Leaving Mundania (6 page)

Dave served as the group's front man, ensuring that FishDevil had space to run at the Double Exposure conventions and good time slots, but left the details in the hands of his boys. Renny provided the group's creative direction and served as head GM. Frank ran character creation for the first couple of years, because he wasn't yet confident as a storyteller, while Cappy, a power gamer known for his mastery of rules systems, served as their walking rule book and could play NPCs (nonplayer characters) or point out system imbalances in a pinch. Gene and several other members of the GM team helped adapt the tabletop Deadlands rules into a larp system, replacing the dice with card pulls. Other friends filled in as support GMs and NPCs.

Their first game was choppy but went well enough to run a second time. George joined the GM team, and Deadlands slowly earned a small following.

Two years into FishDevil's existence, disaster struck. Dave Stern had never been very good at taking care of himself; he hated going to the doctor, so when he got sick, he simply soldiered through. In late 2005, Dave was hospitalized with renal failure, a shot liver, and lungs that were filling with fluid. A few years before, he'd been hospitalized with a staph infection in his spine, which was still affecting him, and on top of everything, he had diabetes. The boys had been living with their father since the divorce, but since the seventeen-year-old Gene was still a minor, he went to live with his mother, while Renny, who was twenty at the time, continued living at their father's place. Dave was in and out of the hospital—but mostly in—for several months, the worst months of Gene's and Renny's lives. Dave's illness thrust Renny into adulthood. Suddenly, he had to cook all his meals and pay the bills and do the laundry all the time and all by himself. It wasn't that he hadn't done these things before, but something about the routine, knowing that he was the ultimate responsible party in the house, wore on him. He spent days and nights at the hospital, eating hospital food, sitting in the hospital parking lot, and talking to his father's doctors. Gene felt heartsick about his father's illness.

Dave's illness also devastated Frank, who joined Gene and Renny at the hospital frequently during those months. On January 31, 2006, Dave called Frank into his hospital room alone. Dave had been a big,
strong guy, tall and rotund, with a bushy moustache, glasses, and eyes that had a smile behind them. Now he was weak. His lungs were filled with fluid, and he constantly coughed up clear mucus. His chest rumbled every time he breathed, and he was hooked up to machines by his wrists, which were bruised from the many IVs he had endured. Dave looked at Frank, and in that look, Frank felt Dave's strength and sincerity. In a weak voice he said, “If anything happens to me, take care of my boys and make sure they're OK.” The next day, he died.

Gene, Renny, and Frank don't remember much of the days that followed. A funeral was held, and perhaps a hundred people attended, people who had known Dave from work or cons. Molly Mandlin was present and stood up twice to talk about Dave. She felt oddly like she was mourning doubly that day, for Dave as a person and for his Avatar character, whom she would never meet again. Dave had always been kind to Molly. Although he lived a short distance from Double Exposure's conventions in New Jersey, he often drove into Manhattan to pick her up so she could attend. It had made her feel that the community wanted her. For Dave, such trips were a way of paying forward the kindness of others—before he'd had a car, others gave him rides to conventions.

The community that Dave helped foster held after his death. After the funeral, Frank's family helped Gene and Renny out with groceries for a bit. Vinny renamed Double Exposure's annual poker tournament in honor of Dave. And one day, in a Dunkin' Donuts, FishDevil decided that although they'd lost their heart, they would continue running games because that's what Dave would have wanted.

The next few years were difficult. Renny and Gene briefly moved in together, and it didn't go well, in part because a bad run of disappointments plagued Renny. He hadn't taken college very seriously before his father's death, and afterward he didn't have the money to continue, so he dropped out. He bounced from job to job, unable to make rent sometimes. Gene, in contrast, found steady work out of high school working for Lowe's pushing carts and stocking the shelves. Their employment situations seemed to reverse their roles; the responsible Gene began to seem more like the older brother. According to Frank, this tension contributed to the drag-out fights
the two had. As in any living situation, both Gene and Renny had issues they felt stubborn about, and that didn't help, either. At the same time Renny and Frank's girlfriend didn't get along, so for a while the two men weren't on speaking terms. As Gene's and Frank's relationships with Renny weakened, the bond between the two of them grew stronger, with Frank serving as a surrogate older brother to Gene. Renny felt angry about being displaced for a time.

Eventually, the tense situation resolved itself. Renny started living with his girlfriend, and later, the two of them moved to Albany. Gene moved in with George and Cappy, as well as Cappy's on-and-off girlfriend, also a gamer. As for Frank, he and his girlfriend broke up. The physical distance eased the tension between all three parties, who reconciled. Frank even gained a dad—at age twenty-one, he contacted his biological father, and the two have since built a relationship together.

Despite the upheaval, FishDevil continued to run games, although some of the GM team faded and new friends stepped up to take their place. Gene, Renny, Frank, Cappy, and George remained the constants in the equation, although at times each of them has grown tired of the responsibilities of running larps twice a year at conventions. They'd expanded their line of larps to include two other games, a dystopian future game called Concrete Jungle and a pan-Asian game called Legend of the Five Rings in addition to Deadlands.

In 2009, the FishDevil clan rolled up a rambunctious band of Celts and started attending a long-running outdoor larp called Knight Realms, a game that used boffers—foam weapons—to settle combat instead of dice or cards. The following year, they also began playing a new zombie apocalypse boffer larp called Dystopia Rising.

Renny, Gene, and Frank still go to conventions together, run games, and crack wise. Renny has their father's humor and charisma, his ability to improvise a scene when the players run wild, and his knack for creating strange and wonderful plots. He is still figuring out who he is and where he is going, but Albany, where he lives with his girlfriend, seems to be a good place for that. Gene has inherited Dave's ability at poker, his charisma, and his ability to think deeply about things from different angles. Three or four nights a week, people
gather at his house for tabletop campaigns, grabbing dice by the fistfuls from an ice bucket filled to the brim. Frank still carries within him Dave's calm view of the world, and he's followed Dave's advice, finishing college. He's a Renaissance man now, a pottery hobbyist and Revolutionary War reenactor who hunts, fishes, and knows how to put up drywall. At conventions Renny and Gene still run into people who remember what they were like as babies, people they don't remember meeting but who knew their parents. Gene, Renny, and Frank are still brothers, and FishDevil lives, for what the game master brings together, let no man put asunder.

T
he desire to pretend is ancient and pervasive. The Romans held mock naval battles and hosted costumed theme parties; the medieval British held a “Feast of Fools” in which master-servant relationships were playfully reversed; and Italians from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries had a tradition of commedia dell'arte, in which troupes of actors engaged in improvisational comedy.
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Larp's modern incarnation emerged in the 1970s and 1980s, although it has a whole bevy of contemporary siblings from Halloween and Mardi Gras dress up, to improv comedy, to the artistic happenings of the beatnik age. And while contemporary culture often thinks of adult dress-up and make-believe as activities meant for dorks, dweebs, nerds, and geeks, that wasn't always so. The pageantry of sixteenth-century Europe is one of larp's closest ancient analogues and was an activity reserved for the highest echelons of society: the rich, titled, and famous.

One morning in 1510, for example, King Henry VIII put on a costume—a short hooded coat and some hose—and accessorized with a bow and arrows and his sword and buckler. Along with a group of his men, dressed in similar outfits, he snuck into Queen Katherine's bedchamber, surprising and startling her. Having astonished the queen, the band did a dance and left.
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Two weeks later, on February 3, Shrove Tuesday, Henry left his dinner and returned with the Earl of Essex, both of them dressed as Turks, accompanied by two pairs of nobles dressed as Russians and Prussians and torchbearers who blackened their faces to look like Moors.
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After dinner, he and his men changed into blue and crimson and donned visors to dance with a group of ladies who had covered their skin with fine black cloth. Costuming was common practice for the young Henry and his men, who once surprised Cardinal Wolsey at a banquet by dressing up like shepherds.

Henry VIII's love of costuming was part of the courtly entertainment tradition of the masque, in which a group of costumed dancers would show up unexpectedly in court, their appearance sometimes explained by a brief theatrical skit. After dancing with one another in their costumes, the performers then chose partners from among the court and danced again before leaving.

Henry particularly loved Robin Hood, according to historian Cornelia Baehrens. During a May 1515 shooting trip, “Robin Hood and his merry men” met Henry and his retinue, led them to their forest hideout, and served the nearly two hundred people a banquet of venison and wine. On the way home, the group met women dressed up as Lady May and Lady Flora—personifications of wild nature—who sat in a carriage drawn by costumed horses, each of which had a singing child sitting atop it.

If Henry VIII was not quite a larper, he was close to it, proof that people—even kings—have long wanted to live the mythic and heroic lives that escape a mundane human's grasp. And while larp itself is a modern creation, derived from a peculiar Prussian war game of the nineteenth century (more on this later), its spiritual heritage lies, perhaps, in Renaissance Europe in the fabulous pageants, disguisings, and outdoor entertainments thrown by and for Europe's monarchs.

Elizabeth I, Henry VIII's daughter, presided over some of England's most opulent examples of the outdoor entertainment. During her reign, Elizabeth and her court made a series of journeys across England, known as progresses. Having a mobile court allowed her to maintain her visibility among the common folk and to keep the scheming nobility—many of its members capable of raising a standing army—on its toes.

The cost of putting up the queen and her hundreds-large retinue was daunting for many of the nobility, but not as daunting as the rich gifts they were expected to present, including entertainments. In 1575, Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester, threw Queen Elizabeth an entertainment so ostentatious that it would put the most vulgar modern-day displays of wealth to shame. He reportedly paid about £1,000 per day for board and entertainment during Queen Elizabeth's visit, and she stayed for at least seventeen days.
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It's hard to measure what the cost of £17,000 would mean in present-day terms, but an estimate would be something on the order of £3.2 million, or roughly $4.5 million.
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For comparative purposes, in Elizabethan times, a soldier earned about five pennies a day, a pound of beef cost about three pennies, and theater tickets cost between one and three pennies.
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For the same amount of money that the good earl probably spent on Elizabeth's entertainment, he could have fielded an army of nearly 1,000 soldiers for an entire year, purchased 566,000 pounds of beef, or gone to the theater between 566,000 and 1.7 million times.

When Queen Elizabeth arrived at the castle on the evening of July 9, Dudley stopped his castle clock to illustrate that the queen's greatness transcended the boundaries of time.
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A sibyl, a mythic prophetess, clad in white silk, met Her Majesty at the gate and recited a poem written for the occasion by the queen's chaplain, predicting that her reign would be full of virtue, peace, and the love of the people. Passing along farther, she met an excessively tall porter, Hercules, also dressed in silk. At first he berated her for making so much noise with her retinue, but then he recognized her and humbly knelt to beg her pardon. He cued a band of trumpeters eight feet tall, probably papier-mache figures with real trumpeters inside or behind them.
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Beyond the trumpeters, the queen passed by the Kenilworth castle
lake, where the Arthurian Lady of the Lake, accompanied by two nymphs—all in silk, of course—appeared to glide over the water to her, conveyed by a moveable island lit by torches.
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When Elizabeth finally made it into the castle, she was greeted by decorative posts left as gifts by seven mythic gods. A small boy explained the significance of the gifts in poetry composed for the occasion.