Building a Fantasy: LARPing in Connecticut

“This is the Druid Camp,” says Jeremy Dunkley. He’s pointing to a clearing in the middle of a patch of woods. In the circle is a small tent, part of a colorful campsite full of flowers, green trees, and a skull or two. It is the most ornate of the campsites around but not the only one. The others will house healers with their herbs and spells, rangers armed with bows and arrows, and heavily armored fighters ready to wage war against the forest’s monsters.

To many, this is the stuff of Middle Earth, of sweeping landscapes, and the soft pages of a well-worn fantasy novel. In reality, this is the scene found many weekends of the year at a campground in Northeastern Connecticut.

The daring adventurers and powerful wizards assembled at the Windham-Tolland 4-H Camp in Pomfret are no more magical than any other human, they’re just a little more imaginative.

“It was something I’ve always dreamed about doing as a kid with the Dungeons and Dragons cartoon. As I got older, I found out, wow, it already exists. That’s fantastic,” says Eric Tetrault, founder of Myth LARP, the company running the game this evening. “I decided that this was the thing to do is create a community of friends that we can all just get together, play a game, and have a good time.”

Tetrault is a LARPing veteran, having started almost four decades ago, in 1986, with The Adventure Game. Since then, he has been involved in the creation of three separate systems of play. The third, Myth, came out of a desire to engage with others in his community and spend time with friends

“It basically gives you a sense of hope,” he explains. “It gives you a place that you feel like you belong, people that you like to be around, and then you’re all just playing a game together and having fun. And I think that does a lot for people, especially with all the stress that we go through nowadays.”

Another LARPer, Tetrault’s business partner Gary Smith, was introduced to the LARPing scene when he was a 20-year-old college student in Albany in 1994.

“I was hanging out with people who went to SUNY Albany, and they kept using this word,” Smith recalls. “After, like, the 3rd or 4th time I heard that stupid-sounding word, I finally asked what the hell they were talking about.”

From there, the LARPing community opened up to him. A make-believe – but highly immersive – weekend experience that was similar in some ways to the Dungeons and Dragons table-top game he played so often. The biggest difference? LARPing took the players out of the game room and placed them into a real-world scenario, forcing them to inhabit the characters they created.

“It’s a fantastic way to experience what today would probably be, like, the Skyrim video game type of Massive Multiplayer Online (MMO) type of experience,” explains Smith, likening the game he and Tetrault run to a popular video game more than the older table-top games. “But instead of sitting there and exercising your muscles in your thumb and your forefinger and your jaw, you’re actually getting up, you’re interacting with other human beings, you’re running around, and you’re pulled out of the world for an entire weekend that you don’t have to think about your regular life.”

Smith didn’t meet Tetrault until a few years into his LARPing journey, in the late 90s, at a different game that Eric had started.

“We just kinda clicked,” says Smith. “We have a similar vision about the experience, about the camaraderie of gaining this giant plethora of friends with common interests and similar likes.”

That partnership lasted more than two decades, until eventually they decided to build a new game system here in Connecticut, and Myth LARP was born.

LARPs, or Live-action Role Playing games, have been around almost as long as their table-top (or TTRPG) counterparts. Dungeons and Dragons was invented in 1974 by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson . The game was a modified version of the board game Wargames that allowed players to invent fantastical characters of several races: Human, Elf, Halfling, Dwarf, Orc, and more.

Characters would then take on different roles – or Classes – which gave them access to different types of skills, including Fighters, Rogues, Bards, Barbarians, Holy Knights called Paladins, Clerics, and, of course, Wizards.

What made Dungeons and Dragons unique, besides the use of a 20-sided die, was how customizable it was. While players had to engage with a core set of rules, Game Masters – or Dungeon Masters as they came to be called – could construct any story they wished for their players. The players, meanwhile, had to weave through the constructed story by interacting with each other, asking questions, solving puzzles, and surviving encounters with whatever monsters the Dungeon Masters could throw at them.

The very first LARP events – at least as near as we can tell – began in 1977 with a Washington, D.C.-based game called Dagohir. While its creators claim they had not heard of the tabletop game before creating theirs, it shared many of the same characteristics inspired by fantasy stories, particularly the works of J.R.R. Tolkien.

From there, events popped up around the world, bringing their own style and inspirations to the growing field of LARPing adventures. Time and technology have only made the phenomenon grow faster.

“The Internet really made it break wide open for people to understand what it is,” says Tetrault. “So that just exponentially made it explode.”

Much like Dungeons and Dragons before them, each LARP creates and maintains a core rulebook. Players must adhere to the rules when constructing their characters and engaging in challenges and encounters. But those rules still allow for immense flexibility.

For Myth, those rules look very similar to D&D, since it is what inspired its founders decades ago.

“It has been my inspiration since 1976,” says Tetrault.

“And a lot of the execution of it while you’re experiencing it live is very similar to video game RPG mechanics,” adds Smith. “You have crafting and various magic skills and fighting skills, thieves skills, all of these kind of things fall under these different mantles. And then people can just pick and choose the direction that they want to take their character and develop it. Just like you could in either of those other types of game formats.”

One of the biggest differences between what players experience in a video game and a real-world LARP is that the non-player characters (NPCs) are much more difficult to spot.

“We want a more organic experience where it’s hard to tell the NPCs from the Player Characters (PCs),” explains Smith. “We especially are really making a big experiment with Myth right now where we’re putting a lot of agency directly into the players’ hands.”

PCs refer, as the name would suggest, to characters created and inhabited by players. NPCs, meanwhile, are characters inhabited by cast members – staff and volunteers who know the story and interact with the players to move it along.

In a normal game, the players would interact within heavily pre-built scenarios, exploring villages controlled by NPCs propelling the story forward. In Myth’s new experiment, players dictate what happens within their towns and the NPCs follow with pre-written reactions to nudge them along the story.

That makes Myth’s segment of Connecticut’s LARPing community a unique experience.

“I, personally, don’t know of any LARPs that are doing anything quite like this,” says Smith. “At least on the scale that we’re trying to do it.”

To pull it all off, Myth requires the assistance of dozens of people to act as writers and cast members. These volunteers build both the story that takes place over a weekend, and the world the players immerse themselves in. Those narratives connect between immersive weekends, building nuance and a more immersive experience.

“We’ve developed it over the years where we’ve had several different sizes of groups helping us do this,” says Smith. “We always accept volunteers. We’ve had really, really big staffs in the past where there’s, like, 30, 40, 50 people that are involved in making this all happen.”

Smith says staff for the events has been pared down over the years to make things more efficient. The events themselves, however, can still host up to 200 people. On the weekend Inside Investigator is invited to observe, that number is closer to 30.

Dunkley, a frequent participant in Myth’s games, got started thanks to his daughter who is a talented cosplayer. For him, it was a chance to bond with his kid while spending time outdoors and getting active.

“I’ve kind of always been into this type of stuff,” he says with a laugh. “It’s a part of me that all my friends are like, ha. You do that? And I’m like, yeah, that’s me.”

While he is often a player, this weekend he is helping out as a member of the cast. At the moment, he is walking the trails, laying out plastic flowers, stones, woodcuts, and other items. Players can pick these up throughout the weekend and turn them in for spells, potions, or items. The crew will have to make this same walk at the end of the weekend to reclaim any items that aren’t found.

Myth operates on a Spring and Fall schedule, holding six major weekend-long events per year. They take the summer off to spare players from running around in homemade armor in the hottest months, but that time off is not wasted. They spend it planning, hosting team-building events, and plotting out the upcoming season of games.

Players, however, make things difficult for those attempting to plot a narrative. People make choices and groups of people make far more choices than anyone could predict, which means any plot they construct must be malleable.

“The running thing I hear people say all the time is no plot survives first contact with the players,” jokes Smith.

“I want them to go down this path, and all of a sudden, they’re completely in a different direction,” adds Eric, laughing. “So you never know what you’re gonna get. But we adapt, which is part of the fun.”

The story is the fun part, writing and creating and playing characters. But building a fantasy world on a New England campground also includes plenty of logistics issues. Players gain experience points which allows them to level up skills and abilities. The team runs a website to communicate events and a Discord server to provide cast and staff with communication tools. Plus there is the matter of site rentals for games, insurance, food, and other financial concerns.

“Eric is an excellent communicator and an excellent marketer and an excellent rules person for the scope and scheme of how to play the game,” lauds Smith. “I am the person that brings you out of that world and throws you into this fantasy world and keeps you there.”

For his part, in addition to helping run the game on major weekends, Smith is a professional artist. He contributes to the immersive experience of each event, leading the writing, making props and weapons, and designing signs.

“Then you’ve got the last part of it, which is really kinda like coordinating everybody and keeping the community up and flowing and running.” His wife, Mandi, serves as the Community Support Advisor. “She basically is the go-to point for anybody who has questions, if there’s any kind of conflicts, if they have concerns.”

While LARPing as an activity has become more popular in recent decades, it can still be daunting to new players. There are rules to learn and skills to master, and then there is the matter of all the stuff : costumes and weapons.

“The biggest barrier to entry that most people see is their costume,” says Tetrault. “They’re worried about what they’re gonna have to wear in order to go play something like this.”

The costume – referred to as a kit – is important to gameplay, but Tetrault and Smith say they don’t want access to a kit, or the ability to make one, to keep people from playing.

“Your first kit might not be the best,” says Tetrault. “But as you play and you see how great everybody looks, you’re gonna want to up your game to fit in with everybody else and feel like you’re part of it.”

“And to be fair too, our community is freaking great,” adds Smith. “They’ll show up online to our Discord server and the community will answer all the questions.”

Smith says many players are willing to donate or loan old equipment to new players struggling to put something together.

New players are also somewhat ushered through their first night of gameplay. Veteran players meet with first-timers to go over rules and tactics: how to stop the game if they get injured, who to go to for medical assistance, and how to safely engage in combat. They have a chance to ask questions and are reminded that it is their responsibility to know how their spells and skills work.

From there, it is back to the main hall which is decorated as a tavern for the weekend’s festivities. It will serve as their base of operations, as a meeting hall, and as a respite from the larger events outside.

With minutes left until the game begins, the energy is palpable. Cast members mill about downstairs reviewing their characters and major plot points. Players sit around tables in the tavern, some reading a makeshift newspaper their fellow players have written to keep everyone on the same page about the goings on since the last session.

As Smith enters the tavern he is unrecognizable, painted green and done up in a fantastical costume. After a few brief remarks and reminders, he tells the new players to meet up nearby while returning ones can choose a location on the grounds.

As dozens of players in armor and colorful garments file out into the night, Smith rings a bell, and the game begins.

The post Building a Fantasy: LARPing in Connecticut appeared first on Connecticut Inside Investigator .