*** Note to my dear sis and possibly Susan - you may want to skip reading this post if you think you may want to join in sometime ***
Live action role-playing (LARP) folk don't get a lot of respect from the gaming community, mostly because of videos like
these show things out of context. Even though I'm a geekette and proud of it, I've always found LARPers to be...well, kind of
out there.
This past weekend, a dear friend from out of town traveled halfway across the country to attend a LARP event with the local group. She invited me to come along and although warning bells were going off, I decided to be a good sport and agreed to come.
The event started off with me getting very lost trying to find the unmarked campground through some very vague instructions. It wasn't a good sign, that.
When I got there, I was shown to the cabin I was going to be staying in. My heart sank. Now, you have to understand, I'm a city girl. That means that if I'm too far away from wi-fi access or can't find a Starbucks nearby, I'd be lost. This...was a cabin. A co-ed cabin. With bunk beds. Yeah...not impressed but I was warned I'd be roughing it this weekend, so I plonked my stuff on a bunk and got dressed in garb.
Oh yes, you have to dress in appropriate costume, which in this case was something roughly medieval European-ish. There was a nice chap in a Roman centurion uniform but aside from him, most other folk were pretty much what you'd find on the set of Lord of the Rings. Pretty elaborate costumes too, so these folk take it seriously.
The game officially started and as a new player, we had to roleplay coming into town. A town under constant attack by the local denizens of the dark. Y'know what? I've walked down dark trails a million times before in computer RPGs and if I were beset by monsters, I'd just kill them and move on. This...this was different. I was on a dark path strewn with rocks, shrubs, fallen tree trunks with no real sources of illumination other than a dim lantern. There were noises all around us where every rustle, every movement of the leaves may herald a sudden attack by the enemy. And attack us they did. Over and over again. We lost several people (i.e. their characters were killed during the attacks, not that they were truly lost in the real sense) culminating in a run back to town when it was clear we couldn't win. Coming into town was interesting as well, because we nearly got skewered by the town guards who thought we were the enemy. Tired, weary and half-frightened out of our wits, we made it back to town. Only to be attacked over and over again - the town wasn't safe at all.
So began a glorious weekend of roleplaying. I wasn't playing a fighting character so RP is pretty much all I can do. During the course of the weekend, I nearly got killed once (in-game, not for real) and saved dozens of lives. After the first night, it became a full-immersion event, something I never thought was possible. Fog rolled in during one of the nights too, adding a very real sense of creepiness to the environment. Words simply cannot describe how one feels when you're all alone in the forest, separated from your group, in pitch darkness only to hear the moan of a zombie right behind you. Dear gods, I was frightened out of my wits that weekend, so much so that I was dreading the fall of night because that was when they came.
Would I go back? Absolutely. Do I feel silly LARPing? Only for the first couple of hours. It's so well run that when I say full-immersion, I *mean* full immersion. The folks were amazing as well, both in-game and out-of-game. Even though it's make-believe, after surviving a massive in-game onslaught, you can't help but like the person who saved your in-game life, regardless of whether that's who she is in real life or not.
The one thing I have to be careful of is to keep my sense of balance and moderation - the full-immersion factor can confuse things a bit.
