Life Imitating Art...
Off politics for once, the news that Steve Irwin has died in a rather predictable manner has percolated through to sunny Christchurch. The reason this caught my eye is an odd one - I once have very amusing memories of playing a very similar character in a LARP a few years ago.
The game was played with characters in the 'Wraith' setting, where the main thing the layman needs to know is that the participants are already dead, and are now ghosts of a sort. So what did myself and my three friends choose to have been in our past lives on this occasion?
Well, we chose to be Aussie 'danger naturalists' called Bruce, Bruce, Bruce and Sheila who had all died in spectacularly silly ways, such as my character for example who had if memory serves been performing live on camera dental surgery on the back teeth of a very large hippopotamus who took exception to his work and bit down. Hard.
All four of us dressed in a mix of rattling chains and survival gear and proceeded to act in spectacularly silly and suicidally bold fashion against the Spectres which were trying to break into our ghostly train and do horrible things to our departed spirits...it was a very funny character concept which at the time was art imitating life, until today at least when the man we were emulating turned the tables on us and went out in exactly the way I'm sure he would have wanted.
Labels: Roleplaying
posted by Dangerouslysubversivedad at 2:47 PM
3 Comments:
LARP'ing sounds quite similar to acting, in some ways. What I don't understand (and the Wiki link never made it clear) is, do you do it in front of an audience or just amongst yourselves? And of course it has to be asked, which one is you in the pic?
Tom,
No, there is no audience as such, though people do often like to discreetly observe. Everyone stays in character as much as possible, though of course its not always practicable to do so 100% of the time. Course for some of us its easier depending on the character...
'Boss, boss, can *I* look after some of the new Vampires Boss?'
'Yes of course you can Yudas'
(five minutes pass)
'Yudas?'
'Yes Boss.'
'I cant help noticing that you've chosen all the youngest and prettiest female neophytes for your group.'
(grinning) 'Yes Boss!'
Some character are easier to play than others...
And I'm second from the left, the one with the whitebait arms, that year's pitiful tan having mostly faded by that point.
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