Leaving Mundania (25 page)

I thought the hindrances were terribly fun. On the advice of Cappy's girlfriend, I took the “enemy” hindrance, which meant my character had an enemy somewhere; in this case, it was a chef who had shut down my restaurant in Paris. I also took the “grim servant of death” hindrance, which meant that bad things happened to those around me, a hilarious problem for a professional chef. The way the in-game mechanic worked, if my attempt to use a skill failed—if I drew an ace from my deck—the worst possible outcome would happen to my party.

I created a French character because I wanted to be part of Team French, consisting of Brendan, his girlfriend Liz, and a couple of their friends. Team French did not mess around when it came to costumes. Liz had purchased a tuxedo jacket with a high waist and tails for Brendan, who also donned a red vest, a cravat, and a gigantic top hat for his role as Jean-Luc LeFleur, an old-money fop who had journeyed from France to invest in Cairo, Illinois. Liz played Amalie Giroud, a woman with a demure demeanor that belied her skill with guns. She wore a tiered faux-satin skirt in dark red, with a fusty black blouse and matching red coat. A black wig covered her hair, and she pinned on a hat laden with black silk flowers and trailing mesh. I made do with an outfit gleaned from my closet. I wore my white chemise from Knight Realms and added an apron with a dishcloth hanging off the waist, a wooden spoon, and a whisk from my kitchen.

After all of us were dressed, we went down to the larp, which was held in the same room as Shattered had been. It was located right next to the bar-lobby area, and so people in costume waiting to start Deadlands milled about with wide-eyed businessmen there for a Friday night drink. In the larp community, venturing somewhere public in costume is commonly known as “freaking the mundies.” But for tonight, at the convention, the freaks far outnumbered the mundanes in this hotel lobby bar.

The Fish-Devils had taken great pains to dress the set inside the beige hotel function room. They had set up a casino, laying printed green felt meant for blackjack, poker, and craps over a variety of tables. Xeroxes of confederate money had been cut to size to provide the currency for this evening of gambling. One end of the room had a rolling bar set up at it, complete with stools and “alcoholic” drinks that consisted of soda, since the convention's policy didn't permit alcohol on the convention floor for a bunch of reasons, including liability and to prevent underage drinking. Screens sectioned off opposite corners of the room; one concealed a special poker table, the other, a museum with framed papyri, a small African mask, a silver-encrusted dagger, and other objets d'arte that the GMs borrowed for the event.

People began free role-playing, talking in-character, although the game hadn't officially started. I soon discovered that my French accent was worse than awful. Michael was there, wearing suspenders and drinking from a flagon, talking fast, making claims, and offering flattery to the ladies. He was playing a snake oil salesman named Dr. Waites. Eventually, the Fish-Devils explained the rules, a little quickly for my taste: conflicts were determined by a stat level, plus a skill level, plus a card draw. The seasoned gamers caught on immediately. I felt immediately confused but figured that someone would explain what I needed to do if and when the time came. All thirty of us milled for an hour and a half, gambling and chatting, while seemingly nothing happened.

I was finding this game harder to get into than Shattered had been, in part because it was a continuing larp. Shattered ran for the first time at this convention, while Deadlands had run twice a year at the Double Exposure conventions for about five years. Many of these players had established characters with private plots they eagerly anticipated. And while my character was playing Brendan's chef, we didn't have much reason to hang out in-game—he was involved in continuing the story of his character; I was new to town and still finding my way.

In the meantime, Michael parked himself at the craps table with a few other gentlemen. He'd heard that the local union was involved with the casino, and Dr. Waites wanted to bankrupt the bank backing
this new casino, in hopes that the money would be gone when the northerners arrived. He enlisted several characters with the in-game “gambling” skill to his cause, and they collectively broke several of the tables. At one point, as a combat was beginning, he scooped all the remaining money off the craps table, said thank you, and slowly walked out of the room, the highlight of his game experience, a spectacular theft hidden in plain sight. Then, for Michael, it was beer o'clock and time to head toward bed.

Around midnight, and three hours into the game, I was bored of Eloise. My horrific French accent, so amusing to attempt for the first hour or so, had grown exhausting to keep up. I had learned to play poker and blackjack in-character, both games I hadn't remembered how to play in real life, because I actually prefer not to play them. I also met an art expert and made cursory small talk with a bunch of characters whose players I knew out-of-game. I was beginning to feel as if four hours of convention larping was about all I could muster. As I prepared to slink off to bed, Eloise was sucked through a portal and into a desert near Cairo, Egypt. The six of us, including Brendan and Liz, banded together and killed two large bulls, which were really demons. Sure enough, the GM supervising our party, combined with my peers, managed to teach me which numbers to add to what type of card pull to determine whether I actually hit the bull with my cleaver. We didn't act out the fight; rather, we verbally described what we were doing, as tabletop players do, while sitting in the hotel lobby. After helping defeat the bulls and returning to the town of Cairo, Illinois, I felt I'd had enough larp for the day; it was half-past beer o'clock, in my opinion.

The strength of Deadlands, Michael said, was its immersive setting—the game space didn't feel like a hotel function room but a thriving casino, thanks to the Fish-Devils' decorations. Furthermore, the world of Deadlands felt as though it extended beyond the immediate realm of the game, it felt substantial, thanks to its campaign setting. After years of game play, the GMs had explored different facets of the world and of the town, which had its own history, a history remembered by the established characters that populated its landscape. Similarly, players had developed and deepened their characters
over time. Players with established characters were also more likely to invest in costuming for them, as Liz and Brendan had, which added to the overall atmosphere. In contrast, Shattered didn't have this feeling of a concrete and complete world because it was a new game with all-new characters; many players of Shattered cobbled costuming together from their suitcases and rolled up a character a half hour before the game started.

The thickness and clarity of the Deadlands world made it harder to arrive as a newbie, though. I'd created my chef, but she didn't have enough depth or substance to play for more than a few hours. And whether it's school, a workplace, or an in-game community of larpers, it's always difficult to fit in as a new kid. Michael also pointed out that Deadlands's plot hooks were hard for players to pick up on. Both he and I were new to town, and both of us spent most of our game experience gambling, unaware of whether there was a plot or how we might involve ourselves in it. The difference was that he was able to find his own character goal (bankrupt the bank) while I failed to make my own fun and simply wandered around. Neither of us lasted till the end of the game.

Around one in the morning, I returned to my room to find that Jeramy, in all his faux-David Bowie glory, was already there and preparing himself for the sort of bizarrely costumed convention-ramble that so many people enjoy. You could wear whatever outrageous thing you damned well pleased around the floor at a convention like this, and people would smile, high-five you, and tell you that you looked awesome. Sometimes it happened unintentionally. Once, I'd been wearing a white shirt, black pants, and red lipstick, and some guy had taken my picture on the convention floor because he thought I was dressed up as Uma Thurman's character from
Pulp Fiction.
A great number of people in wacky outfits perpetually wandered the convention floor. I'd seen a older man with a stuffed dragon eternally on his shoulder, a guy wearing a captain's hat and a long leather jacket strutting about with a cane, a gentleman in a black and purple suit and top hat circa 1890s England, women in full Renaissance wear or wearing jeans with corsets or gypsy bangles around their waists and ten-gallon swashbuckler hats dripping with feathers. Goth kids with
stringy hair and faces full of metal skulked across the lobby, while hipsters in brightly colored leather jackets hunched in their shoulders and darted glances at the strange accessories on display—tiny hats, angel wings, and spirit-gummed devil horns. Jeramy was in full effect tonight. He often purchased odd things from the estate sales that he and his girlfriend frequented—a bomber jacket made out of a bath towel emblazoned with an ad for the film
Gone with the Wind,
a cheesy framed poster of a tiger that he gave to Brendan and Liz when Liz bought a house, an absurd number of cigars he'd acquired at a steep discount. He and his girlfriend, Jenn, a graphic designer, loved stuff that looked theatrical, particularly if it was from the 1980s, and if it was awesomely tacky, cheesy, and over-the-top, so much the better. Currently, Jeramy was hunting for a keytar, a handheld piano in the shape of a guitar that hailed from his favorite decade. When I opened the door to our hotel room, Jeramy towered before me in an electric, Elmo-red flannel jumpsuit with a zipper up the front. It covered him from the neck all the way down to the soles of his feet. I realized he was wearing footie pajamas. They even had a buttoned up butt-hatch. His reddish hair, curly and shoulder-length, billowed behind him in a cloud. In one hand, he held a bottle of rum. We both began laughing hysterically, me at his bizarre, oh-so-Jeramy outfit, him at my reaction, which was pretty much the reason to wear footie pajamas in the first place—to get a laugh out of folks. We had a drink and then wandered down to the mostly deserted convention floor, in search of adventure. Since we didn't find it down there, we climbed the staircase to the ballroom level, which had been sectioned off into four different areas used for larps.

The far room had had a Cthulhu larp, a horror larp, in it; the middle room gave off the fading sounds of battle; and when I opened the door to the third room, a woman in a sleeping bag fell out of it. We had found Sleeping: The LARP, a joke made flesh. Sleeping: The LARP was part of a trend of gamers laughing at their own hobby, using it as a bald-faced excuse to hang out. After all, any social event could be transformed into a larp. There was also Bar Crawl: The LARP running at this convention. I wasn't able to attend, but at the previous convention, DREAMATION, I had gone. We had drunk in
bars while only minimally following the scavenger hunt rules, chief among them “pics, or it didn't happen.” The mock-event Sleeping: The LARP had this description in the convention schedule.

“Sleeping: The LARP.” Our master of dreams, none other than Mr. Sleep himself, will run this fantastic action-packed larp filled with emotion, anxiety, drama and … snoring. Yes, that's right, each player will have an exhaustive list of no goals whatsoever other than to sleep as peacefully as he or she can. An incredible level of interactivity consisting of slumber in near proximity to other participants will surely make this an experience you won't ever forget. Players are encouraged to bring their own sleeping bags, pillows, air mattresses and Ambien. Friday, 12:00AM - 4:00AM; One Round; Bring Your Own Materials. Experts ONLY; Very Serious, All Ages.

There were perhaps five people sleeping near the door, which was opposite the wall that concealed the still-going boffer battle. As the sleeping-bagged woman explained where we were to us in hushed tones, we backed away slowly, and returned to our room, one last tipple, and sleep.

Before I'd arrived at DEXCON, I'd registered for a Cthulhu larp. The Cthulhu games, loosely based on the writing of H. P. Lovecraft and his followers, focused on investigating the Elder gods, dark monsters from the abyss that could crush humanity with a mere thought. The more you learned about them, the less sane you became. A Cthulhu game generally featured characters such as mad scientists, adventurers, mystics, nobility, and professors of the arcane. The games could be set in any historical period but typically had only one ending: everyone dies or is driven insane from facing the hideous unknown, filled with super-powerful alien beings, some of them tentacled, who will one day return to rule the earth and crush humanity like the bugs we are.

The gaming group PST Productions generally ran four or five Cthulhu games at each Double Exposure convention and had a devoted following of players that I hadn't met, primarily because they rarely
ventured out to play other larps—they were all Cthulhu all the time. PST's cult following meant that it was impossible to casually show up to a game—all the slots would already be filled. So I made sure to sign up for the hotly anticipated premiere of their steampunk Cthulhu setting as soon as I had registered for the convention. I was rewarded with a detailed character history that arrived via e-mail. I would be playing Madame Blavatsky, a historical character and self-professed medium, one of the founders of new-age spiritualism who helped create the Theosophical Society, an association based on the belief that all world religions espouse the same set of core truths but that the practicum of these beliefs, the trappings in which each religion clothes those truths, differs from faith to faith and is potentially destructive.

That Saturday evening, I attempted a steampunk costume. Steampunk is a genre that grew in popularity in the early 2000s, attaining its own lifestyle conventions and forming its own subculture. Think steam power and the Victorian age, and then mix in the idea of magic as elaborate technology. Think zeppelins, gears,
The League of Extraordinary Gentleman, 2000 Leagues Under the Sea,
Nicola Tesla, mad scientists, and
Journey to the Center of the Earth
(or bottom of the ocean). The symbol of steampunk culture is a pair of brass goggles or a bare watch gear. I threw on a dress over some baggy pants and boots, laced a recently purchased corset over it, added several necklaces, threw a black scarf over my head to suggest my “mystic” bent, and borrowed a cane with a compass in the handle from Jeramy to help me role-play Blavatsky's bum leg. Not the most steampunk costume ever, but I thought I'd pass.