Passionate consequences

After four years of sadness, Consequences is back, baby!!

After going to Reflections, the larp in the Chislehurt caves in London, I had four days to kill before the start of Consequences. I spent those days in Brockenhurt, a tiny little village situated in New Forest, a beautiful swampy forest filled with autumn colors and about 5000 wild ponies.

On thursday, this merry band came to pick me up and we continued on to Passionate Consequences, the very last of its kind to be held at this particular Butlins in Highcliffe. Damn, that’s the end of an era for you. Anyhow, lets keep the sentimentality aside and jump into the games and the parties!

To kick things off, we played a Hot Tub larp by Alex Helm, about Elder Gods who all awake from their slumber ready to destroy the world… at the same time. Awkward! They have 30 minutes to figure out who gets to destroy the world, or their window of opportunity closes. In our run, we ended up playing Rock, Paper, Scissors for it, cruelly excluding Cthulhu and Jormungander, because they didn’t have any hands and could thus only play paper.

Linfarm run

I got to play Linfarn Run, the first in the series of games based on Firefly with the serial numbers filed off. This was the very first installment of the series. I had played later episodes, so it was fun to go back to the beginning. Plus AJ and Tony had given me my usual character: Ariel Dubrovnik, the badass cop obsessed with bringing Justice to the galaxy. She’s definitely the paladin of the cast, preferring to bring criminals into justice rather than taking it in her own hands – sadly, that doesn’t work so well on the Rim.

When I played her, she was a regular cast member, but this was her first appearance in the show. She played herself as she became fiercely protective of Lissa, dragged a sulking Riley into the engine room to boot him into action, went on space missions with Sax and Max, talked with secret operatives and assassins and generally made a lot of allies in a very short time.

Those came in handy when it turned out there was a space marshall on board who wanted to take her in, dead or alive. My new allies were prepared to shoot him, but that’s not how Ariel do. We sat down together, the temperatue dropped by about 15 degrees and managed to eek out a tense stalemate.

No blood was spilt today.

As always, it was great great fun! It was a very tense game, set right after the war. You know you’re surrounded by people who fought on either side, so any amount of small talk was a conversational landmine. Added to that my paranoia about investigators out to get me and my game was tense, scary and paranoid at every moment. I love this series.

I get so stressed about playing it, because I feel forced to perform badassery, but then the game just makes a bad ass out of everyone on its own, while also being very immersive. Clever design, that.

Ashlight labyrinth

Something weird was happening during the signups: people were not picking the games I thought they would pick, they were all picking Ashlight Labyrinth! I had no idea what that was, but a hot game at Consequences is something I have to jump in on, so I switched my picks around to make sure I was in this game. I’m glad I did!

Ashlight labyrinth is fantasy game for 10ish? characters: the entire game is a drama machine, meant to milk as much as possible out of you at every given moment.

I played Ishtar Daybearer, a fanatical paladin who wanted to purge the world of all magekin. People had told me going in “Oh, you have the best character” and, having played it, I can see why. The writers had some beef with the fanatical paladin trope and it shows.

I can’t say anything about the game, but I have to say it was an emotional rollercoaster and a very effective cult deprogramming tool. Ishtar ended the game completely broken, unable to choose for anything in the final choice, only against her faith.

Pictures on life

I played a larp where played a village child in a primitive society, going into her initiation with a question that another villager would try to answer by channeling the universe through body painting.

My question was about if I wanted to help organise, run and perform at the rituals, like the rest of my very artistic family, or if I just wanted to watch and experience them. What would be my place in society? Emery’s villager painted some exquisite works for me, and in the end, my character decided to leave her society for a while, and explore the rest of the world before making a decision. Other’s were trying to choose lovers, new paths in their life, and so on. It was a lovely quiet game, and I’m not sure if it even needs to be a game, I can also see it be a ritual on its own.

The Inside

The inside was an edu-larp about mental health institutions in the US from 1950-1980. There was even a powerpoint presentation and a documentary involved. The larp itself was around life in an institution. I played a nice nurse, and because we had a smaller run, I never got quite as overwhelmed as I think I was intended to. I also didn’t feel very bad about the things that were going on, because I felt very much “buffered by the institution” of it, which of course made it a lot heavier afterwards. Interesting game!

Parties

After my burn-out five years ago, I entered a period of introversion. Last Consequences, four years ago, I left every party at 2am. I thought that might just be the new me, but thanks to all my hard work in therapy, social interactions are lot less draining than they used to be, and I have refound a lot of social energy. I ended up dropping in my bed at 2, 3, 7 and 5 am respectively.

I had a great time catching up all the Consequences friends I only see once a year. It’s a weird thing, seeing people at a year increment for over a decade. Strange bonds, strange friendships. It was so good to see them all again.