Sometimes your brain gives you solutions in addition to problems.
Chapter 18
This chapter is dedicated to Vancouver’s multilingual Sophia Books, a diverse and exciting store filled with the best of the strange and exciting pop culture worlds of many lands. Sophia was around the corner from my 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 and sign their stock while I was in the neighborhood. When I got there, I discovered a treasure-trove of never-before-seen works in a dizzying array of languages, from graphic novels to thick academic treatises, presided over by good-natured (even slapstick) staff who so palpably enjoyed their jobs that it spread to every customer who stepped through the door.
Sophia Books: 450 West Hastings St., Vancouver, BC Canada V6B1L1 +1 604 684 0484
There was a time when my favorite thing in the world was putting on a cape and hanging out in hotels, pretending to be an invisible vampire whom everyone stared at.
It’s complicated, and not nearly as weird as it sounds. The Live Action Role Playing scene combines the best aspects of D&D with drama club with going to sci-fi cons.
I understand that this might not make it sound as appealing to you as it was to me when I was 14.
The best games were the ones at the Scout Camps out of town: a hundred teenagers, boys and girls, fighting the Friday night traffic, swapping stories, playing handheld games, showing off for hours. Then debarking to stand in the grass before a group of older men and women in bad-ass, home-made armor, dented and scarred, like armor must have been in the old days, not like it’s portrayed in the movies, but like a soldier’s uniform after a month in the bush.
These people were nominally paid to run the games, but you didn’t get the job unless you were the kind of person who’d do it for free. They’d have already divided us into teams based on the questionnaires we’d filled in beforehand, and we’d get our team assignments then, like being called up for baseball sides.
Then you’d get your briefing packages. These were like the briefings the 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 on spits, tofu sizzling on skillets (it’s northern California, a vegetarian option is not optional), and a style of eating and drinking that can only be described 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 I threw 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 at would keel over if I connected. Or not — sometimes we had to call in a ref to mediate, but for the most part, we were all pretty good about playing fair. No one liked a dice lawyer.
By bedtime, we were all in character. At 14, I wasn’t super-sure what a wizard was supposed to sound like, but I could take my cues from the movies and novels. I spoke in slow, measured tones, keeping my face composed in a suitably mystical expression, and thinking mystical thoughts.
The mission was complicated, retrieving a sacred relic that had been stolen by an ogre who was bent on subjugating the people of the land to his will. It didn’t really matter a whole lot. What mattered was that I had a private mission, to capture a certain kind of imp to serve as my familiar, and that I had a secret nemesis, another player on the team who had taken part in a raid that killed my family when I was a boy, a player who didn’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 even as I was enjoying the camaraderie of the team, I’d always have to keep an eye 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 weekend that were like hide-and-seek, some that were like wilderness survival exercises, some that were like solving crossword puzzles. The game-masters had done a great job. And you really got to be friends with the other 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. Shame I’d have to kill him.
I fireballed him as he was seeking out treasure after we wiped out a band of orcs, playing rock-papers-scissors with each orc to determine who 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 night in 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 the kind of kid who really enjoyed that kind of thing. He was more the pulling-wings-off-flies type. Oh, maybe not. But he just was not into being in costume in the woods. He spent the whole time mooching around, sneering at everyone and everything, trying to convince us all that we weren’t having the good time we all felt like we were having. You’ve no doubt found that kind of person before, the kind of person who is compelled to ensure that everyone else has a rotten time.
The other thing about Charles was that he couldn’t get the hang of simulated combat. Once you start running around the woods and playing these elaborate, semi-military games, it’s easy to get totally adrenalized to the point where you’re ready to tear out someone’s throat. This is not a good state to be in when you’re carrying a prop sword, club, pike or other utensil. This is why no one is ever allowed to hit anyone, under any circumstances, in these games. Instead, when you get close enough to someone to fight, you play a quick couple rounds of rock-paper-scissors, with modifiers based on your experience, armaments, and condition. 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 perfectly capable of understanding that the rule was no contact, but he was simultaneously capable of deciding that the rule didn’t matter, and that he wasn’t going to abide by it. The refs called him on it a bunch of times over the weekend, and he kept on promising to stick by it, and kept on going back. He was one of the bigger kids there already, and he was fond of “accidentally” tackling you at the end of a chase. Not fun when you get tackled into the rocky forest floor.
I had just mightily smote Darryl in a little clearing where he’d been treasure-hunting, and we were having a little laugh over my extreme sneakiness. He was going to go monstering — killed players could switch to playing monsters, which meant that the longer the game wore on, the more monsters there were coming after you, meaning that everyone got to keep on playing and the game’s battles just got more and more epic.
That was when Charles came out of the woods behind me and tackled me, throwing me to the ground so hard that I couldn’t breathe for a moment. “Gotcha!” he yelled. I only knew him slightly before this, and I’d never thought much of him, but now I was ready for murder. I climbed slowly to my feet and looked at him, his chest heaving, grinning. “You’re so dead,” he said. “I totally got you.”
I smiled and something felt wrong and sore in my face. I touched my upper lip. It was bloody. My nose was bleeding and my lip was split, cut on 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 thought that it was all in fun. I laughed a little. I moved towards him.