Time Travel Review Board at 6Pi-Con

It's finally happening. The LARP I've been wanting to bring to Pi-Con for three years.

Alleged Entertainment is proud to bring our multi-award-winning sci-fi comedy horde LARP Time Travel Review Board to 6Pi-Con, the Pioneer Valley's geekiest annual convention.  The game will run from 8:00-10:00 PM on Friday, August 26.  (That's conveniently right after the LARP 101 panel, which I'm moderating.)

When Kate Farb-Johnson first asked me if I wanted to run LARPs at Pi-Con two years ago, I immediately thought of Time Travel Review Board.  It's easy for both experienced LARPers and total newbies to get into, and it's low-commitment: horde players don't need to spend the entire time there if they don't want to.  Thus, it's very well-suited to a diverse convention like Pi-Con.

Unfortunately, we weren't able to make TTRB happen due to hotel restrictions about taping things to the wall.  This year, those restrictions have been relaxed to an extent that will finally allow this game to run.

So if you'd like to play Time Travel Review Board, please come check it out at 6Pi-Con!

Resonance and Stars Over Atlantis on Saturday July 23!

Everybody knows that summertime is the dead season for larp. But it’s tough to go through all those months without a single packet to open. That, friends, is why Alleged Entertainment and Paranoid and Crotchety are teaming up to bring you Dia de los Sobres, or the Day of the Envelopes, a doubleheader production offering you two great packet-packed larps on the same day! Alleged’s RESONANCE and P&C’s STARS OVER ATLANTIS will run one after the other on Saturday, July 23rd in Fitchburg, MA.

If you’d like to sign up for one or both of these great larps, click on over to sign up at:
http://journeysurveys.com/answer/312

RESONANCE
By Nat Budin, Susan Weiner, Vito D’Agosta, and Phoebe Roberts
An amnesia and storytelling larp about tragedy, desperation, and the apocalypse.
11AM to 4PM

STARS OVER ATLANTIS
By Liliya Benderskaya and Tory Root
An amnesia LARP about tragedy, sacrifice, death, guilt, karma, love, sex, gender, and forgiveness.
5PM to 10PM

Stepping Stones: Scene-Based Games at Alleged Entertainment

Alleged Entertainment (or, at any rate, a certain subset of it) debuted our new game Resonance back in March.  We've also recently started work on our next big project, A Garden of Forking Paths.  In order to tell their respective stories, both of these games use very unconventional, scene-based structures¹.

For the purposes of this essay, I'll define a scene-based LARP as one in which gameplay is split up into a series of short scenes.  There are many different types of scene-based LARPs out there, and we have written in a few of those styles.

First off: why use an unusual structure in a LARP at all?  Why not stick with well-tested best practices that we know work?  Well, because it's fun to experiment!  Perhaps a better reason, however, is that unusual structures are helpful for telling types of stories that would be difficult to express in the LARP medium otherwise.  We've been on a track of experimentation involving scene-based games for a few years now.

At the beginning of my LARPing career, it would have been difficult for me to imagine playing in a game like Resonance, let alone writing one.  Thus, it's interesting to take a look back at how we got here, and where we're hoping to go now.  Along the way, I'll explain how the scene-based structures help serve the narrative ends of each game.

Better Casting Through Science (?)

Casting is a very important part of running one-shot pregenerated LARPs.  Making the wrong decision about which player should play which character can result in unhappy players and make the game worse.  On the other hand, if you can find that perfect player for a role, they can bring up the level of the entire LARP.

If you ask five LARP GMs for the best way to cast games, you're likely to get ten answers.  Some notable ones include:

• Just give brief descriptions of all the characters and let players pick their top five.
• Casting is an art, not a science.  Ask open-ended questions and go with your gut.
• Everything players write is significant, including margin doodles, handwriting, and when they got the questionnaire response back to you.
• Interview them on the phone or in person.
• We've developed a complex Excel spreadsheet that tells us how to cast people.

At Alleged Entertainment, we've developed a complex Excel spreadsheet that tells us how to cast people.  What follows is a trip into the dark recesses of that spreadsheet.

Next Labor Wars run

Now that we've had some time to recover and think about the last run, we're ready to start planning another run of Labor Wars. This means we are looking for a house to host it in. We are planning for some weekend in November. The exact weekend can be worked out with our hosts. If you think you might be interested in hosting, leave a comment on this post or email me at gothiklezmer@gmail.com.

Benefits of hosting:

• You get guaranteed slots in the run.
• We cook a feast in your kitchen. With warning, you are welcome to eat even if not playing.
• We will coordinate run dates with you, so we can guarantee a weekend you will be able to play.

Requirements:

• A place we can host dinner for 17 people. We can probably arrange for extra folding tables, chairs, etc, but we do need a room big enough to set them up.
• A room in which 17 people can sit relatively comfortably, while not at tables. Preferably this is not the same space as the dinner location.
• At least two (and preferably 3 or 4) other rooms that can be used for separate conferences. These can include walk-in closets, basement space, enclosed porches, etc. Anywhere that is big enough for 2-5 people to have a private discussion. At least two of these should fit 5 people in relative comfort. Bedrooms are fine if you are willing to have people LARPing in your bedroom.
• A kitchen in which two people can work in relative comfort, with a fair amount of fridge space (if you can, for example clear us 1/3-1/2 of a normal full sized fridge, this would be fine, as would be providing a dorm fridge). It does not need to be well-stocked: we can bring cookware and spices, we'll just coordinate with you about what we need to bring.
• We have a strong preference for locations near one of the LARPer concentrations: Somerville, Waltham, and Worcester regions are all open for consideration. If someone in the RPI crowd wants to convince us to run there, we're also willing to talk about that. Anywhere on the T or a good and consistent bus line is also probably fine.

Intereste in hosting?  Leave a comment on this post, or email me at gothiklezmer@gmail.com.

Blog moved!

As you might have noticed from the black bar across the top of the screen, I've moved this blog from being hosted on aegames.org proper to being hosted by Blogger.  This means a few things, none of them particularly major:

1. The address is no longer http://www.aegames.org/blog, it's now http://blog.aegames.org.  I'm putting up a message at http://www.aegames.org/blog to direct people to the right place.
2. Comments should work again.  Please God.
3. Now that it's no longer a huge pain in the ass to make new posts, we'll hopefully be doing it more often.
4. RSS subscribers will have to change their feed URL.  I'm going to be putting up a message on the feed that will let them know that.
5. The LiveJournal feed is probably broken now.  I can't remember who set it up to begin with, but I'm emailing a couple of likely candidates to try and get it pointed at the new URL.

So, why the move?  Details after the jump.

Quote

My thing with plot is that I don't have fun just talking to people who are pretending to be other people. I need a reason for it, some goal, something I'm trying to get out of the conversation that is different from normal interactions with that person.

- Nyren Knapp