Insurrection, event 4
I've been in this hobby for 20 years, but this was my most enjoyable event yet.
Various people asked me late Sunday afternoon "Have you had a good event?" to which I could only answer "It started with my being tortured and it just got better and better".
Friday night - I have never before been in such a chillingly horrible LRP situation as being strapped to a table and tortured. OOC, it was done incredibly sensitively and I felt safe and able to opt out whenever I chose. IC it was brutal and it was sickening. Worse, it was done with comparable skills to my character's own, which really gave me things to think about. I don't know Rik Sowden at all well, but my passing acquaintance inclines me to regard him as a thoroughly decent chap (and I think most people would agree). He played the most courteous, professional, deeply fucking loathsome torturer anyone could wish for. I have an awful feeling I may have actually bitten him while he was 'inserting' a surgical tool up my nose. I'm also not sure whether my spit at his face actually hit or whether his 'recoil and wipe' was just a roleplay response to the attempt. It was a mind blowing 'hard Time In' and I thank Rik (and attendant orcs) for their part in it. 10/10, would be tortured again.
Gladly rescued and escorted to the main IC area, fully expected to get horribly jobbed within minutes but only noticed one attempt to do so (embarrassingly, while I was ditching my prison rags and starting to dress in the first layer of my character kit. No-one should be murdered in their underwear!) While blood-stained rags could be readily enough changed, I still had to deal with having lost an eye. I've played eye-patched characters before, but never for more than a few hours at a time, never at an event with changing indoor/outdoor light levels and certainly never in woodland at night. Damn, but it's hard work! Still, cutting an eyepatch out of my leather armour was a neat bit of business and I have no issue at all with the bloody business of smashing the state leaving me with scars.
Saturday - Still expecting to be horribly jobbed, I didn't actually don full kit until mid to late afternoon. After four "ah, any second now" moments had come and gone, I finally bothered to tool up fully and attach all the relevant lammies rather than have them ready to simply hand over and I started to play in earnest. Very interesting to realise how much the feel of the armour and the way I had to manage a complicated cloak affected how the character felt. No longer 'torture victim', but suddenly once again the 'Wayfarer survivor' who was going to make it through the event and achieve all objectives.
I had a huge mad idea shortly before being asked to address a gathering of 'right on!' students and couldn't help but laugh at how it matched my OOC skills. "Can I talk convincingly about an intricate topic that I barely understand myself? Why, yes I can..." Discovering later that my mad idea of changing the currency standard was almost exactly what the 'evil' Commonwealth was already several steps towards achieving made me frown for a moment, mind. I wondered for a very brief moment whether the Development Team had actually stolen my idea (which would have surprised me since the Dev Team have previously always played very straight), but it turns out that the plotline had actually been active since event 2 and I simply hadn't noticed on account of the rest of the Wayfarers being slaughtered while I ran away with all the money.
It was very odd to realise that I'd had much the same idea as the antagonists, however and I couldn't really argue when a group mate commented "Hendrik would be all for the Commonwealth if only he was in charge of it." Mind you, I think exactly the same thing could be said about most of the PCs. If there are any shiny knights of goodness in this game, they're not among the PCs!
Sunday - Sunday was mainly taken up with an optional 'this is probably suicidal' bonus mission of attacking the Commonwealth's elite troops on their home ground. It was a deeply scary scene, but the PCs won through with a mix of preparation and either tenacity/desperation as it transpired that many people hadn't counted on needing a portal crystal to leave/escape and therefore couldn't retreat. I went through a whole rollercoaster of trepidation, outright fear, shame at having fled, despair at the number of people we'd surely lost, all the way through to wonder at the fact that the mission had been successful after all. Emotional gamut? Check.
Mileage may vary, but Insurrection is a probably the most grown up LRP I've played (where by "grown up" I mean erudite and thoughtful, rather than rated R for adults). The standard fantasy tropes of elves/chainmail/swords/magic/etc are (while enjoyable and easy hooks to hang expectation from) are not what gives the game its individuality. It's a game where actions (and inaction, naturally) have definite consequences and I can't readily name another system where almost every step the PCs take in their quest for 'a better society' (or, rather, each faction's different vision of what such a better society would actually be) is half so well represented by the immediate, obvious and enduring effect of some poor innocent's life becoming a damn sight harder.
Various people asked me late Sunday afternoon "Have you had a good event?" to which I could only answer "It started with my being tortured and it just got better and better".
Friday night - I have never before been in such a chillingly horrible LRP situation as being strapped to a table and tortured. OOC, it was done incredibly sensitively and I felt safe and able to opt out whenever I chose. IC it was brutal and it was sickening. Worse, it was done with comparable skills to my character's own, which really gave me things to think about. I don't know Rik Sowden at all well, but my passing acquaintance inclines me to regard him as a thoroughly decent chap (and I think most people would agree). He played the most courteous, professional, deeply fucking loathsome torturer anyone could wish for. I have an awful feeling I may have actually bitten him while he was 'inserting' a surgical tool up my nose. I'm also not sure whether my spit at his face actually hit or whether his 'recoil and wipe' was just a roleplay response to the attempt. It was a mind blowing 'hard Time In' and I thank Rik (and attendant orcs) for their part in it. 10/10, would be tortured again.
Gladly rescued and escorted to the main IC area, fully expected to get horribly jobbed within minutes but only noticed one attempt to do so (embarrassingly, while I was ditching my prison rags and starting to dress in the first layer of my character kit. No-one should be murdered in their underwear!) While blood-stained rags could be readily enough changed, I still had to deal with having lost an eye. I've played eye-patched characters before, but never for more than a few hours at a time, never at an event with changing indoor/outdoor light levels and certainly never in woodland at night. Damn, but it's hard work! Still, cutting an eyepatch out of my leather armour was a neat bit of business and I have no issue at all with the bloody business of smashing the state leaving me with scars.
Saturday - Still expecting to be horribly jobbed, I didn't actually don full kit until mid to late afternoon. After four "ah, any second now" moments had come and gone, I finally bothered to tool up fully and attach all the relevant lammies rather than have them ready to simply hand over and I started to play in earnest. Very interesting to realise how much the feel of the armour and the way I had to manage a complicated cloak affected how the character felt. No longer 'torture victim', but suddenly once again the 'Wayfarer survivor' who was going to make it through the event and achieve all objectives.
I had a huge mad idea shortly before being asked to address a gathering of 'right on!' students and couldn't help but laugh at how it matched my OOC skills. "Can I talk convincingly about an intricate topic that I barely understand myself? Why, yes I can..." Discovering later that my mad idea of changing the currency standard was almost exactly what the 'evil' Commonwealth was already several steps towards achieving made me frown for a moment, mind. I wondered for a very brief moment whether the Development Team had actually stolen my idea (which would have surprised me since the Dev Team have previously always played very straight), but it turns out that the plotline had actually been active since event 2 and I simply hadn't noticed on account of the rest of the Wayfarers being slaughtered while I ran away with all the money.
It was very odd to realise that I'd had much the same idea as the antagonists, however and I couldn't really argue when a group mate commented "Hendrik would be all for the Commonwealth if only he was in charge of it." Mind you, I think exactly the same thing could be said about most of the PCs. If there are any shiny knights of goodness in this game, they're not among the PCs!
Sunday - Sunday was mainly taken up with an optional 'this is probably suicidal' bonus mission of attacking the Commonwealth's elite troops on their home ground. It was a deeply scary scene, but the PCs won through with a mix of preparation and either tenacity/desperation as it transpired that many people hadn't counted on needing a portal crystal to leave/escape and therefore couldn't retreat. I went through a whole rollercoaster of trepidation, outright fear, shame at having fled, despair at the number of people we'd surely lost, all the way through to wonder at the fact that the mission had been successful after all. Emotional gamut? Check.
Mileage may vary, but Insurrection is a probably the most grown up LRP I've played (where by "grown up" I mean erudite and thoughtful, rather than rated R for adults). The standard fantasy tropes of elves/chainmail/swords/magic/etc are (while enjoyable and easy hooks to hang expectation from) are not what gives the game its individuality. It's a game where actions (and inaction, naturally) have definite consequences and I can't readily name another system where almost every step the PCs take in their quest for 'a better society' (or, rather, each faction's different vision of what such a better society would actually be) is half so well represented by the immediate, obvious and enduring effect of some poor innocent's life becoming a damn sight harder.