Eternalknight
First Post
Just browsing 'round the 'Net and found this:
http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/Co...916&call_pageid=968350130169&col=969483202845
http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/Co...916&call_pageid=968350130169&col=969483202845
Living the fantasy
Imagine, if you will, entering a club and stumbling upon a group of trolls or vampires
MELISSA LEONG
STAFF REPORTER
It's an evening wedding.
About 30 people watch the service inside a small, dimly lit room in a downtown Toronto community centre. The groom, in a black suit with a blue hibiscus tucked in his front jacket pocket, looks calm. The bride, in a crisp white dress and black veil, purses her lips a little, her head held high.
Tiny lights hang from the wall and tulle, flowers trim table edges. Bubbles float through the air and pop on fingers, noses. Smarties dot a castle-shaped wedding cake.
A guy in a cape and sunglasses conducts the service. "I shall ask if there is any here who can show any just cause why they may not be joined. Let this person speak now or forever hereafter hold your peace."
Suddenly, someone in a cowboy hat speaks: "He's already wed. He married a mad woman in Barbados and keeps her locked in his attic!" Jack Spade yells with a Southern drawl.
The guests groan. "What are you talking about?"
"He's blind, ignore him." George the Troll escorts Jack out.
The ceremony resumes, vows are read and the couple — Count Ernest Blackwell and Baroness Anne Regan Bressel — throw themselves into a kiss.
Richard Birt, 23, a.k.a. Jack Spade, stands in the corner of the room chuckling. He holds his cowboy hat and sunglasses in his hands. "Wouldn't it be a shame to have this wedding and not have anything memorable happen?"
It's the unexpected outbursts that make this game fun, he says. And this is just a game. No real wedding. No real trolls. No real-life plots to murder husbands.
This is Changeling: The Dreaming, a Live Action Role Playing game (or LARP), where participants invent characters and act out parts. This particular variation is a soap-opera fantasy involving characters based on fairy tales, myths and legends, each with unique attributes and powers. The players meet once a month — usually at the Tranzac Club on Baldwin Ave., sometimes dressed up — to play make-believe and socialize.
The game was released by Atlanta-based White Wolf Publishing, which publishes six other LARP games involving creatures such as werewolves and ghosts.
Its most popular game, Vampire: The Masquerade, was first published in 1991, and has since been translated into six languages. It and other LARP games are now played all over the world, says Philippe Boulle, marketing director of White Wolf Publishing. The company announced last week that New Line Cinema has agreed to do a motion picture series based on its vampire game.
In a room in the Tranzac building on Brunswick Ave., the wedding guests nibble doughnuts and cookies. The Baroness throws her bouquet and it gets caught in the low ceiling fan, which flings it into a corner. The wedding photographer shows off a picture of the couple kissing on his digital camera: "This moment sponsored by Hoover."
The marriage is all part of a storyline for all of the characters, and it has a lot of players speculating that something awful might happen on the honeymoon.
"We all don't trust the Baroness," Birt says later. "We're all pretty sure that the Baroness will kill him and take the title."
Outside the room, in the rest of the club, people are sitting at the bar, drinking beer, listening to a live band and curiously eyeing the players who trickle out of the room for a smoke.
While the games are free-flowing and improvisational, players still follow a rule book and the lead of a storyteller, who oversees and organizes the action.
The games evolved from table-top role-playing games such as Dungeons & Dragons, where players tossed dice and little pewter figurines were the heroes. Then the action moved into the real world.
"With acting, you read a script. With this, you have the freedom to make the character your own ... It's like getting to take part in your favourite books," says 26-year-old Veronica Bulger. The second-year English student at the University of Toronto is the storyteller for a Changeling game in Toronto. "It's a creative and intellectual exercise.
"We have a lot of people who are university students, computer programmers — that's a big one," she says. "They get to pretend to be someone else for a time." Players have been stereotyped as "skinny, pimply faced, overweight, badly dressed boys," and while there are guys that have "just crawled out of momma's basement," that's not the norm.
"Dungeons & Dragons and role-playing gamers have long been stereotyped as something for shy geeks and nerds. Over the last 10 years, the game is becoming more mainstream."
She credits the popularity of The Lord of the Rings trilogy and vampire movies such as Blade with breeding more gamers. "Vin Diesel plays Dungeons & Dragons. Try calling him geeky," Bulger says.
And for those who are a little awkward in public, Bulger says, "this is a socially welcoming environment. You interact with large groups of people."
The plot of Changeling is like the story of Peter Pan and Alice in Wonderland, Bulger says, or even more like the '80s movies Princess Bride and Labyrinth (minus David Bowie in those tight, tight pants). Characters navigate between reality and a fairytale.
Vampire attracts a different crowd.
In Toronto, it was first played in a goth nightclub, so gamers were and are from the goth scene, says Phil Rickaby, who started playing Vampire when he was 23. "(Some players) want to embody the whole Vampire Lestat (of Anne Rice fame) thing, the elegant vampire. It becomes more about the look than the character," says the 34-year-old former actor. "Vampire by far is a darker game."
He talks about national and international conventions with hundreds of players going until daylight. You show up at night. The hotel staff stops working to stare. You walk into the ballroom. There are women in sparkling renaissance ball gowns with tight corsets and elegant, upswept hair; men in tuxedos, Victorian frock suits. People in tight leather, finger extensions, latex masks. And of course, vampire teeth.
In this game, killing other vampires makes your character more powerful. "In our group, we screw each other over all the time — it's part of the fun," Rickaby says.
Vampire was Bulger's first LARP.
"Vampire is about Machiavellian social politics. You're there to outthink, outwit, outplay. It's vampire Survivor," Bulger says.
She feels it's important for groups to have disclaimers such as this one, found on a Toronto group's website: "(We) do not practice (sic) `ritual sacrifice' and this is not a `cult' ... We do not drink blood and we do not actually believe we are supernatural creatures. Also, this is not a therapy group. If you have psychological problems that you need to work out this is not the place!"
"I'm not a counsellor," Bulger says. "One girl told me that she had multiple personalities ... When a person has a hard time normally telling the difference between reality and fantasy, he should not play these games."
Bulger was 18 when she first played. She was invited to an Ottawa coffee shop — 60 people were pretending to be angst-ridden, hungry, immortal dead in the back. There was something sexy about slinking around in a romantic gothic dress, playing powerful, beautiful, brooding monsters.
Tara Laing's initial reaction to joining a Changeling game and creating a character was, "Do I really want to be a troll? Do I want to be hideous?"
She was told that female trolls were more like "strong women warriors."
Strong, muscular and blue.
Laing doesn't fit the gamer stereotype. She's a newbie to both Changeling and Vampire, and has never played Dungeons & Dragons. She never watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer, nor does she hang out in goth clubs.
The occupational therapist decided to try new hobbies this year: salsa dancing and LARPing.
"It's fun to do something that's different. As a kid, you play make-believe all of the time. As an adult, you stop playing the same way. I think there's something really neat about grown-ups being fantastical and being willing to be silly and playful," she says.
She sips beer through a straw so she doesn't remove her blue lipstick. She has blue swirls drawn on her chest and a bluish tint is rubbed into her cheeks. She's wearing boots, a fitted leather tank top and a short plaid skirt. Blue and white ribbons are bobby-pinned into her wavy brown hair.
Her prosthetic horns are coming in the mail.
"I felt very welcome right from the get-go. I like the role playing. I like the dressing up. (Gamers) are the most non-judgmental, friendly bunch of people."
Last December, she met two players on a Caribbean cruise who got her interested in trying it out. "These guys were clearly different from anyone on the boat. They were working on a screenplay. They were pale, no sun on them."
White Wolf books include safety rules, such as: no touching, no weapons, no drugs or drinking. When characters "fight," they throw rock, paper, scissors, Bulger says. Another important rule: It's only a game. There comes a time to leave it behind.
"I have gotten calls as late as 1 o'clock in the morning from people saying, `Oh my God, so and so did this to my character over e-mail,'" Bulger says. "Uhh, hello? Get a life."
The last rule: there's no winning. "Not `Go out and kill everyone else.' Not `amass more treasure than anyone else.' Just `have fun.' The goal is to tell great stories ..." says White Wolf's rule book.
Back inside the Tranzac, Colin Buffer, the club's first-vice-president, motions to the gamers behind closed doors. "They've always been fairly mysterious," he says. "I don't exactly know what they're doing in there."
He pauses. "But it sounds like a lot of fun."
