What if I told you there was an epic story being told entirely in the shadows?
What if this story featured sinister vampires and devious wizards?
And what if these supernatural creatures were also the people you knew or the people you loved?
Real life is always stranger than fiction. Case in point, Live Action Role Play.
By now you’re likely familiar with Dungeons and Dragons. The basement, tabletop activity that used to be confined to the hushed conversations of geeks bullied in high school has since gone mainstream. People all over the world, it seems, are admitting their love or role-playing games. Since the start of the pandemic, and the rise of apps like Zoom and Discord allowing for video-conferencing, there has been a notable uptick in people talking about their devotion to the geeky pastime of role-playing games.
Admittedly, I started withe D&D. Everyone started with D&D. But my real passion is with LARP. Live Action Role Play. I once said something in an earlier play of mine called “Shadow Court”: D&D is training wheels for LARP. It takes a certain kind of mindset, a certain quality of character, to be able to dress up in costume and actually pretend to be an imaginary character. Now, you may say ‘but theatre people do it all the time’. To that I say, yes. To that I say that some of the best LARPers have been theatre people.
But not every LARPer is a theatre artist. I’ve known LARPers with little interest in being an artist. Yet they can command a room in a live action setting like nobody’s business. In fact, most of the LARPers that I’ve known are nowhere near to being artists. Except if you call LARPing art. Which, to be fair, is something many players and practitioners have begun to do nowadays.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
This blog isn’t meant to examine the art and craft of LARP. This blog is going to examine my hot take on LARP and how my non-fiction experiences have shaped my fiction book. The main characters of Drew and Dana are inspired not only by my real (and unreal) life but the (un)lives of all of my friends. You see, we all have told this story together. We crafted an epic chronicle together. And when that chronicle came to an end we crafted another one. And then another after that.
It’s a shared hallucination between all of us and the basis for countless ‘war stories’ when we get together. But it’s something only we know about. And it loses something in the telling to other people.
Or maybe not. You’ll have to stick around, read the blogs and decide for yourself.
Stephen Near Writer 