The following is a documentation of our internal production notes, which we share to give you an insight into our creative process and approach to organising and running this LARP.
The following is a documentation of our internal production notes, which we share to give you an insight into our creative process and approach to organising and running this LARP.
To develop a setting where everything is broken, its inhabitants are reckless and vulnerable, where conflicts are epic but always personal, where the world feels lived in.
To develop a story where everyone is the protagonist of their own part of the show, where no one is just the adjunct or facilitator to someone else's star part, where everyone is different but equally important.
To give each character a rich backstory that informs a clear purpose and a faceted agenda , proving the tools that enable players inhabit and explore their environment.
To establish connections between characters that is driven by strong emotional and practical dependencies. People have to need each other but their desires always have to clash.
To find a stage for the action to take place on that feels real, is visually appealing, and where are there are well-connected spaces for both public and private play.
To create a set of minimalist rules that can be seamlessly integrated with the action occuring in-game, allowing for a clear communication between participants without breaking the flow of the narrative.
To always centre the comfortable player experience for everyone, using extensive workshops for communication and trust building, employ techniques for safe, consensual gaming, providing amenities ,and having staff to always be there in times of need.
The Kindred of the canon World of Darkness are long-term planners. They can spend centuries slowly circling their prey and hatching their schemes, while they keep a low profile and try to subsist without making waves. They need to play it safe. They want to stay alive and come out on top. They want to win.
We portray a few pivotal nights in the characters' existence. Things need to change quickly and explosively. The most important thing for that to work is that no character holds back and plays it safe. Our game is all about seizing the moment, throwing caution to the wind, and encouraging escalation.
Character goals and player goals are in direct opposition to each other.
The world of our game is not a simulation of the real one or even a semi-real one with vampire conspiracies added. It works according to the conventions of a tragedy.
A tragedy depicts terrible and sorrowful events that befall characters who invite an emotional connection who live in a world of heightened sensibilities and grand conflicts.
Many things about the protagonists are great, admirable even, but they have flaws which will bend their path to a downward spiral.
They feel like real people with real emotions. But they don'texist according to the full range of options that the real world provides. They exist in a world that is designed to make them fail.
The heroes and villains of a tragedy never question how on rails their lives seem to be. They don't reflect on the unrealistically narrow band of options they are faced with. They just act, and that is all we need them to do.
But in a LARP there is no on-stage/off-stage separation. Nothing happens unless the players make it happen. So, the players need to be the ones who limit their character's options toward those that will lead to glorious failure.
In our game, a player's agency comes not in avoiding the fate of their character in clever ways - beating the plot -, but from choosing how they will face and deal with it, how they will make it beautiful, touching, and extraordinary.
So, setting up the expectation of absolute in-game failure for everyone gives off-game license to cut loose and go all in on the swansong.
But it's not enought to play for one's own drama, playing to lose is insufficient. For a proper tragedy, we must play to lift, to elevate everyone's game.
Negotiating mutually beneficial experiences, developing a sense of timing, when to push a scene and when to stand back, helping each other to have great confrontations, terrible breakdowns, and good death scenes are all part of this social contract.
To tell a coherent and mutually enjoyable story together, we need to always remember that this is an ensemble piece.
Ours is a game about the final nights of the vampire nation, but the glue that holds their twisted society together and keeps it running are the undead's half-mortal blood servants.
Roughly half of the characters at the LARP are human to begin with. Only through the eyes of humans can we approach the nature of the Beast.
Where would the twisted mystery, the tragic grandeur and the woeful damnation of vampires be apparent if not for the juxtaposition with what it means to be mortal, to be human?
And, vice versa, are vampires not simply a dark, cracked mirror through which the depths of the human condition may be explored?
Mortals at our game will have the same depth of backstory and social ties as their Kindred analogues. They all have things they are good at and things they cannot do without the help of others. They all have vulnerabilities and needs that drive them towards disastrous choices.
From a story perspective, playing a ghoul will make for a different but not a lesser experience of the game. Mortal characters are able to influence the flow of the story all the time, their players having as much real agency as those who happen to portray vampires.
Sure, mortals may sometimes have to play the part of the timid servant out in the open to facilitate their survival, but they usually have a lot of influence on the minds of their masters and even other vampires.
They know their masters broken psyches well, and they know where all the bodies are buried, literally. What's more, they may be simply prized possessions to the undead, but they are prized - that co-dependency is not one-sided, no matter how much vampires would like to believe so.
Who knows who might come out on top?
There is a very real emotional vulnerability in playing a high-intensity game. Every experience has the potential to be transformative in ways both bad and good, subtle and overwhelming.
Saying “It’s just a game, be mature about it,” or, "if you can't cope, don't LARP" as so often happens, all too sadly, doesn’t solve any problems. It shames, it trivialises, it suppresses, it excludes, and it can make things so much worse.
Bleed between the states of mind of character and player will always happen in various degrees. We experience what the character does and, though there are filters at work, the intensity of the feeling can sometimes unexpectedly touch on places even we didn’t know were laden with emotion, or even trauma, for us.
We believe that bleed is natural. It doesn’t just go away, if we deny it. It is valid. It needs to be processed.
Other than conventional wisdom goes, acknowledging that this is really not just a game, that this also is a lived experience, is actually the mature thing to do.
We all need to acknowledge that there is are emotional issues which need to be addressed with tact, empathy, care and the judicious use of coping strategies both during the game and during aftercare.
We need to commit ourselves to creating a space that is accepting and in support of all participant's emotional states.
We need to help foster an atmosphere of trust earned and given between all participants. All our workshops and the entirety of our communication needs to be geared towards the purpose of creating comfort, safety and openness that will allow for deep engagement.
First, we all need to feel safe with each other, so we can then be dangerous together.
All art is inherently political, and so are all games. Denying that is an easy way out of uncomfortahble discussions, an expression of privilege that is in itself a political action, one of oppression and silencing minority voices,
We must take a firm stand against off-game discrimination, be that on gender identity, sexual orientiation, religion, race, body image or otherwise. All forms of harassment will lead to immediate action and expulsion.
Just as much, we must take care to write and review characters and plot for inherent biases. Harmful tropes (such as rape as drama, fridging of women to motivate men, the magical or comic relief BIPOC sidekick to name just a few) must be examined and deconstructed, not repeated and thus re-enforced.
On the same note, the erasure of prejudice and bigotry would come down to a dismissal and erasure of the lived experience of women, ethnic minorities, LGBTQ+ people, people with disabilities, people living in poverty, and many others.
While we have chosen to make our vampires pretty egalitarian (or at least uncaring) where mortal signifiers of in-group/out-group behaviour are concerned, we do portray a society based on oppression, injustice, dogmatism and intolerance that mirrors real life issues through allegory.
This is a fine line to walk, and we must take into account that we will fail often, that we must continue to try, that we need to listen to those affected with humility and be ready to accept and adapt at all times.
Based on player feedback after the first run of this game, the following rules changes have been implemented:
Instead of three different methods of conflict resolution a single, unified mechanic "The Battle of the Beasts" has been used across the board, based on the system that had the most positive feedback.
Instead of only one discipline power per clan and character, every discipline now has two powers, and every clan has access to two disciplines, providing some variety, without making things too complicated.
Hunger and Health mechanics have been altered to give characters a little more maneuvering room while keeping things dangerous and deadly.
Our calibration techniques have been revised and added to, to include what worked well and proved beneficial in other games.
The following changes in terms of characters and stories have been implemented:
Noddism and the truth of Gehenna have been divorced from a perspective were certain Biblical accounts need to be true. The setting has been reshaped to explain why certain Kindred beliefs mirror Christian points of view as per canon, while allowing for broader interpretations and needing no divine intervention at all.
All existing characters and coterie relationships have been subject to revision based on what worked for players and what didn't.
20 characters have been added to the game. Most of them have been added to existing coteries to fulfill additional roles within group dynamics. An entire new coterie has also been added to complete a symmetry of oppositions that was pointed out to us.
While the main plot has been retained, the resolution of the Gehenna scenario has been changed because of the real world developments of past years.
The story beats and the entire event structure have been revised to reflect wishes for more time to explore the roles, inhabit the world and have a softer curve of escalation.