Manifesto

Teaching Old Dogs New Tricks

(and yes, that includes me)

I've been playing Vampire since 2004, and LARPing it since 2010. Vampire is a great game, and in 10 different chronicles, you can tell 10 different stories. I've made dozens of friends over the years playing it, and I've been all over the country to do so. For Parlor LARP, it's the 800 pound gorilla that's always in the room, and I doubt I'll ever stop playing it.

But it can't be the only Parlor LARP. Don't get me wrong, there are numerous LARP choices these days, and I watched many of them be written by folks who used to play Requiem in my living room. But there aren't really any that fit the Parlor LARP role, or at least a chronicle one, like Vampire does. One where you come to the same place every month, play for 4 hours, hang out with your friends, pay less than a movie ticket, have some pizza, and go home. No tents, no needing a babysitter for the weekend, no hotel rooms. Even though many of us have our comfort show we watch over and over again, we still need to watch other shows sometime.

This isn't even my first rodeo — I tried the same for years with a game called Huldufolk. But if you bring Vampire players to play it, they're going to end up playing it like a Vampire game. And I ended up running it like a Vampire game. Requiem purposefully tried to break many of these patterns, but it didn't stick. Vampire players played it like Vampire had always been played.

I'm back again to try to break out of that mold. To offer a new Parlor LARP with a very different experience. To try to teach old dogs new tricks, including myself.

Star Wars fans love Luke Skywalker. It's great to see him mow down Jabba's goons, or slice through a hall full of droids like a hot knife through butter. But it's when Luke experiences adversity that we're able to relate to him.

Remember how refreshing The Mandalorian was at the beginning? A low level mercenary fighting forces larger than him. Andor took that even further, where even a single stormtrooper is a serious threat. There were stakes, and risk, and most of the time, it was better to hide and evade than to fight.

Remember when Stranger Things came out, and the refreshing thing was a horror show where the protagonists were just kids in over their head? Notice how less interesting it became as they got tougher, and they seemed to be invulnerable? Because they stopped being relatable.

When Vampire first came out for tabletop, the intention was to be playing those low power characters. To riff off of the catch phrase of a favorite RPG of mine, Godlike, you're larger than life, but the war is larger than you. As Vampire moved into LARP, somewhere across the years the characters went from relatable street level folks to extremely powerful Elders, only checked by even more powerful, demigod like NPCs. The stakes went down, the risk went down. Characters went from being relatable to power fantasies. Over time, really the only risk in the game was Player Vs Player fights, which does not necessarily lead to a happy place in a game you're playing to enjoy time with your friends.

In Sporebound, you're much less Luke Skywalker, and much more Andor, if not closer to a kid in Stranger Things. Let's spend some time in a world where even a single low level bad guy can ruin your day — if not because of what they can do to you, then what the consequences of messing with them can be for the people around you. Where conflict needs to be planned carefully, where often the answer is investigation, stealth, and sabotage. Where going full Leeroy Jenkins causes serious problems besides the plotline ending earlier than planned and running a little low on blood.

However, we're not going full Call of Cthulhu either. Your actions do affect the world, you can bring change, and it's possible to win. Like Pratchett said, "it may be a grim, thin hope, an Arthurian sword at sunset, but let us know that we do not live in vain." There is still power fantasy in Sporebound, but a relatable one. You're not Superman punching Nazis off cliffs; you're the waiter who has to serve rich evil assholes all the time — but if you plan it well, maybe you can use that to your advantage for your community. You solve problems like Andor, carefully and with risk, not like Luke Skywalker, cutting with a hot knife through butter.

Maybe some of those problems will be relatable enough, you'll be inspired to try to fix them in real life too.

In America we're ingrained with the idea that everyone should be able to succeed all on their own, and if you can't, you're not pulling yourself up by your bootstraps hard enough. Of course we all know that no one really succeeds all on their own, but in the back of our mind this feeling is still there. We've been largely robbed by our society of what most humans have had for all of human history: community. For many of us, that sense of community is the main reason we even LARP at all.

We innately know that the doomsday preppers with their bunkers are fools, because we understand that in a world that's falling apart, you need the help of your neighbors. So why does that understanding of needing community disappear once you enter into a Vampire game? Why is it small groups of friends, or even just yourself, against the world? Why are other PCs just there to be competition?

In Sporebound, you can't accomplish everything on your own. You're good at the things you're good at, and for everything else, you need other people's help. In Sporebound, you really do need a community larger than your usual group of 5, for more than just the fact that more people show up to gathering than that every month. The knowledge that you need the support of those around you is ingrained into the system itself, and the support of others makes solving problems exponentially more doable.

"No matter where you are, everyone is always connected." Once it was just a terrifying warning about a potential future in the 90s anime Serial Experiments L.A.I.N. Now, that's just our life. We have access to all the world's information (and disinformation) in our pockets at all times. Communication is instant, and mostly perfect.

In the Sporebound 80s, our characters don't live there yet. They live in a world of pay phones and beepers, fax machines and BBSes, postage stamps and deaddrops. Where clandestine communication must be done carefully, and slower than you'd like.

Almost every good modern horror movie starts with a contrivance for why cell phones don't work right now. Let's try being less instant for a while. And let's try mostly leaving game at game, not in our emails between games.

I've been working on Sporebound for a couple years now, it's run well locally and at PAX Unplugged. I'll be running it in South Jersey on May 30th, and if any of this jives with what you're looking for out of a game, and you're nearby, I hope you'll give it a try. My plan is to run it approximately once a quarter, plus PAX U, as an episodic LARP, where game stays at game.

But I miss the days of driving up and down the East Coast bringing my characters places, making new friends around the country, and checking out interesting places along the way. For as many problems as a big connected Vampire game caused, we lost something when it died. I'm hoping that something fresh, something that tries to take a new approach at Parlor LARP, will get some of the band back together. And if you're interested in making that happen, I'd be happy to chat with you about it.