Radical Consequences
Consequences is an annual freeform/theater LARP convention, a long weekend of several largely self-contained 2-6 hour LARP games that attendees can sign up for. Following my megagame experiences, I was keen to try out LARPing, and when a friend suggested this event it seemed like the perfect opportunity to experience a variety of different games. Below the cut are the ones I played and how I found them.
The King in Yellow
A small group of Hollywood actors with a tangled history together go to an isolated and empty hotel for an extremely ill-advised read-through of the titular play.Β
This was a very strong opener for the weekend and for my first LARP, with excellent props, lighting, and sound effects. (And also the appearance of the event photographer partway through, which took us by surprise but in a way that added to the atmosphere.) I particularly enjoyed the script of the play itself, with how it encouraged the tensions between the cast to rise to the fore during the read-through, and Scene 4 was my favorite to perform. The other players also came with great outfits for the 1930s setting, with white suits and dresses.Β
I enjoyed my character of Simon Carter even more than expected, with events serendipitously giving him a neat arc of inaction giving way to drastic action, and providing the opportunity for me to dramatically open a curtain and have my moment in the spotlight. Being killed very violently afterwards was also a fun bonus. (In all the excitement, I did forget my idea of namedropping an Uncle Randolph).
The character of Ronald did have less to do, more so towards the end. Some additional connection to the women of the cast or to the play itself may have helped there. There was also a small issue of one of the players having missed an important detail on their character sheet, but that added to the authenticity of their performance before it was clarified to them.
The Omega Delivery
In a Firefly-inspired setting, a beat-up freighter arrives to make a delivery to an intelligence agency outpost. Much like in Time To Orbit: Unknown, this turns out to be a perfectly normal functioning space station with nothing wrong with it.Β
This game was run in the Arcade, which the GMs made inventive use of, and the costuming advice was minimalist and undemanding but effective. Two of the station crew even serendipitously showed up in the exact same hat without coordinating it, which helped create the impression of a uniform.Β
I played Kai Salazar, an imprisoned economist-politician, and had fun expounding on why the Federation losing control of the outer worlds is a historical inevitability. At first I thought completing my backup objective would be as simple as passing a copy of The Theory of Interstellar Trade to be delivered with a short note to my secretary by someone sympathetic, but then as more and more went wrong with the station it became apparent that someone would first have to make it away from the station alive for that delivery to be made.Β Β
Perhaps because of the game's place in a larger series of connected LARPs that I'd not played, some of the Kestrel cast felt a little superfluous and their roles could maybe have been cut. From the description I'd expected there would be more in the way of Among Us-style side-tasks that people would need to be assigned to in keeping the station functional a little longer, which might have helped to push different smaller groups together to interact with each other rather than everyone sticking together in one place for the most part once the Kestrel docked.
Mean Streets
A nested premise of an immersive 1920s speakeasy game with android hosts within a cyberpunk setting in the style of Westworld. The costuming for this was great, as was the non-alcoholic bar setup. The soundtrack of anachronistic piano covers is also a gag that I continue to love, whether in Westworld or Cowboy Grak 5 or here.Β
My character, Aces, was fairly straightforward to play, though one of the reveals came with serendipitously dramatic timing for one of the conversations I was having with another host.Β
This game felt somewhat lacking in agency, in particular towards the end when we just had to wait and run out the clock. Maybe some of the guest characters involved in changing the usual progression of the in-game story could have been given the ability to hand out some of the memories at times of their own choosing, or the host characters could have been given a few sealed envelopes of past memories that they could open by fulfilling or subverting some of the plot beats of the default progression? Despite the name, these streets weren't very mean, and I'd have liked the guests to have more reason to be mean to the hosts, be that to help uncover the hosts' memories or some other purpose or just giving them license to do so for their own amusement. A poker table setup or similar could also have provided a vehicle for some more character interactions and helped to fill the time.Β
Roses of Saint-Germain
A ball in Musketeers-era France, where the King's Musketeers, the Cardinal's Guard, and some of the most powerful aristocrats come to witness the graduation tournament of several young noble ladies, marred by a murder the previous night.Β
Once again the outfits people assembled for this were great. I played Captain Anton du Valois, leader of the Musketeers in attendance, and kept my attention on protecting the queen. She came out of the night ascendant in power, but that had far more to do with her own political intrigues and lengthy negotiations. I also did my best to coordinate my Musketeers and keep them focused on the necessary investigations, but the evening had many alluring distractions for them. Among them was my daughter, one of the ladies competing in the tournament, to whom I lent my sword and my full support, later recruiting her to the detective work when my formal subordinates were stonewalled. The tournament lent the evening's events a good amount of structure, and there were plenty of other dramatic events like the unscheduled duels and proposals to enjoy.Β
There were a lot of different secrets and intrigues, more than I managed to track, and I think others generally had difficulty with that too. That was evocative of just how tangled the court situation was, so rather than reduce the scope I think having more opportunities to demand truthful answers after a duel would help. Perhaps the tournament fights could also reward the victors with the choice between asking a question or inviting a romantic interest, or else the player pack could include a short list of accepted pretexts for a duel like different insults to more easily provoke them between rounds?Β
The Shadow Soiree
Another game centered on a ball, this one took its inspiration from the Witcher and Shakespeare with several sorcerers competing for membership of their council and to be selected by the different kingdoms in attendance, each of which had their own fraught internal struggles.
The costumes here were perhaps the best of the weekend, elaborate and making an easy visual guide to which faction each player was from and shifting as their situations developed. I played the role of the Tempest, one of the new generation of mages with a complicated backstory. My closest relationships that can be revealed without spoilers were with the Gilded One and Pandora, fellow junior sorcerers, and we had a great time going on magical side adventures. With Pandora there was an initial tension around how competitive our rivalry would be, and with the Gilded One the big question was what would happen as her chains were loosened, but as the evening went on we reaffirmed our bonds and I ended up sharing a destination with Pandora as colleagues as well as best friends.Β
The mechanics for magical combat were simple and effective, inviting us to make bold gestures and call out the names of our spells, and I had fun in each of my duels throwing storm-spell after storm-spell at my opponents. The CYOA elements were also an elegant way to allow us lots of excursions and adventures at our own pace without needing ten times as many GMs to run them all.Β
As for the more spoilery relationships, suffice to say that I had to politely and awkwardly decline one set of advances from someone I'd intrigued after favoring their faction, then stumbled into joining a party that turned out to be an orgy with the last people I'd want to see having sex among my fellow guests. After that disaster, I was all too ready to reveal my secret to avoid any further mishaps along those lines. The highlight of the event came just moments after my voluntary reveal, when another character had independently came up with a fantastic out-of-the-box method that unmasked me as well. Towards the evening I found myself with everything I could have ever wanted, love and power and acceptance and friendship, with a Shakespearean double marriage once the main relationship obstacles had been resolved, and that made the final decisions easy to make.Β
To Hold the Sky
A xianxia LARP, this was the only one of the event for which the characters were not pre-written. Other than the broad strokes of the setting, we decided on our clans' reputations, values, and secrets ahead of the event, and then developed our individual characters collaboratively at the start following a structure of rankings and obsessions. This was a fun process, with our heroic and dutiful Upright Sword Sect (inspired by the Lan Clan and the Jedi Order) forming a complex web of internal dysfunction between our battle-hungry head, power-behind-the-throne seer, reluctant chosen one whose passion was for music over swordplay, and his twin sister who took far more after the head. As for me, I was the clan's humble archivist, an illegitimate son taking on unpleasant duties out of a sense that I deserved them. We then established our ties to people in the other clans, and I found myself accidentally accumulating different mother figures: I was up to three or four by the time play began! I missed an opportunity for using our clan's secret to explain why my birth mother, the clan head of the Wind Foxes, had given me up to my father's clan, but otherwise people had no shortage of great ideas for how to connect the different characters.Β
The costuming was excellent once again, and the highlight was the character of the Emperor: With all his grand flowing motions, he acted the role so well that I think nobody even considered overthrowing him. To maintain the Mandate of Heaven through gesture alone is quite a feat!
Once the game stated, I began by using my assigned affinity for ritual incense to boost the cultivation of our clan's chosen one candidate as two of my three actions, then started work on gathering secrets under the guise of correcting gaps in our clan records. Halfway through, the Emperor announced that we would be descending to the Earth realm to live new lives without our past memories to deepen our experiences.Β
In this realm, the rankings of power were reversed, and I found myself reincarnated as the head of the Righteous Thunder orthodox martial sect. As demons ravaged the land, I volunteered us for the hardest duties, sacrificing ourselves so that the other sects could claim the three artifacts needed to seal them away. This meant that our sect dwindled to nothing, the sole survivor of the campaign seduced away to another sect, and in our absence the other three broke out into open warfare amongst themselves.Β
Following our return to the Sky realm and the restoration of our memories, my character resolved himself in a new direction after seeing the bloody consequences of all his self-sacrifice in that life. I pursued the remaining secrets more aggressively, drawing on my good relationship with the friendliest and most caring of my mother figures to accumulate the last pieces I needed to blackmail every other clan including that of the Emperor!Β
Old habits die hard, however, and rather than use them myself I deferentially turned them over to our clan's seer, advising her on how they should best be used but taking a step back from the resulting negotiations. This had some unforeseen effects as she handled the evidence differently than I'd intended, my closest mother figure being horrified when she learned our clan had collected the knowledge to devastate her own, in part through my conversation with her.Β
At the climax, I was appointed the Court Archivist for the imperial family, an incredible rise - but one I later learned may have come about anyway without souring another relationship by using blackmail to secure that result. With my new station, I suggested that our clan had more to say, inviting the seer to reveal our evidence against the Wind Foxes - but unbeknownst to me, the twin sister in our sect had formed a strong bond of sword-siblings with one of the Wind Foxes, and she was able to discourage the seer from exposing their dark past on the strength of that relationship at the last moment with a fervent shake of her head. Instead, our seer gave a speech on the importance of cooperation and righteousness, one that could be delivered from a position of strength with the evidence we had against all our peers. Without even thinking about it, I'd ended up on an arc like Meng Yao, only for more bloodshed to be averted by the bonds of martial kinship saving the day.
I think the mechanics around clan strength could have been explained better in the information packs, as it was difficult to understand how the different actions would affect it in the short or long term. I also found myself wanting slightly more actions available to take, maybe five rather than three? But that would probably require other adjustments around the difficulty of the different crises and the number of imperial actions available to be given out as well. The Earth realm intermission was an excellent idea but suffered a little from a lack of direction. Maybe to encourage and better define the conflicts there, some subset of players could be assigned to play the role of the demons instead of the martial sects, and those who die getting another reincarnation as one of the common people so they can choose to in the earlier scenes of that intermission without fear of being left out afterwards?
After the Crisis
A superhero LARP, this was tightly scoped to the meeting held between members of a super-team following a disaster that they failed to fully avert. I went into this expecting a slightly darker tone, closer to the aftermath of Leviathan in Worm with more morally questionable actions from the heroes, but it was easy to adjust to the premise being about a group of more idealistic four-color heroes reckoning on their having failed to save the day cleanly and bloodlessly.
My character was Anonymous, the team super-scientist. I spent the meeting chiming in with scientific corrections, criticizing our leader's rigid moral code that had led to the crisis, and floating my stepping down from patrols to focus on equipping the team and developing more systemic solutions. The other players were very good in their own roles as other heroic archetypes, expressing different perspectives on justice and the superhero genre's assumptions, and the detailed briefs gave us lots of great material for referring to different parts of the setting with a common understanding.Β
Putting this on the morning of the last day of the con was a great slot for it, as it made it easy to embody the roles of exhausted superheroes. I was also a big fan of the use of the printouts that were handed to us by the GMs as emails and text messages poured in for us to ignore or respond to while the meeting was ongoing. The bookend no-dialogue opening and ending segments were excellent tone-setters as well.
LDRBRD
Set in the Arcade, a fitting location for this LARP of video game characters interacting. I played Space Commander, the Commander Shepard/Buzz Lightyear expy, and amused myself picking my options from a dialogue wheel, alluding to past adventures, and ending most conversations with an "I should go." In the end my self-sacrifice saw me deleted after riding beyond the borders of the Lightcycle grid to infinity and beyond. The costumes were the best part of this, in particular the triumvirate of Princess, Fast Hedgehog, and Italian Plumber.
It would be nice if this had done more with the Arcade gaming space, as the Omega Delivery had. The character packs were lacking in information to give us enough to do, and the minigames each incentivized stalling for as long as possible which sapped the pace. Maybe it would help to have a speedrunner's bonus for finishing a turn or minigame as fast as possible, or to reduce the overall duration of the game?
Conclusion
Overall, Consequences was a lot of fun, and I expect I'll attend again in future. I've now got a better idea of the kind of LARP I can best engage with: I like having secrets (and the means to uncover them), agency (often but not always via game mechanics), and an excuse to dress up, while I struggle more with roles that inflict angst on the characters that I'm not very good at acting out. I'm also thinking about writing up a theater LARP of my own, and have a couple of ideas already. Let's see if I manage that or play any other forms of LARP before Serendipitous Consequences comes around next year!
