A Day at the Races, A Night at the Baths

Stephen Tihor, Beth Bartley, mnemex, and I have been spending the last couple of days working on the larp we'll be running at DexCon on Saturday, July 16. Vinnie had asked us for a virgin larp, one never run before, and I suggested to Stephen that we write one set at the Roman Baths so that we could play in the hot tub. He's been giving the rest of us the course sequence in larp writing, and we've been studying very hard.

This is a different kind of larp than the rest of us have written before, one with very minimal characters, and very easy to expand. We want the proppage to be limited to a deck of laminated index cards that can be taken into a hot tub. This means that the character sheet should fit on the back of the index card. This means that the character sheet can fit on the spreadsheet we're using for the game.

We have a total of, I think, 25 characters. Of these, we've got character sheets for 15, and we started writing the actual character sheets at about 7 pm tonight, averaging one sheet every 15 minutes or so. I will be stunned if we fill even 14 of the roles we wrote, and even more stunned, and a bit nervous, if we get 20 or more players. But hey, hot tub.

Of course, I now have to buy a bathing suit. And, naturally, mnemex's Shadowfist tournament overlaps with the game, but, if things are going well, we're either running a 2 hour game, giving him time to make it, or we're running a 4 hour game, and he'll be able to duck out and leave the rest of the running to us.

An added bonus for me was that I got to familiarize myself with SD cards, using them to transfer data between Stephen's Mac, my pda, my laptop, and my desktop, with mnemex helping me figure out why my desktop had been having trouble with my card reader. I'd made the mistake of looking under "Memory_card" when I should have been looking under "Removable Disk". I'm starting to like SD cards.

So, if anyone reading this is free for DexCon, come over and drop by the hot tub for our run.

Keruton and other ideas

agrumer told me that he and other Cthulhupunkers were considering, in addition to a Prime Time Adventure Keruton game, something set on Bioko -- maybe a Law-n-Order variant? I forget -- and CSI Arkham. I still favor Keruton, not least because I've never seen an episode of CSI.

As I said, it'll be September before I try to run anything. Beth, agrumer, and mnemex are interested. kent_allard_jr seems a bit torn, and I want to make sure I neither push him away, if this is something he wants to play, or push him into playing, if he'd really rather not. OTOH, the words "Yes" and "No" are part of his vocabulary.

Prime Time Adventures is a game where it's important to make sure that all players can make all sessions, I think. First, there's a small number of sessions. Second, all players are supposed to be active, even in scenes where their PC is not present. This really is an ensemble game, which makes sense given how it's using television as its model and metaphor.

2nd edition Prime Time Adventures is supposed to be available at GenCon, and, so far, Beth, agrumer, and I want to get copies of it. Yes, I have first edition, but there are things that aren't as clear as they could be, and we're hoping that 2nd edition will clean those up.

agrumer speculated that, if we had a time limit on sessions, I could run them at Columbia Games Club. I'm not unwilling, but I am dubious. I suspect mnemex would prefer not to, as he enjoys playing board games, card games, and other non-RPGs at Games Club. Also, he and I have memories of an RPG that was supposed to run for only 2 hours worth of Games Club, but nearly invariably lasted until Games Club closed for the night. The game was often a lot of fun, but we hadn't wanted to give up the entire Games Club evening for it.

mnemex and I were idly wondering about a Keruton theme song. The scary thing is that "Keruton" scans to "Totoro". We did wonder if we could use a variation on Ultimate Destiny Apocalypse, aka the song from Revolutionary Girl Utena where Utena climbs all the stairs.

I also asked mnemex how he'd tweak Firemaker into an anime character. We agreed that his edges should probably be Spy, Shaman, and Persuasive. mnemex thinks that the contacts should be Coyote and Other Spirits. Issue is an interesting one, and should probably be something that someone hearing about Firemaker would think it should be, as opposed to what Firemaker's actual issues in the two Cthulhupunk campaigns were.

mnemex pointed out that exactly how to shape Firemaker and the others would depend on the structure of the typical Keruton episdoe. What is the show about? Is it a monster of the week thing, as Keruton and friends fight demons? Is it a question of collecting Good Guy Weapons to fight Bad Guys, as the Bad Guys collect Bad Guy weapons, with the heroes perpetually unable to stop the Bad Guys from getting their mcguffins? Should it be something else completely? All of this is stuff that the players need to work out in collaboration. It needs to be a show that we'd all want to watch, even, or, perhaps, especially, if it were trashy fun.

Hm, I'm doing a search for possible Japanese translations of "Firemaker". One online dictionary lists the following for "fire": kasai, faia, houka, hi, hinote, kaki, gogyou, kaji. For "maker", it lists: tsukurite, me-ka-, me-ka, tsukurite.