Forsaken

(Cross posted to camarilla and the Forsaken-OOC list.)

I ran Forsaken last night. I still love the game - I think it expresses some of the things I liked about Apocalypse in a much cleaner fashion while also reducing the power level several significant levels. I'm just not entirely sure its a great LARP game.

Let me explain. The point of Forsaken, really, is that you have your pack around you and you protect your territory against all comers. This can be humans doing things that substantially affect the Hisil, spirits that wish to spend some time in the flesh or whom have their own politics with the area broods that probably doesn't work with your own well, the Pure who want to take your territory, pull off your head and piss down your neck, Bale Hounds who follow a Maeljin Incarna, or other Forsaken who want your territory. Forsaken may very well not care much about area that is not their territory.

Now, this works wonderfully for a tabletop game. A tabletop will be based around a single pack, and the focus will entirely be on them. This works less well for a LARP. A successfull LARP will, after all, involve several different packs, all claiming different territory. This means that a LARP plot that affects one pack may very well not affect another pack. Since different packs may go out in vastly different directions, this suggests that you need a ST per pack.

Given the situation in Rochester I don't think this is a likely situation - if I'm wrong and you want to run Forsaken with me, toss me an email or a comment. My current thinking, though, is that the market for a Forsaken venue game is small enough that its going to be very hard to find someone who wants to co-run a Forsaken venue game.

So far, I've tried to work around this by having plots that affected multiple territorial areas. This hasn't been that hard - the game currently has two packs that have contiguous territories that cover some interesting areas of the city. I'm not sure, though, if that approach is working. I felt, last night, like I was being pulled in two different directions - one by the larger pack present, and one by the two members of the other pack. This would have been completely terrible if the entire other pack had been around - essentially I would have had to run two contiguous games, leaving one pack sitting around doing nothing for roughly half the game. This isn't acceptable to me - ideally I'd like people to be enjoying themselves throughout the game.

So far, I've come up with the following alternatives:

• Expand my plots out further, ensuring that they affect all territories in play and are powerful enough that both packs need to deal with this. I'm unsure about this approach. Judging the power level of an adversary isn't a simple formula - ten minds will always think of alternative solutions that alter the power level of the engagement. That's not something I want to lose - I love watching players come up with off-the-wall solutions that cause me to leave the room and break out laughing. Furthermore, there is a strong argument to be made that plots that affect a single pack are more powerful, more personal.



• Continue to run plotlines as I have been, but ensure that there's always a "meeting place" that PCs can go to do inter-personal interactions. This seems to me to be the classic alternative - vampires gather around Elysium and Apocalypse werewolves gather around their septs. There is not default alternative to this in Forsaken. I have a pack of NPCs that occasionally offers their house as a meeting place in that regard at the moment, but I've been hesitant about using them too much. I don't want them to become a cliche, after all. The solution here may be that the pack purchase a coffee house or something inside the city (but off of PC territory) and offer it up as a common meeting area.



• Shrink the plotlines, and make sure people understand that I'm running this as a classic pack-based game. I offer this approach only because it is next in the spectrum I'm building. I don't like it at all. Again, people will be sitting around too long. Further, it doesn't scale - three packs in the game would lead to a significantly harder problem than having two packs in the game.

I suppose the questions become these. (A) How do the players in my current game want me to deal with this situation? If you have an alternative method, now would be a great time to explain it. (B) How do other STs in the Camarilla who are, presumably, running into this problem deal with this problem?

John Christensen
US2002021510
VST, NYD06 Forsaken