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

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.