Actual Play- Golden Cobra Sampler

Golden Cobra Sampler: A Crow Funeral by Tim Hutchings and The Lofty Beacons by Jonathan Walton
http://www.goldencobra.org/submissions2015.html
Actual Play

At the Living Games Conference one of the sessions was the Golden Cobra Sampler, in which an array of games were made available for play. If you are unfamiliar with the Golden Cobra, it is an American freeform larp contest that just had its second year. The winning games are run by the judges at Metatopia, and the winners get bragging rights. It is a pretty great contest, and I actually had an entry for the first year under the name “Troupe”, which I created with the help of George Locke. After a discussion between the facilitators and the players, we chose two of the games to play in this session: A Crow Funeral and The Lofty Beacons.

A Crow Funeral by Tim Hutchings

No game got more in my head at the conference than A Crow Funeral, which is interesting because the game itself is light, quick, and fun. The story is that a group of crows has gathered over the corpse of a deceased fellow crow to determine the cause of death, based on nothing but their own fears and wild speculations, so that they too might avoid its fate. There are a few mechanics to this game, but the primary one is that during discussion all the crows have their hands in the center, and only the crow with their hand on top may speak. If anybody speaks out of turn, or if there is any hint of speaking out of turn, the other crows yell “Hey!” at the offending crow until they feel order has been re-established. 

We had a lot of people, so we broke into two murders of crows, which was interesting because the crows from one group would try to either learn from or misdirect the others, an act always followed by a glorious cacophony of “Hey!”. Our group was primarily facilitated by Jason Morningstar, who is probably best known as the writer of the tabletop rpg Fiasco, as well as the writer of the larps The Climb and Juggernaut. I have grown to know Jason better over the course of several games, and appreciate him both as an incredible writer and designer, and as a person trying to help create a diverse and open culture of play in what is normally an insular group. It is fair to say that he brings a lot of social capital to the table in any game he plays though, which meant (at least from my perspective) that his personality, role as facilitator, and extra-diegetic reputation combined to make him the lead crow… a first among equals, if you will. Not that this stopped him from getting yelled at.

The reason this game got so in my head is that when I left it, those yelling crows came with me. I became very aware of social conventions that we used to govern who is allowed to speak, both in informal groups and as part of panels, round table discussions, or presentations. For the conference we had adopted a few commonly agreed on signals, such as holding an arm up for silence or waving hands for agreement rather than clapping, and all of a sudden I could see the parallels between my real life and the game I had played. 

This became especially clear in a workshop I attended at which the facilitator used a series of hand signals to help her facilitate discourse- a crooked finger for a question, a single finger for a following point, two fingers for the person who wanted to speak after that, and so on. As a big man with a deep voice and a somewhat theatrical bearing, I can normally make myself heard in any given conversation with relative ease, and as a result I normally hold back until the end of a conversation unless I feel very strongly about a point… a practice which, coincidentally, normally gives me the last word. At first I felt some small resentment towards those hand signals, but anytime I felt the urge to speak regardless of their use I could hear those damn birds in my head yelling “Hey!” at me. The situation forced me to confront a privilege I have in most conversations that I had been taking for granted without realizing it, that my facility with language and with public speaking was, in more senses than I wanted to admit, a patriarchal club that I had been wielding. 

As a teacher and as a person trying to navigate the course of academia, the truth of the matter is that sometimes I need to assert myself. However, if I am to continue to tout the belief that, as Nick Sousanis has put it, discourse is more of a dance than a battle, than I need to be aware of how I am affecting the discourse. The limitations imposed on social discourse by tradition and convention can be challenged and changed, but as a person in a place of privilege I have a responsibility to make sure that quieter voices rise to the top, and this means doing more than staying quiet until I can have the greatest impact or the last word.

Stupid birds.


The Lofty Beacons by Jonathan Walton

In The Lofty Beacons, crews of between 2-4 characters in a post-apocalyptic future serve on mountaintops, where they are prepared to light a signal fire when threats come bearing down on the community they have sworn to protect. It is a bit like the “Gondor calls for aid!” fires in Lord of the Rings, but way less upbeat and happy. The threats and events are determined through a card playing mechanic, which also helps pace the game, and the players move in and out of character to determine how their group responds and whether they are successful. When the cards run out, the beacons are (hopefully) lit.

We had enough players to form two groups of four, each with its own facilitator. Each group in a game has access to the same four basic characters: the Punk (a kid, trying to prove themselves), the Goon (a criminal, paying the price), the Merc (a former raider, attempting to make a new life), and the Prior (a veteran, returning to the mountaintop and nominally in charge). How these are played varies greatly from group to group. For example, my Goon had broken the law by leaving the compound for resources without permission. He was not bright or subtle, nor was he particularly “good”, but he was strong and believed in sacrifice for the good of the community. The crew on the other mountain had a Goon who was a former dentist who had accidentally murdered someone, and ended up being the only member of that crew that was experienced in any form of either medicine or of death.

The tone for our mountain was set early on: an explosion of the beacon had left the top of the mountain blackened and inhospitable, which set us up to immediately resent the other crew, whose mountain looked (from a distance) pristine and pure. Our characters were damaged goods: the Prior, terrified of failure, the Punk, interested in only her own wants, the Goon, making every foolish choice that was possible, and the Merc, who did not trust any of us (with good reason). This lead to just about the most dysfunctional crew that was possible, and the series of violent external threats we pulled from our deck did not help matters in the least. 

Over the course of our time there, my Goon was hurt by foolishly attacking raiders. The wound turned gangrenous, and his infected leg had to be cut off. At one point, scarce resources and selfish decisions left the Goon as the only guard at the beacon, and though he tried he could not stand guard on his single leg the whole time. When the Prior returned and saw the Goon on the ground, he beat him within an inch of his life for dereliction of duty. However, the whole crew united around their arbitrary distrust and dislike of the crew of the other mountain… save, at first, the Punk, who had an affair with a member of their crew early on. It did not end well. 

The most disturbing scene was probably the Christmas celebrated by our crew at the top of the mountain. Their ritual was to give things to one another, which they burned as objects that represented unnecessary needs. The representation of linked love and abuse as these four celebrated life through destruction was touching, a reminder that horrible people are never the less still people. Inspired by the show of love, my Goon crawled off to die in the wilderness. Our Prior lead a search, and on finding the Goon was equal parts thrilled to have found him and full of rage at his departure. After we returned, the other crew lit their fire. We struggled, but never the less managed to discharge the duty we had been placed there for as well. As the barbarians stormed the mountain, our Merc said “Well, it was a nice dream for a little while”. 

As wretched as our lives had been, it had been the happiest time in the Merc’s life, a duality of humor and sadness that really sums up the experience as a whole. Jason Morningstar said we were “the worst”, which is pretty high praise coming from him. Our experience was heightened even more when the other crew informed us that while we were fighting, cursing, and struggling, all of their cards had been introspections about what humanity had lost. Man, forget those guys!!!

I imagine the emergent themes of The Lofty Beacons change if you have only one crew, but in our case the clear us/them divide with people that we ostensibly shared a common cause rose right to the top. Even after the game, I felt a certain loyalty towards my crew and had a little bit of a tendency to tease the crew of the other mountain. Other than this residual cliquishness, the main take-away for me was that the game was a lot of darkly comedic fun, and that it had a notably unique and enjoyable narrative. Because the story will vary depending on the players, context of play, and draw of the cards, a high degree of variety is a likely quality in any run through.

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