KublaCon 2015

This year for KublaCon I only played in two games, and ran one - but they were all good. The games I was in were:

• The Battle of Ankh (Saturday 11AM)
• STRIKE! STRIKE! (Saturday 6PM)
• Dark Ridings (Sunday 11AM)

This was a larp in the comedic fantasy setting Discworld, planned prior to the news of author Terry Pratchett's death in March 2015. So it turned into a tribute as well. This was planned for 30 players, with 10 written by each of three authors, but we only had around half that. The ongoing device was a "Battle of the Bands" where different musical groups would perform, lip-synching to songs over speakers.

I played a punk rock golem (a magically-animated clay statue) named "Sheol", based I think on punk rock legend John Cale. The golems were all free beings - part of the Golem Trust, a financial collective where free golems put their earnings into buying other golems and freeing them. They were technically still inanimate property, but owned by the Trust organization that they controlled. My character couldn't talk, but only wrote on a slate. I had a paper notepad, but I could also talk to represent my writing out-of-character. I often wrote messages as part of staying in character, though. The fun bit was being a punk rocker who would only grunt and communicated in short phrases (because writing is slow). The highlight of that, of course, was the lip-synch number with the other golem (played by David O) where I vigorously air-guitared and then joined in on lyrics with only unintelligible grunts. It was very punk.

David O was my counterpart as the extremely stiff golem Castor, who didn't believe in golem free will, but instead just tried to obey his owner. It was an interesting conflict, though we were so diametrically opposed that it was difficult to make any progress. I think we would have made interesting influences on a missing character, a third golem. It was cool to juxtapose the humorous punk rocker who can only grunt, with the serious conflict over free will and slavery. Interesting other characters I interacted with included: Erik D as a human guitarist in love with a vampire who killed himself in-game, Ammy W as the vampire who accepted a challenge to a guitar battle with me that we unfortunately didn't get a chance to play out, Erik W as a wonderfully lispy and helpful Igor, Danielle as the rich diva, Rebeka as Lumina (the Moon), Zev as reporter, and Oliver as the musician's union assassin.

The main plot was around the Moon disappearing, but for a while it took back seat to the band performances, which is amusing and quite Diskworld-y.

STRIKE! STRIKE!

I was sold on choosing this game mainly by the choice of Hans Gruber as the lead, since Die Hard is my favorite movie, and Alan Rickman is a big part of it. As it turned out, though I was only in the middle of the character picks, Hans Gruber was still free, and I got him. He was the one who had kicked out the event, inviting the other characters together with his girlfriend, the Baroness from G.I. Joe (played by Lauren A).

The characters were an odd mix to me. The heroes included James Bond, Indiana Jones, Kyle Reese (from Terminator), Ash (from Army of Darkness), Batman, and Spiderman. The villains included Hans Gruber, the Baroness, Agent Smith (from The Matrix), Caesar (from Planet of the Apes), Davy Jones (from Pirates of the Carribean), Maleficent, Cyrus the Virus (from Con Air), Princess Kitana (from Mortal Kombat), and O-Ren Ishii (from Kill Bill). There were also two studio representatives - icons of their studios, Lady Libery for Columbia and Bugs Bunny for Warner Brothers. Oddly, Spiderman was specified as being from the comics, and Maleficent from the original Sleeping Beauty cartoon rather than the live-action feature. The genre mixing meant it was difficult to have any idea what to expect, or how things worked. In particular, since I was only an exceptional thief with no science-fiction elements or magic, it was tricky to work out what was possible.

The game had several plotlines going on in the background, while in the foreground there was the device of a mystic tournament of 15 fights (one every 15 minutes) to determine who was the greatest badass among the 16 key fighters. Each fight was done purely by mutual narration by the two players. The players first found out out-of-character who would win, and then came up with narration for how that end would be reached. Then in-character, the two characters would disappear and the players would narrate how the fight would appear on the screen.

As things turned out, we attempted to seal the Necronomicon in a dimensional jar; heroes and villains cooperated to work against a reality-hopping plot of Cyrus; Agent Smith started to borg-ify Cyrus and Bugs Bunny; I restored Maleficent's power by a drink from the Holy Grail (stolen from Indy); she used this to get her magic needle back; James Bond won the tournament in the final match against Spiderman, who knocked him out but left him alive. In the end, my secret plot was foiled when Maleficent put everyone to sleep; and we were sent back to our individual realities as the Kraken came to eat us all.

Dark Ridings

Dark Ridings
Game system	Homebrew LARP	Start time:	SUN, 11:00 AM
Category	LARP	Duration	6 Hours
Event ID	79002	Location	9041
# of Players:	16	GM / Judge	John Kim
Description	The high priestess Teona has called the council of practitioners to meet and discuss the disturbing visions that all the members have felt. The dark force that all the practitioners have felt is closer than even she thinks, however, and its first strike will be before they have fully met. The question is, how will they stop it? This is a Voodoo Noir mystery larp, set on a fictional island in the early 20th century. It is a mix of politics and mysticism, with ghosts and loas both featured in confronting the danger. TROUPE:
C/E Rating	1/A    Complexity = Simple / Experience = None | C/E Info
More Info	Dark Ridings

This was my first run of a game design centered on Haitian voodoo and film noir. It was set in 1930 on technically a fictional island, that was clearly Haiti. My original thought was that I wanted to avoid getting caught up in historical detail, and portray a positive image but not miscommunicate the real-world practice of voodoo. I'm not sure about that decision, but it worked well enough. The players and their characters were:

• Danielle G as Mama Teona, The Wise Matriarch
• Theron G as Father Adric, The Catholic priest
• Josh E as Kalfou, The Trouble-Stirring Renegade
• Samantha L as Francois, The Portly Business Magnate
• Barak E as Dante, The Crusading Lawyer
• Sandra M as Keyon, the Charming Gangster
• Milo K as Wilky, the Hard-boiled Detective
• Autumn R as Sidney, the Sickly Plantation Owner
• Lauren as Darline, the Femme Fatale
• Lorelei as Lolo, the Nosy Teenager

This was 10 out of 16 planned characters for the game. The 6 missing characters were: Zora, The Salt-of-the-Earth Farmer; Janjak, The Corrupt Policeman; Ton De, the Creepy Accomplice; Manou, the Brutish Thug; Zann, the Knife Man; and Latondra, the Plucky Assistant. Still, I think the mix was good. Having only 10 players made it easier for everyone to sit around and discuss things as a group, but still easily break up into small groups and pairs.

The characters were all planned around film noir archetypes, which worked quite well, I thought. The setting is that in 1930, a group of prominent voodoo practitioners meet at the home of Mama Teona to discuss a recent murder of one of their own, the land-owner and husband of Darline. The central device of the game was that each player has a sealed envelope that represented a loa that they could call upon in the game. When they open the envelope, they are possessed by the spirit and have a different character sheet they run. From my point of view, some things that worked really well in this first run:

• Confession to the priest was a great way to bring out character foibles and involve their spiritual life, and
• The device of loa possession worked excellently.
• The discussion over spirituality and politics kept up and had some meat to them.
• The dramatic violence and death of the end of it, started by Josh in excellent sticking to his character's guns, and ended by Lauren in climactic use of her loa's power.

For future runs, I want to include a little more religious background for players. Also, I should clarify that the envelopes (and the designated loa) are a game device rather than a character feature.