Pacificon SF 2015 Report

         This was my twelfth year coming to Pacificon. I had planned on running one larp and one tabletop game, but I didn't get players for my tabletop game (Night Witches).

• Secret Worlds - The Coming Storm
• Endgame
• Oh Dear! We Seem to Have Run Out of Time
• Truce of Mosphiera (CJ Cherryh’s Foreigner)
• Conclusion

Secret Worlds - The Coming Storm

This was a steampunk game in a continuing universe, set on an airship carrying many important statesmen headed from Germany to Paris for a peace conference. Prior to the game, the airship was attacked by pirates, who were driven off by a jet-pack wearing hero, and then aided by a private yacht (who were secretly pirates themselves). The players and their characters included:

• David O as Captain Donovan Smythe (of the luxury liner The Ostermark)
• James A as the engineer of The Ostermark
• Danielle G as Lady Victoria Brettwich (of the private yacht) - aka Broad Head Gil
• John K as Nigel Strong, first mate to Lady Brettwich
• Devon A as Charlie, jetpack-wearing engineer hero
• Joe P as an American industrialist, aka masked crimefighter "The Enigma"
• Rachel Fagundes as a demon-fighting nun
• Wendy L as Lady Hope Bannister
• Bradley M as the professor's assistant
• Stefon M as Mr. Hoagfield, the Professor's asst
• Chelsea K as Maria, a Romanian spiritualist
• David P as __
• Logan W as __
• Lori P as __
• Matt L as __
• Melissa M as __
• Theron G as __
• Amy E as __

There was a fair amount of tension, including a struggle in the cargo hold over an old sarcophagus that some said threatened to release evil, and attempts to dump that and other valuables while on the way. There was also some

Endgame

This was a run of the game from the book, Larps from the Factory. The game instructions were written presuming a personally-run larp space rather than a convention, but in most details I stuck as close as possible to the instructions. Of the larps in that book, this is the closest in style to the typical Bay Area convention larp - so while it is technically Nordic, it is the least shift in style.

• Rob A as Arthur Harringdon, wealthy engineer for the Defense Department and host of the evening.
• Melissa as Anna Harringdon, a rich widow re-married to Arthur.
• Eric R as Andrew Grey, assistant to the host Mr. Harringdon.
• Stefon as Conrad Cox, a car factory owner.
• Danielle as Theodora Cox, niece to the car factory owner.
• Autumn as Sofia Wilcott, a young heiress.
• James A as Benny Bloom, an aspiring writer.
• Logan W as Dr. Jean Edwards, an well-to-do doctor.
• Theron as Marcus Smyth-Montague, a well-bred and debonair gentleman.
• Wendy as Charlotte Fairfax, an heiress and inventor.

         I felt the run went well. It began a bit slow as characters adjusted to the situation, and played a few hands of poker. Soon there was a murder, though, and characters suitably reacted to the situation - and pushed up the tension. There was a small supernatural element, which came up in the form of symbols that some of the characters half-remembered and reacted to. I improvised some of this as GM rather than following exactly the scenario, and I thought it added well to the horror side of things.

Oh Dear! We Seem to Have Run Out of Time

This was another larp from the book, Larps from the Factory. This was more unusual in style, with players creating characters out of whole cloth with little setting defined, defining the whole timelines and/or universes that their characters came out of. The players and the characters they came up with included:

• Chelsea K created Lady Persephone Carter, a time-traveller from 2050 who is very enamored of cats
• Eric R created Prester John, Keeper of the Graal, favoring the age of Arthurian legend, who requires time travel to watch after the Graal which is eternal.
• John K created Joshin Hur, a contractor in Seoul who hijacked the first time travel experiment to create his own "perfect" timeline
• Lori P created Ash, a flapper from the 1920s with innate psychic abilities including time travel and telekinesis
• Scott S created Harrison, a member of a noble time-travelling family (going by Harry) who mostly just surfed and hung out
• Syrina S created Luna, an outgoing woman who does what she wants, fond of the Victorian era
• Jessy W created Roro, hailing from the 7th universe, a member of the family lines of the "Lucky Littles", who stumbled on a pair of glasses that travels through time, and works against her family (who oppose the Royal Society)
• Chris G created Maiz Maximus, an intelligent corn from the year 4000 or so, who happened on a cup from a wrecked spacecraft that lets him travel through time
• David O created Raymond Croft, a man from Cornwall in the 2050s who connected himself psychically to versions of himself in all timelines and dimensions
• Bill H created Herbert Green, a gentleman form Victorian London (going by "H.G.") who is a mechanist
• Amy created Olivia, a socialite and secret cat burglar who stole a piece of jewelry with time travel capabilities

In addition, there were two NPCs: Rob A. as Lord Baron Julian Jules Nolden-Wells, and Devon A. as Terry Fletcher Houlihan-Viceroy.

As can be expected by this eclectic mix, the characters were confused upon connecting to each other, and we had a bunch of discussion about what could be done about the time travel problem that we were collectively stuck with - trapped in a bubble of reality apart from the changes that threatened the universe. Eventually, it came out that there was a prison of sorts within where we were, and that someone had escaped. Play was still enjoyable, but it struggled with incoherence.

Truce of Mosphiera (CJ Cherryh’s Foreigner)

This was a larp set within the setting of C.J. Cherryh’s science fiction novel Foreigner and its sequels. It is set a few centuries before the main era of the books, in a time skimmed over within the first book. A colony ship from Earth becomes hopelessly lost, and the colonists are stranded by a world inhabited by a humanoid alien race, the Atevi. The humans attempt to settle and live with the Atevi, but war breaks out through difficulty in interacting. The Atevi have a different set of emotions, based mainly on hierarchical relations. The players and their characters included:

• Stefon M as the Atevi moderator
• Eric R as a human representative
• Rob A as human military
• Rachel F as a human translator
• Joe P as a human industrialist
• Myself as Jona, voice of the Atevi clan being displaced by humans
• Chelsea K as Janiya, sister to Jona
• Devon A as an Atevi guildsman
• David O as an Atevi representative
• __ as the Atevi astronomer

As it turned out, there was an attempted assassination, which gravely wounded (?) a delegate - but it did not derail the negotiations, which eventually went through.

         In particular, my character struggled with the fact that he was dying - and could potentially be saved by advanced human medicine - but our collective position was that we were not going to expose ourselves to disruptive technology too quickly.

Conclusion

There has been considerable debate over Pacificon - in particular because it lately has been scheduled the same weekend as rival gaming convention CelestiCon. It seems that Pacificon maintains dominance of larps for now, although there are many other excellent games at Celesticon.

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John H Kim <jhkim-at-darkshire-dot-net>

Last modified: Thu Sep 20 11:29:00 2015