Leaving Mundania (29 page)

I died almost instantly, and as I lay there on the stairs being dead, I could hear the carnage throughout the house—in the
form of demons counting, people shouting their actions (“One! Two! Three—Evade! Four! …”), people role-playing their injuries, the noises coming from the kitchen, the dining room, outside, the battle splitting into branches—all I could do was hear it, and I was surprised at how totally exciting it was, and how the combat procedures of the game, regulated though they are, created a simulation of chaos, exactly like a battle but in very slow motion. And then I was carried up to the Doctor's room, and lay there in triage until he operated on me, took out my heart, and turned me evil. And still as I lay on the bed in his room I could hear battles outside, characters good and bad trying to get inside. It was terribly exciting. It showed how completely this game, when acted out and taken seriously by a large group of people, can turn into an experience very realistically heart-pounding.

Daniel, a web designer from Boston who played a cryptozoologist connected to Chip's character, thought that the big brawl helped unify Team Good. He remembered, “Everyone was on the brink of death; there were undead chasing us from every direction.” After he helped drag the dead upstairs, “the wounded characters bounded together to regroup and confront it [Gene]. It was a compelling, almost epic moment because at that point everyone was working together to fight the same thing—we had the nun's paladin wielding the holy sword we'd acquired earlier and a slew of characters gunning it out on the stairs uncertain as to whether we'd survive. And we did, because we were awesome.”

The players' highlights weren't all action oriented. Aatish, a physicist who played an undercover member of the Knights Templar, really got into the role-play. Later, he explained, “The moment when I woke up in the doctor's office and was staring at the ceiling, having just been chloroformed was a real in-character moment for me. The doctor played his character so well that I really found my sense of out-of-game reality sort of melt away and became increasingly convinced by the reality of what was happening in-game. I started getting stressed out by my conflicting allegiances, which I think is hilarious. That
incredible moment of suspension of the disbelief was definitely the high point of my experience.”

I missed what was, perhaps, the most memorable scene of the game. Both the evil and good rituals required a statue from another place, through a portal to another dimension. Gene had decided that the players would get the statue from a being who is part of the Cthulhu oeuvre, a demony creature named Nyarlathotep, essentially a stand-in for the devil. He decided that the NPCs would portray the seven deadly sins when the players entered and asked my permission to run a scene that had what could kindly be called “mature” themes. He warned everyone going on this mission out-of-game before they went down the stairs into the basement. No one will ever forget the sight. Two male NPCs unwillingly coupled on the floor, leaving a stream of fake blood below them. One of Gene's NPCs force-fed him cookies, beer, and cream puffs, personifying gluttony. Three months later, Gene said the thought of sugar cookies still made him sick. For the characters, the commitment of the NPCs to terrifying them raised the level of the game. The detective bartered away his skill at lock picking—to such an extent that he was unable to use doors at all afterward—in exchange for the statue the team so needed, and everyone returned to the house, their sanity levels a little lower after the numerous checks performed in the portal.

Events quickly unspooled after the portal group returned. The mystic and the nun powered up the statue, with Sarah, who played the mystic, breaking out some chants she knew from yoga. One of the businessmen bartered away his hand in exchange for a ritual implement needed for the good ritual. The mobster, turned evil by the doctor, had to shoot one of his prostitutes in order to get an implement that Team Evil needed for its ritual. She survived, and he blamed her injuries on the zombies that happened to attack at that moment. When the doctor attempted to revive her and remove her heart, something went awry, and she was able to remember what had happened to her and tell the others. As Liz “killed” her boyfriend in retaliation for his corpse-animating ways, a series of fish-demons stormed the house, killing Team Evil in mid-ritual and disrupting Team Good's subsequent attempt to bar Cthulhu from this world. Jeramy described the
carnage as Cthulhu created a swirling vortex that destroyed much of the house, killing those inside. The final round of sanity checks, as Cthulhu began emerging from the center of the ritual circle made in the backyard, left nearly every character insane. At the last minute, Dieter the mobster, hewing to his backstory as a devout Catholic, broke through the evil doctor's hold on his soul and gave up the statue. An angered Cthulhu ate him, but with the statue in hand, the remaining good characters were able to close the vortex.

With that, the game ended, and we all headed into the living room for debriefing. We went around in a circle, talking about what had happened to each of us during the game. George thought it was funny that while Cthulhu was sucking everyone into his tentacly mouth, the big game hunter walked into the vortex to retrieve her gun but failed to retrieve George's unconscious body. The shady businesswoman was delighted to have sold her whaling company to the dilettante, the mystic liked being the unofficial leader of Team Good, the precog artist liked drawing the “visions” the GMs gave her, and the nun liked retrieving the skull of St. Catherine she'd been sent to locate, even though her character died. As we went around the room, it was plain that almost everyone had had a good time. Jeramy said it was the most smoothly run game he'd seen. Even the NPCs seemed to have enjoyed donning latex prosthetics and scaring the bejeezus out of the players. I was so relieved it was over that I almost threw up.

We spent the rest of the evening getting to know each other out-of-character and kvetching over all the things that had happened in-game.

My inbox filled up with post-game questionnaires in the following weeks, and a number of common experiences emerged. I felt nervous to read the questionnaires, since I had encouraged the players to write scathing criticisms, but as it turned out most people enjoyed the game, and their writing articulated a number of key truths about the hobby, impressions that reinforced my own. For starters, most everyone felt surprised that larp was so fun. Though he had never larped before, Chip immediately connected larp with childhood pretend, echoing a typical explanation of the hobby, that it is cops and robbers for adults. He wrote:

I was surprised, really, by how absorbing the experience was; it was like playing make-believe when I was a child, and having no sense of passing time. I expected it to be more awkward, that we'd spend a lot of time giggling at ourselves and that we'd eventually fall out-of-character completely and the whole thing would descend into chaos. But no: within minutes I felt transported, simply by putting on the trappings—the clothes, the mannerisms, the motivations—of someone I was not, and it was surprisingly easy to fall into that role and be there for an extended time. Time passed very swiftly and I hardly noticed that the sun had set. I think it had to do not only with playing a role, but playing that role with some goal in mind, a motivation—the game element of it. It was a quest, full of intrigue, danger, shotguns, whispered asides, hidden nooks, tight stairwells, people you couldn't trust—it was surprisingly absorbing and one of the most fun weekends I've had in a long time. It was also utterly exhausting—I was surprised by that.

As a new larper, I'd had trouble really getting into character and out of my awkward self, so I'd tried to help my players by providing longer, interlocked backstories, costuming tips, and realistic props, and by bringing in role-play veterans to model game behavior. Still, before the game I'd been anxious that my rookies wouldn't play through the awkwardness and into their characters, something I was rarely able to do even after a couple of years on the scene. As it turned out, in many ways, my efforts paid off. As John, a physicist who played a wealthy businessman put it, “I thought things would be a little more awkward, but when everyone around you is doing their best, then it puts pressure on you to keep up your own character as well. Acting in-character was another thing that I thought might feel sort of weird, but it was surprisingly natural.”

Not everyone found it so simple to get into character. Several players definitely felt self-conscious, like Jenn, Jeramy's girlfriend and our precognitive artist, who cleverly figured out how to keep that awkwardness in-game. She wrote, “As the game went on, I noticed I wasn't the only one who was having trouble not laughing sometimes …
but that could easily be passed off in-character as insanity eking through.” For many players, the role-playing breakthrough came when they realized they didn't have to perform the character as if it were Shakespeare but could relax and let some of their own personality come through. August, a physicist who played the mob boss, explained, “Rather rapidly, the character just devolved into me being me. Once I started yelling, telling jokes, and directly engaged in all affairs, I was simply acting in the way I would if I were put in that situation (and happened to have a criminal history). A fifty-year-old, brutal, German, mob boss would
never
be that loud and engaged in a room with strangers.”

My cousin Phoebe and Daniel the web designer, both tabletop role-players, found that playing in a larp changed their geek-on-geek prejudices about the hobby. Daniel wrote, “Like many other role-players (and probably the rest of the world at large) I'd always secretly looked down my nose at the activity…. But I also think I secretly felt that I was going to love it.” Phoebe came from a similar place. She wrote, “Having previously developed a pretty negative opinion of larping and larpers through my self-perceived placement in the geek hierarchy, I was most surprised by how much fun I had…. It really did feel like a natural next step in gaming for me, combining my beloved tabletop with my hobby of costuming. Larping was exactly what I expected it to be: people in costumes running around killing things and solving mysteries almost completely in real time. I guess I've moved to a lower level in the geek power rankings now.”

Not everyone loved the game—one of the players, a mathematician, said that the game caused her to realize that “Larp is not for me…. I couldn't get into my character at all; I didn't know what she should be doing. And since everybody else was really into it, I felt strange…. For me, at least, a lot of things just felt like ‘milling around.'” I hadn't avoided dull cocktail party syndrome completely.

The larp also evoked feelings in the players that lingered after the game ended. Sarah, for example, who played the mystic and unofficial leader of Team Good, felt betrayed by Daniel, who had been turned evil toward the end of the game. As she put it, “I felt so much closer to everyone after [the game]! I'd never met Daniel, but talked to him
Friday and then we ended up on the same ‘team' in game. When I found out after it was over that he'd been turned to the dark side right at the end, I felt totally betrayed and the game was over already!” To me, the fact that Sarah couldn't shake the feeling of betrayal meant the game had been successful in forcing her to invest emotionally in her character.

Although the game had ended, several players weren't ready to let it go. The return to normal life from this metaphoric vacation was difficult for August, who felt “a jumble of emotions days afterward that took some time to weed through,” adding that the event had been “a whole day of being bawdy, violent, aggressive, powerful, well-dressed, and deeply engaged in life and death situations. The following day I had to go back to worrying about pleasing a potential advisor.” Vijay, a mathematician who played the detective, had to leave early the next morning to get to an event with his advisor and wished he had more time to spend with the other players out-of-game. His early departure left him with “this strange empty feeling,” because “I had spent a lot of time with many really cool people the previous day, but I didn't know their names or anything about them and didn't even say goodbye to most of them. I would have at least liked an extra day to hang out with them in real life!” In other words: larp can create a yearning for out-of-game social contact.

Nearly everyone felt the game had brought them closer to their fellow players. After the game, Daniel felt like he'd known some players for a long time and that he “could strike up a conversation with them without fear because, after all, we faced the hideous unknown together,” and said that the game worked as an icebreaker. Jenn found it easier to socialize in-character, because “I didn't have to worry about being awkward or making a good impression,” but after the game was over, she felt that it was “a common experience we could all relate to.” Chip said simply, “I loved my fellow gamers. We were an amazing group of people.” John felt that the experience “was somehow more intimate than, say, going camping for the weekend.”

So what was the verdict? Of the fifteen new larpers who tried Cthulhu Live, thirteen said they'd try larp again, given similar circumstances and a similar group of people. Several people expressed
concerns about larping regularly, worrying that the game might take on an inappropriate level of importance in their lives, since it was so absorbing.

The lingering effects of the game were more substantial than I expected. The game drew people together and bonded them, serving as the core topic of conversation for the rest of the evening. Afterward, Team Good met up for drinks in Boston a couple times. A month after the game, when George and I went to a gathering where many of the physicist and mathematician gamers were present, we talked about the game for nearly two hours, boring those who hadn't been there.