Category Archives: LRP

Shaken till booze falls out

Empire, LRP, Me, , ,

I spent my weekend in a castle, my face painted with scales and two bottles of booze in my bag. It was a good weekend.

To say I was unsure what I was going to do/achieve at the beginning of the event would be an understatement. I had no idea if I was going to manage what I wanted, never mind if it was possible. Turns out I was proven wrong.

My goals for the weekend were to introduce myself to some people, get better acquainted with others, and have some fun. All of these goals were met and then some.

Turns out that I accidentally ended up being the most competent person in the room at one point which led to me being embroiled in some politics I’d previously had no idea about – that’s going to give me a lot more to do in the field this year.

I may also have almost started a new religion with my salted caramel cream liqueur hot chocolate – pronounced to “taste like glory” and to be “heresy, so I should confiscate it for the good of the Empire”.

Decided to join the tournament with the last minute addition of hidden steel chainmail under my Suaq layers. That helped me through the first round, but didn’t help at all against Rodrigo Barossa’s zweihander. If only I’d had my mage staff…

Bohemond even congratulated me on my duelling technique – shame he later shook me until booze entered his hand.

So very glad I went, and so very keen for Empire now…

 

Empire 379YE Autumn Equinox

Empire, LRP

Ugly

  • We got caught by a speed camera as we approached the site
  • Craig was in an accident the Tuesday before and had whiplash
  • Getting so dehydrated I felt ill and nauseous in Conclave

Bad

  • Taking the field meant I didn’t have as much time for running around organising things
  • Missed Saturday dinner due to not stopping all evening
  • Attaching latex scales took much longer than I expected
  • Trying to attend multiple meetings scheduled for the same time doesn’t work very well
  • Going “feck it” to touching up my makeup on Sunday morning means there a few photos of me with a rubbed off forehead
  • So tired on Saturday evening – kept napping everywhere
  • My bag got nicked while doing a ritual and we lost the covenstone
  • Bonding at last event went wrong and it turns out I wasn’t actually bonded to my robes…
  • Never stopping moving. Google can confirm that the only times I really stopped moving was Conclave…

Good

  • Taking the field meant I got to (a) try out chainmail as my elite mercenary without losing my new latex scales to an orc mask and (b) got to be part of Team Saker as part of the back-up Day ritualist team
  • Salted caramel cream liqueur goes down as well as ever
  • White chocolate strawberry fudge also went down well
  • Dem Cambion girls
  • Chilling on site on Friday meant I had time to experiment with latex scales
  • Two addresses and a gambit meant I got to make my name in Conclave
  • Being recognised in Military Council was a new experience
  • Tent is sufficiently cool during the day to mean beers aren’t overly warm
  • Civil Service Hub cushions are good for napping on
  • Now known by name to archmages, grandmasters, generals, senators, and the warmage
  • An Imperial Title has been created for the job I’m doing because people thought I deserved one
  • Political drama generating MC politics on Sunday
  • Suaq dance party
  • The Nightclub of Worlds
  • Mana rich for a while (before I miscalculated and gave more away than I meant to)
  • Tea-stained map experiments were a success
  • Mhorish breakfasts
  • Carrying the stool around gets annoying but it’s worth it in Conclave
  • Still not from Urizen

A lack of game

Empire, Isles of Darkness, LRP, Me, Musings, , , , , , ,

I don’t know why but I don’t do LARPs very well. I don’t seem to be able to hook into them or get involved in things. Plot passes me by and I never know how to get into the game.

It’s not just an IoD thing, but I feel it more there. At Empire, event plot pretty much passes me by but I’m so busy doing other thinBluträchergs that I don’t notice that I didn’t get involved in it. This is likely part of the problem I had in LT as well – I couldn’t get involved in things, so I didn’t like playing.

I can recognise this in IoD games as well – in Requiem, where I’m Harpy, I don’t notice as much that I’m not involved in the plot that everyone else seems to be pulling out of the woodwork somehow. In the other games, I can’t find my way in, and I feel lost as a consequence and don’t enjoy the games. I find myself asking if anyone would even notice my absence.

My lack of ability to hook myself into the games has led to me abandoning playing Forsaken to NPC, and abandoning playing Awakening to aST/NPC. I don’t really know why I haven’t given up on Lost yet. The thing is that I know I can enjoy these games, but typically the times I enjoy playing these games is when I have things to do that aren’t relevant to the plots of the game. My last Forsaken character was a lot of fun because he just wanted to punch things, talk about punching things, and intimidate people – and I enjoyed that game as one-dimensional as it was.

I find I always feel that there are groups of people who find the plot and run off with it and become epic in the game, and I drift along at the sidelines with no idea how to do that. The only reason that I’m where I am in Empire now is because Rob offered me some work and after a year of doing it, I’ve managed to make myself known to the point of being recognised by most of the Conclave.

It feels like there’s some trick I’m missing – something that I’m doing wrong or not doing at all that leads to people having fun at games and getting involved in epic plots. It feels like I’m failing at my hobby, and like there’s no point in my trying because I’ll never manage that.

Part of all this is that I’m terrible at setting character goals for myself. When I write an NPC for myself, it’s not an issue to find goals because they’re related to making the plot work right, but when I write a character I just can’t do it right. It’s sheer luck that I’ve managed to both get a character goal and (potentially) achieve it at Empire, and it wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t been handed a job by someone else.

Perhaps I should just stick to crewing and storytelling as it seems to be where my abilities are stronger.

urgh

Empire, LRP, Me

I feel sick, it’s hard to focus, hard to breathe, and I’m trying not to let on that anything is up.

My little brother was run off the road this morning by someone driving recklessly and is currently in hospital waiting for a CT scan. He (and his new car which dove into the ditch with him) was supposed to be on the boat from Shetland tonight, and we were going to be heading down to Empire on Thursday.

Now I don’t know if he’ll be able to leave the hospital today, never mind attend a LARP at the other end of the country this weekend.

What makes me feel worse is that I feel terrible about looking at alternate travel arrangements. This is a nightmare, and I feel awful about being selfish like this.

Larperlei Reinforced Leather Jerkin

No Rest Costume

Costume, LRP, No Rest for the Wicked, ,

So I’m playing the next event, and I’m looking into my costume options for Trysten. I’ve asked the lovely Ms Bell to make me some layers, but I’m looking at getting this reinforced leather jerkin from Larperlei. (This tabard may also be in consideration but I prefer the jerkin, I think.)

My problems with ordering this are essentially two-fold: the first problem is budget, the second is timing. If I order it today, I might have it in hand in time for the event (November 6th). I get paid in a week and a half and I still have to pay for Empire food and travel.

To put that in perspective, if I order it this week, I’m on a tight budget for the next two weeks, but I might have it for the event. If I don’t order it this week, I almost certainly won’t have it for the event.

The general costume idea would be to have a tunic, with this jerkin over the top, then a surcote over the top of that. I’m liking how it looks in my head (bit hard to tell how it would look in reality. My other options would be to either not have it at all (which removes any armour from the character), try using my old leather jack from my LT days and see how that suits (I already know it won’t look as good), or try using the leather top I picked up (which isn’t quite the right size for me (but that wouldn’t be noticed under the surcote) and is black which detracts from the general colour theme I’m building I think.

Thoughts? Suggestions? Input welcomed.

#rpgaday2015 day 28 – favourite game you no longer play

Isles of Darkness, LRP, Roleplaying, ,

A few candidates for this one, but I think I’m going to go with Created.

Promethean: the Created was a strange game that took some effort to understand. A game of monsters trying to be human by emulating them. In the Isles of Darkness, I played Rocker, a Frankenstein on the Path of Tin struggling to communicate with other people and lashing out with violent lightning when he couldn’t find any other way to let things out. Unfortunately, being one of the smaller games in the IoD, it suffered for want of storytellers and eventually all of the games closed, leaving Rocker’s story unfinished. Still, he got some good music and lightning in before he died.

#rpgaday2015 day 26 – favourite inspiration for your game

Isles of Darkness, LRP, Roleplaying, , ,

Pretty simple, this one: song titles. When I was running my mortals game for the Camarilla UK/Isles of Darkness, I’d often use Lordi song titles to inspire plot.

Probably one of my best plots came from using “Forsaken Fashion Dolls” as the core premise and seeing where it went from there. I started with the idea that maybe abandoned shop mannequins came to life somehow and ended up with a mad scientist who had lost their daughter creating a doll replica of their child, bringing it to life, and then becoming distraught at what they’d created and running off. The doll, left to herself powered by a spirit bound into her “heart” and given the mind of an eight-year old, had reached out in her abandonment and brought friends to her in the form of mannequins she animated unconsciously. That was a rather emotional plot when players got involved.

Android apps

Code, LRP, No Rest for the Wicked, Tech

As some of you likely know, I occasionally write Android apps outside of my day job. Most of the time, I write utilities of various types which I find useful, and I publish them to the Play Store as Moltis. I currently have five apps on the Play Store at the moment, and if anyone’s using them and finds them useful any feedback on them would be valued.

If anyone has any ideas for other utilities that might be useful to them, let me know – I’m interested in new challenges, and open to filling gaps.

No Rest for the Wicked apps

I’ve written three apps for use at No Rest for the Wicked, one for storytellers and two for players.

Warp Bag is an app that handles the contents of your warp bag and drawing beads. It needs some updating in line with the new Psyker rules, but seems pretty solid from feedback I’ve had. [1]

NRftW Event Admin is a utility I designed for use by the storytellers to keep track of people going on endeavours so we could determine what the balance was. How useful it was varied. It relies on having an internet connection, and every player having an account on the downtime system – if you’re not on the downtime system, it can’t track you. There are myriad improvements that can be made, but it wasn’t terrible to use. [2]

NRftW Deck Timer is a utility I’ve recently designed to help people track how long they have to roleplay when using decks. Currently it’s only set up with a hacking interface, but it does function as a timer for any type of deck. My main thoughts on it are that you probably want to start timing as soon as you start laying out cards and totalling up the time once you’ve played all your cards, which means that it needs a mechanism to (a) start timing before a total time is added, and (b) add further time in as you sort out your cards. It’s not a perfect system, and without significant effort I’m not sure I could make a “perfect” system, and the system I can envision would require everyone with a deck to have an Android device to solve it.[3]

Other apps

There was some commentary that we didn’t have an IoD specific dice roller, and I made a comment that I could write one if someone was willing to pay me to do so. I’ve still not been paid to do so, but I have created Dice Roller, a beta app that handles nWoD dice mechanics as well as being usable for rolling any other kind of die as well. [4]

The last app is actually one of the first ones I wrote, and the most subtle. You’re Awesome is a utility that at random intervals sends a message to the phone’s user reminding them that they’re awesome. I wrote the initial alpha on my laptop on a train down to London, and I created it to as a confidence booster for anxious people. It can either use generic messages, or messages that it combines with a given name, and you can alter the frequency of the messages.[5]

Footnotes   [ + ]

1. ↑ Currently I have 20 users using the Warp Bag app according to the Play Store
2. ↑ Currently I have 4 users using the Event Admin app according to the Play Store
3. ↑ Currently I have 1 user using the Deck Timer app according to the Play Store
4. ↑ Currently I have 6 users using the Dice Roller app according to the Play Store
5. ↑ Currently I have 4 users using the You’re Awesome app according to the Play Store

#rpgaday2015 day 23 – perfect game for you

Empire, LRP, Roleplaying

Honestly, depends what I’m doing and what type of game we’re playing, but I want a game I can get involved in, that I can engage in as I want to, where I can work to my own agenda, and/or to a shared one, and where I have OOC support in doing so.

I find all of that at Empire. I usually find it all in most tabletops I play in as well. Genre, system, and setting tend to matter less to the above criteria because I can usually find a hook into genre and setting I wouldn’t normally play in, and systems just take adapting to.

#rpgaday2015 day 22 – perfect gaming environment

Empire, Isles of Darkness, LRP, Me, Roleplaying,

For my perfect gaming environment, I need to be comfortable. It doesn’t need to involve sofas, or cushioned seats at all (though they can help) – it just has to be an environment I’m comfortable in. I should feel comfortable enough to go and get a drink, or a snack, and ideally comfortable for the other people to do likewise. It doesn’t need to be a space that’s mine – neutral spaces or spaces belonging to other people are also good.

Most of my gaming is at Empire, or with the Isles of Darkness. The RAF Club where we hold IoD games is somewhere I’m comfortable – I’m on the Committee, I know the staff, and I have the run of the place. I very rarely feel uncomfortable because of the environment, no matter what’s going on. At Empire, there are over a thousand people on the field, and I know that no matter what else happens, I could duck into Mhorish and catch a friendly conversation with people in there and restore my calm or I can retreat to my tent for a bit and get away from people. These are environments that I am comfortable gaming in, and that means a lot for me.

Basically, perfection is an ideal you’ll never really reach, so I’d rather stick with what I know works – which is a friendly atmosphere where I feel comfortable.