theyellowhobbit

After having Friday night dinner at MT’s, we headed over to the HRSFA house for more partying. I played another game of Basari which I didn’t win this time, as well as a game of Jungle Speed. And then there was Botticelli, which is really hard when the person running it chooses a name that starts with a vowel. And both rounds were this way. Vowels are evil!

It also probably didn’t help that it was 3am…

At around 3:30ish we headed back, and I went to bed around 4. I was hoping my body could do the thing where it wakes me up early without an alarm, since I wanted to eat lunch and then go to the LARP. And lo and behold, I woke up at 9!

lowellboyslash’s LARP was fun, though it was a lot less structured than the last LARP I was in. But since it was shorter and simpler, it was a lot easier to win, at least for me. I suppose for most people it was harder because we all competed in the storytelling contest and there was only one winner, but I realized in the first third of the game that winning the storytelling contest would be of no use to my character, and that I could achieve my goal in another way.

The prizes for winning the storytelling contest were a laurel wreath and the privilege of marrying either the prince or the princess. In order to win, you needed to tell the greatest story in the land, which had 10 elements in it, and we each knew some of them and had to trade information in order to acquire them all. Though beyond having these 10 elements, you also needed to have the best story.

Each character also knew a secret about two different characters, and there were specific items floating around which would prove the character’s secret was true. If someone had the item and knew what it proved and presented it before the Queen at the end, the character whose secret was revealed would be executed. So another goal was to not die.

My character was the Maiden, who was really the Fox Wife, though this was a secret. I had married a man who didn’t truly love me, and when he found out I was a fox I was forced to leave him. My goal was to find True Love¹ so I could become human, which according to the character sheet, I only had a chance of finding it with the prince, since anyone else would want to meet my family before marrying me, and then they would know I was a fox. So not only would I have to win the contest, but I would also have to make the prince love me. But I realized that the prince really wasn’t my True Love, nor did I have any desire to run the country.

So at first I decided I would devote myself to making sure that the princess didn’t have to marry someone horrible. I told her some details I knew about some of the other characters. I also was trying to find the item that could kill me, the Fox Tail. And it turns out that both characters who knew my secret decided that they wanted to help me, and between them I got my Fox Tail. Originally

mikevonkorff, playing the Traveller, was going to use it to blackmail me, but decided that my character seemed so nice and happy and she probably wouldn’t take that very well. It ended up that since he helped me, and since I didn’t want to win the contest, I helped him. There was no good reason not to.

Then I decided to see if any of the other characters were out to find True Love, or at least weren’t interested in marrying the princess and/or running the country. And I talked to the Soldier, who also was out to find True Love (though it didn’t expressly say so in his character sheet) and we decided we would run off together, although he needed the Laurel Wreath to be at peace.

From then on I was just talking to people and asking them if they had any interest in the wreath itself, and got most of the characters to promise they would give it to us if they won the storytelling contest.

yaleartificer, playing the Peasant, ended up winning the contest (and rightly so) and then he gave us the Laurel Wreath and some of us lived happily ever after.

Yay for me picking a character that I could easily identify with, and yay for getting my True Love in all of the LARPs I’ve participated in thus far. And yay for being rewarded for being nice.

After the LARP there was more hanging out, and at around 7 I went back to MT's so I could have real food for dinner. After Shabbat ended we went back to the HRSFA house, and there was 1000 Blank White Cards, the game where you make a bunch of cards each with instructions of how to play the card on the back, and relevant artwork and the title of the card on the front,, and then you play them as written, no matter how broken the game might become. We ran out of white cards before Shabbat started, though I did take one so I could write it after Shabbat). We later made some colored cards, but those didn’t really end up being played because by the time we got through the blank white cards, it was really late.

My one blank white card was “No Cartwheels in the Con Suite.” The text on the back said “Do a cartwheel. No seriously, I dare you. If caught by the co con chair lose 20 points.

My colored cards included the D1 (Use A: Roll the D1. If you roll anything but a blank gain 1000 points. Use B: When you need to roll for damage, substitute the D1 for whatever die you should have rolled, and take no damage.) The Futuristic Space Bathroom (…with super powers of lazers. Beyond the obvious, it also makes a great place to hide), the Tapestry (You’ve finished a tapestry. Gain 20 awesome points) and Arrow’d (I forget how much damage this does, but you can roll the D1 instead).

The game was insane. There’s no other way to describe it.

Afterwards, MT and I headed back, I packed, took a shower, and got approximately 2 hours of sleep. Then I woke up and got dressed and finished packing my stuff, and we left the house at 6 so I could make my 6:30 AM train.

Much like the last time I took a train home from Maryland, the train in front of us today was malfunctioning, so we had to stop a while and get all the passengers from that train. Again, the train is completely full. But fortunately this time it’s only pushing us back 40 minutes instead of 2 hours, and also this time I have food with me. And I slept for the first half of the train ride. So right now I am not dying of starvation.

When I get home, I’ll probably spend the rest of the day doing Greek homework and studying for my quiz tomorrow. Though I’m sad I left the HRSFA party early, this was probably the right decision, since I actually want to do well on the quiz.

¹I thought that the True Love mechanism was like that of a

thekinginyellow LARP, where a certain character was specifically designated as my True Love, and I needed to find him, should he exist…