Words and Thoughts

As I mentioned yesterday, I ran two events at Intercon H: J. Tuomas Harviainen’s A Serpent of Ash (discussed here), and 10 Bad Modules in 100 Bad Minutes, a campaign-oriented spin-off of Alleged Entertainment’s 10 Bad LARPs franchise that Gordon Olmstead-Dean and I wrote.

10 Bad Modules in 100 Bad Minutes (or 10BM, for short) is, perhaps unsurprisingly, a very different beast than A Serpent of Ash. Where Serpent is a quiet, serious, and contemplative event, 10BM is cacophonous, absurd, and scatological. It’s also deviates a bit the standard 10 Bad paradigm: it’s still centered around (appoximately) 10 events that are either poorly conceived, in extraordinarily poor taste, or both, but we added some tenuous connecting material between scenes to give it more of a campaign feel. Additionally, players were given characters that they were playing for all 100 minutes of the event (it’s actually two characters — someone who’s playing in the campaign and his character), which had the effect of making the players as involved in the collapse of the campaign as the GMs (this contrasts with my impression of most 10 Bad events, which is that players are playing them in good faith, even if they are atrocious).

I don’t want to into much detail on any of the modules; not because I’m concerned about secrecy so much as because I think a lot of the humor would be lost by knowing what’s coming. That being said, I think it is fair to say that the campaign is a spiritual successor to 1936: Horror, covering most of World War II as the PCs attempt to thwart the Germans. There are diplomatic scenes, combats, social puzzles, and just a smack of edutainment all contained within one sweet 100 minute package. None of them are any good though — such is the way of 10 Bad.

In a bit more seriousness, I think 10BM went very well. A number of scenarios could use a bit of tweaking, but I think the characters (and players) carried us through the slower spots with aplomb. We also did fairly well at working in some blatantly offensive material (no 10 Bad event is complete if there isn’t a module that’s so obscene that you’re both insanely proud of it and deeply frightened that the wrong people will find out about it); a lot of the worst stuff is strip-mined from easy topics, but I like to think that’s fairly in-character for the franchise.

As a side note, I’m glad that the “safety boffer” props seemed to be well received — they’re actually one of the earliest ideas I had for the event, inspired by Dr. David Šnajardian’s comment about “(living) in a reality where honor is defended with pool toys which are depressingly phallic in nature.” It was kind of fun to write something that was pretty much just slapstick and prop-comedy.

It seems likely that 10BM will run again in the future — it got good marks and I think there’s enough of an audience for it that it should have some play left. It’d also give us an opportunity to clean it up a bit and maybe get the documentation into good enough shape to be runnable by someone other than us (though that may just be a pipe dream).

Coming up next: A report of what LARPA has been up to this week.

Tags:   10bad · intercon · larp · postmortem2 Comments