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Mar. 7th, 2007 03:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
oakenguyMy weekend at Intercon* G (long and very strange) ((the post, not the weekend...well, okay, both)):
This time in, I felt like I had enough larp-styles under my belt that I knew my strengths and weaknesses, and could pick my games accordingly. Example: I told![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
tpau that I knew I did poorly in angst-heavy LARPs because, for one thing, you know how chimps bare their teeth and look like they're smiling when they're upset? Same thing with me.
So of course my character in my fourth LARP wound up being the most emo, angst-filled character I've ever played, and I LOVED it. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
**The following paragraphs are very spoiler-y.**
Friday night was Divus Ex: Gaslamp Gods, wherein Gods and Powers who had a stake in 19th century England got together in one room and interacted about as well as one might expect****. I played Lugh the Silver-Handed, Celtic god of Skill, and found it challenging. For one thing, I was a bit frazzled from getting lost twice on the drive up and nervous about getting the hand on. For another thing, my character was supposed to have a huge chip on his shoulder about a) these new upstart gods and b) his hand (aka, in his mind, his HORRIBLE DEFORMITY), yet repeatedly he'd go up to a Victorian god ready to pick a fight--and get fawned over for how clever and well-made his hand was. It was like aikido!
And that was before Eureka, the Victorian Goddess of Invention*****, gave him absinthe. Things got very strange after that. It was shortly thereafter that he cut a deal with Brigid and the God of Railroads to create a network of railroads that ran on leyline energy, and a Celtic Mystery Cult version of the Masons to be in charge of building and operating them. Which felt good, but compared to Puck and the angels nearly ending existence and Cernunnos nearly turning every mortal into a tree, it was small potatoes.
I will state with pride that the four Celtic deities made a wonderfully dysfunctional family. When the happiest, most stable person in your group is the Morrigan...
After the game it was time to drink root beer floats and wishtpau and shadowravyn happy birthdays! Which involved limoncello and geeky conversations and much goodness.
Saturday morning involved getting lost in a completely different way, and then the run of Girl Genius: Agatha Heterodyne and the Perfect Construct. Wow wow wow. Alternate dimensions, multiple Agathas, guest appearances by characters from 'Narbonic' and 'Buck Godot', amazing costume and RP jobs, True Love, a castle with Fiendish Deathtraps...in five minutes I was nearly squished by sliding walls, buried under 10,000 rats, covered in grease, hugged by a trans-dimensional deity who looked like a smiling lizard and hit by a pie, and that's before the gerbil got a crush on me.
I just love sentences like that.
(Run-ons, you mean?)
(Oh, hush)
Saturday afternoon I played a supporting character and quite a few horde****** members in Fire on High, a rollicking space opera that was 3/4 Star Trek, 1/4 Gilbert and Sullivan. We got off to a slow start due to some technical glitches--the GMs had put a lot of effort into creating an actual starship bridge with laptops and a big viewscreen and even opening credits, so of COURSE the computer crashed 90 seconds in--and my character was expendable and not really linked into any of the main plots apart from knowing one piece of gossip (which he repeated at Every Available Opportunity), but the horde, omg, the horde. So. Damn. Fun.
I got to play a Harem Guard, a General secretly in love with the General on the opposing side, and Android 8675309; in the course of this I got to kill a Red Shirt five times, once in the ceremonial Tossing of the Spear during a wedding reception. (All the Red Shirts were played by the same player, who got admirably Zen about the short lifespans of her accident-prone characters.)
And then there was the Chicken Dance. We will not speak of the Chicken Dance.
Saturday night was The Dance and the Dawn, which…god, how to describe it? Members of two Houses are brought together for a night of dancing, knowing that someone in the other House is their capital-T True Love and this is their only chance to find them. Imagine a high stakes speed-date designed by Guillermo del Toro and set in a twilight part of Fairyland and you’ve got the basic feel of it.
Hovering over the heads of their charges like swords of Damocles are the Duke of Ash and Queen of Ice, who actually found true love for a few happy hours and then had things go HORRIBLY, UTTERLY WRONG. (The Duke, for very good reasons, totally blames himself; the Queen, for similar but not identical reasons, also blames him. They have Issues.)
The Duke, I can’t describe how much I liked the character sheet, heartbroken and protective and ironic and melancholic and damned and weary, so very weary…and they chose me to play him? ME? And withrigel playing the Queen, and her rp skills and the dynamic between the two of us…oh my god, it was like being a shark and stumbling across an aquatic rodeo. Chelmsford is still rebuilding to replace the scenery that I chewed. And that was before the duel of honor, and the stabbing, and the…I’m getting dizzy just thinking about it all.
After that I went home and I slept for a long, long time.
*Intercon is a weekend-long convention full of larps**.
**Larps, live action role playing, is basically longform improv*** with character sheets and stats (in some cases) and GMs who (in some cases) guide a plot arc.
***Longform improv is….ack, this is exhausting. How exactly did you find this post?
****About as well as a score of chimps tossed into a compound and given boffer weapons and squirt guns, in other words.
*****Who was dressed as Helen Narbon. Which was PERFECT.
******Another quick step back here, as I realize the WoW folks on my f'list outnumber the LARPers: in this context "horde" just means the very brief roles taken on to provide aliens, zombies, helpful hermits, and other encounters for the main cast. No Taurens were harmed in the making of this plotline.
This time in, I felt like I had enough larp-styles under my belt that I knew my strengths and weaknesses, and could pick my games accordingly. Example: I told
tpau that I knew I did poorly in angst-heavy LARPs because, for one thing, you know how chimps bare their teeth and look like they're smiling when they're upset? Same thing with me. So of course my character in my fourth LARP wound up being the most emo, angst-filled character I've ever played, and I LOVED it. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
**The following paragraphs are very spoiler-y.**
Friday night was Divus Ex: Gaslamp Gods, wherein Gods and Powers who had a stake in 19th century England got together in one room and interacted about as well as one might expect****. I played Lugh the Silver-Handed, Celtic god of Skill, and found it challenging. For one thing, I was a bit frazzled from getting lost twice on the drive up and nervous about getting the hand on. For another thing, my character was supposed to have a huge chip on his shoulder about a) these new upstart gods and b) his hand (aka, in his mind, his HORRIBLE DEFORMITY), yet repeatedly he'd go up to a Victorian god ready to pick a fight--and get fawned over for how clever and well-made his hand was. It was like aikido!
And that was before Eureka, the Victorian Goddess of Invention*****, gave him absinthe. Things got very strange after that. It was shortly thereafter that he cut a deal with Brigid and the God of Railroads to create a network of railroads that ran on leyline energy, and a Celtic Mystery Cult version of the Masons to be in charge of building and operating them. Which felt good, but compared to Puck and the angels nearly ending existence and Cernunnos nearly turning every mortal into a tree, it was small potatoes.
I will state with pride that the four Celtic deities made a wonderfully dysfunctional family. When the happiest, most stable person in your group is the Morrigan...
After the game it was time to drink root beer floats and wish
tpau and shadowravyn happy birthdays! Which involved limoncello and geeky conversations and much goodness.Saturday morning involved getting lost in a completely different way, and then the run of Girl Genius: Agatha Heterodyne and the Perfect Construct. Wow wow wow. Alternate dimensions, multiple Agathas, guest appearances by characters from 'Narbonic' and 'Buck Godot', amazing costume and RP jobs, True Love, a castle with Fiendish Deathtraps...in five minutes I was nearly squished by sliding walls, buried under 10,000 rats, covered in grease, hugged by a trans-dimensional deity who looked like a smiling lizard and hit by a pie, and that's before the gerbil got a crush on me.
I just love sentences like that.
(Run-ons, you mean?)
(Oh, hush)
Saturday afternoon I played a supporting character and quite a few horde****** members in Fire on High, a rollicking space opera that was 3/4 Star Trek, 1/4 Gilbert and Sullivan. We got off to a slow start due to some technical glitches--the GMs had put a lot of effort into creating an actual starship bridge with laptops and a big viewscreen and even opening credits, so of COURSE the computer crashed 90 seconds in--and my character was expendable and not really linked into any of the main plots apart from knowing one piece of gossip (which he repeated at Every Available Opportunity), but the horde, omg, the horde. So. Damn. Fun.
I got to play a Harem Guard, a General secretly in love with the General on the opposing side, and Android 8675309; in the course of this I got to kill a Red Shirt five times, once in the ceremonial Tossing of the Spear during a wedding reception. (All the Red Shirts were played by the same player, who got admirably Zen about the short lifespans of her accident-prone characters.)
And then there was the Chicken Dance. We will not speak of the Chicken Dance.
Saturday night was The Dance and the Dawn, which…god, how to describe it? Members of two Houses are brought together for a night of dancing, knowing that someone in the other House is their capital-T True Love and this is their only chance to find them. Imagine a high stakes speed-date designed by Guillermo del Toro and set in a twilight part of Fairyland and you’ve got the basic feel of it.
Hovering over the heads of their charges like swords of Damocles are the Duke of Ash and Queen of Ice, who actually found true love for a few happy hours and then had things go HORRIBLY, UTTERLY WRONG. (The Duke, for very good reasons, totally blames himself; the Queen, for similar but not identical reasons, also blames him. They have Issues.)
The Duke, I can’t describe how much I liked the character sheet, heartbroken and protective and ironic and melancholic and damned and weary, so very weary…and they chose me to play him? ME? And with
rigel playing the Queen, and her rp skills and the dynamic between the two of us…oh my god, it was like being a shark and stumbling across an aquatic rodeo. Chelmsford is still rebuilding to replace the scenery that I chewed. And that was before the duel of honor, and the stabbing, and the…I’m getting dizzy just thinking about it all.After that I went home and I slept for a long, long time.
*Intercon is a weekend-long convention full of larps**.
**Larps, live action role playing, is basically longform improv*** with character sheets and stats (in some cases) and GMs who (in some cases) guide a plot arc.
***Longform improv is….ack, this is exhausting. How exactly did you find this post?
****About as well as a score of chimps tossed into a compound and given boffer weapons and squirt guns, in other words.
*****Who was dressed as Helen Narbon. Which was PERFECT.
******Another quick step back here, as I realize the WoW folks on my f'list outnumber the LARPers: in this context "horde" just means the very brief roles taken on to provide aliens, zombies, helpful hermits, and other encounters for the main cast. No Taurens were harmed in the making of this plotline.
