Dream Come True was the first LARP I wrote and it’s up there in terms of weirdness. The world was a sitcom/fantasy world with all the rules of modern sitcoms. You had the kid who took two dates to the dance. You had the bartender who seemed to know a little bit too much and was a bit of a gossip. You get the idea. But the sheets were all weird. In the middle of sentences, in font about five points smaller than the rest of the sheets, you’d have weird messages. Memories that the character didn’t have. Memories that were just…wrong? One sheet had the sentence “so many corpses” written over and over again. Lines like “you said hello and found yourself a god” and “wakeupwakeupwakeup.” As both the name and what I mentioned imply, this is all a dream.
In reality, the apocalypse has happened. Dream Demons have risen from the earth to destroy human civilization. (Though destroy does imply a level of agency, they were simply drawn to memories in the way that a moth is drawn to flame.) The characters are survivors in three settlements, often in conflict with one another. And one day one of the Demons came to the settlement. This one had consumed so many conciousnesses that it too had become somewhat human. A hodgepodge of different lives sewn together by guilt and regret. So in an act of atonement, they found the settlements and brought those who lived there into an eternal dream where they could be happy forever. But it’s falling apart and people are regaining their memories, oh no.
The big question in this larp was “Is it better to live in a happy lie or a painful truth?” In hindsight it was somewhat of a trite question, but I think it was fun. The big mechanical twist was the fact that the characters regained all of their memories about halfway into the larp. Which meant that I had to hand the players a 4 page document in the middle of the game for them to read and internalize as “who they really were.” I tried to make the Dream and Reality sheets as close as possible to one another to help with this, (if someone hated someone in the dream, they probably hated them in reality) but it did cause a bit of a pause as most characters had to read a full document in the middle of the game.
Still, I think it worked well. You had a mix of ideologies mixed with personal drama. You had characters with political aspirations as well as characters who wanted to change the technology of the world. And all these desires and fears all melded together in a really interesting web, with the first half of the larp causing the latter half to feel so much more dramatic because of the weirdly happyish place it started from.
It’s hard to get a feel for how people enjoyed a particular LARP, since you’re mostly on the outskirts of a game as the writer. But I think the very character conflict (high stakes conflicts with a low scale) were the things I enjoyed the most and that’s what filtered into a lot of my later writing. It also gave me an appreciation for how wildly different players will react from where you expect them to, and how you should try and add fuel to the madness. Also, given that I started from a weird place, I’ve always strived to make future LARPs even weirder. Even if I now think that handing people an entirely new sheet in the middle of a LARP was a bit of an immersion breaker.
