Hydra Favourite Moments

I’ll kick this off. My favourite moments from the games I played!

Alone in the Cold
Horror, my genre! I loved the use of the space that Scott and Vanya made, I was genuinely intimidated as I moved through the darkness, the cold and the wind. I loved the build up of suspense as the game drew closer and closer to fluffy bunnies. I knew there would be daisy chains just wasn’t sure when or what sort of daisy chains they would be. Alas the game end early for me when I made the mistake of accusing the wrong person of being in league with the fluffy bunnies and by ‘wrong’ I mean ‘right’ which resulted in a swift and inglorious death with a bullet to the head. Whoops. I observed the rest of the game from under a tree which was creepy in its own way - as Judit pointed out, I was alone in the cold, which was exactly what was advertised! :laughing: Suppose dead wasn’t so bad, I avoided the horrible fate of bunnies and unicorns and kittens that awaited the rest of the players :smiley:

Loved RPing with Nick Pitt, Frank and Chris in this one :slight_smile: Thanks for writing and doing the enormous amount of setting dressing prep, Vanya and Scott!

Wilkinson-Baker Hall
I really, really enjoyed this game. It was exactly what I hoped for. Lots of upstairs/downstairs drama! I loved keeping Granny on her toes with backhanded compliments that compared her and me, I enjoyed showing the Major around the hospital trying to make him laugh (which seemed to result in all sorts of rumours about us marrying!), and I really enjoyed my confusing relationship with a mother I wasn’t all that sure loved me. Bryn and I must be the absolute worst doctors in the world, given the phenomenal body count at this sedate parlour drama, and that all we seemed to be able to do when someone dropped was to give them a cup of tea and a blanket. Highlights included diagnosing a pregnancy from across the room, interrupting Granny and Father’s meeting with the lawyer on suspicion of them wanting to disinherit me and finding out something MUCH worse, and roleplaying my character’s particular poignant personal situation which I shan’t detail for spoilers. Big thanks to Lisa Aronson, Evie Gray, the Nicks Pitt & Cole, Bryn, Hannah and Donna especially for their roleplaying in this game, and to the amazing game masters Hannah McKie and Sophie Melchior, it was pitch perfect.

Dry Spell
I loved this game. My character was amazing, my character’s friends were amazing, my character’s enemies were amazing! I had so much to do and so many cool people to RP with I could have easily kept going for another four hours. Highlights include mouthing off at the White Council and then having to turn around and ask them for help ten minutes later (they rightfully laughed at me, then agreed to help), being rude to the Black Court, ripping my hand out of the Red Court Duke’s hand when he tried to put his mouth on it (narcotic salvia, ew!), turning my back for five minutes and then finding my friend Eliot Ness being soul gazed by a demon (“Okay, ground rules, guys - no looking into people’s eyes, no accepting ANY coins and no letting anyone lick you.”)…then when I thought things couldn’t get any worse, finding out the Summer Queen was trying to kill me (“Oh, of course she is, why wouldn’t she, she can take a number and get in line!”) and walking up to her in the middle of her violent tirade (oops). I loved my antagonism with Capone and Lashciel (thank you so much, Norm and Nasia!), Fish the Fae’s peculiar helpfulness the reason for which I didn’t find out until after the game, and my turbulent relationship with the White Council in particular Simon who meant well but we just could not see eye to eye. Capone, trying to shake my hand as he left with a genuine sort of “Hey, let’s bury the hatchet I’m sure we can get along” and I only just managed to not spit in his face. I loved the Soul Gaze and Wizard Sight envelopes, Best of all, my relationship with Finn, the man I loved (played by Jarratt) who was a ghost and we had to interact through Lyle, played by Nick Pitt. This was so painful and heartbreaking, I still tear up thinking about it - when I caught sight of him by accident using wizard sight, when I realised we could not bring him back, that I couldn’t avenge him, this was the most powerful emotion I’ve felt in a theatreform larp. Absolute tragedy.

At the end of the night, right after game end, Mash who had been playing Simon turned to me and said, “Oh my god, you had the WORST NIGHT EVER! I couldn’t believe your awful luck!” while I stood there tears still streaming down my face. Best flagship I’ve played to date. Want to do it again.

Thank you to all the writers, and to the people I roleplayed with that made it amazing: Jarratt, Fraser, Mash, Norm, Nasia, Sophie, Jack, Nick Pitt, and more.

Kirby High Golden Jubilee
I think I can sum up my experiences of this game as that it’s pretty scary to be surrounded by five super heroes hell bent on ripping me to pieces* and that Bryn makes a terrifying blackmailer :open_mouth: I had the most fun with my dim but lovely ‘husband’ Mayor West, ‘my’ lovely son Lucius (mummy still loves you, dear!), and Reynard Hackett my vampire blackmailer.

[size=85]* I deserved it, but still.[/size]

Hmm, I have no idea how far I’ll get before I fall asleep at the keyboard (two eleven-hour nights of sleep and I’m still a bit shattered!) but here goes…

Alone in the Cold
Oh, this game. I was expecting two ways this game would go down, and I got the second of my two options, so that was entertaining. The wandering backwards and forwards in the dark was very entertaining, and the fact that all the power in the venue was run off one actual generator made me very nervous that all the lights would go out. I wasn’t expecting to be offered a position with the Bunny Rabbit Corps quite so early in the game, and I think as a result I found it less immersive and scary than I otherwise would have - I can only imagine how everyone else felt towards the end. As much as I enjoyed recruiting Allen for the Bunny Rabbit Corps, I think my favourite moment was talking to Anna’s character’s corpse in a moment of shock, then questioning myself as to why I was doing it. I think we wound up satisfying the ‘win’ conditions for the game, in a purely technical sense. I don’t know if anyone can truly ‘win’ a horror game.
‘Alone in the Cold’ gets my ‘Character-ception’ award, for the fact that I wound up playing a straight character pretending to be gay. ‘Larp Larp’ probably has me beat, but I still need to play in that.

Truth, Justice and Spandex
Having securely taped my costume to myself, in a desperate attempt to avoid wardrobe malfunctions, I found myself having quite a blast in this game. My character wound up in one of the weirdest love triangles I’ve ever seen, for no other reason than the other two people in this triangle were a pacifist telepath (Naomi, who I had a lot of fun wooing while desperately hiding the fact that I was an egotistical jerk), and a science-experiment human-badger hybrid with a few extra secrets (Chris, who never failed to surprise me with the next bizarre revelation). There were a lot of really fun moments in this game, from being bluntly asked by the biggest hero in the city if I could go dig up a corpse for him, to Jon Ball’s Iron Man suit making noise at random moments, to asking Badger out for a burger sometime, to Nik Crombie repeatedly getting thrown at other people. I loved it, even if I realised halfway through that I’d had four cans of Coke and a bottle of Powerade in the first hour.

Wilkinson-Baker Hall
My pick of the weekend, because it was so utterly pitch-perfect. If there’s one thing I have a weakness for in games, it’s character-intense drama, and this game had it in spades. Playing Charles Faulkner, a WWI soldier with memory loss, I got to spend the first half-hour lying down in the infirmary, which was at least a relief after running around in the game before. High points, aside from the death scene that I decided was suitably devastating for the characters around me, include: my wife (LIsa) not recognising me during our first conversation because she couldn’t see my nametag, to which I responded ‘I didn’t think I looked that different’; thinking Daniel A’s character was staring at me, and thus must know something (when it turned out that he thought I was staring at him because I knew something); and Sophie’s increasingly frantic attempts to stop her players from playing the game, when we wouldn’t shut up after three ‘game end’ calls.

Dry Spell
It’s always a bit of a shame to have to put a plot in the ‘too hard’ basket, but I honestly didn’t mind in this game because there was so much going on. My character’s love plot was rapidly going to pot, and after trying it on with any male character in the room that wasn’t a hired goon or was too busy backing slowly away whenever I got close, I resorted to just looking for a hunting mate. And then I got three, which was nice. Everyone I got to encounter in this game was an absolute blast, from Hannah as a delightfully malevolent Guinevere, Anthony as a stunning Tolkien-esque figure, Sam as the shapeshifter who just wanted someone to watch cartoons with (two flagships, two best mate plots, dude. Here’s hoping for three at Chimera!), Frank and that awkward sex scene, Sarah, Steph, the hellhound who wanted puppies (sorry, I don’t think I caught your name)… the interactions were a blast. Next time, I’ll be sure to say ‘yes’ to more plots, but at this stage I was starting to feel the drag of a full day, and just wanted to eat all the candy.

That night I stayed up until 1 a.m. set dressing. Next time I’ll be sure to drink and socialise instead.

Angels in the Fog
I want to start by saying thanks to all my players, because they rocked. I was so terrified that the game would be over in thirty-five minutes and everyone would be very disappointed, but it burned at about the right speed, which was great. I won’t say much, because I didn’t actually see everything that went on, and I don’t want to spoil the plots too much. Suffice to say at one point I was in one room, listening to a character confess to a murder that the cops weren’t even investigating. I looked up and saw flames through the door. I ran through, wondering if we were all going to die, and how much Norm would charge for the destroyed lights, but instead what I saw was this: Steph, standing in the rain and reading her poem out loud, while the actual prop (!) burned away in her hands. Idiot had a gun pressed to her head as she did this, Bex was trying to pretend nothing out of the ordinary was going on… it was perhaps the most cinematic moment of the weekend for me.

Kirby High
I was, I’ll admit, too tired to play in this game. I don’t do very well with mean-spirited characters, but I wanted to test myself, and perhaps the last game of the weekend wasn’t the best place to try new things. I decided to play the snobby rich bastard by deliberately lying through my teeth to people about how I was just misunderstood, seeing how much they would give me, and then running away with it. I couldn’t keep up the meanness for too long, though, and so I wound up with a date to the homecoming dance (although that didn’t last too long with her drunk pirate captain buttonholing me every twenty minutes to deliver some long-winded and confusing talk about the birds and the bees). Best moment of the game? Upon finding out that the GMs didn’t have an animal to represent the ‘sorrow’ demon, immediately suggesting ‘manatee’, and having it instantly become canon. Later, upon slipping the phrase ‘manatee of sorrow’ into conversation, the Green Lantern-equivalent character makes a hologram of a manatee appear, for educational purposes. I swear, sometimes I don’t know what’s going on in LARPs, but I love every second of them.

Big thanks to the Hydra organisers and GMs. I thoroughly enjoyed myself and wish I could have played in more of the games.

I posted this on facebook, but figure no harm in reiterating it here for the Hydra people. I’ve tried to keep it spoiler free.

Down and Out in Middenburgh - as Pestilent Pete, a poxy beggar. I grossed people out by licking infectious wounds. I was desperately trying to get more illnesses so I could beg better but people thought I had some weird diagnosis power. It meant I could lick more wounds and expose myself to more gross stuff so big win to me. Right?

Truth, Justice and Spandex - as Legend, The Greatest Hero of Them All [TM]. My most effective power actually turned out to be the power of Public Relations. The entire planet loved me, and I got rich off endorsements. I dare say Wealth is one of the best super powers to have.

Southern Seas - I was a kindly person who helped others as much as possible and managed to save two people from poisoning. The fact that I was trying to save them in order to be sacrificed to the mighty Kraken later shouldn’t count against me should it? Near the end I stabbed someone as a sacrifice to try to make it happen. Sadly (not really), I didn’t get to summon the Great One and had to poison myself because I was worried they’d take me far from the sea to hang me. I couldn’t get them to throw me overboard to my beloved Kraken for love or money.

Dry Spell, which was based off the Dresden Files which I haven’t read - I was a Red Court vampire, (demonic vampires that wear humans as skins, can walk around in daylight, and are physically very powerful). I got in two fights to the death, which I won and then didn’t bothering killing my opponents. It confused the crap out of people which made it worth doing just for that. I was really trying to get my opponents to withdraw trial proceedings against me by pretending to be honourable. I had strong intentions of killing one of them later.

Slash 2 Suck it Good - I mentioned this the other week, I had thought it was a horror LARP. I was mostly mistaken. It was actually a game based on slash fan fiction. If you’ve never heard of slash DO NOT look it up. That is all I am permitted to say about the game. Fight Club rule 1 applies. Or should that be F*ck Club rule 1 applies?

Kirby High Golden Jubilee - I was Edgar Edmonson, the reincarnation of Merlin and found out quickly that I was a complete dick. It was a sequel LARP and I hadn’t played the first. I found it very challenging as people knew more about my character than I did. I didn’t get to grips with the >30 relationships fast enough, notably missing that I had another granddaughter, which was mildly embarrassing later. I managed to continue the character theme of being a complete dick by taking an apprentice and then dumping her for a more powerful apprentice that I missed out on getting anyway.

Hydra was amazing!

Spoilers if anyone else wants to play these games.

Let’s see… On Friday I went to the feast of Adversia. While pickpocketed most of the beggars (which was surprisingly profitable) got a magic ring, gained an orc minion and then was so chuffed by his willingness to do whatever I said that I stole the money from the guy who controlled rats so that my orc could open a restaurant specializing in serving rats. I also convinced the rat guy that showing up at the feast of Fortuna next week with all of his little ratty friends was a GREAT idea because there would be cheese and lots of people to listen to his claim about being the prince. I didn’t in any way believe he was a prince, but I’d promised my thief friends I’d get them a distraction for the occasion. We also learned of the potential arrival of an army of orcs. With my new pretty ring I wasn’t really worried, though I did tell the guards and thieves so that I could say “I told you so” later.

I had many good conversations with Daniel’s char, who turned out to actually be rich. My favorite moment probably was the LotR quote… even if I couldn’t keep a strait face afterwards. Also Ants standing on one leg because I told him to and offering to kill anyone who mildly annoyed me.

On Saturday morning I put on my purple tights and went back to my old school. There I found my long lost daughter, learned my loyal minion was in love with me (rather than the dozen or so other people I suspected from using my invisibility to listen in on his conversations), awkwardly avoided my two old flames (a hero and a villain respectively) and used my invisibility to punch a blackened star into the heart of a world destroying evil. My hand got frozen for the trouble. The Amazing Mr. Amazing and I then retired to France to clean out the Louvre and try dating.

My favourite moment was probably listening in on the last half of a conversation between my minion and my old love and jumping to completely the wrong conclusion.

Saturday afternoon was spent trying to find out who murdered my captain and several other passengers. Unfortunately I learned every other plot first, including the treason plot, which got me poisoned. My life was saved by a man who later turned out to be a cultist, but the antidote wiped out my memory of the event, making me useless as a witness. However when the restored my memories I remembered that in fact I was the killer of innocent children and passengers all along. After having a breakdown and reassuring myself that I now had magic beads that kept me sane (admittedly given to me by a lady who insisted on handing out bags of live spiders as the cure for everything) I pinned everything on the poisoner and the cultist and became ships captain.

My favorite moment was probably right after I was poisoned and I was incoherently babbling about a black bandana, but it was so mangled no-one could work out what I was saying.

Saturday evening…. A LOT of great things happened on Saturday evening.

Saturday evening confirmed my theory that loyal minions are in fact the best things ever as my dedicated winter court leapt to obey my every whim despite me being a psyco-crazy-bitch. I rampaged, I flirted, I gave cryptic advice, I froze the lips of anyone who kissed my hand but got very offended if they dared try to get out of it…

Much of the evening was spent in self-blinding denial that my daughter White-doe had murdered her sister Snowflake. Any-one who told me this to my face was very very lucky that they were on neutral ground, the only exception was my hand-maiden whom I probably would have let live due to her exceptional service and loyalty, but I still denied that she was in the right until I had no choice. White-Doe’s insistence that I was boring and the Red-court was more fun was very hurtful, as I personally prided myself on being the best torturer around. People kept trying to give me information on the murderer in exchange for favours when I was quite clear that what I WANTED was the murderers head on a plate, or at least their eyeballs on a stick.

I had good fun taunting the Denarians, especially the ones whose hosts still believed themselves to be in control. I deigned to give Al Capon a chance to make his case, but walked off laughing when he asked what I, I the Winter Lady, could bring to the table. Later I gave him another chance due to the tireless campaigning of his pet red court vampire. I liked the way he looked to my fey sight, and having a mortal hitman (who isn’t as well known as my loyal winter knight) could be useful… so I generously agreed to sign in return for three open-ended favours (which would not hurt his organisation or his family). This became an even better deal for me when he became a red court vampire, and the second in command of that group to boot! It almost made up for the disaster of the rest of the evening.

I slowly got more and more upset and crazy as the evening continued. At one point I had frozen a vampire into a vamp-ice-statue and was at the point of just declaring war on the Red Court as an outlet for my rage, but Duke Garcia quickly negotiated me down to simply killing this one vampire who was inappropriately close to my daughter. The deal was that the vamp could live as long as I got the real killers head on a platter, so I shoved a shard of ice into his heart that would kill him at midnight and stormed off. He then married my daughter while . This rather increased my desire to see him in pieces, still alive and screaming for preference, but since Garcia and I had a deal I was resigned to simply waiting for him to be dead.

Everything rather came to a head when my daughter (whom I had managed to freeze thanks to her being delayed by the most lovely were-wolf EVER and whom I will totally be trying to recruit to my side later) finally told me flat out she was the killer, and as I procrastinated (not actually wanting to kill her) her vamp-husband stabbed me in the back with cold iron. Of course at this point an outsider, a being I specifically existed to fight, arrived and began to cause havoc. The Winter Knight gave me his mantel back to keep me alive long enough to get me to the Summer Lady, who healed me. The imbalance caused by this mess was extreme, but luckily someone took care of the outsider while I was in pain. I spent the rest of the night horribly injured. I was forced to ask the Winter Knight to kill my daughter and indicated to the Summer Lady that if her Knight felt he could help in killing my daughter I wouldn’t get in the way/retaliate. The whole mess was particularly upsetting as the knife I was stabbed with had been offered to me as a gift earlier that evening by Mistress Gobbo in exchange for being freed from the Winter Court. She had earlier insulted me by telling the Summer Lady something rather than coming to me, so instead of taking the knife I had released her with the promise she would not try to evade her punishment (which thanks to the vamp getting his hands on her knife is now going to be EXTREMELY unpleasant. Seriously. People will be talking about it for millennia).

My favourite moment… too many… but I guess one I hadn’t covered above would be when early in the evening my handmaiden asked me who White-doe’s father had been, since apparently my daughter was asking. I told her it was just some mortal who had been fun at the time. Later that evening White Doe glamoured Tom’s character and dragged him to me with the words “Here’s a fun mortal, have more babies so I don’t have to be the Winter Lady!” I broke her enchantment and explained that if I wanted a mortal, then no matter who that mortal was I could HAVE that mortal with minimal effort. We then had to negotiate a weirguild for her breaking the accords.
Oh and the deal the Troll made with me that the temple dog could go home if she fought the Summer Knight and the Gruff and won… and then I missed both of the fights so I lost the dog AND didn’t get any entertainment out of it. I also missed the fight between the gruff and my troll, which was upsetting cause I LOVE watching my trolls and the Summer Ladies Gruffs duke it out.

… ok I’ll stop now.

Soooo moving on… on Sunday morning I was the Architect of a very fine city. I carefully planned everything, and it was quite annoying when people got in the way of my perfect vision. People insisted on being irrational and emotional about things, like art, which should only exist to serve a purpose. I needed to find a new designer, since mine had been killed, and somehow work out what the heck the Tokyoto ambassador wanted. I stalled her by claiming grief and then bluffed my way through the inevitable meeting using one of the potential new Designers. Turned out we’d borrowed and then destroyed a priceless artefact of a book. The city was almost destroyed by war but disaster was averted when it turned out the ambassadors bodyguard was the assassin, there was a decent forgery of the book available, and for some reason Tokyoko wanted the most irrational poet I had ever met as a citizen. I hired a new designer and continued my work. Apparently my designer later tried to get me assassinated…

Favourite moment. Explaining in perfect monotone that I couldn’t make any decisions right now, I was too emotional.

On Sunday afternoon I felt rather useless for most of the event until I successfully err… distracted the drunken Pirate Captain from trying to ‘help’ with my friends with their relationship issues . I also freed a Raven-fear demon from Sparrow (I TOLD that Alexandra we shouldn’t have tried talking to it), learned my favourite student was Puck (darn it), and found the true source of magic. He was a bit of a bully, but I convinced him to become my apprentice, figuring that with some one-on-one training and some proper heroics under his belt he’d come right. I also started hinting that he could take up a stage magician theme in order to continue my family tradition since I was unlikely to have kids all things considered (but no pressure. Really. You can come up with your own theme. But think about it…) . With my perfect occult knowledge and his extreme power I think we shall do well together, we shall use our powers for justice! Truth! And picking up chicks in bars! Merlin wasn’t happy about this, but really he’s only been a REAL mage for about a year, the true source of magic deserves a more experienced super-hero.

Favourite moments, staring down Merlin regarding my new apprentice, disappearing Jean’s rum under my hat “where is the RUM?!” and feeling a moment of terror that someone who was one of my best friends was genuinely going to strike me before another one of my friends shoved me out of the way and into a doorframe. It was intense.

In conclusion having loyal minions apparently makes games twice as fun for me.

You’re very welcome, ma’am. Although I’m afraid I have a standing invitation to go jogging with a dragon, so unfortunately I may be too busy to join your side.

You’re very welcome, ma’am. Although I’m afraid I have a standing invitation to go jogging with a dragon, so unfortunately I may be too busy to join your side.[/quote]

I’d write the frankly creepy sales pitch Boadicea would give you here, interspersed with vague threats about what happens when you refuse and offers of vengeance and blood for acceptance, but it’s just not the same without being surrounded by atmospheric Dresden files characters.

Save it for the sequel! There will be a sequel, won’t there, Scott? :slight_smile: