Isle of Saints

Template:Larp Isle of Saints was a one to two days and nights long LARP for about 60 players, organised by team of three writers. It was also what’s known in Finland as a city game – a larp where the play area is a whole city and sometimes beyond that. The setting was loosely based on White Wolf's World of Darkness. The text below was originally written in 2007 as developement debrief from one of the organizers and can be read as an example of late 90's/early 2000's Finnish larp, based heavily on pre-written characters and plot hooks.

The vision

The game was held in Helsinki, which doubled as the capital city of Isle of Saints – an imaginary island in middle of Atlantic Ocean. The cities were identical copies and the players were instructed to think that the streets matched and internally think that the street names fitted the setting.

IoS was based on White Wolf’s World of Darkness, mostly Vampire: The Masquerade and Mage: The Ascension, though not on the Minds Eye Theatre-versions of them. One of the reasons we wrote the LARP was to fix things that thought were not working well enough in the MET-based LARP’s we’d been participating.

Some examples of things we wanted to avoid or do in a different way:

Change the rules. Minds Eye Theatre is, for a character immersive play, a very clunky set of rules; it basically takes the Storytelling system tabletop rules, streamlines them a bit, changes dices to RPS-test and tells you to roll with it. In essence, it brings a tabletop-paradigm to a LARP with not that good results, since LARP’s are very different beasts. More about this in rules -post.

The “Elysium-syndrome”; LARP’s tend to happen in single physical place, which is a bit ankward for a large group of players and characters. Players have to fake reasons to stay in the playing area even if it’s clear that their characters would not stay there. So either you hang around, with no reason, or go out from the game.

The “Only Vampires Allowed”-syndrome. It doesen’t really feel that you’re a beast in the top of the food chain if the only people you meet are other beasts in the top of the food chain. Where’s the personal horror and predatory feeling in that? We wanted to simulate a full city in World of Darkness, with several different supernatural factions not entirely aware of each other, and with lot of humans mostly unaware of supernatural beings. In essence, we wanted “the masquerade” that works.

We wanted to avoid a large social gathering with obvious plots happening during a fixed period of time; in other words, we wanted to simulate few days and nights of life of the characters; not the least exiting days, more like starting slow and then acclerating the pace.

We decided that we’d want to have around 60 players and that the game would be invitation only; we picked an initial list of players whom we know would have the same idea of Live-Roleplaying that we had. We also had to take into account matters like playing space (players that could provide their aparments for playing) and travelling (players with cars). We drafted initial budget, calculated the participation fee and discounts for players providing apartment or a car.

We didn’t really spent a lot of time pondering on how we wanted to do things; two other writers had one similar game under their belt and we reviewed what worked in it and what did not, what to do in same way and what to improve.

Initial concept design and iteration

After the vision has been decided, we had the rough number of players and basic concept for the game (setting, logistics, idea for what kind of game we wanted to do), we set down to do the concept design. Basically, it’s brainstorming, setting design, character concept design and plot hook/structure design.

We started with the setting; what kind of place Isle of Saints was? What was the history, both normal and supernatural one. Isle of Saints was modelled after the Over-the-Edgish island-state of Al-Amarja, with the somewhat kooky secret society and paranoid stuff ripped out and replaced with “enlightened” western dictature; take the Kennedy family and give them dictatorial powers. The island was set about 400 miles east from Newfoundland. The main GM, responsible for the setting, wrote about six to seven pages of setting background, mostly “fluff” for reading and establishing tone and theme of the place. It included instructions on how to map the imagined setting into the real life counterpart.

Then we brainstormed the major character groups, factions and initial plot hooks that would tie these groups together; the possibility of conflicts.

And then went to to brainstorm character concepts within the groups, relationships within the groups and relationships spanning from individual character in one group to characters in other groups. We did this iteratively; sat down four or five times, tossed character concepts, possible plot hooks and relationships, took notes and at the same time pondered about what could be realisticly achieved. We had a rough estimate of playing spaces at this point, which we also included to the brainstorming; this large communal apartment could be used for this, this small city apartment for that. We also started looking at the player list and casted players to character roles.

At the end of concept design phase we had:

- List of character concepts - List of character group concepts - List of character relationships - List of players - List of locations - Setting information

Main plotlines, groups and group level plotlines

The character groups were:

Camarilla vampires, seven or eight characters and several mortal servants Sabbat/Anarchist vampires, three characters and several mortal assosicates Technocracy mages, six or seven characters Tradition mages, six or seven characters Polices, six characters, one nonplayer character Criminal gang, six characters The Artist Gang, five or six mortal characters The rest characters were mortals in different small groups or connected to other groups

The characters were divided to three writers roughly according to groups; I wrote, for example, five camarilla vampires, three sabbat vampires, five police detectives, one tradition mage and five other mortal characters (son of a detective, husband of a mage, boyfriend of a sabbat vampire and three office workers).

Main plotlines or -hooks were written in the concept creation and further detailed in the character writing. These were things we GM’s more or less set in motion in order to bump different characters and groups together and create situations. Some of these were pre-set events around which the LARP was built, happening in playing spaces. Some examples around the camarilla vampire group:

Main event for the most mortal characters and a good amount of other characters, from almost every character group, was an engagement party of a young couple; a young, talented artist and his girlfriend. The Vampire prince of the city had set his eyes on the young artist and his trusted servant had been sponsoring the artist for some time, and was now ordered to bring the boy to see his unnamed patron during the engagement party.

The camarilla vampires had received a tip of a police detective who had been spying uncomfortably close to them and been in contact with someone who obviously had knowledge of their power structure; their game started with a meeting in which they were to decide what to do with this. The detective himself was a non player character who was bound to go missing in one way or another. This would put the other detectives on the edge.

A camarilla vampire dealing with criminal underground had set his eyes on a certain statue and wanted the criminal gang to break in to the apartment where the statue was supposed to be. The owner was a retired techoncracy agent, and breaking into his apartment was bound to get that group intrested. However, the statue had accidentally been delivered to his neighbour, an outwardly normal office worker, with delusions of grandeur and international espionage business.

One camarilla vampire had found out that her childhood friend hanged out with the sabbat vampires and wanted to meet her. The sabbat vampire(s) wanted her to defect and were arriving to town both to see her and check the status of their informant (who was blackmailing the police detective).

The detectives had open cases: they had seek and detain orders for one camarilla vampire (not knowing that he was a vampire), shadowing orders for several criminals and domestic disturbance case for one of the tradition mages.

And so on. The plot hooks did not have a scripted endings; just the setup, initial directions and character goals or needs. Some of them appeared to be character level plot hooks, but with the amount of hooks they were bound to collide at some point. We wanted to set so many wheels into motion and have so many relationships that the events would drive themselves onward and in turn, create more events.

The tool for controlling the events was an simple one; we used pre-determined starting times for characters and pre-determined times for meetings. Some examples:

The Prince

Friday 19.30 – an emergency meeting called by the Sheriff (game starts) Saturday 18.30 – Servant Blackwell brings young William Morgan to meet me at Elysium Saturday 19.30 – Prince’s reception at the Elysium

Mike Freyd, detective

Saturday 14.30 – lunch with son Jens at the Burger Joint (game starts) Saturday 16.00 – Work shift starts Saturday 16.30 – Meeting of the evening shift Sunday 03.00 – Work shift ends

Jens Freyd, detective’s son (hanging with the criminal gang who’re bound to call him at some point)

Saturday 14.30 – lunch with dad at the Burger Joint (game starts) Saturday 18.00 – a pre-emptive beer with the work mates (the office workers) at Bar Old Hat Saturday 19.30 – William’s and Anna’s house party (will turn into a suprise engagement party, but Jens doesen’t know that)

We used the different stating times and meeting times as a pacing tool, which both allowed us to keep track on the start of the events and gave us times when certain character groups were in certain places. Apart from that, the game was mostly out of our control.

Techniques used

Pre-written_characters

Influeces

Helsinki FTZ by Panu Alku was probably the first city-wide larp held in Finland. It was followed by Mage (the Ascension, of White Wolf -fame) larp organised by Mikko Rautalahti and Mika Loponen.