Allnighter: Imperiet

After our pizza dinner, I set down with four players to play Imnperiet. We agreed on two humerous games: “The Butter Forger” by Olle J0nsson and “Averland Averessen” by Johannes Busted.

Averland Abendessen

We started out with Johannes’ game. Quickly arranging a “kitchen” out of tables, we placed dice around the place to be readily available. The game is organised into four timed “courses,” each including a number of suggested scenes to play. I started each course by reading the menu, and asking them, what their characers were doing at that exact moment. Then I would count down, starting play. We did it “semi-larp”-style, playing out most things, but narrating a lot of things. I would tell them when things woould happen, then they would react. At a certain point they would roll the dice, attempting to vanquish the opposition.

The game was a big success. Most of the time, we had people running around, shouting, screaming, sweating. Pretty soon, they would start doing things when I was paying attention to someone else or the trying to decide what to do next, just as I soon lost all count of their dicerolling. In the end, we were tired, sweaty, and sore with laughter.

We did have some critiques, however – listed here, as far as I can remember them, along with other pieces of advice and shareworthy experience:

• Johs suggests running several scenes at once – but playing semi-larp and with only one GM, that seemed almolst copmpletely impossible. I tried it in the beginning, but in the end, I had enough just trying to keep up with running one scene at a time. An assisting GM /NPC-player would have been ideal, freeing me to narrate and moderate the game, instead of jumping between playing and moderating.
• We had saved a number of lids from pizza trays. These were priceless as “trays” for the players to imitate carrying things.
• The characters were far too busy to ever develop their personal plots. They requested a bit of calm to enable them to talk a bit and to catch up to the pace.
• Some suggested plots involving the character’s internal relationships might have been appropriate – maybe telling Rofus (the chef) “Geo (the cook) is cutting the carrots in uneven slices.”
• The Skaven events were impersonal, and needed a bit of a twist. I liked how it (and most of the other plots) escalated during play – but you needed something that made a bit more sense, even if it was the “buffer plot,” being something you could always introduce several times in the same course.
• The characters were not ideally suited to this kind of fast play. By the time Tomas von Grieg, the poetry lover, enters the kitchen, Geo’s player had completely forgotten that HE wrote those poems. Maybe characters written mostly in bullets, might have been better, pointing out very clearly which points were important. This would also help the GM to tailour plots to each character.

But in the end, we really enjoyed Averland Averessen. Props to Johs.

The Butter Forger

The next game didn’t quite live up to the first. We set up a courtroom and went through a number of witnesses, but when one player had to leave after 45 minutes, we decided to stop. We just weren’t having a lot of fun, though were were laughing a bit.

On one hand, this surprised me – I thought the buzz was, that the Butter Forger was one of the games that people had really liked from Imperiet. On the other hand, I didn’t find it the least bit odd – when I read the scenario, I could never envision how the game could really work.

One part of the problem was of course, that the prosecuter and the defence attourney didn’t really get into the characters, not even once shouting “objection!” And their questioning of the witnesses weren’t the sharpest I’ve seen. On the other hand, I think Ole very firmly put his finger on the problem when he said: “What’s the point? The game clearly states that he’s guilty – so why are we doing this? There is nothing to help us achive a curve of intensity, no guide to what we should attempt to play for.” The point of the game seems to be in the comedy of the witnesses – but comedy with out direction and purpose has about as much bite as butter dentures – forged or not.

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Allnighter: Return of the Chainsaw larp

This weekend, Ole and I had organised a so called “allnighter” for our kids (so called, because it lasts all night – funnily enough). We met up at the school at 1 o’clock pm, and leaft again at closer to 7.30 am (well, actually, we left the building at just after 6 o’clock, but we sat outside for an hour after that, playing Werewolf).

There were 11 of us, so we were split into two groups for most of the time – one set of groups untill dinner, a new set after. In the first, I helped run the larp from the Lumberjack academy, in the second, I ran Imperiet.

It had been my plan from the start to have the people in the Lumberjack Academy do a rerun of their larp at the Allnighter, with me as moral support and NPC. Unfortunately, one of them had to cancel shortly before the weekend, and I had to step in as assistant GM. In the end, I think the other GM felt it was a success, but I am afraid I interfered a bit too much, and that she may have felt like a good bit of the success was my doing. But while I did do a good bit, I tried hard to let her make the decisions, and it was still their (well, mostly her) game that succeeded.

For this game, we ahad two male and one female player. Two of these players were some of the kids, the last was my co-teacher Ole. This did mean that they were mismatched in personality power – on the other hand, I know Ole worked hard to help the two others along. Unfortunately, the traitor was the character that lent itself most easily to being converted into a woman, but the female player was the Weakest Link, not being wery comfortable playing “bad” characters.

The other GM did the casting, and did it exactly opposite to what I would have done. She cast the young guy as the old, stubborn character and Ole as the young, fiery guy. As always, the casting completely coloured the game. In many ways, I think her casting was better than mine – while it would have been more believable to cast Ole (who is ten years their senior) as the older guy, playing to strong emotions can be hard, and I am not sure the other player would have been as able to play the character. BEsides, the older character was already the more powerful, and casting Ole in that role could have meant that he would be completely dominating the game.

In the end, it turned out very well, albeit very differently from last time, probably providing the GM’s with more challenges than last time (I was a Player then, so I can’t be sure). For instance, at one point, we started putting a lot of pressure on them (“The PM wants an answer NOW”) – to which they replied by sending one of them to meet the PM, which effectively, at least in our (well, my) mind ment out of the game. We countered by putting a juicy clue into his hands, both feeding the tension in the room, and giving us an excuse to put even more pressure on them (“You said you were sending someone over, yet you didn’t -WHAT’S GOING ON?”). Their solution was also completely different. Where we were ripped apart by strife, they ended up covering the whole thing up, with Ole lying to an old journalist friend cementing their common moral fall. A much sweeter tragedy than ours, in which two of the three were consumed by their own righteousness.

In the end, all of the players were very happy and impressed. As Ole said to the girl who was GM, this was her first larp – and even compared to larps generally, this one was pretty good.