LIGHTNING BOLT! Sorry but you’re dead now, you have to go back to base and count to 100… Ten seconds ago you were on top of the world, your sword whipping about like lightning, slaying lowly warriors hardly fit to walk the same field of battle as you. But then that impudent druid snuck up behind you and it was too late. Everything can change that quickly in the mystical world of Live Action Role Play. A bizarre phenomenon of duct tape swords, fake spells and the occasional dragon, “larp”, as it’s commonly known, is preserving the magic of medieval times for the modern day.
Every weekend, all across America, untold numbers of people from all walks of life tape up their foam swords and take to the field of battle. Actually, LARP can be much less exciting than the “boffer” games we tried (boffer is the name for the foam weaponry). Games that focus more on the role-play side of LARP include tabletop card games and vampire societies where disputes are settled with rock-paper-scissors… But we don’t mess around with such riffraff, if we’re going to pretend to be in the middle ages, there had better be a sword fight.
LARP is much more pervasive than most people think. Just about everywhere that people love magic (in other words, everywhere), a branch of one of the major LARP clans can be found. For us, the clan was Amtgard, a global non-profit organization which focuses primarily on the live combat aspect of LARP.
Along with trusted comrades Sam Maliska, Will Glazier, and Josh Chin (all ‘11), I ventured to Cesar Chavez park in Berkeley to find a group of serious larpers of widely varying ages, both dressing the part and sporting all sorts of hand crafted weapons: swords, bows and arrows (even maces) constructed with nothing but sticks, foam and cloth.
Sadly, the two boffer swords that Sam and I slaved away on the weekend before were hopelessly out of line with Amtgard’s safety standards, and we had to use loaner weapons. But the clan members were immensely welcoming and wasted no time before beginning to show us the ropes. The rules of LARP are a bit stricter than I expected. Losing two limbs or a shot to the body is a death (you have to yell “DEAD!” once you’re killed), and a strict honor system is the judge of what constitutes a lost arm or a torso shot.
A slightly mouse-like man with graying hair emerged as the informal leader of the group and as he sparred with Sam (who quickly established himself as a natural), we all came to the same conclusion: this dude can ball. Cronk was his name, LARP was his game, and by the time we started playing our first group battle game called Ditch, he was flying about slaying helpless opponents who looked like they were moving in slow motion.
Meanwhile, the four of us held our own among the more experienced larpers, as we fought battle after battle through the tall grasses of the park’s lower hill. Next, we donned some borrowed armor and took the fight to the forest, as some of our comrades traded swords for bows and foam-tipped arrows. From two bases separated by dense trees and elevation, opposing forces employed all sorts of tactics to outflank and outfight the enemy. At lightning pace, the game went on ferociously until the last man was ‘shattered’ (out of lives).
After the excitement, we stuck around to converse with our new friends. Their conversation was extremely cryptic to us four, all of us were hopelessly out of the loop. But what was made exceedingly clear was that LARP constitutes far more than a weekend hobby for these people, it’s probably closer to a way of life…
All the fighting, chasing and strategy make LARP a uniquely fun experience that everyone had really ought to try… at least once. But to me, it seems the real appeal of these role-playing games is that they provide a golden opportunity to make pretend, and anyone who ever imagined their bed was a fort when they were little knows that doing so is always more fun with good company. The people you’ll find on Sunday afternoons at Cesar Chavez Park might at first seem insane, but I think they’re more like eccentric geniuses—and friendly ones at that. Truth is, reality often sucks. And in this crazy world, pretending that you’re a bard or a druid for a few hours every week might just be the most brilliant way ever invented to keep your sanity.
