iCon: one week roleplaying in Northumberland

[triskellian]

I spent last week living with 26 roleplayers in a large manor house in Northumberland, playing games, lazing around, eating food, and immersing myself in large bodies of water, which I was able to do on 75% of the days. Clearly a success by my holiday standards :-)

Saturday: hot and soapy
On Saturday, the water was hot and soapy, and contained in the immense bath in the en suite bathroom to the gothic bedroom. I wish I'd taken photos of this room - it was glorious and silly at the same time, with gauzy gold curtains across the bath, and faux stone blocks painted on the walls. The shower attachment was no use for actually taking showers, so I used the main bathroom for showering, but I loved the silly en suite anyway. The gothic bedroom itself wasn't so different from bedrooms I've seen in open-to-the-publc stately homes, lacking only the roped-off walkway which keeps you away from the furniture, and leaves you only a small space to stand and peer into the dressing room before it shuffles you out again. The dressing room wasn't very interesting, anyway - all wardrobes and mirrored doors. Very useful for the storage of clothes, not so interesting to look at. The corridor to the dressing room was much more interesting, being a quarter-circle, with lovely curved windows overlooking the drive, and curved windowseats with cushions. The windowseats are one of many things I regret not properly appreciating.

Sunday: hot and chlorinated
On Sunday, the water was hot and chlorinated, and in the covered jacuzzi beside the chapel. It was early in the morning, and I was wandering around the nearly-silent house, marvelling at it. I encountered al_fruitbat marinating chicken in the kitchen, and after further wandering, ended up sitting on the jacuzzi terrace with frax. The way forward was clear: we sat in the jacuzzi for about an hour and a half, being gradually joined by others as more people got up. My first game, Malice in Wonderland, wasn't starting till mid-afternoon, so I'd thought Sunday morning an ideal opportunity to go to the nearby beach, but no one seemed to agree, and that early in the week I wasn't desperate enough for the sea to go alone. There was plenty of time.

I was still getting lost sometimes walking around the house, which seems strange because it's actually not difficult - everything is basically in straight lines - but I remember losing my bearings over and over again, and using the trick of calling out the name of the room I was looking for in the hope that there would be people in the room to call out in reply so I could follow the sound of their voices.

Malice in Wonderland was a freeform run by UndyingQueen, set in a modern fairy kingdom, and concerning the difficulty of marrying off the 21-year-old prince (ao_lai to a princess who loves him, thus fending off the curse. I'd better not write any more about the plot, because the game is destined to be sold by freeformgames.com, but I dressed up as a princess and had a wonderful time. And we had a lovely moment where kauket, frax and I were, in character, perusing the dressing-up clothes at the top of the main stairs, when we gradually realised that the conversation going on at their foot was both in character and plot-relevant. Out of character they didn't know we were there until we asked for a description of the item (represented by a card) that had been passed between two players; the first they knew of it in character was when we appeared down the stairs with the solution to the problem they had been discussing. That, and the games I played on Friday (see below) made me wish we'd made better use of the house as the setting for a roleplaying game rather than merely the location for playing them.

Monday: cold and salty
On Monday, the sun was hot, but the sea was still very cold. frax and I went in, regardless, and made friends with a nice old man who was also swimming, and who pointed out various interesting things to be seen around the edges of Beadnell Bay, most notably Dunstanburgh Castle right at the other end. quantumboo made a Japanese garden while we were in the water.

On Monday afternoon, smiorgan's Mallville cast ealuscerwen, wimble and TheHattedOne as the a-crowd, secretrebel and killalla as the geeks, and me as the sole punk, and sent us off to work out what on earth - or off it, as it turned out - was going on with the cave paintings and this Clark Kent boy, and the weird time repeats. We saved the world, some of us learnt useful lessons about cliques and friendships, and most of us got dates to the prom. I got to play the punk who waltzed into the a-crowd and whisked off two of its key members, and secretrebel played the geek who takes off her glasses, unties her hair, and is suddenly a cheerleader who's dating the quarterback.

Tuesday: hot and soapy
On Tuesday, someone was setting off small bombs inside my head. Neither painkillers nor a bath helped, but we went to Lindisfarne anyway, with smiorgan assuring me repeatedly that we'd come straight back if I wanted to. We went into neither the castle nor the priory, but spent some time sitting on the far coast of the island, just absorbing the peace and the beauty. And then we bought mead, and cake, and kippers. Yum.

Wednesday: cold and salty
Wednesday, unusually, was not hot and sunny in the morning. In fact it was merely warm and very, very misty at the beach. zandev, hearthfire and I swam anyway, although we took a while to decide we were going to, and we didn't stay in long.

Wednesday's game was sesquipedality's Babylon 5: the ephemeral walls of Babel, where I was the leader of the rogue telepaths, trying to negotiate a truce with Psicorps, as represented by nickeyb, and - playing my character's ex - smiorgan (sesquipedality claims this was random casting). There was loads of propaganda deployed on both sides, culminating in an agreement which left both sides feeling victorious, which probably isn't a good sign ;-) There was also some wider political upheaval going on, but I had to run away and cook, so I missed it (secretrebel, UndyingQueen and I cooked vast quantities of veggie Mexican).

Thursday: hot and chlorinated
smiorgan and I jacuzzed, before he was summoned to watch a wombles film in preparation for chrestomancy's game, and I went off to play an angel, newly arrived in Heaven and assigned to the vitally important mission of stealing the Turin Shroud and leaving a fake in its place. Or stealing a fake and leaving the real one in its place. Or swapping a fake for a different fake. Or getting a good newspaper story. Or destroying as many Turin Shrouds as possible. Or... well, there were lots of character goals in The Turin Test, quantumboo's game. Many of them were contradictory. Some of them were probably impossible. But Heaven works perfectly, so it must all be part of the ineffable Plan, and therefore all for the best. Trust in Heaven.

On Thursday evening, I designed an iflag (A7 piece of paper with design on one side and blank on the other side, sellotaped to half a wooden skewer), and - while most other people were concentrated in only a couple of places - I sneaked around the house, scoping out places to hide my iflag, ready for the following day's iflag hunt, as masterminded by secretrebel. Ellingham Hall is a fine place for sneaking. There are alcoves and doorways and corridors, and several alternative routes between places. So I snuck around, deciding where to hide my flag while avoiding anyone seeing where I was sneaking. Eventually, I chose a spot, came up with a clue, and hid the flag.

Friday: no immersion in water :-(
But Friday did bring the great iflag hunt, accomplished partly by solving clues, and partly by finding flags and then working out which clue referred to them. Large parts of both methods involved lurking innocently in various locations, pretending to fellow hunters that you were there on an unrelated matter, or that you already knew the location of the flag they were looking for, or that there were no flags to be found in the vicinity, and so on. (The finder of a flag must mark their initials on its back and return it to its hiding place, so everyone gets a chance at every flag.) No one found all of the flags, but all flags were found by someone, and it was a new way of appreciating the house, looking around it at the tiniest details, and spending time in out-of-the-way parts of it.

Friday also brought the culmination of something that had been going on all week, although I'm only mentioning it now. On Sunday, frax ran a short scene with me where my character was at a seance, feeling skeptical. On Monday, I received a letter from a doctor, dated 1853. On Tuesday, it was a marriage certificate dated 1851. On Wednesday, a note from a police inspector in 1850, and on Thursday a fraught moment with my character's mother, mere days after That Awful Night...

So on Friday afternoon, we timed in for frax, cardinalsin and ealuscerwen's A Foreign Country just after dinner on That Awful Night. Our characters did not have any knowledge of the future. The players did, although we only had clues, and none of us was quite sure what happened. The 'gimmick'? We were allowed to use out of character knowledge to inform in character actions. We had the chance to change the future, to save ourselves. And I played my favourite type of character: a clever, sneaky, misunderstood girl. The game was set in Ellingham Hall itself, and in describing my character's sneaking around the house, I knew the geography, and had snuck around those corridors myself, only hours earlier. High Victorian melodrama was had by all :-)

Friday evening was the eat-up-the-leftovers party, and then it was nearly over.

Saturday: no immersion in water...
...Unless you count the thunderstorm most of the way along the M1, that is. The journey home was not pleasant (and not just the weather: smiorgan and I chose the worst service station ever to stop for lunch. We had to queue for half an hour to get out of the place. And it was covered in rat traps.)

Thank you, everyone who came, who ran games, who cooked, and washed up, and did anything else to make it as much fun as it was :-)

Comments

[bluedevi.livejournal.com]

the house as the setting for a roleplaying game

I was thinking that too - because there are so many places to spy on people unseen! You could stand on the roof terrace listening to people just outside the kitchen and they might never know you were there.

And windows in angles where you can catch glimpses of things going on in other rooms! And, and...

[lathany.livejournal.com]

the house as the setting for a roleplaying game

Trouble is, you need to know about the house first and the game is usually done by then. Waiting and then writing games whilst at a Con tends to be a barrel of no fun.

[sea-of-flame.livejournal.com]

Unless people were to go back to the house a second year running...if that's a possibility, it might be worth someone drawing up a house layout with the eavesdropping/sight-lines marked in for future GMs to use?