Tag: Russia

Быть Монахом (Being а Monk) was a larp simulating the life of a Benedictine monastery in the Pyrenees during Holy Week of 1202. The organizers were inspired not only by history and art, but also by their personal experience. The Duende larp held in 2010 in the Urals, where this larp’s organizers were players and part of the monastery team, proved that life in a monastery could provide interesting play. Another source of inspiration was the experience of pilgrimage on the Spanish Way of Saint James (Camino de Santiago). Thus an idea of a larp about a monastery on a pilgrim route was born.

Unity of Place and Time

The core idea of the larp was to:

• show the monastery structure as a hermetic microcosm;
• make possible a unique and rich gameplay on religious subjects which are seldom touched;
• make the monastery represent a moment in the history of the whole European religion; the Church’s decline and crisis at the beginning of the 13th century.

The larp was focused on the idea of an individual within the structure, not on the structure itself – that is why the larp is titled Being a Monk, rather than, for instance, “The Monastery”. The Middle Ages were obsessed with the questions of essence and existence, and the existential aspect was crucial to the larp.

Why 1202? The idea of the Church on the edge of change was an important issue for us. The Franciscans and Dominicans were just about to appear, but their presence in the larp would make the answer too simple. The question was where the Western Christian world would go. Thus, the Benedictine monastery became the symbol of the Catholic Church; its inner problems, the distemper of all Christians; and the participants’ answers defined the subsequent destiny of the Church.

Why the Pyrenees? It was important that the monastery was situated on a pilgrimage route, and the Camino de Santiago was chosen. Vivid Basque culture created another plotline, throwing together Christians and pagans.

A Rose Is a Rose Is a Rose Is a Rose

The key sources of inspiration were Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose and Postscript to The Name of the Rose. However, the larp was based not on the books themselves, but on their sources: on the archetypal plots and conflicts. A monastery (though in another region than Eco’s), theological treatises, historical facts and legends, Benedictine regulations – it all formed the larp according to the spirit of the sources.

The process of building of Saint James’s Cathedral was a plot-defining event of the entire larp. The major conflict of the larp was a struggle (an ideological one rather than military) between Catholics and several groups of heretics and pagans. All those groups aimed to build the Cathedral according to their ideology. The construction combined an actual building process with the inclusion of the symbols corresponding to the sides of the conflict.

An integrated and hermetic universe was an important part of the game. The monastery was planned as a closed system with no participants outside, and as a self-contained system of in-game knowledge. Not everyone is an expert in the Middle Ages, so there had to be a set of information adequately comprehensive, yet concise. The monastery had to be an entire microcosm for everyone who lived in it. The organizers selected a limited set of in-game information available to any character, and that information was collected in the Library available before the larp and later in-game. Any references to other texts and sources were “prohibited” off-game. Thus the participants could be sure that they had access to everything they could need for fully developed play.

Spirit and Body

Asceticism, both physical and mental, was another significant part of the game. It did not use any specific larp techniques, but rather authentic monastic practices that have been working very well for many centuries. Among them there was a daily session in which each character spoke about his sins in front of his brothers, as well as an obligatory confession.

The monk’s day was divided into “hours”, and his daily schedule included five prayer services, even nightly ones. Lenten fare was used to influence the physical bodies of the participants. Large pre-game introductory texts of liturgy, history and game rules aimed to submerge the participants in the text traditions of those times, as well as serving as part of the asceticism. Even the larp’s length of three full days was chosen on purpose to immerse the participants into the monastery’s rhythm of life, as the rhythm was a defining element.

Gender issues are unavoidable in such a strongly male-centric game world. Many female larpers wanted to have this unique experience of being a male monk. There is quite an old tradition of crossplay in Russian larp community (mostly with female larpers portraying male characters), but, although the number of crossplaying participants is usually strictly limited, in this case we allowed all interested female players to play monks.

The larp had 19 sets of rules, several simulated crafts and spiritual/heresy regulations known only to some of the participants. The most important rules were devoted to:

Spirituality

These rules contained the doctrines of each of the conflicting groups. Following their dogmas, the characters could gain spiritual power. Obtaining spiritual experience was one of the most important game points for some of the characters. The most advanced characters were especially active in the ideological struggle for the Cathedral. Those who, however, had no interest in this field, were free to avoid this part of the larp.

Crafts/Cathedral construction

These rules connected the Cathedral with spirituality. Three main arts – mosaics, stained glass and murals – were a collective work of the majority of the monks. At a fixed hour, all participants created the concept of a future work, filling the template with symbols, which was an important opportunity for heretics to show what they were thinking. For example, by the end of the larp all the frescos in the Cathedral had turned out heretical (gnostic).

Imagining the Cathedral

We should mention that there are many differences between Russian and Nordic larp traditions. Nordic 360° illusion means “everything or nothing” – if you can’t show something for real, don’t even try. Most Russian larpers consider this a needless limitation. They are ready to accept a certain (and rather substantial) extent of conventionality if it suits a particular larp.

The construction of the Cathedral was therefore first and foremost a symbolic action, and there’s a huge difference between playing in the real cathedral and building a cathedral with your own hands. We thus needed something that could actually be constructed during the larp and by the participants themselves.

Things that inspired us were gothic architecture itself, and the novels The Spire by William Golding and The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett, both of which were, in their turn, inspired by Salisbury Cathedral in England.

Our limitations when making the project of the Cathedral were the following:

• The in-game building was to house and protect from rain all the participants (about 100 people) during the Easter mass at the end of the larp.
• The style and structure of a gothic cathedral needed to be recognizable.
• It was to be constructed by the participants and NPCs without any help from professional builders.
• The time allowed for construction was 3 days before the larp plus 3 days during the larp.
• The use of modern tools was to be minimized during the larp.
• It was OK not to finish the building, as in reality cathedrals took centuries to build.
• By the end of the larp the Cathedral was to be decorated inside with frescoes, stained glass windows, mosaics, sculptures and handmade candles.

We decided to construct the building from 25 mm wooden planks, and to cover the walls with cloth and the roof with tarpaulin.

This approach is typical for Russian larps, but this particular project was different from the others not only because of the size of the building, but because it was really much more complicated than anything done by Russian larpers before.

Our main limitation was scarcity of time and people, so the task had to be simplified as much as possible. We therefore decided not to make a second floor in the building, and to play only on the ground.

Initially the 3D-model of Salisbury cathedral was taken from Google Earth and used as a reference. Then 1-millimeter precise project was created in Trimble SketchUp. A professional engineer was called upon to verify the project’s feasibility and safety, and his suggestions were adopted.

Finally, a three-nave basilica with a transept and a tower above the crossing was projected (see the plan). The final dimensions of the building were: 19 meters in length, 8 meters wide and 9 meters high.

In order to speed up the process we decided to assemble the roofs, facades and the tower on the ground and then raise them up as a whole using ropes and poles – yeah, not historically correct for sure, but definitely dramatic. The projected lift weight of the tower (with the spire) was about 111 kg.

Raising the Walls

There was an in-game architect who overlooked the whole process and could take a look (in his personal room where other participants couldn’t see him) at the 3D-model on his laptop. Looking at the model he made sketches by hand on pieces of paper and gave those sketches to the building foremen who oversaw the construction. Foremen further distributed the tasks to workers who performed them using the sketches, and the architect monitored that everything was cut and assembled correctly.

The participants who were actually building the Cathedral therefore didn’t need any specific knowledge or skill except for the ability to climb a stepladder while wearing a frock and using an electric screwdriver. Those who didn’t know how to do it were taught on-site. In this way, everyone whose characters wanted to work got the chance to do so.

To make the building process look more authentic during the larp we invented historical designations for all the materials and instruments we were going to use. We pretended planks were stone blocks, the electric screwdriver was called a brace, etc.

Decoration

All the interior decoration of the Cathedral was created during the larp. The participant who played the head of fresco painters was a professional painter (the only professional of all of us!) The statues of the Virgin and St. James were made of parts of a torso mannequin and a head mannequin with the addition of some insulating foam, plasticine and paint.

The crucifix was made of plasticine and painted; the crosses above the Cathedral and the baldachin above the crucifix were covered with copper and brass foil respectively. The floor mosaic at the crossing was made of mosaic pieces for bathrooms, on a plywood base. The simple campanile was constructed near the Cathedral and was fitted with brass bells 3 to 20 cm in size, brought by some of the participants from their homes.

The culmination of the larp was to be at the Easter mass at night, so the stained glass windows didn’t seem like a good idea for that: but we desperately wanted to make something with the same visual effect. In the end we suspended a bright hand-made stained glass lamp in the centre of the Cathedral, highlighting the entire building in colorful shades.

As a final note, we should say that we used about 3 m³ of timber, and the budget of the construction was about 2500 euros – thanks to the fact that almost all the expensive tools were borrowed from our friends for free. The photos pretty much say the rest.

Being а Monk

Credits: Anastasiya “Domenica” Sarkisyan, Liudmila “Var” Vitkevich, Alexander “Gray” Orlov (Design & Production); Vasily “Jolaf” Zakharov (Cathedral design and construction management).

Date: May 6–10, 2015

Location: Rented summer houses near Moscow, Russia

Duration: 3 days (plus 3 days pre-construction)

Participants: 80

Organizers and Helpers: 20 NPCs and staff

Budget: 8,000 € (30% location rental, 30% Cathedral construction, 30% other stuff)

Participation Fee: 80 € (in advance) to 110 € (last moment)

Game Mechanics: Adapted ritualistics, Spirituality, Crafts, Construction of the Cathedral

Website: http://monachum-sum.livejournal.com (in Russian)
Cathedral report: http://jolaf.livejournal.com/tag/cathedral (in Russian, with lots of photos and videos)

This article was initially published in The Nordic Larp Yearbook 2015 published by Rollespilsakademiet and edited by Charles Bo Nielsen, Erik Sonne Georg, et al.

Cover photo: Service (Play, Nataliia Lavrenova).

Atlantis is a small town in Washington, USA. It’s surrounded by woods, has no phone line, and the mail service works poorly. The only way to come there is by the railway, and the train is the only way to leave. The ticket office is closed, and the quizzical Conductor (somewhat resembling O. G. Grant) won’t let you on the train without a golden ticket. Sometimes a swirling mist comes from the forest, people not hasty enough to hide in their homes and caught by the mist on the streets get ill, or die. But that is not a problem – as everybody who comes to Atlantis is already dead.

Characters of our larp didn’t notice their death, and all of them decided to board a train to Atlantis for some reason. Some were escaping something, others were looking for a place to start a new life. Some were just traveling without a particular destination. They thought they got a shiny golden ticket to Atlantis in the moment when they actually died. We asked players to fabulate how their characters got their tickets. Their choices varied from trivial; “bought at the ticket office” to strange; “found in a dead man’s belongings” or unlikely; “someone forgot it on a cafe table”. We wrote how the character really died based on these stories. For example, the man who thought he had won the ticket playing poker was actually shot by the loser in a poker game.

Our players didn’t know that their characters actually died in “reality”. Their characters thought they just moved to a new place, having decided to change something in their life. Having come to Atlantis at the beginning of the larp, they did what any of us would do if we were them – looked for accommodation and jobs, got settled, talked, danced, drank…

Participants still had to find out that their characters were already dead – either by dying in-game, or after the game from game masters.

Inspiration

Ticket to Atlantis was a synergy of music, electronics, Stephen King’s despairing nostalgia about the lost 60’s and the question of what is death and what lies beyond.

Using music as a meta-technique, as a building block of a larp in one way or another, has been a trend in Russian larps for the last five years.

Our design team gathered three years ago to create a fully music-based larp House where the world sounds… (2012) based on a Russian bestseller novel House where… (2009) by Mariam Petrosyan. We were so fascinated with how our “musical engine” worked, that we decided to definitely do something more with it.

In House portable MP3 players were used, and the participants had to switch their musical tracks manually, according to specific rules. But in the following year Moscow electronics-for-larp engineers from Ostranna CG made a step forward, so for Ticket to Atlantis we were able to use custom made electronic devices that could switch music tracks automatically, depending on where the player was and what other players were around.

We read Hearts in Atlantis and are fond of this book. Music is extremely important for its characters, for the atmosphere, and for the book as a whole. Having our experience in creating and participating in music-based larps the idea of making Atlantis into a larp was pretty obvious.

In the team, we are all in our 20’s or 30’s. We heard about the 60’s, Stephen King’s Atlantis, we read about the epoch, we watched movies, we felt that anguish at the 60’s King writes about, and we regret we weren’t there. We are afraid of the 60’s because we know what they did to people.

Inspirational pieces: Stephen King’s Hearts inAtlantis (mostly second half), Interstate 60 (2002), Twin Peaks (1990), Across the Universe (2007), Hair (1979), Platoon (1986)

Hearts in Atlantis is not about the 60’s, it’s about people who survived the 60’s, and are still somehow connected to them. And so was our larp.

Ultimately, we wanted to talk about death. Death is a thing that’s frightening yet marvelous; marvelously frightening. One is afraid to die, and to deal with that fear, to live with that fear, one has to talk about it. That was our idea. But such talk is not easy, and not many people are ready for this talk right away. So we decided to talk about death without naming it. We decided to ask some questions and find some answers before saying what we were talking about out loud.

Afterdeath

We wanted the players to find out what was going on during the larp. It was possible when they died – from a knife, or bullet, sudden illness or a touch of mist. So in-game death was the major instrument here.

Those who died went out-of-character to a special designated place just outside the playground. What they found there was a room with walls covered with 1970 newspapers from all corners of the USA, with obituaries in them of all the characters with circumstances of their death; photos and short biographical accounts. In that moment they understood at least that what just happened was definitely not death in the usual sense.

After taking one’s time in the newspaper room, overwhelmed players went to another room representing a train car, and an NPC representing a random, semi-real fellow passenger, almost an inner voice, talked to them for some time while the wheels rattled, helping to sort out what happened and to embrace the new state of mind.

In most cases it wasn’t a fully in-game talk, but rather a conversation of two people (each of them just slightly covered by their roles) about life and death.

We tried to make it as comfortable for players as possible and used this communication, besides other, to find out if the player wanted to play on. And to play on was not so easy – as the train was heading back to Atlantis, and player stepped off the train on the same station, in the same role, with all the character’s memory intact.

The only thing that changed was character’s name, confusing and arousing suspicions in fellow citizens. Special Dark Secret rules prevented the returning characters from discussing the fact that everybody in town were already dead, and forcing them to deny the idea that they had been in the town before and not just recently arrived by train.

We never considered Atlantis as Hell, or Heaven, or Purgatory, and avoided religious rhetoric altogether. We thought of it as of a place where some people went after they died, just because that was the place they needed to go to sort out what they really needed to sort out, but hadn’t had a chance to while living.

We refused to judge characters in any manner on purpose. According to our idea, Atlantis consisted of common beliefs of people who came there. They thought it was normal for money to exist and to be dollars – and hence there were dollars.

They wanted to have a lot of money – and hence the salary for one hour’s work was a thousand dollars. They had subconscious fears – and hence there was the fearful mist (represented by NPCs in silver gowns and masks, bearing smoke flares).

They had an inner demand for order and the habit of having a job – and hence the town had a Selective Service System office, paying good money for sorting the forms of draftees (with their name, age, color, family, children, job, education etc.) to decide who would go to Vietnam and who would stay in the rear. Grave ethical disputes sometimes arose over these essentially faceless papers.

We tried hard to create the fundamentals; the core of each player’s game, not of some events but of their character, and insisted on players creating characters as elaborate and interesting as possible. Besides other issues we asked players to take note of Important People who changed their character’s life in the past or just sunk deep in their minds, and of an Important Item that once meant a lot to a character (like a handgun that misfired at a suicide attempt), but were lost long ago.

For each character we looked for similarities, “reflections” of their important people in other characters and used the “music engine” to suggest feelings similar to those they had had towards their Important People to occur when they met the corresponding characters.

One could leave Atlantis – by finding the right person who could give them a ticket to a departing train and saying the right words to him – essentially stating that one had had enough of this town and was ready to move on. The train would take them away – ending the larp for the player and taking the character… who knows where, but definitely to some place where they needed to be.

The Music Engine

In larps designed using a technique that we call “the music engine” music mostly doesn’t exist for the character. It serves like a personal soundtrack to the player’s experience, and suggests character’s emotional state.

While creating the characters, players sent us a number of musical tracks, and specified for each track what emotions this music evoked in them. Or, in other words, what music should play when the character was in that particular emotional state.

We used such emotions as happiness, sadness, joy, fear, interest, anticipation, despair and so on. For Ticket to Atlantis, we created a list of 80 emotions that thus could be provided with special soundtracks, and the number of music tracks players sent us varied from 50 (when a participant used just one track for some of the emotions) to 500 (multiple tracks for each supported emotion).

All the player’s music and information on emotions was put into an electronic device we call Armlet, that players wore on their wrist. This device played music like a portable MP3 player into the participant’s ears via earphones so a player had a continuous soundtrack for their larp.

The earphones had to be picked and adjusted carefully beforehand so that player’s ears could endure many hours of continuous use and players could listen to the music and perceive the surrounding sounds in the same time.

Armlet is an STM32-micro controller (the same kind that is used in modern “smart watches”) based device with a screen, some buttons, digital audio playback chip, standard earphones jack and digital radio chip for data exchange in range of up to 30 meters. Other devices of similar design but simpler, with no screen, etc. (we call them Beacons) were placed around the playground marking specific in-game locations.

All the devices were constantly exchanging data packets, and thus each player’s Armlet knew where the player was (by receiving data packets from Beacons) and what other players were around (by receiving data packets from other Armlets), and who was closer (judging by radio signal strength). Using this information and information on emotion-to-music relations specified by the player, Armlet chose what music to play. Reacting on characters that were reflections of one’s Important People was the most notable case.

The critical point that makes this approach completely different from every other way the music is used in Russian larps is:

Organizers didn’t choose music for the larp and didn’t have to rely on if it would trigger the desirable emotions in the players. Instead, the music is chosen by players for themselves according to their own musical taste and emotional reactions. The electronic device maps the emotions (specified by organizers for different situations) to the particular player’s music, thus creating for players their own, special, unique soundtrack that pulls exactly the right strings in the right moments.

In some situations instead of music a player could hear a voice describing their feelings or giving them imperative instructions. It was used for drug effects and in case of a character’s in-game death. Drugs were represented by tiny electronic “pills” connected to Armlet, and lack of a pill in case of addiction caused continuous playing of a special addiction track that forced out all other music for hours, until a new pill was obtained.

The player’s ability to influence the device directly was very limited and rarely needed, thus most of the time player could just listen to the music. A player could only specify (using Armlet keypad) a limited number of intentions (like going to kill someone), and Armlet reacted, for example, waiting for some time (representing the character psyching herself) and then playing a special music track (that a player specifically chose for killing), and while the music was playing the character could actually kill – hence the combat rules.

Passing one of the earphones to another player was treated as empathy, a desire to share one’s feelings with another person. However, different people naturally feel different emotions while listening to the same music. This pretty well represented the chasm of human misunderstanding. Sex was represented by taking some of the clothes off and dancing while sharing earphones and listening to one of the players’ special sex music.

Most other rules of the larp (like rules for representing brawls) was also based on some special tracks that could be played by Armlet at some particular time or as a result of player’s interaction with Armlet.

The Forest

Atlantis is surrounded by woods and we made the forest a mystical place, accessible at night only, much similar to the Black/ White Lodge in Twin Peaks. There were gazebos there, depicting typical locations in a typical American expression of that epoch – boy scout tent, movie theatre, perfect housewife’s living room, Vietnam bush trench and so on.

In those places there were Important Items of the characters. Having another character’s Important Item could give you enormous (and definitely not kind) power over that character, but you could bring only one object from the woods so you had to choose whether to take your own item or someone else’s.

The woods had a special soundtrack, and gazebos were connected by trails made of LEDs (essentially Beacons) that reacted to Armlet presence by lighting up before a character, and going off behind them, and one only could walk from one LED to another. Different trails reacted to different characters, so each character had to find their own way in the woods.

Perspectives

Though created in Russia with little to no awareness about Nordic larps, the game seems to follow the Nordic tradition pretty closely. It lasted without interruption for 38 hours, and it used some meta-techniques like music as an instrument for influencing player to affect characters. Of course, Armlets and earphones didn’t exist in-game, a train car was symbolically represented by a room with properly arranged chairs, and NPCs in gray were only representations of swirls of mist, but mostly what you saw in the game was what your character saw. Moreover the larp was psychologically challenging and made participants face some existential issues.

It was our second larp using the Music Engine. In general, it used the same paradigm as our House where the World Sounds… (2012) though the technique was almost fully automated, creating a personal context-based soundtrack for each player, reducing player’s interference to minimum.

There have been something like 5 – 10 music-based larps in Russia, the trend appeared around the beginning of 2010’s, though games besides the two mentioned above used completely different approaches to using music.

Another important game that must be mentioned here is Saint Summer (Moscow region, June 2014). Based on Hair, Jesus Christ Superstar, Across the Universe and The Wall and created by our friends completely independently of Ticket to Atlantis, that rock-musical larp explored the 60’s at their peak – with sex, drugs, rock’n’roll and Vietnam war.

From a musical point of view, it was a complete opposite to Ticket to Atlantis – it used a stage, loudspeakers and hit music to set the pitch and drive the action of the whole game from one extreme to another. Set a few years before Ticket to Atlantis and held three months before, it served as a prequel for a number of players who participated in both projects, some of them playing the same characters.

Reactions

We were doing what we called “a kind larp about the good”, though it was neither simple to do nor easy to play. It appeared to be a larp about realizing some simple yet important things. One of our players, talking to an NPC on a “train” after his character died, said that besides his own death, he was much more disappointed with the fact that all other the nice and wonderful people he met in Atlantis were in fact dead.

The fact that they were dead made them less valuable to him. Well, we tried to convey the idea that death is a choice. Some people die by their own choice long before their actual death, and some continue living even after they die. Our characters had no real cause to consider themselves dead except the fact itself, presented to them in the way of obituary. They could live on, the only thing they needed was the courage to live on. Death has no power over those not afraid to live.

We should say that in the end, after a larp that definitely was not easy; even really difficult, after some reconciliation with themselves, most players came to feel what they called “warm aftertaste”. And we felt a lot of joy after reading reports about the larp settling down in heads and hearts, people giving up pain and struggle and moving on with joy. It was very warming to hear something like “It wasn’t a larp about death. It was a game about life and about the absence of death”. We are very thankful to our players for saying that and helping us to believe it’s true. We end with some quotes from reports:

Ticket to Atlantis

Credits: Nadezhda Vechorek, Vasily “Jolaf” Zakharov, Evgeniya “Nel” Patarakina, Philipp “Phil” Kozin, Dmitry “Kudryavyj” Roldugin, Anastasiya “Suliven” Dobrovolskaya. Electronics development, Ostranna Creative Group: Gennady “Kreyl” Kruglov, Roman “Jam” Leonov
Date: September 11-14, 2014
Location: Rented summer houses near Moscow, Russia
Length: 38 hours
Players: 70
Budget: ~€6,000
Participation Fee: €85
Website: http://atlantis1970.livejournal.com/271.html

This article was initially published in The Nordic Larp Yearbook 2014 which was edited by Charles Bo Nielsen & Claus Raasted, published by Rollespilsakademiet and released as part of documentation for the Knudepunkt 2015 conference.

Cover photo: Welcome to Atlantis. (Play, Julia Tishkova). Other photos by Julia Tishkova.

Genre: Rock opera
Theme: Utopia and its Fall
Setting: Rock’n’Roll festival in the late 1960’s, US
Sources: Aldous Huxley ‘The Island’, Jesus Christ Superstar, Platoon, Hair.

The Messiah has been gone for two millennia. The times of rock star messiahs ended half a century ago. We have mass communication galore, but the same questions still stand. In this larp we hoped to find some answers. Many say Jesus Christ Superstar is the best rock opera ever written. Perhaps that’s because the USA of the 1960’s was very much like Judea of the 0’s. In both, the paradigm of the System, the Society, the ‘You are what you do’, the Leader, was being replaced by the paradigm of the Individuum, the Human, the ‘I Do What I Am’, the Messiah. Both approaches have their pros and cons, and Russia nowadays is a battleground for the two (again).

In JCS, the story of Christ is rewritten as a story of the individual; a story of a idealistic madman who dies, not for idea(l)s but because of other people. By his death he declares his ideals, becoming the iconic representation of these ideals in the minds of people. His personality and deeds are erased, replaced by him as a personification of his ideals. Incidentally, this is as true of Judas as it is of Christ. That story of sacrifice and ascension has been retold in innumerable stories: Hair, Platoon, One flew over the cuckoo’s nest, etc. and played out in many larps. In our larp, we wanted to create a rare opportunity to “strip away th e myth from the man”, experience them in their full complexity, play their stories, and see how myths are created.

Visions of Utopia

In a sense, the game was set in the USA of the end of the 1960’s and the start of the 1970’s, at a hippie festival; at the same time, it was also set in biblical Judea, and, in more than one sense, in modern day Russia.

The game space was centered on The Stage. Before the Stage the Saint Summer community radiated out in a rainbow of seven groups. Behind the Stage stood the Wall, beyond which was the System. Between the Stage and the Rainbow, there was a large open space. Completely by accident, in the middle of that space stood a single apple tree, which became, more or less by itself, the Tree of Eden. We placed a toy snake in it. The players then put a haystack under it, and it became the place of much merrymaking.

There were seven character groups, representing the colors of the rainbow. Each group was historically accurate as to 1960s USA, and each strove towards a different ideal of Utopia.

This, on one hand, created the conflict, and drove the game forward. On the other, all these teams fit together and, between them, fulfilled every need a society could have.

• Red was the New Left and Socialists. For them, Utopia was social justice, freedom and human rights.
• Orange was Brahmins. They sought Utopia through personal transformation, enlightenment through study, meditation and the teachings of gurus.
• Yellow, the Diggers, were the smallest group. They saw Utopia as the absence of suffering and hunger, and they fed, clothed, and cured everyone.
• Green, the largest group, were the Free Communes, the Flower Children, the iconic hippies: Utopia as eternal childhood, Never-Never land.
• Cyan were gonzo journalists. Utopia was the Truth, and all the truth. For everybody.
• Blue. Bikers. Utopia as freedom. Urban nomads.
• Purple were the followers of Timothy Leary and Ken Keasy, they called themselves the Brotherhood of Happiness. They saw Utopia as a transcendence, and the freedom to do whatever you desire with your consciousness.

This rainbow was opposed by the Grays and Blacks of The System, a grotesque, cynical, and very efficient instrument of oppression: Police, Army, State Propaganda, and The Asylum. They, of course, had their own vision of Utopia: order, conformism, stability, sanity, victory.

Tools and Rules: Sex, Drugs and Rock-n-Roll

Our game, as many Russian larps, was relatively rules heavy. Still, all the rules were carefully tailored to produce the theme and style of play we wanted. Without going into all the details, we’d like to outline the central game design elements that, in our eyes, ‘made the game’:

Sex, Drugs and the Space Beyond the Wall.

Music was the central medium of the game: everything, all the game rules, from sex to fighting to drugs, involved music. In contrast to other games with a musical engine, e.g. Дом в котором Мир звучит/Dom v Kotorommir Zvuchit/The House where the World Sounds… (2012), where every character was enclosed in their own soundtrack, we made music a uniting experience. It was loud, coming from The Stage, as well as being created by the players, and it was as ”Woodstocky” as we could make it.

Free love was of course an indispensable part of Saint Summer. Russian larpers are quite shy, and most larp restrict diegetic sex or make it taboo. But not here.J

To express the pervasive nature of free love, the rules defined that anything creative done with music could be considered as having sex, if the participants so decided.

To express love as sharing, after the deed the players were told to exchange tokens of affection. These depended on the character’s group: hippies gave bead bracelets, leftists pin buttons with slogans, bikers tattoos, etc.

Drugs came in three types of in-game drugs (we did not count the other stuff). The simplest, weed, was simulated by incense sticks, and it was everywhere. To ‘light up’, one put some appropriate music on, and lit the incense, and anyone could join if they wanted. The players were expected to behave more emotionally and be more emphatic when high, but also to react more emotionally if things went bad. Personal chemical hallucinogens were modeled using play buttons; small MP3 players that looked like pin-buttons with the game logo. Each play button contained a 10-30 minute story that guided the player down the rabbit hole.

About a dozen such tracks were recorded: a combination of music, sound effects, descriptions of what a character sees, as well as direct orders to do something, and a ”post/after” effect. Everyone could get a button from a Purple group dealer.

Lastly, every night a shared trip on the Stage, led by the GM’s and joined by everyone, set the atmosphere and, in some sense, agenda for the next day. The first night’s trip, “Celebration of Misbehaving”, was all about breaking free from The System.

It started as a humiliating lesson in a boarding school, and then morphed into a concert, where four deities: Jesus (accidentally female but it worked perfectly), Shiva, Bacchus, and a native American spirit, led the crowd in a Beatles singalong, sharing wine and chocolates.

The second shared trip, “Armageddon” focused on the fears of the 1970’s. It started with everyone playing a competitive game of tag, with loud, somewhat aggressive music playing.

Gradually the game changed: the ones tagged were told to play dead, and increasingly violent clips were projected onto the Wall: Disney cartoons, then 1970’s street riots, then Vietnam war, and lastly nuclear explosions. At the end everyone dropped dead, the video showed the aftermaths of nuclear war, and the theme song from the Requiem for the Dream was playing.

Whenever a character crossed the Wall, they momentarily left the game and went into a meta-game ‘limbo’ where player, as an actor, decided with the GMs, as scriptwriters, where to take the character.

That was done because, in our experience, when the game changes drastically to the worse, many players either drop out of character or lose their motivation to play, and we wanted to give the players a moment to stand back, reset, and look at their character from a narrativist, not simulationist, perspective. We think it worked, because there was very intense game-play beyond the Wall. Some players, however, hated this ‘limbo’, partially because a similar system was used in the larp Стоимость Жизни / Stoimost’ Jizni / The Value of Life (2011), a powerful art-house larp about consumerist society that left many players with a very bad aftertaste.

Prison, Asylum and Vietnam, locations beyond the Wall, were run by the GM team, providing “Passions”; hard moral choices for the character, pushing them to become either a Messiah or a Traitor (or, in one rare case, both). Those who chose sacrifice got a white rose and died; those who chose betrayal got a red rose and returned to Saint Summer. Players who did not choose at all returned as well, telling stories.

Of those, especially Vietnam was successful. We invited a dedicated group of players who, for the last seven years, have run a Vietnam war larp. They brought with them full Vietnam war kit, but more importantly, they brought the right atmosphere; the war mentality, the disgust of the hippies. From the start in the ‘Fort Summer’ boot camp, heavy use of obscenity in marching songs stressed the harsh, masculine, polarized world of the war as opposed to the soft and inclusive Saint Summer.

Endspiel

At the end of the third day, the police raided and razed Saint Summer; the bulldozers mowed the Wall and the ‘art installation’ barricades. Many left before that. Most groups had traitors. Others stayed. The overt message of the larp was that Utopia is impossible because humans are made to fall. But the victory of the Utopia starts from its ruin. Messiah crucified, paradise lost, Woodstock ended, but in their destruction they create the dream, and the seed of hope.

To make the players feel this victory from the ruins, to feel this faith that is stronger than facts, we made the ending ambiguous: in-game, in the finale the police laid down their weapons, while the last news flash, released after the game, said that the police shot down everyone who stayed in Saint Summer. Many players did not believe the news flash, and argued passionately. That is exactly the moment we were driving for. The moment of belief that there is no death, that Jim Morrison still sings, that once in history, the Summer is forever.

Святое Лето/Sviatoe Leto/ Saint Summer

Credits: Olga ‘Shaggy’ Shovman, Ekaterina ‘Freexie’ Godneva, Elena ‘Mirish’ Khanpira, Anna ‘Shakty’ Shekhova, Maria ‘Lotta’ Grubaya, Dmitry ‘Mityaj’ Gruby, Xenia ‘Xenyaka’ Kuznetsova, Seraphima ‘Arnaksha’ Melnikova, Mark ‘Qwerty’ Shovman.
Date: June 13-15, 2014
Location: Empty field in the Moscow Region.
Length: 3 days
Players: 97
Budget: ~€2,000
Participation Fee: ~€25

This article was initially published in The Nordic Larp Yearbook 2014 which was edited by Charles Bo Nielsen & Claus Raasted, published by Rollespilsakademiet and released as part of documentation for the Knudepunkt 2015 conference.

Cover photo: “Roses are blue, violets are green / where will you be when the acid kicks in?” (music drugs) (Play, Roman Vorontsov). Other photos by Roman Vorontsov and Dalia Kochneva.