probably use a variant of Donjon’s success = narrate a fact about the setting system (with players not able to summon the HP but being able to narrate freely about his/her impacts/traces etc.)
• The players generated something like 18 static, half of it fighting the rogue agent, but I didn’t follow the static escalation as closely as I could have
• Jim (the one player who I know) mentioned that Lacuna would work as a gm-less game with players taking turns framing scenes/acting as control.
• Come to think of it, it would be cool for static to alter the rules as well as the setting, so the game could start with a standard gm then introduce player narration then go gmless or something.
• 6 players is probably too many

But overall, despite these concerns, it was an interesting first attempt, the players seemed to enjoy aspects of the game, and I’m up for playing it or running again.

Lacuna Quotes

In 1949, three developers bought 3,500 acres of Southern California farmland. They planned to build something that was not exactly a city. In 1950, before the work of roughing the foundations and pouring concrete began, the three men hired a young photographer with a single-engine plane to document their achievement from the air.
The three developers were pleased with the results. The black-and-white photographs show immense abstractions on ground the color of the full moon. The photographs celebrate house frames precise as cells in a hive and stucco walls as fragile as unearthed bone. Seen from above, the grid is beautiful and terrible.

The streets in my city are a fraction of a larger grid anchored to one in Los Angeles. The Los Angeles grid is a copy of one carried from Mexico City. The grid the Spanish Colonel carried to the nonexistent Los Angeles came from a book in the Archive of the Indies in Seville. The book prescribed the exact orientation of the streets, the houses, and the public places for all the colonial settlements in the Spanish Americas. That grid came from God.

D.J Waldie, Holy land: a suburban memoir

“Most of Davis’s films – and he made over 150 – possess the visual dynamism of a pancake. The Bicycle Clown, Dead Right, Alcohol is Dynamite, Girls Beware, and dozens of others – all appear to have been shot at noon. Their characters squint in the bright southern California sunshine; casting no shadows, they wander a flat landscape of tract housing and hamburger stands before being run over by cars, molested by perverts, or arrested by the police.
Many of the horrors featured in Sid Davis films were too complex to stage on a thousand-dollar budget. Instead, the camera pans away at the last moment before tragedy strikes or cuts to a shot of horrified onlookers – a power of suggestion technique necessitated by financial constraints. The gaps in action sequences are filled by the narrator –relentless, judgmental – hammering away with all the anger in Sid Davis’s soul, not at the drug pushers and child molesters but at the hapless kid victims.”

Ken Smith, mental Hygiene: classroom films 1945-1970.

A block away is an even more improbable sight: a circus wrecking yard. Scattered amid the broken bumper cars and ferris wheel seats are nostalgic bits and pieces of Southern California’s famous extinct amusement parks (in the pre-Disney days when admission was free or $1): the Pike, Belmont Shores, Pacific Ocean Park, and so on. Suddenly rearing up from the back of a flatbed trailer are the fabled stone elephants and pouncing lions that once stood at the gates of Selig Zoo in Eastlake (Lincoln) Park, where they had enthralled generations of Eastside kids. I tried to imagine how a native of Manhattan would feel, suddenly discovering the New York Public Library’s stone lions discarded in a New Jersey wrecking yard. I suppose the Selig lions might be Southern California’s summary, unsentimental judgment on the value of its lost childhood. The past generations are like so much debris to be swept away by the developers’ bulldozers. In which case it is only appropriate that they should end up here, in Fontana, the junkyard of dreams.

Mike Davis, City of Quartz: excavating the future of Los Angeles

“She loved the fields and the branches loaded with ripe apples, not the woods and rivers. She carried a curved pruning knife, not a javelin, with which she cut back the luxuriant growth, and lopped the branches spreading out here and there, now splitting the bark and inserting a graft, providing sap from a different stock for the nursling. She would not allow them to suffer from being parched, watering, in trickling streams, the twining tendrils of thirsty root. This was her love, and her passion, and she had no longing for desire. Still fearing boorish aggression, she enclosed herself in an orchard, and denied an entrance, and shunned men.”

Ovid, Metamorphosis, Book XIV,
describing the goddess Pomona.