Listen to this episode here.
Last week was a show about how it might work to frame a scene when you get to decide whatever you want that scene to look like. But this week, we're looking at the reverse: what happens when you're given a very detailed scene and must figure out how to incorporate it into your story?
This episode brings together a bunch of threads I’ve been building up throughout this larp series: immersion, the separation or lack thereof between player and character, safer play, and more. I couldn't ask for a better cohost for that than Sharang Biswas.
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Preorder Sharang’s book The Iron Below Remembers
Further Reading
House of Craving by Tor Kjetil Edland, Danny Wilson & Bjarke Pedersen
Lumberjills by Moyra Turkington
I Say A Little Prayer by Tor Kjetil Edland
Just a Little Lovin’ by Tor Kjetil Edland and Hanne Grasmo
Uncertainty in Games by Greg Costikyan
Rules of Play by Katie Salen & Eric Zimmerman
The Self Reflexive Tabletop Role Playing Game by Evan Torner
The World is Born from Zero by Cameron Kunzelman
Socials
Sharang on Bluesky and itch
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Transcript
Sam: Hello and welcome to another episode of Dice Exploder. Each week we take one mechanic and divine its life path. My name is Sam Dewald and my cohost today is Sharang Biswas.
You might know Sharang from last time he was on the show for the 2023 end of year episode. He's also a games professor, the co-editor of Honey and Hot Wax with Lucian Khan, an anthology of erotic games, and a designer whose credits include the avatar, the Last Airbender game. Plus his first novel is in pre-orders now: The Iron Below Remembers. Gay archeologists, giant robots, colonial India, horny superheroes, and a metric ton of footnotes. You can pre-order it now.
I'm lucky enough to have LRP ped several times with Sharang at various big bag cons, and when I invited him to come talk LARP with me, he brought in the mechanic of fate play scenes from House of Craving. These are scenes that come about halfway through the day long runtime of this LRP and that are very explicit about what happens in them. So you know from well before the game starts what you're going to be doing about halfway through it.
But that's not all that's very explicit about these scenes because House of Craving is a very sex forward horror larp. So this is a general content warning. We stay pretty focused in this conversation on the mechanics of the game, but it's impossible to talk about House of Craving without mentioning topics like simulated sex, rape, incest, and more.
Again, I don't think we get much more explicit than what I've just already said in this content warning, but I wanna be clear that this game doesn't have to be from you, and you don't have to play it for us to talk about it and learn something from it. And also, if you are not feeling it, then please feel free to skip this episode. You don't have to be around for this one.
I love this conversation, though. I think it ties together a lot of threads I've been building up throughout this LRP series. Immersion, the separation or lack thereof between player and character, safer play, scene framing and more.
And with that, thanks to everyone who supports Dice explode. on Patreon, and here is Sharang Biswas with Fate play scenes from House of Craving.
sharang, thanks for being here on Dice Exploder.
Sharang: Thank you, Sam, for having me for the second time in person and the third time in spirit.
Sam: all right. I wanna give you a chance of talk here to plug your book while we're still like at the beginning of the episode and people are still listening. So, uh, yeah, what's the deal with your book?
Sharang: So The Iron Below Remembers is set in a world where, in ancient times, the country of sort of India took over the planet, basically, as a global colonizer because it had access to giant mech robot technology.
And so fast forward to the present, an archaeologist finds one of these giant mechs buried in the earth and is like yes this is the find of the century it will make me super famous and more importantly it will make me more famous than my boyfriend who i'm very jealous of because he happens to be the biggest superhero on the planet.
Incredible. Love it. So good. what are we talking about today?
So I'm gonna call it based on a specific mechanic in the LARP House of Craving,
Sam: Yeah.
Sharang: is a, 360 degree LARP by Tor Kjetil Edland, Danny Wilson, and Bjarke Pedersen. they call it for that LARP, the fate play scene,
Sam: Mm
Sharang: I'm using as a shorthand sort of to mean a scene that is highly predetermined,
Sam: Yeah.
Sharang: that comes up in the middle or at some point during a
Sam: yeah.
Sharang: As much play to find out. It's like, this scene is going to happen. It will probably look very much like what's written up here,
Sam: Yeah. yeah, we just talked I think last week's episode will have been Moyra Turkington talking about lumber, Jills, and I say a little prayer and these spotlight scenes in those games and the way those games kind of work is each player gets the chance to go around the circle and say, like, this is the scene I want to see right now, and, like, we're gonna bring in those stuff.
But that's only after doing a round of, like, very prescriptive scenes, like, Character A and Character B have this scene in this time in this place with this thing going on and that's a lot What we're kind of talking about here with this right and in this different game But I think these these two different kinds of framing scenes are gonna blend together nicely so Yeah,
Sharang: the designers of both these games, right? It's clearly an evolution of his ideas of LARP and his ideas of LARP design. Obviously, he has different co designers, but he is this common factor in both of them, right?
Sam: Yeah, totally. So why don't you set us up by, like, what is House of Craving?
Sharang: Amazing! So House of Cravings is a spicy, spicy LARP. So House of Cravings is a Nordic LARP, and I'm going to use that because the designers are all from the Scandinavian countries. It's a small group I think it was like 15 to 20 people. It was around that size. The story is that you all are members of a family and some close friends of the family. The mother of the family has just died by suicide. And As a grieving process, the family decides to take a vacation in this, like, isolated place, this farmhouse y place. And the lot takes place in this isolated house, converted farmhouse in Denmark. I played it in Denmark.
And the thing is that they come to this house. It is haunted. And the ghosts of the house start gaining power over these characters and drive them to insanity, incest, rape, and murder. And at the end of the night, the members of the family die. And then the players who played the family stay on the next day to play the ghosts for the next group of players. This means that the first group and the last group to play the The roll off happened like five times over the course of a month.
Sam: Right.
Sharang: and the last group have a very different experience. Because the first group, their ghosts are only the small group of organizers.
Sam: Yeah.
Sharang: and the last group don't get to play ghosts. They
Sam: Yeah.
Sharang: as a family that dies. Everyone in the middle gets to play two roles ish. They play themselves as living, and then they play themselves as ghosts. And the ghosts are simultaneously themselves, and also the house, and also fundamental forces
Sam: Yeah, yeah,
Sharang: in the world. So that is the LARP in general. A key thing for participants and scholars of this LARP is that this LARP is very sex forward. So players will be simulating a lot of sexual acts very physically. So the rule of the game is your bottom underwear must stay on during sex scenes.
Sam: Right.
Sharang: could be a funny moment where you are in a hot tub nude someone, but as soon as a sexual scene starts, you get out, put your bottom underwear on, get back in the hot tub, and then continue the sex scene,
Sam: Yeah.
Sharang: So that is an important thing to think about. It's a glaring elephant in the room, or whatever, when talking about this. If you don't talk about that in this LARP, a lot of context is lost.
Sam: Sure. this is the first I'm hearing about the part of this LARP where like, it's this chain of like, players. Like, I knew that day two you played as ghosts, but I didn't realize that that was with an entirely new group of people. I can't believe we're not talking about that.
That's so cool. What does that do? No, but like,
Sharang: you do workshopping twice, right? So on the first day, so arrive, the previous groups are LARPing, one of the organizers meets us and says, let's go into this room and talk everyone. And then, so we do workshopping with the organizers. Then we do workshopping with the people who are gonna be our ghosts. Then, the next day, we do workshopping with the people for whom we will be the ghosts
Sam: yeah so, introduce us to the Fate Play scenes in this, like, what was yours, what are they generally?
Sharang: so the fate play scene is interesting. I will read out a little blurb from some of the game materials that I was sent when I signed up for the LARP. not when I signed up, when I was in the LARP already. Like, this is sent to the players, not just to people who are interested. So, quote,
These scenes are required scenes and are thus central and defining for your journey.
End quote. also tell you that, quote, they are to be played sometime during Act 3. See play schedule. End quote.
Sam: translating back to sort of colloquial English, it's like, these are going to be required scenes, you're definitely going to play these scenes, and they're going to happen late in the game, that's what Act 3 means?
Sharang: yes. There are, I think, five acts in the game, I
Sam: Okay so just,
Sharang: by time, so at a certain time this act starts,
Sam: got it.
Sharang: Now, this is interesting because unlike in games like I Say a Little Prayer where you all do workshopping and then come up with I would like this to happen, which is a thing that happens in many
Sam: Yeah
Sharang: a more concrete extension of like stars and wishes, right? When people say I would like to see more of this in our game,
Sam: Yeah
Sharang: This is given to you as a player before the LARP, right? Remember House of Craving has pre written characters, Like many Nordic LARP, you do not create your own characters.
And with your character, they will give you, this is your Fate Play scene, in three months time, you will be playing this scene,
Sam: yeah,
Sharang: And I'm gonna read out my Fate Play scene description.
Sam: actually even before that. I just want to like underline the fact that like Three months in advance, you are learning about this, right? Like, there's this huge, because that's not typical in the tabletop world, that you are like, planning to play a thing three months in advance and doing all this prep work.
But when you're doing something that is a full weekend like this, or even longer than that, like, that's gonna be this 360 experience, that is how long in advance you are preparing to do all of this.
Sharang: but! Preparing is an interesting word because I didn't talk to my scene partner or any other player until the first day of the LARP,
Sam: Totally.
Sharang: workshop. So, that's interesting, right? There's so many LARPs, and just to be clear, by 360 LARPs I mean this re fully produced LARP where the setting is important, where you're there for multiple days,
Sam: The LARP is, being produced 360 degrees around your person.
Yeah.
Sharang: And of course there are many edge cases and
Sam: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Sharang: So are many LARPs. Example, New World Magiskola, right? There was a robust discussion forum. It was on Facebook, back when Facebook was still popular. Beforehand, where we would like talk to each other and be like, Oh, you're gonna be a student, you're gonna be a professor, you're gonna be in this magical house.
It's a sorry, New World Magiskola is a magic university LARP.
But, in Magiskola, there was robust conversation like, Oh, you're gonna play this person. What if you play my ex boyfriend? That fits in well with both our storylines. Then ending. Alright, we had a lot of that kind of content, like pre planning.
And the funny thing is, every time I pre planned for a LARP, at the LARP itself, when the midden hits the windmill, as Terry Pratchett writes Most of that planning, I have found for me, not for other people necessarily is thrown out the window, right? A lot of it is based on organic stories that come out, and this other story that we planned is no longer relevant,
Sam: Yeah.
Sharang: Or, the chemistry that I have with other players is far stronger than the chemistry I have with the players I pre planned
Sam: Totally.
Sharang: these are people I've never met before.
Sam: And chemistry works differently in person than it does on the internet.
Sharang: Exactly, and I don't necessarily mean romantic and sexual
Sam: A hundred percent. A hundred percent.
Sharang: player chemistry,
Sam: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Sharang: know Sam Dunnewold before the first time we LARPed and it turned out we had great friend chemistry
Sam: Yeah.
Sharang: Um, that kind of thing. And now we're friends and every time we meet at a con I try and make time to have chatting time with
Sam: Yeah, totally.
Sharang: But so that's actually really funny that we did a lot of this generative pre planning before in these LARPs and we don't have the scene,
Sam: Yeah.
Sharang: House of Craving they're like, this is not generative, here is your scene,
Sam: Yeah.
Sharang: it because the LARP says this will happen and this is the time in which it'll happen.
Sam: Well, I think that there's two things I want to add there. The first is, there's also stories about New World Magischola, Like some people weren't involved in that pre planning and showed up and like felt left out or like didn't feel left out because all of it went out the window or whatever, like the, the, you get that sort of interesting bifurcation that is a whole other topic to think about.
But, I also wanted to underline here that like, when I was saying, you're spending three months planning, I don't necessarily mean like, this is what's gonna happen in this scene. I mean more like anticipating, right? Like, even if you're not talking to anyone, you have all this time to like, think about the material, both in the just sort of anticipating a fun event coming up, you are able to just sort of have it in the back of your mind thinking about it. And that is its own emotional experience with content that is as charged as we are about to get with the description here.
But it is also time to let you think about, like, where are my limits gonna be, right? It's, time to think about, like, how am I gonna want to just sort of approach this as a human being if not an author?
Sharang: I've either read a paper on, or I've talked to an editor about someone should write a paper about this idea of Anticipating in for games
Sam: mmm.
Sharang: Up and we were talking about like when you buy a new RPG that you haven't planned on who you're playing with yet, but you read the like
Sam: Yeah, yeah.
Sharang: and you're like oh, it'll be so fun for me to make this kind of character, ooh, right this anticipation is a very powerful thing. And in fact many RPGs work on that because again who plays all the TTRPGs they buy,
Sam: A hundred percent. Yeah.
Sharang: Right? So that force is leveraged in a way in this being like, oh, I'm replaying this scene, especially if it's a very spicy
Sam: Yeah.
Sharang: of the, I think all the places in House of Craving were spicy in some way
Sam: Yeah. Yeah, I think of that as a very lyric game thing, of the like, reading the game is play, in exactly the way that you're describing, of like, imagining the future. And, then you get into, I've had like, very annoying semantic conversations about like, okay, is reading a novel play then? And it's like, okay, our definition of play is breaking down to the point of uselessness, but there is something to the idea that I get a lot of pleasure out of reading a novel and imagining the thing that the novel is telling me about.
And in the same way it's a more active experience to sort of take the framework of a game and imagine what is the thing that's going to come from this later. But it is still an act of imagination as you are engaging with a text and from a book in front of you.
Sharang: Yeah, and that question or that act skirts the edges of the, question about like, is a novel interactive,
Sam: yeah.
Sharang: or like, how does reading a novel differ from reading the rules of an RPG?
Sam: Totally.
Sharang: I get excited reading the rules of a board game,
Sam: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Sharang: a lot less immersive, but I'm like, oh
yeah, ooh, I can imagine doing this.
Sam: I'm playing the Arcs Blighted Reach expansion this weekend.
RUH! HELL YEAH DUDE WE'RE GONNA HAVE TO
Sharang: this weekend, but our next session is starting
Sam: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
Sharang: of the regular ones
Sam: yeah.
No, this, this sounded, I've been playing a bunch of Arcs like in preparation for this and like reading up on the, the Blighted Reach rules and be like, how is this going to change the game?
And so it's exactly the same thing. It's exactly that same. Yeah. Okay. Okay. I can't. Oh, incredible.
Sharang: This is why we're friends, Sam!
Sam: I did not think that the House of Craving episode was going to bring in arcs. But okay, I want to bring it back to What is the actual fate scene gonna be here?
Sharang: Yeah, so, something that TK has done in many LARPs is he groups two to four characters together into like a core group.
Sam: Mhm.
Sharang: in Just Little Loving it was like a hundred person LARP. So there were like core groups of four or five people and they have like a narrative going on specific to that group, right?
So same thing happened In House of Craving. Again, I keep calling it TK's LARP. Just know that I acknowledge that it is a with shared authorship. But I'm saying TK because played two LARPs by him and stuff, right?
Each group has this fate play scene. That's the same for that group, right? So my group was just two of us, okay? My character, Sebastian, and the other character, Benjamin, who plays my younger stepbrother. Okay, so I will read out Our Fate play scene. uh, It's called Bad Romance, Benjamin and Sebastian Scene. Quote,
The house brings Benjamin and Sebastian together. Sebastian seeks out Benjamin who is hurt from Sebastian's previous rejections. Sebastian comes on to Benjamin with a strange intensity. Benjamin notices something is strange with Sebastian. This is a mutual seduction scene. Both Benjamin and Sebastian can try to resist. We really shouldn't. eventually, the house will make sure that they both give in to their desires.
End quote.
Sam: Yeah, so.
Sharang: So as I said, this is a very charged larp about incest. And somewhat non consensual sexual contact. In fact, there was full on rape within the LARP game. And just as a disclaimer to anyone listening, the LARP includes very heavy workshopping and discussion of boundaries and limits and calibration tools and how to, like, change if things aren't going. The organizers were very, very thoughtful about this. I want no one to listen to this episode and just be like, oh my god, why would someone make this, right? The organizers are extremely thoughtful. Also have a lot of experience making this kind of larp. I know for a fact that Bjarke and TK have done this kind of thing before. I know Danny less, but I'm sure he has experience. Just putting that out there.
Sam: this episode of Dice Splitter is brought to you by everyone who support the show on Patreon.
And it's also brought to you by Extra Ordinary at T-T-R-P-G about found family, trauma and kids with strange powers. It's Animorphs, Percy Jackson, X-Men or Stranger Things if all the kids were psychic. And it's all baked into a role play Heavy GM full game using the Dice List Belonging Outside Belonging System. I myself am writing an ANIMORPHS and Battlestar Galactica inspired play set for this game. So go check it out. The Kickstarter is live now, or you can get a free Quickstart on Itch. Extra Ordinary on Kickstarter now.
So what is it like in act one at the start of the runtime, you know this is coming up. How are you thinking? Like, where is it in your head? Are you thinking about it at all? Like, what's the experience of it?
Sharang: Love that. So, I think that your previous point about this anticipation is very important because it is unavoidable,
Sam: Yeah.
Sharang: not think about
Sam: Yeah.
Sharang: because you're given your character description, you're given some other details, and then you're given this. And it's, and it's very saucy. It's very spicy.
Sam: Yeah.
Sharang: is going to happen, and it's in our current society where all this kind of stuff is very taboo to think about this, right?
Sam: Yeah. Yeah,
Sharang: up for the LARP knowing there's a high sex Simulation LARP, right? Many people sign up for the LARP knowing and because it is a high sex simulation LARP because that is the experience they want.
I am a academic, not a scholar, but I am an academic who thinks about sex and play a lot and I will not deny that that is one reason I signed up for the LARP, right?
Sam: right.
Sharang: a high sex simulation LARP. I'm like, this is one reason I want to play this LARP. So it is. Unavoidable to think about, right?
Sam: just want to throw out there. I hear this and I imagine the experience being very similar to that first act of a horror movie where like, the characters don't know what's going on, that this is gonna go terribly. But like we, the audience, and in a larp like you are simultaneously the character and the audience, right. We know this is a fucking horror movie. Like, I paid money to come see a horror movie. feel that that thing is going to come. But like, it's, I can, I can imagine the scene where it's just sort of like, hi, it's good to see you. Like, we're just kind of like hanging out, but like, this is just like hovering like a cloud over that scene.
Sharang: In an article for First Person Scholar, I called LARP players as reflexive transceivers of narrative and information because you are creating narrative, experiencing the narrative, playing it out, and watching yourself experience and create it simultaneously, right? You're participant, observer,
Sam: Yeah.
Sharang: all at the same time, right?
And that is very potent. There's a very potent, like, heady cocktail of things to be doing at once. And that's why many kinds of LARP I would not recommend to beginner gamers. I would be like, this is gonna be challenging for you. You're gonna get in your head a lot for this kind of LARP. Especially in a LARP where you might be naked and have people smear food all over you on a dining table, right? That happened to me, for example.
Sam: And that's not all LARP. I did a whole episode with Randy Lubin about, like, good first hand LARPs. Don't get afraid of LARPing. But, yes, also, maybe don't do this LARP as your first LARP. Like, yeah.
Sharang: just like I wouldn't tell someone who is interested in reading English novels, I wouldn't say read Finnegan's Wake as your first
Sam: Totally. Totally.
Sharang: I would tell very few people to read Finnegan's Wake at all, but same thing, right? There's an audience for this and this is a LARP that is challenging, right,
Sam: Yeah.
Sharang: into as a player.
Sam: Challenging to get into as a player, but a fate scene like this feels like it would really help get into it as a player.
Sharang: I mean, it's interesting because I just said all this and there were first time LARPers at this
Sam: Oh wow.
Sharang: But, every first time LARPer who I met had a lot of experience with immersive theater. So they had LARP like experience. And the one I'm really thinking of is a therapist.
Sam: yeah,
yeah, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Sharang: and what does emotion mean and stuff a lot,
Sam: Totally, totally.
Sharang: But yes. But also maybe no, because, oh your question again to reiterate was is it helpful to have this constrained scene? I don't know the answer to that.
Sam: Okay.
Sharang: it's helpful, but also in roleplaying games, TTRPG or LARP, the pervasive cultural idea is play to find out.
Sam: Mm hmm.
Sharang: You expect to have this idea of freedom, you can do all kinds of things, and then you get to this scene. It is not always true, even for games that keep telling you this is true. For example, if you are playing a traditional heroic fantasy RPG like Dungeons Dragons, often, your GM is like, this boss fight is going to happen, right?
Sam: Yeah.
Sharang: there are these planned things, but we don't talk about this, we forget that sometimes these are planned,
Sam: Yeah.
Sharang: But, in many of these games, there's pervasive ideas, you play to find out what happens. Sometimes, it can be challenging because you have to ask yourself, How do I get my character to this fate play scene's emotional moment? like, that's what an actor does, right? An actor has to be like, how does my character get to this emotional state? And I have to figure this out beforehand and get there.
In this LARP, It's a challenge because you might have, you might think about it beforehand, but then you only have the workshop to talk to your scene partner about it. And then you have to, because the first part of the LARP is play to find out,
Sam: Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Sharang: form. you have to play knowing that you are getting yourself to that emotional state.
Sam: yeah,
Sharang: goal in mind constantly. And it's not just hey, at some point, I'm gonna eat the muffin. It's, at some point, I am going to let my brother seduce me and we will then have sex.
Sam: yeah.
Sharang: That is a bit more charged, right? How
Sam: I
Sharang: any character get to that emotional state? It's very hard, right?
Sam: mean, it's helpful that you're in a fucking haunted house, and like,
there are players around playing ghosts that can push you there, right?
Sharang: Exactly! Both TK LARPs that I've played have extra mechanics that push you towards that state,
Sam: Yeah,
Sharang: So in Just a Little Loving there's the mechanic of the green drink where at the end of the night these people pass around this green drink which is literally just water with food coloring in it. think it's an all natural food coloring as well to prevent allergies and stuff. And the mechanic is this is a psychedelic, hallucinogen, some sort of psychoactive drink. And you drink it, and what it's gonna do is it'll either push you to really go for an emotional goal you have, or it'll push you in the opposite direction, right?
So, for example, in that game, when I played the American run of it, I had a crush on this senator character, but I was a porn star sex worker person. I would say prostitute because a porn star is also a sex worker. And I had a questionnaire, but I'm like, but I can't get to confess that to him, it isn't working emotionally, and then I had the green drink, and I'm like, yes, my character took this drug, and is gonna go and make a very physical move on the senator, right? So there was a mechanic to push you there.
In here, the ghosts are told, over the course of acts, to ramp up their activity. So, early on, the ghosts will, like, whisper things to you and move objects. But later in the game, the ghost will grab you and pull you into rooms, or move your hand and put it onto someone. So the ghost is going to lead you there. And so you have this I'm not going to use the word alibi because alibi in LARP is used when it means that the player has an alibi to do things that might be socially unacceptable outside the LARP. But the character, you embodying a character, have this like, diegetic alibi
Sam: yeah,
Sharang: to get to a certain emotional state. Even if your character's like, what is this feeling? So sudden, so new, right? You are like, oh, but the ghost made me do it, in a way. But of course the ghost is also a metaphor for repressed desire,
Sam: yeah,
Sharang: societal repression and all kinds of things, like, oh sorry, flouting societal So, so getting to that stage, you have the challenge of getting there, that's actually very challenging, but you have things to help you, such as the ghosts, and Mikke Pohjola has written very eloquently about this idea of inter immersion, right, where in a LARP setting, we desire immersion, immersion is heightened by other players heightening it for you,
Sam: hmm,
Sharang: Their performance, their play, their actions make you feel like who you are and more and more because they reify, they underscore the reality of the LARP
Sam: right,
Sharang: towards it for you, right?
So, a quick example of what that means is, when I played as Allen Ginsberg in the, in the LARP The Beat Generation in New York City at that point I had no published poet, right? Now I have like six. But even though I'm published now, I'm not a phenomenal poet,
Sam: right
Sharang: but I have to play Allen Ginsberg, a famous intellectual, lauded as a poet, but I wrote random stream of consciousness, off the cuff poems, and people around me would be like, Amazing, Allen, what a
Sam: yeah,
Sharang: right? It's obviously trash, but they produced inter immersion by underscoring the reality of the lot,
Sam: yeah,
Sharang: a quick example of inter immersion in an easy way.
But here these ghosts kind of helped with that, right? They're like, we are going to help you get to this state. Part of the fun of being a ghost is how do I get these players to this state
Sam: yeah,
Sharang: workshopping also helps with that. The workshopping with my scene partner was very powerful because we talked about, Okay, what are we doing in this scene? So, for example, my scene partner and I are both queer men. And funnily enough, we also both found each other physically attractive. So we're like, great, so when we do this scene, we're gonna do this, we're gonna make out, we're gonna be hot and heavy with this.
When we were ghosts, the two people playing Benjamin and Sebastian, literally told us during workshop, we are aiming to de emphasize the queer aspects of our character. Now, the fact that these are the only two queer characters in the LARP, the fact that these two straight players decided to play the only two queer characters in the LARP and then straighten them out, and the fact that both my scene partner and I thought that was kind of weird, is out of the scope of this discussion.
What is in scope is that they decided that they have a direction that the characters are gonna go. So, even for them, they still did the scene. But for them, they lent Into the fact that it was ghosts driving
Sam: right,
Sharang: oh, no, this is something that's so bizarre. Do we we don't want to do this, but what is happening at the end? They're like we're not gonna talk about this ever again, which is a powerful scene to LARP, right?
Sam: yeah,
Sharang: interesting emotional effect. Well for my scene partner and I Did a very hot and heavy scene. It TK told us that most Fate play scenes last like 15 20 minutes. Our Fate play scene lasted a full hour,
Sam: yeah,
Sharang: And it was wild. And and in the end we were like, okay, this happened and we're gonna lean into it now. We are characters that now have sex.
Sam: yeah,
Sharang: more than once, right? So, the pre negotiation changes the tone of the lock. And this brings up this really important point is that We're still playing to find out, right? But we're not playing to find out necessarily what actions occur.
Sam: right.
Sharang: obviously we are because the scene wasn't a moment by moment breakdown. It wasn't like and then you say this and then you put your hand here. It was a more outline. So we're still playing to find out some about what the actions occur.
But more importantly playing to find out what spurs the action, and how we feel about those actions, and then what the consequences of those actions are, right?
So, Greg I, I find Greg Costikyan's Uncertainty in Games to be a really powerful book for game designers. His thesis is that all games involve uncertainty in some way, otherwise it is not interesting or something like that,
Sam: Or it's not a game anymore. Like, yeah.
Sharang: I don't know if he goes to that. I don't remember if he goes to
Sam: Yeah.
Sharang: you know There's a history of what what a game is and even
Sam: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Sharang: talked about definition Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman they end up saying ultimately what is a game lies in the eye of the beholder, right?
But Costikyan says it's not always the uncertainty of what will happen. In roleplaying games, especially when we talk about video game in our roleplaying games, we talk about, oh, your choices have consequences, different consequences, ooh, ooh, ooh, and that's held as like the gold standard, right? People praise Baldur's Gate because you can do a lot of things, and they all have different effects, and there are 55 million endings, right?
But, in this for that fate play thing, it's not about what happened Costikyan's idea that it's more about what leads up to it and what we think about it. And that is still extremely powerful, because as I just explained, my scene partner and my what leads up to it and what we feel about it was night and day from what our new Sebastian Benjamins, what led up to it and what consequence came out of it, right? Night and day.
And that was still Part of the LARP. you can imagine that in some ways, obviously this isn't the thing and I don't think the authors of the LARP would say this is a thing, but in some ways the LARP becomes about getting to this climactic moment, right? Rather than what will happen in this LARP, right? Which is most LARPs, right? It is about how do we get ourselves to the stage? What, twisted things have to happen into the minds of these two stepbrothers to get there?
And therein lies the magic of the LARP, right? It's about exploring human twisted emotions and how it can get to a bizarre place. Because to be honest most LARPers If you put a haunted house family together, wouldn't drive themselves to incest, rape, and murder.
They
Sam: Yeah.
Sharang: the murder part, sure. But they probably wouldn't get to incest and rape. Right? While we, because that was the scene, point of the LARP is to explore these dark aspects, we got there and we got to explore these kinds of topics and the things that these topics stand as metaphors for which I think that's quite powerful.
Sam: Yeah. I mean, say it louder. Like that, I feel like everything you just said, like the like, it's perfect. It's great
I feel like I've been like 2020 I want to say I playtesting Our Traveling Home. This game by Ash Krieder that is sort of like the Howl's Moving Castle RPG, and it's really fun, and I really went through this whole process of like, this game is a rail shooter RPG.
This is something I've talked about on the show before of like, it's so clear what happens in this game like you are so on rails, but it's so fun anyway in the same way that a rail shooter is fun. Like you're you're being taken from place to place, but you it's what you're doing at those places that makes the game interesting.
But that idea of like what are you playing to find out feels so powerful to me like that's the thing I want to underline here like people are not thinking about that question nearly as much as they could be . And I think RPG players often assume the answer to that question when they are looking at a game and looking at what kinds of games they might want to play, and that having a broader understanding of like, what else could you be playing to find out, the idea that the playing to find out can be about how we feel about the thing, not the thing itself, can be at least as if not more interesting and compelling than what's gonna happen next like it's different kinds of stories. But I don't I just think that that's so important and so cool.
Sharang: So Yansu Davis and I are working on a commission for the National Academy of Science called Bloomfall. I will not tell the learning goal of it because I kind of want to keep that, ooh,
Sam: Yeah
Sharang: you get learning more if you actually play the game. But it's it's about plants is the main thing, right? It's about fae, plants, and a magical school and stuff. But we are leaning into that. We're calling it an interactive storybook RPG
Sam: Sure
Sharang: Chapters where kind of predefined things happen and there's wiggle room in there but we're calling it interactive storybook RPG because it's kind of railroaded a bit, right? There are some choices and changes, but not, that's not the main thing of the game.
And I think we are interested in exploring what that does in an RPG. Like, what kind of game is that? Right?
And I think this idea is very powerful if you think about this theory that was popularized by Ron Edwards and Emily Care Boss and then the clearest explanation of it I've actually read from Evan Torner. And it's called Stance Theory.
So the clearest explanation I've read of it is in a paper not about stance theory. It's in a paper that Evan Torner has called The Self Reflexive Tabletop Role Playing Game. And it is in the Italian Journal of Game Studies. Because I think the og explanations are all on like Google Plus
Sam: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Sharang: it's this idea that when you are controlling a character role playing game, you can be controlling them as different stances, right? You can be controlling them as an actor stance where you embody the character and are trying to make decisions as though you are seeing what will that character do?
You could be an author stance where you are like, oh, I want this character to get to this emotional arc at some point, so I'm gonna behave in this way.
You can do it in director stance where you also might control other things around you and you are framing the scene to get to that place, Not just yourself.
And you can do pawn stance when you are like controlling the character like a pawn Pawn just to get the player goal that you want, right? Where you're like, I really want to play a sex scene So I'm gonna like make my character do this so I get to a sex scene, right?
And often people who don't think a lot about it or haven't thought deeply about this, This is not a criticism of them. This is just someone who doesn't think deeply about LARP and RPG theory, thinks about oh RPG is all about playing an actor stance. Do what your character would do.
But in reality No one plays that way, right? all are like, oh, well, I as a player want this goal, right? For example, at the start of meeting in a tavern in a heroic RPG, if the quest giver comes to you and gives you a quest, and then you all say no, we're not gonna do it. Bye. Most people agree that you're a jerk of a player,
Even though your character might be like, No, we're tired. We just killed a dragon. You as the player is gonna use author stance and be like, Yeah, we're gonna get our characters to agree. So even though they might show resistance in the beginning, Like, oh, how much they're gonna like, money, They will ultimately go on the quest, right? So everyone navigates because otherwise you're a jerk and the DM is not gonna play with you anymore, right? Or the DM shouldn't play with you anymore because you're a jerk.
So players are good at navigating this, right? We just don't think about it. And so this mechanic is making us use those other stances very explicitly, right? Like, how are you going to get to that state? You can't just play an actor stance, because like I said, most humans will not be like, oh, and then we will have incest, right?
So you, you are doing director and author stance, being like, okay, I'm gonna get myself to the thing. And I like this framework, this theory a lot, because it helps us think about how we get players to this stage or how we as players get ourselves and others to this stage, right? so I think that's a powerful way of thinking about this kind of fate play scene or this kind of Preset kind of scene right?
There's similar mechanic in in my upcoming in an upcoming lot that I'm gonna play Called, Miskatonic University by Free League Publishing, where there's a descent into madness. It's a cosmic horror LARP, inspired by writings of H. P. Lovecraft. where, we will all Have, like, this madness moment after touching this strange book and stuff.
And each character has their own descent into madness. And the game says try and make sure this descent into madness happens at some point. And each character's descent into madness has, similar to this, similar to Fate, they've seen some prescriptive stuff.
Now, it's less prescriptive than this. It doesn't give you action. It gives you more of a emotional thing. It gives you some actions and it's kind of different for different players, but it's less prescriptive than this one. But we know as players that if you get assigned that character that will happen at some point. Usually after you've touched the book or read the book or something the demon, demonic book.
And so similar idea. How do you get yourself to that? What does it feel? And that one is differently interesting because the rest of the game, you don't know what's happening, you do all this stuff, then you have your descent into madness, then you can decide, well now, what does that one moment of cosmic madness mean to my character who was doing all these other things, right? We're in a university, I have all these goals, I do all the things, I have this one moment where the elder gods affected me and I became mad, now what does that mean for my character's journey, right? In a way different from House of Cravings, because in House of Cravings, you know you're all gonna die at the end.
But in Miskatonic, you probably won't. Some of you might, but you probably won't. And so, what does that, for that fate play scene, I'm gonna use the same terminology, what does that fate play scene do to your character? And that's where the uncertainty is, right? So,
Sam: yeah, this is something I was gonna mention about House of Craving too. It's like these fate play scenes are happening in Act 3 But then you were saying there's an Act 4 and an Act 5 and we
Sharang: yeah, yeah, yeah.
Sam: at the end still, but there's still like playing to find out What is the fallout of these
Sharang: Yes, yes.
Sam: afterwards
Sharang: Yes.
Sam: with miskatonic University. you're talking about like, okay, you're going to have this scene in the, I mean, like, you haven't played that yet, so you don't know for sure, but like, you're going to have this scene and then it's, much more open ended of like, what are we going to play to find out after the fact?
Sharang: Yeah, yeah.
Sam: what happens to the game when you move that point of certainty around, right? Like, Ten Candles is a game, I'm gonna do an episode on, coming up very shortly here where it's very clear, everyone dies at the end, right? In
Sharang: Mm hmm, mm hmm. Mm
Sam: if everyone dies in the middle, then like, in some ways that is what's happening here in House of Craving too, right? Because then you're gonna come back and play as ghosts. And like,
Sharang: hmm.
Sam: are you gonna do as ghosts? Like, you know the arc of the story. You've been through it once. But also, It sounds like you have a lot more freedom. Like, you
Sharang: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Sam: this experience of like where, what happens afterwards.
Sharang: Yeah. Though, of course, dying at the end is its own thing. I wrote an article for the, Zine Endgame Sequences about TTRPGs and LARPs where players die at the end and what does that mean and how I think I talked about dialect a lot, for example, in that one, right?
And so I think both are interesting in their own way, right? Like there's open ended of what happens next, and like, well I'm gonna die, how will my character behave knowing this certainty, right?
And there are many RPGs that do that. Bluebeard's Bride is a great example. You know you'll come to a sticky end, it might not be death, it probably won't be death and you know a lot of what's gonna happen, but it is the journey of getting to that emotion that's powerful.
And we do this a lot for other kinds of media. You know in most superhero movies basically what the ending is. You know in almost all rom coms, novel or movie, kind of what the ending is gonna be, right? but we gain delicious pleasure in getting there, right? In the fluff that gets us there, and in also the emotional journeys that get us there, right? and that is extremely powerful and valuable, and maybe, like I said, more interesting, because sometimes wouldn't get to the ending that ending yourself. In a lot of contexts, right? are forced to get to that ending, and you see how do I get to that ending.
that's where the, like, magic of play, happens.
yeah, and, And recently, at the Dremation Convention in New Jersey, I got to finally play Jason Morningstar's Little LARP Juggernaut, which I've been wanting to play for a while, which is a small, like, take home LARP, it's a small deck of cards and rules, where you play, six people, like scientists, military personnel, government officials during the Cold War. The scientists have built a machine that can accurately predict the future. That is, that is the axiom of the game, that it is accurate and you are locked in this room and like drama ensues, right?
But the way the game works is you draw a card and the card has a prediction. And some of the predictions are about a year later, but some of the predictions are today, right?
And part of the fun of the game is that you as the players ensure that the predictions come true, and that's really fun, right?
Sam: yeah.
Sharang: and it's, it can be very silly. Like, I got a prediction which was like, You will lose your pen, and you will engage in a fruitless search for it.
And I just, I'm like, oh wait, oh no, the card is right. Where's my pen, everyone? But then there are two edge cases that were very interesting, where one player read a prediction, A week later, your mother will die of a drug overdose. And he looks at it and says, well, that's rubbish. My mother died a long time ago. I'm like 60 something. My mother is dead. And then we all said, oh, we're so sorry. He's like, wait, what are you sorry about? We're like, it's so sad to find out this way that you're actually adopted.
Sam: Yeah.
Sharang: Right? And he's like, what? And we're like, yeah, but the machine is accurate.
And we also had, I had a card which said, you will bring up, uh, I'm making up a name here. I forgot the actual name. It's like, you will bring up Jenkins and how he died and how he disappeared from this project. There had been no mention of anyone named Jenkins before and so I suddenly, I'm like, wait, why is the card telling me that I'm gonna talk about Jenkins? How is Jenkins involved in this project? Because Cold War paranoia, right? What is happening, right?
So again, making the fate play scene, making the prediction come true, is very exciting. But in this game, it also shows us this, like, weird twisty idea of, yeah, this is now true, but what does it take for it to be true? You're actually adopted?
Hmm. Or, like, why is this truth even here? Why am I talking about Jenkins? What does he have to do with our Cold War project, right? So,
Sam: Yeah.
Sharang: The scene you're playing towards, is very powerful in Juggernaut, in a slightly different way, because again, the fluff is very important, the fact that the Cold War setting, the fact that our characters all hate each other, the fact that like, we're in an experiment trying to prove this machine wrong.
But as players, again, our actor stance wouldn't work, because the players all want to prove the machine wrong, but in author and director stance, we all know the game wants us to make the predictions true, right?
So, very, very, very, very clever.
Sam: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I played Juggernaut once and I had this weird experience of, it's not that like we as players weren't on board with the premise of the game, and it's not like we weren't trying to like cooperate to get to the predictions being true, but I think a lot of people were like trying to make predictions come true in different ways, and like, not quite seeing how, like, we're gonna have to escalate into two people getting into a fight, right?
Sharang: Right, right.
Sam: kind of
Sharang: Right.
Sam: it was like, I'm trying to get mad at you so that you will punch me later, but you don't understand that's going on. You're trying to get mad at them so that they'll punch you later. And like none of us are quite seeing what's going on and because it's a LARP and tough to just sit down and as players have the conversation out of character: How are we trying to do this?
And eventually the LARP broke down and we had to do that. We had to
Sharang: Right.
Sam: be like, okay, we have these predictions.
How are we gonna do it? And like, play got interrupted in a way where we ended up having to just sort of like say, Okay, here's how the next like, six bits of this game
Sharang: Yeah.
Sam: like,
Sharang: Yeah.
Sam: just gonna wrap this up out of character. And I found that interesting, that sort of like, We all are trying to pull in the same direction, but because of the limitation of first person ness in LARP, It became tough to do so.
I found that very
Sharang: Mm hmm. Mm hmm. think from an external view, this is even more interesting, because, Juggernaut uses predictions, right?
Sam: Mhm.
Sharang: from a meta perspective, the characters you're portraying might be having the exact same thoughts. Like, the character might be thinking, am I fighting with this person because I just read a prediction that someone will have a fight, or am I actually fighting with this person? I don't know. What am I doing?
It is like the larp makes you question the nature of free will and stuff a little bit, right? Now, of course, in play, it might not be as fun, in quote marks, right? But, post facto, I think it is extremely interesting because it is modelling what the characters are feeling in a, in a weird sort of twisty twisty way.
And I think that's cool, right? Because, Juggernaut uses a predetermined outcome, but it used that to be like, what does it mean to tell the future? What does it mean to have free will? While House of Craving used it to be like, what are our darkest impulses and how do ghosts get us there? And so, the same like, sort of mechanic, predetermined scene, fate play scene, like all good game mechanics, can be used to ask very different kinds of questions to inspire very different kinds of exploration, Darko Suvin, when he talks about science fiction, he talks about this idea of a novum, a departure from reality from what we view of as reality, as the main question that then we expand to think about other things, right?
So think of a quintessential sci-fi like the show Severance. The question is, what if you can separate your work self from your self self, right, that is the novum, right? So here, I'm stretching his use of the term novum, be like, oh yeah, what if a scene was predetermined, right? In Juggernaut, the scene is predetermined within the story. It is diegetically predetermined. In House of Craving, it is I like saying exegetically. It sounds fun. The term that's most often used actually extra diegetically, predetermined,
but what does this predetermined thing do? And as any good artistic thing, as any good novum, for example, the authorial hands, and in this case it is the author, it is both the players and the designers, because the designers make something, the players make more of the narrative, together contribute to a new interpretation and meaning of this novum, right? Of this mechanic, of this point of departure. I think Cameron Kunzelman talks about moments of speculation, which might also be relevant here in his book The World is Born from Zero.
And even within the same sphere, so within House of Craving, like, again, my scene partner and I had one interpretation, new scene partner had a different interpretation, and within different games, House of Craving versus Juggernaut, completely different interpretive framework of what this predetermination means.
And I think that is powerful and kind of the point of your podcast, right? This mechanic, what does it do, uh, in different situations, what can it do in different situations, so, yeah.
Sam: we're gonna end there. That's great Thanks so much for coming on. You're very smart We're gonna have to have you back a lot of times which we were doing in the near future.
Sharang: Thank you, Sam. It's almost as though I used director stance to lead the conversation to a good sounding ending.
Sam: Alright, our homework today is to take a game, maybe one you're working on, and write down five scenes or moments that you would love for that game to create at the table, and then ask how does the game create those scenes or does it fail to do so?
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And thanks again to Sharang for being here. You can find him on Blue Sky SharangBiswas. His book, the Iron Below Remembers is available for pre-order now. As always, you can find me on Blue Sky at Dice Exploder, or on the dice Exploder discord, and my games are@sdunwell.itch.io.
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