Sulphate and the City

2/14/17 08:27 am

“That looks epic!” I remember looking at the video trailer on YouTube for Black Friday way back when the international run was first announced and adding it to the list of larps I wanted to tray and get a place for. The other blockbuster larp for this autumn was Convention of Thorns. They started booking really close to each other. The buzz of getting on to these events is like scoring tickets to a festival. You know they are going to sell out, you just don’t know if the booking system is going to fail.

For BF you had to buy tickets for a specific “community” within the game. Some were more popular than others; the Law Enforcement community, where I wanted to play, was one of the groups that was oversubscribed. By luck, more than anything else, I got a place.

There is a second round of booking for BF where you decide what character you want to play. Originally this was going to be allocated based on a “first click” method. The characters are released and the first person to click on the one they want gets it. The organisers changed this, mainly under protest from the players. Casting is difficult, but it tends towards fewer bad feelings between players than a straight out snipe.

I did badly in the casting; I not only didn’t get a character I wanted, I actually got a character I really did not want to play at all. Fortunately someone swapped with me and I ended up with a character I liked.

This is important. At CoT I played a character I disliked. For clarity this was not about the character itself, but rather the personality of the character. I despised the person I was supposed to be portraying at CoT and it affected my game.

The characters at BF are archetypes. Mine was “the disillusioned cop,” favoured of so many movies. His story arc could go off in many ways; the most obvious were that he would turn against the FBI, or that he would somehow reconcile with the organisation he believed had rejected him. I prepared for the role by listening to a lot of Latino rap, and getting my beard shaved into the style of a Mexican gangster. This last act caused much consternation in the barbers.

The first day started at 4:30am. I’d not been sleeping well. Hell I’ve not slept well since the 80s, but the last few months have been really bad even by my standards. On the upside, it made rolling out of bed at half-four less of a challenge than it might be for many others. I’d packed hand luggage only, threw myself into my clothes, and waited outside for the cab that would take us to Stanstead.

I hate Stanstead airport. If Gatwick is chaotic, Stanstead is one of the nether hells, populated by petty-minded bastards. We cleared security – eventually – and got onto a Ryanair flight to Turin. I sort of slept on the flight, just as I sort of slept in the cab. In as much as I closed my eyes and looked into the darkness. That counts as sleep for me. In Turin I had my first coffee of the day. My Italian is not very good. I actually did a lot of work in Italy in the 00s, back and forward to Rome and Milan, and I spent enough time in meetings with lawyers and the Italian government to be able to understand quite a lot once I get tuned in. I still can’t speak it though. Fortunately I know enough to order coffee. Coffee is good.

The car hire was a faff; we stood in the wrong queue for 45 minutes, but eventually got the car, got an upgrade, and managed to program the satnav to take us to Wyoming. Driving on the wrong side of the road is easy, as long as you don’t have to turn left.

The drive took an hour, maybe slightly more, and we practiced our American accents en route. My character might have been from Los Angeles, but as the only Californian accent I can do is full-on valley girl, I had to stick with a generic mid-nowhere Americanese. This was more for my own benefit. I’m not very good at accents, but they do help me get into the character.

We got lost on the mountain; driving down the wrong track and having to do a 150 point turn above a ravine whilst a small dog and an angry woman shouted at us from a five bar gate.

The site was a holiday village, a series of small stone buildings on the mountain side, dressed to look like a Wyoming mining town. The attention to detail here was significant. The cartons of milk in the fridge had missing person photographs on the side – like you’d expect in an American film – but the photographs were actual of , or pertaining to, characters in the game. The vehicles had US plates on them. The delicious Italian coffee had been replaced with American instant granules.

One of my few complaints was about the cold. I knew it was going to be cold. The organisers had made it clear that the buildings were heated by wood burners and it would be the player’s responsibility to keep these alight. I have a wood stove at home. I know how to make them work. I had, briefly, wondered if I should make my character smoke. The archetype would have a packet of Marlboro full-fat and would break off the filters. It seemed like an expensive prop. I wish I had. The lack of a lighter made starting the fire, and lighting the gas stove, more of a challenge than it should have been. Few of the international players smoked. I suspect this was a cultural oversight. The Italian organisers assumed more people would have lighters. In the cottages there were fireplaces; some firelighters would have made it a lot easier to get the fires started there.

I’ve larped in sub-zero temperatures; I have camped in sub-zero temperatures. This event was cold. Travelling with just hand luggage makes it significantly harder to bring the layers and warm sleeping kit that I’d usually have for a UK game. Fortunately I brought a hot water bottle; that made the nights a hell of a lot easier.

I had a few hours before the game started, but was asked to remain in the area set aside for the law enforcement community. My travelling companion was based in the town. We did not see each other again until the game was over. I tried to grab a nap, then helped to move a few bits of kit about the place while I waited for everyone else to arrive.

I’ve played these games before. Unlike my first journey into Poland where I knew no one, I’m now in a place where I have friends on the international larp scene. We greet each other like long lost relatives. It’s awesome and amazing. Friends who we never really meet; we have shapes and personas that we dress in, and only a few ever get to know the players beneath the skin. There is a joy in the reunion that makes the experience almost profound.

Things get confused. There were pre-game workshops. We had ours as we got into kit. The FBI SWAT team. Undervalued hard-cases, led by someone we didn’t trust, first in the line of fire, and we dressed in black. The game had a kit rental charge – our uniforms, body armour, weapons, equipment, guns were included in this fee. As we worked out how to put on the various items we worked out the team dynamic. We had call signs, an off-game agreement that when we were working we had each other’s backs. We looked badass. At night we looked more badass that the Delta Force. Special Forces soldiers who really should not have been operating on American soil at all. We knew there was going to be friction there.

In the dark we went through the violence mechanic. The game has two meta-techniques. “Is that all you’ve got,” which is an invitation to escalate, and “Lay off,” which is an instruction to turn down the intensity. Late in the game, having lost his temper, my character attacked one of the special forces soldiers. Having beaten him into unconsciousness, the other soldiers grabbed my character to try to stop him from kicking their buddy in the head.
“Is that all you’ve got?” I shouted when they grabbed my arms.
They tried to force me to the floor. I shouted at them again, “Is that all you’ve fucking got?”
One of them took my legs out with a sweep and I fell onto my (armoured) kneepads. I shifted my position and used the drop in weight to lift one of the soldiers off their feet. If I’d gone full speed I’d have flipped him over my shoulder.
“Lay off,” he whispered, and I didn’t throw him.

We also learned how to use the guns.

The game used blank firing weapons to represent real guns. I was fortunate enough to be armed with Beretta, a handgun I know will enough to feel comfortable loading and firing as my airsoft pistol is an all-metal P92F. We were issued 8mm blanks. I loaded my gun carefully. Checked the safety was on. I didn’t rack it.
The first evening of the event was an introductory sequence. We arrived at our base of operations. The Special Forces had got there first and had set up a communications space and had ‘secured the perimeter.’ The FBI SWAT team tested this perimeter by coming in over the back wall and surprising the soldiers; we knew they were the big dogs, but we still had to bark.

Our orders were not to make contact with the townspeople, but that soon broke down. The soldiers were up to something unconstitutional. Ninety minutes in and they’d already pulled a gun on one of the Feds, and we found ourselves having to stand in their way more than once as they tried to illegally search the property of US Citizens on US Soil.

The first evening ended around 2am. Fog of war. It was cold. If anyone really knew what was going on, they were not saying. We had a ‘time out’ though. We knew that when we woke the following morning the game would run, without a break, until some unspecified time on Saturday. I filled my hot water bottle with water from the stove, took a sleeping pill, and crawled into my sleeping bag in the bunk room where the FBI were camped.

A little before dawn the next morning a siren sounded. The game began. I dressed, drank disappointing coffee, and our unit checked our guns and kit and headed out to try to save the world. I did not sit down again for 18 hours. Meals were taken where possible. Hydration in fits and starts. Up and down the mountain, with a mask on to protect from some unseen biological agent. A little after sunrise my character found himself standing close to his wife. April Clinton was a high-flying FBI agent. Her career was on the up-and-up, and she and my character had been drifting apart. He was pretty sure she was seeing someone else. His plot arc, I thought, would be determined by how quickly their relationship disintegrated under pressure.
“I see you’ve stopped wearing your wedding band, April.” I told her, “I’ve still got mine on.”
She seemed stunned.
I didn’t realise how important my interactions with April’s player would be. What we had was a pre-written relationship, a pre-written backstory, and two players who had never met each other in real-life before the larp. Somehow it worked, it really worked. We exchanged pointed words. Short phrases, possibly designed to hurt.

“You remember, Top Gun, don’t you, April? He was the best man at our wedding.”
And then it was off again to perform some sort of SWAT activity. April and D didn’t get a chance to have a conversation, not yet.
Later in the morning my character shot someone. (I am going to use the first person to describe my character from this point on wards.)

Over the last three and a bit decades of larping I have certainly done a bit of PvP / Character vs Character violence, I’ve murdered a lot of characters. Stabbed most of them, poisoned a few,, taken others down with magic spells, but I have never with anything that looks and feels plausibly like a real firearm.

I'd received a radio call telling me in no uncertain terms that a particular individual needed to be detained and that if he ran away I needed to stop up; specifically I needed to shoot him.
He ran away, and had enough of a head start that I was going to struggle to catch him to bring him down. I'm sure I pulled the gun, cocked it, and aimed. I heard the shots - I fired twice - I saw the target fall clutching his leg.

I have no recollection of pulling the trigger.

I find this experience absolutely fascinating. I appear to have blanked something from my experiential memory. I've heard of other instances of this - in larp, using firearms – but this was the first time I experienced it.

Then April got sick. A disease had been ravaging the down; our masks were supposed to protect us, but they didn’t seem to be working. D saw her walk past, hunched over, and then saw the rash on her face. He walked her to the medical lab. Still they did not speak. His fingers brushed hers. They wore gloves.

The intensity of the event continued to increase. More people got sick. The FBI unit were ordered to go into people’s homes and force them to relocate. The reasons behind this are spoilers. I’ve cut them.

April was sent to quarantine. D made friends with the local priest. The FBI SWAT stopped following orders and realised we were all that stood between the people of Liberty Town and the forces of corruption. It all got a bit hectic.

And then April started to recover. She was out of quarantine and back on active duty. She and D got to play a scene where they talked about their future together. How they were going to make things work. D’s narrative arc went in an entirely different direction at this point.

The following morning, at around 7am, April Clinton died. She bled out on the floor of the FBI dorm. Blood coming from everywhere and her entrails spilling out from her stomach onto the floor. She was screaming, and two or three people held D back so he could not touch her, could not hold her while she died. (I did not know that April was an NPC in this run until after the event.)

I was fucked up now. Played out a scene saying goodbye to my character’s dead wife and then have to go out into the cold to save the world. D volunteered for a medical experiment with a very low chance of survival. (He was to survive it in the end, but mainly because from a steering point of view, making him live was far worse than death.)

We tried to save the world. The FBI team had planned an escape from the mountain. We had weapons, keys to a vehicle, hazmat suits, and supplies. When we managed to acquire two samples of the antidote it was time to go. We loaded into an RV and drove down the mountain. I sat on the front passenger seat with an AK47 pointing out of the window, ready to shoot the fuck out of anyone who tried to stop us. As endings go it was epic. As we crossed the off-game line the rest of the team cheered, but D was thinking of April, and I turned away so the others would not see me cry.

But here comes my other criticism of the event, and this is perhaps the most significant, there is only a few ‘solutions’ to the game. A handful of endings that can only be triggered by a set of ‘exact’ actions. Somewhere along the line, we’d deviated from the script and our attempt to save the world failed. Back at the base, the Delta Force soldiers were killing the civilians and scientists with nerve gas. In Liberty Town a few survivors were getting ready to sell their lives dearly against special forces.

I understand that at the second run everyone died. To ensure the disease did not spread, the soldiers killed everyone and then killed themselves. This was an ‘approved’ ending, but I would have found it less satisfying than ours.

In a larp with a labyrinthine and detailed plot – and Black Friday really had this in spades – I want more agency to affect the outcome. That is not to say that I wanted to save the world, that would only have mattered if April had lived, but I would like to have had the chance. There was a critical path through the story and no mechanism for deviation from it. If we learned one thing from the Odyssey LRP experiment it was that Combat Narratology works; it adds something significant to games. It was missing here.

However, whilst this criticism is significant, the game itself delivered. It was properly Epic. Like living inside a film for three days. It was exciting, and terrifying, and heart-breaking, and beautiful. And it was going to be my last game.

I decided part way through Convention of Thorns that it was time to stop playing larps. One of my (non-larping) friends pointed out that it was messing me up. The bleed, the PLD, the recovery time, were significant and that I appeared to be hurting myself. It is no secret that CoT didn’t really work for me, and I’d struggled to make sense of Forsaken in places.

You should always end on a high. Right? For Black Friday to be my last game would be no bad thing. Whilst not perfect, it certainly features in my top 3 larps of all time. The Southern Style of game is excellent. Imagine how awesome it would be if we could find a way to marry that to Combat Narratology?

I love larp. The opportunity to step into another world, and to be someone else is too good to turn away from. Yes it hurts. Yes bleed is dangerous. Yes it has taken a week or more to try to get my brain chemistry back to earth normal. Yes I have drunk too much and cried too much this week. I get all of this. But some of my broken heart is in Wyoming, and some in Czocha, fuck some of it can probably still be found at the Gloucester ritual circle. What Black Friday did for me was to rekindle that love. There might not have been a lighter for the fire, but I’m burning bright for the form again.

6/30/16 08:44 am