And more Nick:
> Erik Sieurin describes (in an excellent summary) live roleplaying in
> Sweden.
Still, some people seem to have misunderstood.
First, This Is Not The Rubber Sword Crew!!!!!!
Rulesbooks for this sort of game have been mercilessly killed in
Swedish "Live" fanzines. Combat is in no way non-existent, but the
hackn'slash guys are just as hated as in "serious" TTRPG (like most
of this list). In advertisments for scenarios, the reduction of
violent plots and violent characters is almost always stressed - to a
degree that some Lives stress that "you can come to us and
hackn'slash".
Second, I belong to no "group" (sadly enough), and this style is
followed by the THOUSANDS of LARPers that exist in Scandinavia. The
LARP that exist at Glorantha-cons is virtually unknown, as is
"rent-a-castle"-style RPG.
> >First of all, the current trend, and it has been the trend for years,
> >could be called "maximum visual realism".
>
> People tend to take that a bit too far. The group I know refuses to
> take practical food like potatoes and rice with them 'because they
> didn't have them in Sweden in the early middle ages'. Which I find
> a bit weird since it's fantasy roleplaying, not historical reenactment.
(Sigh) I recognize these guys' style. I'm pretty sure they are into
"interaktiv teater", not "Live" or "lajv" :-). When I did my
"The Feast of Oberon" scenario, I kept to the "no-potatoes"-rule,
since this was "Mythic Europe"-style, but I have always found it
crappy otherwise.
> I have been put off a bit by the very elitist attitude of the 'live-ers'.
Can I QUOTE this in an ongoing debate in the Live-fanzine StrapatS?
>
> >Sigh. I'll guess I'll have to settle for a Swedish style Glorantha-
> >based game.
>
> If you run such an event I'll come!
Good, hope you'll not be the only one :-). As I said, it can be hell
to hammer BACKGROUND into people's heads in LARP.
>The usual setting I have heard of
> is a very bland, run of the mill fantasy with warriors, wizards, orcs
> and elves with a pseudoeuropean medieval culture.
The current style that is Correct and Trendy is "saga", which means
few wizards, no orcs, and the elves transformed into "fairies". The
tendency is shying away from things that are Ad&Dish.
Some of it is bland, the best isn't. Some morsels:
1, During one longer Live, the "darkfolk" (read orcs) were A, no way
intrinsically evil, B, very wellplayed and C, (the interesting part)
had their own "language". The dozen or so guys and gals who played
darkfolk had simply memorized 30-something words, and using them,
gestures and human "loan-words", they succeeded in NOT SPEAKING
"COMMON" (Swedish) for a week-end - including when not in the
presence of humans.
Similarily, there were a few among them who "knew human tongues", and
the other darkfolk stuck to "not understanding human".
Picture the following scene: A priest of the Oppressed Native
Barbarians (pretty similar to Sartarites, come to think of it) is
parlaying with the darkfolk to get an alliance against the
Imperialistic Sun-worshipping Invaders (pretty similar to Dara
Happans, come to think of it). The darkfolk chieftain has a pretty
good interpreter, but we are sure he UNDERSTANDS more than he
pretends to do. Suddenly, he grunts a sentence in "darktongue". His
second-in-command starts to laugh. One by one, all the darkfolk
warriors join in the laugh, and it is a damn natural one. They crowd
closer around us and start to chatter in darktongue, and smile tusked
smiles. We feel VERY uncomfortable, and the priest leans closer to
the interpreter and says sotto voce "Uhm , what was that about?"
The interpreter answers apolectically "Aaah - be darkfolk joke. Not
translatable, me very sorry." And then he put on a smile meant to be
reassuring......
2, The best "magician" character I've ever played was a Live-character, in a somewhat tongue-in-cheek After The Catastrophe-game - without any "magic", or similar. He was a shaman from a barbarian tribe which, as most others, considered technology to be "magic", and I've never seen people play so wonderfully "superstitious". Our encounter with the "civilized" trader was VERY good - but incredibly frustrating to the trader, who wanted hardware like working tech, canned food or weapons, not the high-quality talismans or visionary divinations Dances-With-Simca (the Simca was his totem, BTW) offered him.
3, Last, the six-years-old younger brother of one of the creators of a high fantasy scenario, who played the crown prince (six years old, of course). He had a good dampening effect on the powermongers who played barons, generals and court magicians - he would storm up to them and demand a somersault, or a song he hadn't heard, or a "funny face". He had a wonderful talent for smelling out pompous asses, and the bastards HAD to do as told or suffer the wrath of his reigning mother.....
And, BTW, LARP and TTRPG can support each other a lot - I have used all these experiences as a GM in TTRPG. Vice versa, being a TTRPG-GM is very good background for creating LARP-scenarios, better than you think.
What I should have stressed more at the end of my "Live in Ygg" post was the enimity with which the roleplayer/storyteller Live-people met my suggestions regarding the form of LARP ("freeform", would that be a good term) discussed currently on this list - 'cause they thought it too close to TTRPG.
Erik Sieurin
End of Glorantha Digest V2 #557
WWW material at http://hops.wharton.upenn.edu/~loren/rolegame.html
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