Of Dice and Men: The Story of Dungeons & Dragons and The People Who (25 page)

Our party took seats at a table covered with dark cloth and set with eight heavy pewter plates. A lantern and small candles flickered at the center. On the wall to our right, a royal-blue banner emblazoned with a sunburst hung above a stone fireplace—the crest of Baron Valerius, the noble who governs World’s Edge.

After a few moments, a woman in a plain cloth dress with a lace-up bodice approached the table and bid us welcome. She handed us heavy ceramic mugs, stepped away for a moment, and returned with a pitcher of wine and a charger covered with grapes, cheese, and chunks of cured meat. Famished, we fell on it with gusto.

A few minutes later, we were joined by the final member of our party. A man stood at the head of our table, wearing a loose blue tunic. He seemed familiar to me . . . slightly short, with an athletic build, a healthy tan, and hair cut close to hide where it was thinning and receding.

“My name is Kint,” he said, smiling. “May I join you?” He took a seat at our table. “What brings you to World’s Edge?”

Otherworld is a little bit like Fight Club: There’s brawling, there are secret missions, and you’re not supposed to talk about it. Participants—who may only attend once—are asked to keep the plot a secret; I’m risking a boffer sword up my backside over the few details I’ve already shared.

The code of silence isn’t a by-product of Project Mayhem–style brainwashing, despite the hugely dedicated staff. (Otherworld is run by former participants like Morgan who return year after year to share the experience; their level of devotion may border on cultlike, but it
lacks any of the creepy implications.) Instead, it’s all about spoilers. The Otherworld weekend is really a massive piece of interactive theater, with a script, a cast of characters, and a set of plotlines, some of which repeat year after year. Being a participant feels something like if you climbed up on the stage during the final act of
Hamlet
and kicked Laertes in the crotch . . . and the actors responded by working you into the story and reciting dialogue the Bard had written in case this sort of thing happened.

Otherworld was founded in 1991 by four members of Quest, a Connecticut-based LARPing group. Several months after completing a particularly challenging adventure, they received a letter from one of the participants.

“It was from a woman who’d attended, and she started by saying, ‘You’re going to think I’m crazy, but the event you ran changed my life,’ ” says Kristi Hayes. “She was working in a dead-end job she hated, and she was living with her boyfriend, who from the sound of it was really treating her pretty badly. She’d sort of accepted that . . . this was probably about the best she could expect from life.

“And then, she said, she came and spent the weekend having all these adventures and doing all these challenging things. She was particularly afraid of any sort of public speaking, but at one point during the event, the story line took a dark turn and she had an idea about how to fix things, so she stood up in a crowded room and told everyone about it. People listened to her and followed her idea, and as it turned out, doing so saved the day.

“She told us that for a long while after coming home from the event, she continued on with her normal less-than-stellar routine but often thought about the weekend. She thought about the person she’d been there, the one who’d stood up in front of all those people, even though she was afraid, and convinced them to listen to her. And I will never forget what she wrote about that . . . ‘
She
would never put
up with crap like this.
She
would find a way to fix things . . . if I can do heroic things when I’m running around in the woods, why can’t I do them here at home?’

“And then she did. She went out and got herself a better job and she ditched the lousy boyfriend. She’d made those changes and built herself a better life, and she felt like she needed to write to us and thank us for it. That was just amazing to me, that we’d been able to help someone reach that point. And we started thinking, ‘Gosh, if this event did all that, when really our only goal going into it was for everyone to have fun, well, what would happen if we ran events where we tried to give people these opportunities?’ ”

Because Otherworld deliberately courts non-LARPer participants, it does away with many of the rules typically found in those games. There are no skill points or attributes, and even though you adopt a fantasy name, you remain yourself; you’re not role-playing a character with its own personality.

“I’m always hesitant to use the word ‘role-playing’ to describe what you’re doing at Otherworld, because it so often makes people think they’ll be pretending to be someone other than themselves,” says Hayes. “Still, having said that, we’ve certainly borrowed plenty of ideas from D&D and other role-playing games. We’ve also borrowed ideas from experience-based educational groups like Outward Bound, and then mixed them up together to make something related to both but its own separate thing.”

Otherworld also simplifies the rules for activities like spell casting. In many LARPs, if you want to shoot a lightning bolt at an enemy, you have to hit them with a thrown beanbag while calling out the name of the spell (“Lightning bolt! Lightning bolt!”). At Otherworld, you blow a whistle, everyone freezes in place, and you read from a script that tells everyone exactly how to react:

“I, [name], a mage of Fire, do cast the spell of Lightning Bolt upon
[select one target]. I now call down from the sky a mighty bolt of lightning, which will strike your [specify one limb of your target].”

Otherworld focuses on story, not game play; it’s trying to impart an experience. In many LARPs the plot is utilitarian—“The red army and the blue army are at war” or “You’ve been hired to kill an evil lich.”
²
At Otherworld, there’s a fully developed narrative, a central shared conflict, and dozens of party-specific subplots.

Kint was so moved by our tale of the leviathan and Keer’s desperate need for help that he offered to serve as our companion. He had a house not far from the tavern where we could spend our nights and promised to introduce us to locals who might help with our quest: Solomon, the innkeeper; Serendipity Bostwich, a scholar and scientist; and Obsidian, a cleric rumored to be among the most powerful in the kingdom.

We were discussing our first steps when the doors of the tavern opened and a man entered whose presence silenced all conversation. Tall and handsome, he was dressed in a scarlet tailcoat and wore a black top hat, which he tipped from his head and tucked in the crook of his arm.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he called to the crowd, “I am Maximilian Von Horn, ringmaster of the Circus Eternal.” The troupe, he told us, had set up camp on the edge of town and for the next two weeks would hold nightly performances. We would have a chance to witness some of the finest traveling entertainers in the kingdom: acrobats, jugglers, a strongman, even a fire dancer.

The pronouncement was met with cheers from the crowd. “Do you have any clowns?” a woman yelled from a table across the room.

Von Horn scowled at the thought. “Clowns, my dear, are an unfortunate side effect of circuses.”

My weekend in Connecticut saw the second and final performance of
The Circus Eternal,
a story told over the entire weekend, starring most of the staff and every Otherworld participant. (Each party also has its own subplot, drawn from a pool of frequently repeated conflicts—we were not the first travelers from Keer with a nasty leviathan problem.)

Sometimes the story advanced through a form of dinner theater: When our party visited the tavern for meals, staff members (in character as residents of World’s Edge) would stand to make pronouncements or act out scripted conflicts. At other times the actors used a kind of directed improvisation: while walking across town, our party might run into Bumble the Wizard or Professor Chuttlesworth, who just happened to mention a suspicious crime that had occurred the week before last.

Typically, Hayes writes a new story every two years. They’re meant to entertain using elements of traditional theater (
The Circus Eternal
even included a musical number) but also to encourage participation. Each story places the village in some sort of peril and requires the participants to work toward its salvation.

It’s a surprisingly effective technique. Sure, you might lose yourself in the drama if you sit in a theater and watch a play about a village in peril. But when you sit
in the village
and the actors come up to you, take your hand, and beg for your help, it’s wholly engrossing.

“As a human, I think it’s only natural for me to be really interested in myself,” says Hayes. “So a story in which I personally play a key part? That’s a story I’m going to find very compelling . . . and when I have the opportunity to do incredible things and amaze even myself with what I accomplish, seeing the story unfold is going to have a really powerful effect.

“It’s like when you watch a feel-good movie and you cheer at the end, because the hero triumphs over adversity and you’re left with
this warm glow inside. This kind of story has all that, but the person who triumphs over adversity is you. That’s really powerful.”

I am not a fan of audience participation; when I’m in a theater and the performers step offstage, I tend to shrink in my chair and pray they’ll pick the sucker sitting next to me. But Otherworld is designed from the ground up to pull people out of their seat and into the action, and it’s so smartly scripted you can’t help but be drawn in.

“Each staff handbook I write is about four hundred to four hundred fifty pages long,” says Hayes. “It’s not a true script, of course, in that I rarely tell our eighty-plus staff people exactly what to say. Instead, I tell them about all of their characters—each Otherworld story line has about one hundred characters, not including monsters and encounters of that sort—and the backstory and then also about the rough timeline of the weekend.”

My favorite moments were when a seemingly improvised comment turned out to be a crucial element of the story. For instance, as the plot of
The Circus Eternal
played out, it became clear that Maximilian Von Horn’s traveling show was more than it appeared to be. A full day after his introduction in the tavern, several parties were ambushed and killed by strange monsters in the woods—evil creatures in creepy harlequin makeup, carrying massive swords. It turned out clowns really were “an unfortunate side effect of circuses.”

Successfully executing those plot twists requires tight scripting, but Otherworld also requires improvisation and flexibility, so players can make their own decisions. They need to feel like they’re achieving something, instead of just watching, and that’s where the companions come in.

Embedded into our party as Kint, Chris was able to gently nudge us the way we needed to go while maintaining an illusion of free will. He’d offer suggestions and advice, but since they came from a member of the group, it didn’t feel like we were being railroaded.

In one task, we discovered we needed to enter the realm of Death to obtain a magic item, but the local portal to the underworld was kept closed by Bumble the Wizard, who cast a spell each morning sealing the way. Bumble—a genial but forgetful fellow, his brain lightly fried by arcane forces—wore a string tied around his finger to remind him of this responsibility. So our party decided our best plan was to wait until Bumble was alone, sneak up behind him, and bash him on the head. We’d steal the string and run off, ensuring that he’d forget his duties, the portal would open, and we’d gain access.

It was a fine plan, except for the fact that the weekend’s story hinged on a totally different way to open the portal; doing so early would destroy the plot and the weekend—and we’d all be wanted criminals once Bumble woke up and reported how we’d assaulted and robbed him.

Chris initially tried to warn us off gently (“Maybe there’s another way?”). When we couldn’t come up with a better idea, he made an emotional appeal (“Bumble’s a nice guy, do you really want to hurt him?”). When we revealed ourselves as unfeeling brutes, he succeeded through misdirection (“Since you guys can’t decide, why don’t we do something else and come back to this later?”). Of course, we had decided, but he was able to make his own reservations feel like they were shared. When we tried to return to our ill-considered plan later, he found ways to put us off until the situation resolved itself as planned (“Hey, who’s hungry?”).

Other staff members face their own challenges. Only companions play a single character over the course of a weekend; most staffers play multiple roles, hiding behind monster masks or makeup. They have to make quick changes and move rapidly from one area of the camp to another. In the staff area of the main lodge there’s a massive spreadsheet hung on the walls, stretching from floor to ceiling, easily sixty feet long. It describes where each and every person needs to be
at each moment, and in which costume, over the course of the entire weekend. It looks like something you might have found in George Patton’s command center during the North African campaigns.

Chris also carried an iPhone in his pocket all weekend, running a staff-designed application that used the phone’s GPS antenna to track our party’s movements. Organizers planned to analyze the data after the fact to determine common routes around the camp and when attendees tend to do different activities. Ultimately, it will help make the weekend’s planning even more precise.

The stagecraft is immensely detailed, too. Otherworld’s props, sets, and costumes may be constructed by amateurs, but they’re convincing enough. When I first walked into the Inn at World’s Edge, I didn’t see a 4-H camp mess hall—I saw something straight out of Tolkien. It might as well have been the Prancing Pony, where Frodo and his friends met the ranger Strider.

“One of my goals, and one of the ways that the stories I’m writing are different from most other authors’, is that I’m really looking to create scenes we can bring to life with a reasonably high degree of realism,” says Hayes. “I won’t write a story that’s set in a castle, because as much as I love to read novels set in castles, we don’t have a castle at our disposal, and I don’t want to settle for a room with cardboard rocks taped to the wall and a ‘pretend this is a castle’ sign. That’s why, at Otherworld, you won’t meet anyone who can fly.”