Words and Thoughts

Intercon H was this past weekend, and I was crazy enough to run two events there. The first of these was J. Tuomas Harviainen’s A Serpent of Ash, which ran on Friday night. Astute readers will recall that this was the same event that I spectacularly failed to run at Intercon Mid-Atlantic this past November; this time there was fortunately no such issue.

From what I can tell, the event ran well, we were in one of the smaller spaces at the convention, but it was plenty of space to hold the sort of meeting which occurs in the event. As Harviainen had indicated in his notes, the event ran for almost exactly 90 minutes; the players actually decided to end the event on their own without any intervention from myself as a director.

Once the event had started I was in and out of the event-space a good deal; it was very important to me that the players not use me as a proxy for interacting with the event (and each other). I actually made a speech to this effect prior to starting the event; one of the things I remember learning from Juhani Eronen’s runs of Carpathian Night was that American audiences tend to need this expectation to be set explicitly, as GMs tend to be more actively involved in events here. (As an interesting side note, one of the players had actually played in Carpathian Night and was speaking to some of the other players about it before the start of the event.)

So, while my personal recollection of the event is a bit disjointed, there are a couple of things from my notes that I think are worth recounting:

• Discussion about the circumstances of Timothy’s death did gain traction, and the whole story was known by the time the event ended.
• The format of the meeting never really deviated from the initial chair circle. Based on some of Harviainen’s notes, I’d expected this to break up eventually, but evidently I was incorrect. I’m actually curious to know if the meeting usually breaks up or not.
• I noted several times that pro-Liberated sentiment seemed fairly strong, and there were several times that the idea of reforming the group came up as a topic. I actually missed the resolution of this topic, and if it came up during the postmortem I’ve since forgotten what was said. I was a bit surprised by how much traction this seemed to have, as I was expecting some of the anti-Liberated characters to be a bit more vocal. Then again maybe they were and I just missed their “moments.”

A lot of the postmortem focused on discussing the form of the event (this is quite possibly because of direction I added to the conversation) — I think all of the players “got it.” I’m very glad that I took a moment to set expectations before the event started, both about my role during the event and about “going off sheet.” My general impression was that players had been nervous about the amount of information received (the average sheet at an Intercon game is probably several pages), but seemed more comfortable once they’d been told how to use the information given to them.

Overall I think the event went quite well. If anyone who played the event has anything to add please feel free to do so, all of you probably have a more useful and complete understanding of how the event ran than I do.

Thanks again to all or my players and to J. Tuomas Harviainen for allowing me to run the event.

Coming up next: 10 Bad Modules in 100 Bad Minutes

Tags:   intercon · larp · postmortem3 Comments