#freeform larp

Strap yourselves in, it's going to be a long one.

Last weekend I disappeared off to my happy place in Retford to play in Lullaby on the West End, a LARP I'd been looking forward too for far too long and it was everything and more I could have asked for. I had to wait until today to start to convert my bullet points into legibility, and wrangle those word squirrels into sentences before they escape into the wild and get eaten by reality.

I'd like to say a massive thank you to all the people who made the story possible, to the GMs for writing all the chaos, to the utterly exceptional cast of players, but especially to the players behind Miss Mullins/Trunchbull and Dewey Finn who were the cornerstones of most of my play.

I had the utmost joy of being cast as Jenny Honey, timid school teacher of Horace Green being run under the strict thumb of Rosalie Mullins (Trunchbull). I have always felt a kinship with Miss Honey, growing up with the Matilda movie as one of the core tenets of my upbringing and so when that character sheet came floating into my inbox I did a happy little dance in my computer chair (much to the horror of my cats).

Her story can only be described as the most incredible journey. I laughed, I cried, I laugh cried and I cry laughed. The one thing I was not expecting was just how much love everyone seemed to have for her, and how much they wanted her to succeed, from the students (who were her world) to the other teachers and everyone in between. It was that love and support that really gave Jenny the self-confidence she needed. I genuinely cannot emphasise enough how heart-warming her story was, only that it was better than I ever could have imagined.

You don't really have ten years to hear the story in its entirety, and there are SO many heartfelt moments and even more things that Jenny got involved in over the game, but I would like, if I may, to share some of them with you.

Warning, spoilers lie beyond this point.

Miss Rosalie "Mistakes Were Made" Trunchbull/Mullins - The perfect antihero, a villain for everyone to rally against and ironically played by one of the kindest people I know. From yelling at Jenny for the audacity of being given flowers by her students to dragging her to the Chokey for spending FAR too much money on books (more than I the player had really understood) and generally making Jenny feel like the most pathetic, spineless being ever. Only to then have the most wholesome conversation after Rosalie had re-inherited her family powers where she admitted she may have been entirely wrong about Jenny (which was in no small part due to Joe Casey persistently telling her about what she'd done for him) - "Miss Mullins, you're not yelling at me. Are you feeling alright?" and the discovery that Rosalie had in fact stolen the will that Horace Green belonged to Jenny all this time, and that the Chokey was a machine put in place to take the children's creativity to power the factory that Wonka had built. A factory that met an incredibly explosive end.

Dewey Finn/Ned Schneebly - Although they seemed a strange pairing to the outside, Dewey was Jenny's rock in the chaos of the storm, and the one who supported and encouraged her from the first moment Miss Trunchbull yelled at her - even if at that point she just knew him as Ned Schneebly. He brought out her rebellious side and in turn she showed him how wonderful the students were and taught him to be a teacher. He won her trust and then her heart, and as they escaped into the underground tunnels to get away from the tentacles reaping havoc in the city, he realised there was more to Jenny than met the eye "My girlfriend's a superhero!"

The Students - There was nothing Jenny cared about more than her students (both current and ex) and no matter how she was feeling at the time, she wanted to be there to encourage and support them. This resulted in a strange combination of both sweet and chaotic scenes as they asked her for help and advice in anything from issues with their parents to strange bird people in dark alleys handing them a mysterious cheese.

They also handed her an obscene amount of flowers, because it made her happy (or in Raven's case because she didn't want them) which in turn made Miss Trunchbull furious...so they did it some more! She got so many, that when I gathered them all together Jenny had a perfect disguise as a floral arrangement.

She also got to encourage them all to take part in the various activities - Captain Tempest's Space Auxiliaries and the Kite Festival, the latter of which Miss Trunchbull had explicitly forbidden Jenny from taking the students, and in a pique of rebellion, she decided to do the opposite and so turned into an incredibly sweet moment of joyous singing and waving kites to the iconic song "Lets Go Fly a Kite". Until Pugsley blew them all up (perfection).

Jenny held one official "lesson" during the game, which was originally set to contain some Science from Dr Horrible and then ended up being filled with Chaos, as Javert turned up to Educate the students about Crime, Dr Horrible got recruited by the Evil League of Evil and then then students went off with Rusty on a train ride. Because why not?

Parent-Teacher evening was an experience. Taking place just after Jenny had inherited the school, it contained the dramatic revelation that Dewey Finn had been masquerading as Ned Schneebly the whole time, which of course caused an uproar with the parents, and was perhaps the first and only time anyone ever saw Jenny Honey raise her voice. It also saw her put her new-found confidence to the test and persuade Mayor Falco to come see his daughter Raven in the battle of the bands, and witness their tearful reconciliation afterwards.

The Lost - Part of Jenny's story was her alter-ego as Jennyanydots, a no-nonsense teacher who had stumbled upon a bunch of people in the underground tunnels who needed her just as much as the students in the school. The genuine pride she felt at Stratt's grammatical accomplishments on the protest boards, and the bonding that happened later in the game as the Lost and the Cats worked together to save the world through the power of musical instruments and the hunt for Schrodinger's guitar.

Her connection to the Lost also led to a few escapades in the tunnels below the city, including the discovery of a train holding barrels of sarsaparilla being guarded by totally-not-cybermen and the Beige Room. Nobody liked the Beige Room. We also went on a quest for Goop and narrowly missed encountering Sid the albino crocodile.

Cats - Oh yes, Jenny was a Cat. Or at least the anthropomorphic personification of one. Struck by strange purple lightning, her and a small handful of other City dwellers were granted cat-like powers including for her a perfect Clark Kent disguise that allowed her hide in plain sight as Mysterious Stranger, Jennyanydots.

It also turned out these cats had an Important Decision to make, which we used to help save the world. Jenny somehow ended up becoming the leader of these felines, even being given the proxy vote of one Hidden Paw, the Macavity cat - something about organising the students, plus seemingly having the most information about what exactly was going on meant she was strangely adept at herding cats.

There were a couple of wonderful moments of getting to really show off Jennyanydots' abilities, diving in to rescue fellow school teacher Harry Blitzstein from being thrown into the Chokey - the first real time she ever stood up to the Trunchbull and it was not as herself - and then dropping into the tunnels to land in the classic superhero pose as her and Dewey escaped the approaching tentacles. 10/10 would be a cat person again.

Singing - My biggest regret, and perhaps my only one is that I never got to sing all the things I'd planned to, mostly due to the grey sponge that occupies my skull giving me incredible stage-fright (which given how much singing/dancing I did in Lullaby 2 made me cross at myself). However, taking part in many of the group numbers including defeating a pop-music AI through We Will Rock You and the grand finale of Bohemian Rhapsody is something I will remember with great joy.

In all, it was the best weekend I could have possibly imagined and my favourite weekend game of all those that I've played. There are so many small things like offering Javert a lamp as people kept telling him to "Lighten up" and calling Charlie Bucket's new suit a "Chocolate Orange" that enriched the game, and getting to spend that time with the people I hold dearest in my heart and adding more people to that number (you all know who you are).

looks like my character has a privileged background. a skiing accident led to her being in coma for a while and her ex didn't wait for her to wake, and her parents died shortly after she woke. and now aforementioned ex and their new partner is in Gay Afterlife now!

hoping to say hi to @jv while i'm out there too 🥰

the setting was the 1930s, when a minor lord well known in occult circles started a project to have a convention of occultists to summon all 72 demons from Ars Goetia, having them possess people to obtain the mystical knowledge they have. needless to say, things went horribly wrong; all players knew going in that nobody would survive, which tbh is my favorite kind of game.

i ended up playing Elina Tarasenko, a Ukrainian anarchist whose parents met while fighting for Father Makhno. fleeing persecution for her politics under the Soviet regime she ended up in a group of mystical queers in Paris. she ended up studying the occult in order to learn and thereby gain power for the people; a worker's revolution backed by demonic pacts is a great idea, right?* what is a soul to death for the bourgeoisie?

in the evenings after my character was possessed, and i played Glasya, AKA the Dissector of Hope, Debaucher of Tyrants, President of Envy(*), and author of murder in the hearts of humanity. it was a great role to play, as my brief was basically like "you are cold and vicious and so, so bored", so i spent most of my time doing a hellish vacation having drinks, making friends, enjoying debauchery, plotting vengeance, and making humans who i encountered very very sad.

in the end Glasya murdered the King of Envy to take his place and Elina got promised a cushy spot in the Seventh Circle if she made it there. she died calling the archangel Gabriel "a feathery bitch" while holding onto her found family.

it was a good time, i made a ton of cool queer friends, and had plenty of saucy lines. i love these games and can't wait to do another!

It has been a good 7 years since I last traveled to Retford for a weekend of LARPing, but having spied a last minute space, I would have been a fool to pass up the opportunity to see and play with everyone again.  This is by no means the full account of my character’s weekend, but this is quite long enough.

So it was I stepped into the sparkly shoes of Hollywood movie star - Mary Pickford, leading lady, founder of United Artists and wife to fellow Hollywood royalty Douglas Fairbanks.  To the outside eye it looked like she had it all.   Money, fame, love?  But things were not as blissful as they seemed.   Fame and the pressures of the movie industry had taken a large toll on Douglas and Mary’s marriage to the point where she very nearly left him for another man in the event she refers to as That Night - it being one of her biggest regrets on many levels, and when offered the chance by their good friend Charlie Chaplain to go to Egypt on holiday, it seemed like the perfect opportunity to fix their marriage and to put Mary’s troubled past behind her.

Except drama was always in a movie star’s life, and no sooner had she arrived in the city of Luxor she was accosted by a man representing Wolf Industries demanding that she pay back the debt her former rat of a first (yes, first) husband Owen had lumped her with - having forged her name on paperwork whilst they were still married.  After telling the man in no uncertain terms she wasn’t paying it, Mister March returned to Mary her ex-husband’s wedding ring...with the finger still attached and a promise if she failed to pay up then this fate would await her too.  Shocked and appalled, Mary reluctantly paid the man the £25,000 and told him to go away and never return.

Asking both her husband and Charlie, Mary discovered that Wolf Industries was behind the gambit to buy out United Artists and made the pair refuse any and all offers to hand over their shares, having a heart to heart with her husband about Owen’s debt, the ring, her affair and the events of That Night.  Promising that it was all behind her, and could he forgive her?  It seemed he could, and Mary genuinely believed her marriage was on the mend.

Mary was quite good at avoiding things she didn’t want to talk about, or more specifically people.  One particular person in fact.  “Prince” Ali Kamel.  Despite him sending a Private Investigator to look into her (something that very nearly earned him a slap) she managed to avoid her former beau until he turned up at the set where United Artists were filming “Freedom” - a short movie for the EFOFF awards held later that weekend  - and desperate to avoid confrontation between Ali and Douglas, she asked her good friend Charlie to cover for her and snuck away with the Prince with every intention of telling him to go away and leave her alone forever.

Except she couldn’t deny that she still had feelings for him, having fell in love with him when he was just a Major in the Army, and when he told her that he had written to her as promised all those years ago, she called him a liar.  She had married Douglas because he hadn’t written to her at all and assumed that to him she was nothing but a fleeting romance and Douglas had gone to such lengths to prove just how serious he was about marrying her.  Ali now “Prince” Ali - came back into her life the second time, conveniently when her husband was away for 5 weeks, leading to That Night where Ali had proclaimed that Mary was leaving Douglas for him..except she couldn’t do it, and once gain Ali had left and never come back before Mary had time to change her mind.

Upon pressing Charlie for information, he produced the truth.  A large stack of papers stolen from Douglas’ office, written from Ali to Mary proclaiming his love to her.  Furious about being deceived so, Mary publicly denounced Douglas’ behaviour and his claims that he was only “Doing it for her” .  Ali took Mary for a walk around the Winter Palace Hotel to calm her down, and she apologised for doubting him all this time, and he once again begged her to leave Douglas for him because all that he had done, he had done for her, to be seen as an equal to her, confessing that some of those things might not have been entirely honourable.

Douglas, however, had decided to drown his sorrows at the bottom of not one, but two bottles of bourbon.  When she first heard that he been “Taken unwell” she rushed to his side, worried that he had been poisoned or something else.  The only poison was alcohol, and he had throw up over the poor waiting staff.  After asking Charlie and his bodyguard Charles (who was fast gaining Mary’s respect and friendship) to take care of him, Mary was back to a white hot anger at spending most of her holiday apologising for her husband’s messes and fights when all this time he had been lying to her and asked Ali to whisk her away on a date, where he proceeding to woo her some more, promising to give her the world if she would go with him and her promising to give him her decision by the end of the night.

After the whirlwind of her date and the excitement of the Motor Race, Mary found herself in a strangely frank but honest conversation with King Fu’ad about choosing what was best for her public image and her business and what was best for herself, promising her safe sanctuary, her own palace and a yacht at her disposal should she need it as Fu’ad confessed himself to being in a similar position with his own wife.  Mary discovered a new level of respect for the King-behind-the-scenes and knew she had a difficult conversation to have with Douglas.

However, her husband was not incapacitated for as long as she thought and had spied her out on her date, and whilst she had been in the Palace with the King, he had sought out Ali with the intention of having it out.  Instead Charlie had somehow convinced Douglas that the way to win Mary back was to (for the first time in Douglas’ life) be nice to Ali and prove he could change for the better.

This began what can only be described as the oddest evening in Mary Pickford’s life.  After having performed at the gala entertainment*, Mary found herself dragged up to dance with both Ali and Douglas.  At the same time.  In public.  It was at that moment that Mary really wanted the ground to swallow her whole to save herself from the mortal embarrassment of having two men - one of which being her husband, who was proclaiming very loudly “Look honey, look I can change, see” - fighting over her.  After being told by several rather confused that her dear, darling husband was going around stating loudly that he was so proud that he was able to keep conversations with pretty ladies “above board” and control himself, Mary was more than ready to make her decision.  Except her husband had gone to bed early so she couldn’t explode at him until morning.

But this turned out to be a strange blessing, because it meant she could spend the rest of the evening with her Prince uninterrupted and told him her decision.  Ali then proposed to her one the spot, to which she accepted... just as soon as she had broken things off with Douglas in the morning.   However their night of bliss was not to be, as an army of the undead had accidentally been released from one of Egypt’s many tombs and had surrounded Luxor!  The only thing that could keep them at bay was the Torch of Anubis, which Ali volunteered himself, his golden Rolls Royce and Mary to drive around all night to hold them off until a man called Fritz with a Special Rod could turn up and (hopefully) banish them for good.  Up until this point, Mary had heard nothing but rumours of animated mummies and such things, thinking it just an elaborate set piece by someone with a really good special effects team.

But as she sat in the open topped Rolls with her true love (and a very enthusiastic Fakir in the back honking the car horn with a reckless abandon akin to Toad of Toad Hall), holding a strange Egyptian artifact above her head in what made her look more than a little like the Statue of Liberty she couldn’t deny that it would make a really good movie, especially when morning came and Adele Blanc-Sec and Fritz Lang jumped in the Rolls to lasso one of the undead, discovering that it did indeed kill them, instantly.  But only on touch.  Then they realised that the other mummies refused to go anywhere near their fallen brethren and built what can only be described as a low circular wall of the twice-dead around Luxor to keep them at bay so someone could actually work out a plan to close the portal and banish them for good.

Tired, yet exhilarated by the nights events, being heralded as Saviour of Luxor by a few, Mary was confronted by her husband who tried once more in a misguided attempt to win her back.  Upon realising that her decision was made, Douglas launched into a fight with Ali.  Distraught, Mary leapt between the two, breaking up the fight, throwing her wedding ring Douglas and telling him for all the world to see that he had lost her the moment Charlie had given her the letters from Ali, and that in hiding them from her she knew that he was only acting in his interests not hers, that he was the one who never truly loved her and she would never forgive him for getting between her and her true love.

At Ali’s insistence King Fu’ad dissolved Mary’s marriage to Douglas there and then in front of a crowd of witnesses, then re-married her to Ali later that morning with the Fakir as witness (because if it was alright for Henry VIII, then surely it must be fine here).  In the absence of her actual family, Charlie Chaplain gave Mary away to her beloved and Mary was accepted into Ali’s family with open arms (and several offers to quietly remove of Douglas should he decide to cause trouble).

And trouble he did.  Seeing his wife get married to his worst enemy was enough to break him once and for all.  In true Hollywood drama, Douglas Fairbanks drove himself out into the wilds of Egypt and off a cliff into the sea, it is said he changed his mind at the last minute, but it was too late and he perished so incredibly dramatically.  The car was found later that day, after Aziza Amir told her that he had rudely kicked her out of the car in the middle of nowhere and driven off at high speed.

In all of this, the EFOFF awards were nearly forgotten and although United Artists did not win the award, all the movies were incredibly well received - Forbidden Love being a fair and worthy winner.  Mary and Charlie however were not...impressed with the edits Douglas had made without them (*cough* changing the villain’s name) and decided that should “Freedom” go to a public audience it would need a re-vamp.**

That was the end of Mary Pickford’s weekend of drama, although it followed her for many months to come.  After discovering that her husband had committed suicide, the media spoke slightly more favourably of her, for a grief-stricken (twice) widowed movie star who had been betrayed by her husband, denying her the opportunity of true love made for a better story (and movie) than the scandalous American harlot that ran off to Egypt with a street rat.  

Mary did grieve for Douglas, feeling an intense amount of guilt that it was all her fault, but Ali persuaded her that she was not to blame, and with Douglas not able to voice a complaint, passing the paperwork to file her divorce in America went a lot smoother than it would otherwise, having learned from Valentino’s prior mistake and staying firmly in Egyptian soil for the requisite year before marrying Prince Ali officially and with great public ceremony.

United Artists continued to thrive under the joint care of Charlie and Mary, with Mary opening a studios near her newly acquired palace called Shifting Sands, bringing more industry and fame to Egypt (much to King Fu’ad’s delight).  Her and Ali lived a pleasant and incredibly comfortable lifestyle after Mary had persuaded him to give up the...less above board parts of his money making in the interests of not bringing scandal to their door, and for the first time in her life, she was happy.

*  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *

And there you have it!  It was an amazing time and I genuinely could not have asked for better people to play with.  Saturday evening and Sunday morning had to be the highlight of my game, the incredibly bizarre dance scene between Mary, Ali and Douglas having me trying to not be in stitches, the explosive ending of her marriage and gaining the Disney ending of her story.  I would also like to say that Mary had no less than 6 separate offers of making Douglas...disappear before he returned to America.

Special thanks go to the players behind Douglas, Ali, Charlie, King Fu’ad and Charles for without them Mary’s plot would not have been anywhere near as fantastical as it was and they were perfect to bounce off, as well as all the other Actors and Movie cast.  It was a pleasure to disrupt Karnak with you all.

Without the GMs this game would not have been possible at all.  Thank you so much for letting me step in at the last minute, your time, patience and the hard work you all put in behind the scenes and for helping me when I was struggling with Mary’s problems hitting a little to close to home.

I really hope I get to play in 1897 next year, and that I will at least see some of you before then!

* I apologise on behalf of everyone’s eardrums and if I try and sing in public again you’re all welcome to duct tape me so I can’t.

Brodie Atwater joined me this episode to share some research on debriefing, marginalization and accessibility, and a touching larp about artificial intelligence.