This chapter is dedicated to Vancouver's multilingual Sophia Books, adiverse and exciting store filled with the best of the strange and excitingpop culture worlds of many lands. Sophia was around the corner frommy hotel when I went to Van to give a talk at Simon Fraser University,and the Sophia folks emailed me in advance to ask me to drop in andsign their stock while I was in the neighborhood. When I got there, I dis-covered a treasure-trove of never-before-seen works in a dizzying arrayof languages, from graphic novels to thick academic treatises, presidedover by good-natured (even slapstick) staff who so palpably enjoyed theirjobs that it spread to every customer who stepped through the door.
Sophia Books: 450 West Hastings St., Vancouver, BC Canada V6B1L1+1 604 684 0484There was a time when my favorite thing in the world was putting ona cape and hanging out in hotels, pretending to be an invisible vampirewhom everyone stared at.
It's complicated, and not nearly as weird as it sounds. The Live ActionRole Playing scene combines the best aspects of D&D with drama clubwith going to sci-fi cons.
I understand that this might not make it sound as appealing to you asit was to me when I was 14.
The best games were the ones at the Scout Camps out of town: a hun-dred teenagers, boys and girls, fighting the Friday night traffic, swap-ping stories, playing handheld games, showing off for hours. Then de-barking to stand in the grass before a group of older men and women inbad-ass, home-made armor, dented and scarred, like armor must havebeen in the old days, not like it's portrayed in the movies, but like asoldier's uniform after a month in the bush.
These people were nominally paid to run the games, but you didn't getthe job unless you were the kind of person who'd do it for free. They'd238have already divided us into teams based on the questionnaires we'dfilled in beforehand, and we'd get our team assignments then, like beingcalled up for baseball sides.
Then you'd get your briefing packages. These were like the briefingsthe spies get in the movies: here's your identity, here's your mission,here's the secrets you know about the group.
From there, it was time for dinner: roaring fires, meat popping onspits, tofu sizzling on skillets (it's northern California, a vegetarian op-tion is not optional), and a style of eating and drinking that can only bedescribed as quaffing.
Already, the keen kids would be getting into character. My first game,I was a wizard. I had a bag of beanbags that represented spells — when Ithrew one, I would shout the name of the spell I was casting — fireball,magic missile, cone of light — and the player or "monster" I threw it atwould keel over if I connected. Or not — sometimes we had to call in aref to mediate, but for the most part, we were all pretty good about play-ing fair. No one liked a dice lawyer.
By bedtime, we were all in character. At 14, I wasn't super-sure what awizard was supposed to sound like, but I could take my cues from themovies and novels. I spoke in slow, measured tones, keeping my facecomposed in a suitably mystical expression, and thinking mysticalthoughts.
The mission was complicated, retrieving a sacred relic that had beenstolen by an ogre who was bent on subjugating the people of the land tohis will. It didn't really matter a whole lot. What mattered was that I hada private mission, to capture a certain kind of imp to serve as my famili-ar, and that I had a secret nemesis, another player on the team who hadtaken part in a raid that killed my family when I was a boy, a player whodidn't know that I'd come back, bent on revenge. Somewhere, of course,there was another player with a similar grudge against me, so that evenas I was enjoying the camaraderie of the team, I'd always have to keep aneye open for a knife in the back, poison in the food.
For the next two days, we played it out. There were parts of the week-end that were like hide-and-seek, some that were like wilderness surviv-al exercises, some that were like solving crossword puzzles. The game-masters had done a great job. And you really got to be friends with theother people on the mission. Darryl was the target of my first murder,and I put my back into it, even though he was my pal. Nice guy. ShameI'd have to kill him.
239I fireballed him as he was seeking out treasure after we wiped out aband of orcs, playing rock-papers-scissors with each orc to determinewho would prevail in combat. This is a lot more exciting than it sounds.
It was like summer camp for drama geeks. We talked until late at nightin tents, looked at the stars, jumped in the river when we got hot,slapped away mosquitos. Became best friends, or lifelong enemies.
I don't know why Charles's parents sent him LARPing. He wasn't thekind of kid who really enjoyed that kind of thing. He was more thepulling-wings-off-flies type. Oh, maybe not. But he just was not into be-ing in costume in the woods. He spent the whole time mooching around,sneering at everyone and everything, trying to convince us all that weweren't having the good time we all felt like we were having. You've nodoubt found that kind of person before, the kind of person who is com-pelled to ensure that everyone else has a rotten time.
The other thing about Charles was that he couldn't get the hang ofsimulated combat. Once you start running around the woods and play-ing these elaborate, semi-military games, it's easy to get totally adrenal-ized to the point where you're ready to tear out someone's throat. This isnot a good state to be in when you're carrying a prop sword, club, pikeor other utensil. This is why no one is ever allowed to hit anyone, underany circumstances, in these games. Instead, when you get close enoughto someone to fight, you play a quick couple rounds of rock-paper-scis-sors, with modifiers based on your experience, armaments, and condi-tion. The referees mediate disputes. It's quite civilized, and a little weird.
You go running after someone through the woods, catch up with him,bare your teeth, and sit down to play a little roshambo. But it works —and it keeps everything safe and fun.
Charles couldn't really get the hang of this. I think he was perfectlycapable of understanding that the rule was no contact, but he was simul-taneously capable of deciding that the rule didn't matter, and that hewasn't going to abide by it. The refs called him on it a bunch of timesover the weekend, and he kept on promising to stick by it, and kept ongoing back. He was one of the bigger kids there already, and he wasfond of "accidentally" tackling you at the end of a chase. Not fun whenyou get tackled into the rocky forest floor.
I had just mightily smote Darryl in a little clearing where he'd beentreasure-hunting, and we were having a little laugh over my extremesneakiness. He was going to go monstering — killed players couldswitch to playing monsters, which meant that the longer the game wore240on, the more monsters there were coming after you, meaning that every-one got to keep on playing and the game's battles just got more and moreepic.
That was when Charles came out of the woods behind me and tackledme, throwing me to the ground so hard that I couldn't breathe for a mo-ment. "Gotcha!" he yelled. I only knew him slightly before this, and I'dnever thought much of him, but now I was ready for murder. I climbedslowly to my feet and looked at him, his chest heaving, grinning. "You'reso dead," he said. "I totally got you."I smiled and something felt wrong and sore in my face. I touched myupper lip. It was bloody. My nose was bleeding and my lip was split, cuton a root I'd face-planted into when he tackled me.
I wiped the blood on my pants-leg and smiled. I made like I thoughtthat it was all in fun. I laughed a little. I moved towards him.
Charles wasn't fooled. He was already backing away, trying to fade in-to the woods. Darryl moved to flank him. I took the other flank.
Abruptly, he turned and ran. Darryl's foot hooked his ankle and senthim sprawling. We rushed him, just in time to hear a ref's whistle.
The ref hadn't seen Charles foul me, but he'd seen Charles's play thatweekend. He sent Charles back to the camp entrance and told him hewas out of the game. Charles complained mightily, but to our satisfac-tion, the ref wasn't having any of it. Once Charles had gone, he gave usboth a lecture, too, telling us that our retaliation was no more justifiedthan Charles's attack.
It was OK. That night, once the games had ended, we all got hotshowers in the scout dorms. Darryl and I stole Charles's clothes and tow-el. We tied them in knots and dropped them in the urinal. A lot of theboys were happy to contribute to the effort of soaking them. Charles hadbeen very enthusiastic about his tackles.
I wish I could have watched him when he got out of his shower anddiscovered his clothes. It's a hard decision: do you run naked across thecamp, or pick apart the tight, piss-soaked knots in your clothes and thenput them on?
He chose nudity. I probably would have chosen the same. We lined upalong the route from the showers to the shed where the packs werestored and applauded him. I was at the front of the line, leading theapplause.
241The Scout Camp weekends only came three or four times a year,which left Darryl and me — and lots of other LARPers — with a seriousLARP deficiency in our lives.
Luckily, there were the Wretched Daylight games in the city hotels.
Wretched Daylight is another LARP, rival vampire clans and vampirehunters, and it's got its own quirky rules. Players get cards to help themresolve combat skirmishes, so each skirmish involves playing a littlehand of a strategic card game. Vampires can become invisible by cloak-ing themselves, crossing their arms over their chests, and all the otherplayers have to pretend they don't see them, continuing on with theirconversations about their plans and so on. The true test of a good playeris whether you're honest enough to go on spilling your secrets in front ofan "invisible" rival without acting as though he was in the room.
There were a couple of big Wretched Daylight games every month.
The organizers of the games had a good relationship with the city's ho-tels and they let it be known that they'd take ten unbooked rooms on Fri-day night and fill them with players who'd run around the hotel, playinglow-key Wretched Daylight in the corridors, around the pool, and so on,eating at the hotel restaurant and paying for the hotel WiFi. They'd closethe booking on Friday afternoon, email us, and we'd go straight fromschool to whichever hotel it was, bringing our knapsacks, sleeping six oreight to a room for the weekend, living on junk-food, playing until threeAM. It was good, safe fun that our parents could get behind.
The organizers were a well-known literacy charity that ran kids' writ-ing workshops, drama workshops and so on. They had been running thegames for ten years without incident. Everything was strictly booze- anddrug-free, to keep the organizers from getting busted on some kind ofcorruption of minors rap. We'd draw between ten and a hundred play-ers, depending on the weekend, and for the cost of a couple movies, youcould have two and a half days' worth of solid fun.
One day, though, they lucked into a block of rooms at the Monaco, ahotel in the Tenderloin that catered to arty older tourists, the kind ofplace where every room came with a goldfish bowl, where the lobby wasfull of beautiful old people in fine clothes, showing off their plastic sur-gery results.
Normally, the mundanes — our word for non-players — just ignoredus, figuring that we were skylarking kids. But that weekend therehappened to be an editor for an Italian travel magazine staying, and hetook an interest in things. He cornered me as I skulked in the lobby,242hoping to spot the clan-master of my rivals and swoop in on him anddraw his blood. I was standing against the wall with my arms foldedover my chest, being invisible, when he came up to me and asked me, inaccented English, what me and my friends were doing in the hotel thatweekend?
I tried to brush him off, but he wouldn't be put off. So I figured I'd justmake something up and he'd go away.
I didn't imagine that he'd print it. I really didn't imagine that it wouldget picked up by the American press.
"We're here because our prince has died, and so we've had to come insearch of a new ruler.""A prince?""Yes," I said, getting into it. "We're the Old People. We came to Amer-ica in the 16th Century and have had our own royal family in the wildsof Pennsylvania ever since. We live simply in the woods. We don't usemodern technology. But the prince was the last of the line and he diedlast week. Some terrible wasting disease took him. The young men of myclan have left to find the descendants of his great-uncle, who went awayto join the modern people in the time of my grandfather. He is said tohave multiplied, and we will find the last of his bloodline and bringthem back to their rightful home."I read a lot of fantasy novels. This kind of thing came easily to me.
"We found a woman who knew of these descendants. She told us onewas staying in this hotel, and we've come to find him. But we've beentracked here by a rival clan who would keep us from bringing home ourprince, to keep us weak and easy to dominate. Thus it is vital we keep toourselves. We do not talk to the New People when we can help it. Talk-ing to you now causes me great discomfort."He was watching me shrewdly. I had uncrossed my arms, whichmeant that I was now "visible" to rival vampires, one of whom had beenslowly sneaking up on us. At the last moment, I turned and saw her,arms spread, hissing at us, vamping it up in high style.
I threw my arms wide and hissed back at her, then pelted through thelobby, hopping over a leather sofa and deking around a potted plant,making her chase me. I'd scouted an escape route down through thestairwell to the basement health-club and I took it, shaking her off.
243I didn't see him again that weekend, but I did relate the story to someo............