Last night I played in my first official LARP, courtesy of badgerbag's kind invitation.

And to say it was dramatic would be a tad of an understatement, methinks.



What follows are semi-processed ramblings and recountings -- I post them now because if I wait too long, I suspect I won't post anything at all, and I want to at least say these things.

The game was dark -- I knew that was coming. I was playing a "light" character in it, which I supposed meant I didn't have too much bad stuff in my background.

No, instead, I was the sheltered religious figure (a rabbi -- I figured I could pull it off better than a priest) who wanted more experience of life.

Short setup: a group of people are sucked from their homes, via mirrors, into a room full of mirrors. Two kids are already there and unconscious, one bleeding. Two other kids and a mother and child are among the people sucked in.

Only one person wasn't sucked in -- me. The rabbi. I'd prayed for a sign and gotten a shimmering mirror inviting me to step through as, I thought, a response.

By the end of the night (and my compliments to my fellow players, who did a very good job of it) I'd managed to have my left hand chopped off voluntarily, committed sacrificial murder (of a quasi-willing victim, admittedly), and eaten a heart. To end up trapped as the force behind the room, looking for my next victim. With the eventual fate of returning, someday, after forcing some other group to go through something akin to that, to wander the earth one-handed and more than a tad nuts.

Throughout the night I tried to interpret what the signs from God might be meaning, and bullheaded my way into the final sacrifice on an Abraham-and-Isaac model. All of it done from the best intentions. All of it gone catastrophically wrong. (Well, in theory, I think four of us made it out as intact as could be given the realization that such things could happen. Y'know, a 1d100 SAN loss for all you Call of Cthulhu players out there.)

And while I know that many of the links were purely coincidental -- removed hand with damaged hands, volunteering with volunteering, and the final bitter drive to take responsibility (had God done this to all these people to show me what it felt like to suffer, to make me suffer?) --I did feel a much stronger connection to Emilio Sandoz and a book I already loved than I had before.

But I have got to learn to stop such strong character-identification. Especially in those situations.

As an emotional tool, it was remarkably effective; I don't know if it would work for me on an ongoing-character basis, or whether it would work in a larger group. I freely admit that I felt like I was playing the hero of my own story, and whether or not I would be the main character in an external observer's retelling of events, I'm not sure -- I suspect so, but I was, shall we say, a biased observer.


badgerbag, you will be glad to know that my dreams were undisturbed last night.

ETA: My thanks (were this not clear enough) to all my fellow players, including whumpdotcom, cynthia1960, jhkim and several others I do not know the LJs of, if indeed they have them. Oh, and for the voyeuristic, some photos are up at http://www.flickr.com/photos/74453626@N00/95220835/.