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'''Isle of Saints''' was a one to two days and nights long LARP 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==
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 larp was to fix things that thought were not working well enough in the MET-based LARP’s larks 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 larp with not that good results, since LARP’s larps are very different beasts. More about this in rules -post.
The “Elysium-syndrome”; LARP’s larps 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.
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 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.