Live Game Labs

24Hour_FinalRules

UPDATED AGENDA and Rules

It’s UP!

Background information for the Game is now available here! Sign up via email at kirsten.hageleit at gmail.com!

This is going to be an experimental larp in many respects, so please email me at the address above if you have questions or confusions. Signups for this round will be capped at 25 participants, but I will be running this at least once again, at TriWyrd Con (http://wyrdcon NULL.com/tri-wyrd/) this June.

For more Sunken Places inspiration…

The Game of Sunken Places
historical paraphernalia (http://mt-anderson NULL.com/sbs/)
assorted relevant documents (http://www NULL.scholastic NULL.com/gameofsunkenplaces/explore/)
trailer (http://www NULL.mt-anderson NULL.com/suburbmovie/)

“Hide And Seek (http://www NULL.youtube NULL.com/watch?v=McDgDlnDX0Y)“

SCIENCE FICTION GAME THIS SATURDAY, JANUARY 7 2012!

A new science fiction interactive theater (larp) game is starting, the first session is this Saturday, January 7, 6pm-10pm(ish).

Larpers of all skill are very welcome!! It’s a fun cooperative task-based sci fi game with a heavy dollop of role playing. If you are a fan of Firefly, Battlestar Galactica, or Star Trek, you’ll enjoy Starship Valkyrie.

I am role-playing the commander of the Sigrún, a new Valkyrie-class starship. This event will be about the launch of the new ship with her new crew. The game lasts about 4-5 hours and costs $25 per person, and that includes snacks and all the props you’ll need.

Location is a Tax Plus office on Venice Boulevard, a few miles west of the 405 freeway. Plenty of free parking around.

Costuming is extremely simple (just wear the color related to your department), rules are very easy and will be explained. However, if you want to make a character and have input on who you are, you need to sign up ASAP. We do welcome walk-ons from 6pm to 7pm, but you’ll have to take the character we give you.

More info here (http://starshipvalkyrie NULL.com/)

Sign up on the FB event here (http://www NULL.facebook NULL.com/events/205949729487804/)

(http://www NULL.facebook NULL.com/events/205949729487804/)Happy New Year!

A freeform larp about games, live-action roleplaying in particular, with accompanying workshops and discussion.

Game Type: Theater, metagame.
Date: February 24 (evening) and 25 (all day). Additional workshops for players may be added as needed and as schedules permit.
Locations: TBD for pre-game workshops, Wyvern Manor for the final game
Players: maximum 20
Ulterior Motives: To discuss and then play out the different roles of larp in a quick and highly improvisational game, based loosely on the book The Game of Sunken Places. This is our first attempt at a Scandinavian-style larp workshop, and I want it to be fun as well as informative for all the participants. However, the process will require a real commitment of time and energy from everyone.

More resources on the world of Sunken Places can be found here (http://mt-anderson NULL.com/sbs/), and here (http://www NULL.scholastic NULL.com/gameofsunkenplaces/explore/#).

Introductions
There is a book called The Game of Sunken Places. It concerns a game, played and designed by human beings, but meant to determine the final outcome of a conflict between two warring parties of an enchanted, otherworldly race. The game is run in secret, and the truth is kept from the players. It is not made for their benefit; they are like tokens, or dice. The makers of the game are themselves members of the warring parties, bound by only their own rules—and they are not impartial.

In the book, the game is played by two young boys, invited under false pretenses, set up to play without their consent, and by their playing they determine the fates of millions of people—or, “people”—they do not know, and will never meet. There is nothing in it for them, and yet they are forced to play.

It is, in many ways, a game made of lies, signifying nothing.

Of course, every larp is a game made of lies. The outcomes of our struggles there matter nothing in the actuality of our daily lives. And yet we play. We design; we build. We stay up through late nights to dream up new worlds; we sleep in the cold and wait for inevitable battles in the cold hours before dawn. We spend our money and our time on making unreal things slightly more real, to step into worlds other than our own.

Why do we play?

Despite the growing body of work studying larp, nobody to my knowledge has tackled this one yet. In truth, the answer is likely to shift places, depending on the point of view of the person asked. However, in Southern California we haven’t had much access yet to the intellectual aspects of larp, and the question itself has gone unasked. This is not a fault. Many people participate in larp merely because they enjoy it, and they don’t need to look any deeper than that. They are fortunate.

Some of us, however, aren’t so easily satisfied. What we are doing, we think, is actually rather interesting, and odd. We pretend we are someone else, in strange worlds we dream up ourselves: all the traditional province of childhood. Now, play pretend and world-building are acceptable for adults, but if you can make a living doing it—actor or author or director or videogame designer, fine, but there is no respect for the amateur here. When you consider the acceptance given to the amateur chef, or weekend soccer league, or the community theater, this seems a little suspicious. Why is what we do so much different?

We could, of course, just sit and discuss it. But why not play it?

A game, based on the theme and world of The Game of Sunken Places­—a game about a Game designed, constructed, run, and played by all the participants.

More to come.

LGL is running a pervasive, weekend long larp at the steampunk symposium (http://hrmsteam NULL.com/) January 13-16.
The symposium is a weekend-long steampunk convention aboard the Queen Mary (http://www NULL.queenmary NULL.com/) ship in Long Beach–what an awesome venue!

We can use some NPCs and players. If interested, email Aaron (see contact info to the right).

If you are a GM or designer, there is room for more RPGs, board games, card games, etc. Contact Aaron for more details.

Pre-registration closes December 12. (http://hrmsteam NULL.com/register NULL.html)

For more info about our larp, click here (http://hrmsteam NULL.com/gamereg/Schedule NULL.php?action=25&EventId=15).

January 28 & 29, 2012:
Live Game Labs, in cooperation with UCLA’s Enigma (http://wiki NULL.enigmata NULL.org/index NULL.php?title=Main_Page), will host our first larp design workshop on the UCLA campus.

Folks are to arrive Saturday morning for some general larp theory lectures and discussions about the art form.
Next, teams and their coaches will be selected and three “secret ingredients” will be announced.
These teams and their coaches then have 24 hours to design a 90-120 minute larp that will run on Sunday.

Cost: will be $20 tops, if not less. And this is for photocopying, mainly.

We especially need playtester judges to play all the team’s larps on Sunday, from roughly noon to 6pm.
If you are interested in participating as a designer, playtester, or even a coach, please contact Aaron at: AaronLARP@gmail.com

(this will be cross posted to LARP Academia, International LARP Academia, LARP Alliance Advisory Council, Live Game Labs, my LJ, and the Wyrd Con group)

Inspired by a heated discussion on the Wyrd Con facebook group, I wanted to throw this question out to y’all:

What is your ideal larp?
In other words, what do you think would most satisfy you in a larp experience?
This could be something you have already participated in, and could be something you designed or played (but say which).
It could be something you’ve read about, or something you are working on. It could be an ideal that’s never attained.
It could be your very first one, but it’s more than just a great moment in a larp, but ideal larp as a whole, where nothing goes wrong.

If you could wish your perfect larp into existence, what would it be like?

I am curious because I would like to know what people seek in larps, or what gives them enjoyment. The facebook discussion was using words like “fun” and “entertainment” a lot, but I feel that those are very subjective terms. I have more than once had the most “fun” in a larp where my character died, for example. But I can see others having a horrible experience if their character dies. I ask not because I want to judge or critique, but because I am genuinely curious. I hope that you will be respectful of others responses. We each have our own desires and dreams, and I am fascinated by the variety of them. I think the larp art form can satisfy everyone, but I’d like to know what can or has satisfied you from a larp.

To get the ball rolling, here’s my response:

My ideal larp, my gold standard, my OPINION (note this is not fact, just opinion) would be one of the Lovecraft larps run by the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society. I’ve only read about and talked to the GMs about them, never played in one. So in reality, it might not be as cool as it sounds, but to me, they do everything I want in a larp:

total immersion – everything is exactly what it is, including yourself. If the spell is written in Latin, you better know Latin or find someone who does to translate it. There are no character stats or skills. You do what you can do. You have a character, however, but one that is based on your own abilities, a la, if you really can understand Latin, you can play a classics professor. The ultimate goal of this, which occurred in an HPLHS larp was that a player dreamt in character–it was a nightmare, and they woke up screaming. This paralyzed another player, who was so scared they couldn’t move to comfort them, just a few feet away in the next bed.

no deadline – the HPLHS larps didn’t have a set time where the game ends. They just kept going until the characters reached a conclusion (or were killed/driven insane). So a larp could last a weekend, a week, four days, one day and a night, whatever. It moves at the speed of the characters: “Hey, let’s get together tonight and go talk to that crazy old man under the bridge about those strange lights he saw.” There were some controls by the GMs, where a ritual would take place at a certain point, but I’ve never had a larp that wasn’t shackled to a clock somewhere, usually connected to the venue’s rental contract.

no Big Brother GMs – The HPLHS had GMs design larps, but then they remained behind the scenes until the end (or maybe appeared at the beginning). Because everything was 360º involvement, they weren’t there, though they usually had an NPC chaperone for the players, or played an NPC so they could be with the PCs. But I love the idea that there will be times when the PCs really are by themselves in the environment. It’s my belief that any time a player has to talk to a GM, for a rule clarification or more information about something happening in the bubble (or magic circle), the larp’s fiction hiccups. My ideal larp has me meeting the GM(s) at the beginning and then at the post-event wrap up for milkshakes, and other than that, I never interact with them.

high production value – In “Mose Ain’t Dead”, the HPLHS PCs boarded a helicopter and flew out over to the sand dunes of the SoCal desert. This was required so they could get an overhead view of a giant occult symbol drawn in the sand, hundreds of yards across. The chopper lands, the PCs meet with an NPC who hands them a shovel and tells them to start digging in the middle of the symbol. In a shallow grave is a life size withered corpse (a prop, but a very good one). It’s things like that that I would remember forever. The attention to detail, to props and items and artifacts and costumes, etc., are exceptionally high with their larps, and I really desire that. Although I can have a great time in a hotel banquet room doubling as a starship, I’d really like to experience something totally unique and special, made specifically for the narrative, and sells it. I came very close to this in a horror larp that Christian Brown (co-founder of Live Game Labs and GM of Starship Valkyrie) ran years ago at a creepy old house in Hollywood: there was a secret door under a floor rug in the living room. I lifted it up and saw a skeleton clutching some old pages of a journal, the papers ruffling in a slight breeze from the long dirt tunnel that ran under the house. I had to pause for a few seconds just to stare at this spectacle before I reached down to snatch the papers, because I was positive something was going to grab my hand as I did. I was totally in the moment, bleeding between character and player. I want more of this.

small player count, three dimensional characters – I’d rather be interacting intensely with a few characters than diluting my role-playing across many individuals. I want to engage with complex human beings with deep personalities, not a large contingent of stats, levels, or race traits. With high PC counts and timely crises, I think I dehumanize the other PCs to their roles/classes/skill sets. When I played “True Dungeon” at GenCon SoCal, it came to a stress point where I just called the other characters by their classes, i.e., “Get the cleric over here!” or “Mage, cast that detect traps spell over here.” There were only five of us, but still, I am much more interested in role playing with characters than throwing a series of numbers against another series of numbers.

danger – There were chances of injury, either physically or psychically, in some of the HPLHS larps. They were horror scenarios, so that’s to be expected, but one anecdote involves PCs being asked to jump off a second-story roof through a fogged dimensional gate where they couldn’t see the other side. The NPC they were pursuing just leapt through, but they didn’t know what was over there. When the HPLHS were recruiting for a larp they never ran, they asked my friend Mike, in all seriousness, “Do you have a phobia of being buried alive?” to which Mike replied “Not yet.” That was a diversion, they wanted to know if Mike was claustrophobic, because in the game they planned on locking him in the trunk of a car. But up front, there’s that element of “You will not finish this larp unscathed” that is very attractive to me.

Cthulhu genre – I have a preference for the horror genre, and especially the works of H.P. Lovecraft, so these types of larps would be pushing my fan-favorite tropes

Few rules – Larp rules usually bore me. I realize they are necessary, but I wish we would have more realistic ways of simulating something than memorizing a D&D handbook. I’d rather spend the time reading about the character or setting.

larps inspired by mood, tone, atmosphere – The HPLHS met as theater majors in college. They are interested in plays and movies more than gaming. This dramatic sensibility is more important to me than gaming tricks, mechanics, randomizers, puzzles, etc. They came from a drama background, not a D&D background.

I’m not sure if the HPLHS will ever run another larp; though they did run one in Sweden a few years ago as part of a screening of their movie The Call of Cthulhu. I doubt I will ever get to play my ideal larp. However, I have wanted to run something like this, but my location fell through (two different larps, two different locations). But I have another option in mind…

If you know of any larps that you think will satisfy my ideals, please let me know.

What’s your ideal larp?

Aaron

PS-that’s my ideal right now. It might change in a month, a year, a decade.

Thank you to the participants of the ChronoAgents Reloaded Road Rally, which took place last Saturday, August 27.

Run by LGL members Aaron & Kirsten (and others), played by LGLers Morgan and Mike (and 19 others), it was a day-into-night event across Los Angeles with clues, challenges, duels, magic, and fake thievery.

Thanks to Kirsten and Ross for all their help, which was critical to making this happen.

Thanks to the businesses that donated product or their venue to the event:
826LA (http://826la NULL.org/) and their Echo Park Time Travel mart, is a on-profit helping kids with writing; and it’s a very cool store that, years ago, inspired me to run another faux time travel road rally
Cafe 50′s (http://www NULL.cafe50s NULL.com/), especially owner Craig and the Silverlake store manager, Dani. They were very hospitable to us. It was Craig’s idea to have the agents find something in the restaurant to stop the clock.
Public School 612 (http://www NULL.publicschool612 NULL.com/), which let us in at the last minute (like Thursday) for the after party.
And to Hollis Bulleit of Bulleit Bourbon (http://www NULL.bulleitbourbon NULL.com/) for donating part of the first place prize.

There was a lot of coverage of this event:
My write up is here (http://aaronjv NULL.livejournal NULL.com/), in multiple parts.
Photos from Ross and others are here (http://www NULL.printroom NULL.com/ViewAlbum NULL.asp?userid=SomeCo&album_id=229028).
Video of Team Delorean’s warrior duel is here (http://www NULL.youtube NULL.com/watch?v=lIGZPhUmnUY).

If you are interested in more events like this, please subscribe to the Live Game Labs mailing list on the right side of this page.

The live action role playing documentary Screw It, I’ll Play Make Believe, directed by Briana Young, will be playing on the Documentary Channel. It features many members of the Live Game Labs, including Aaron and Kirsten. It will play at these times:

Fri, Sep 2, 2011 15:30:00
Tue, Sep 13, 2011 10:00:00
Mon, Sep 26, 2011 02:00:00
Thu, Oct 13, 2011 16:00:00
Mon, Oct 31, 2011 15:30:00
Sat, Nov 12, 2011 19:00:00

If you don’t have the Documentary Channel, you can purchase the DVD here (http://reframecollection NULL.org/films/film?Id=2097).

I usually like to give players some music beforehand to get into the mood. This time it’s just a little late.

Feel free to forward on the link to anyone who played or participated – I don’t have everyone’s email addresses.

And thank you all, again, for making Limbo such a good time!

01 Jazz Devil (The inspiration for the game)

02 Da da Da Ich Liebe Dich Nicht Du Liebst Mich Nicht (and the theme song.)

03 Eye of the Tiger (Paul Anka, “Rock Swings!” Kind of awful; kind of awesome.)

04 Puttin’ On The Ritz

05 Love Is Better Than A Warm Trombone

06 Gunfight Epiphany (Theme from Terriers)

07 The Bossa Nova Squad

08 Walk Like an Egyptian

09 Money Makes The Monkey Dance

10 Burro

11 Mais Non Mais Non

12 I Want To Be Evil

13 Clocks (Buena Vista Social Club Remix)

14 Humo en el Agua

15 Gunning For The Buddha

16 Black Cat Boogie

17 Yachts (A Man Called Adam Remix)

18 Mr. Ghost Goes To Town

19 Feel Good Inc. (Buena Vista Social Club Remix)