Mountain Clams

Queenmaker

On Sunday, I woke up about 15 minutes before my alarm clock went off. Sure, I've done this before, but not when my alarm is set for 4:50 AM. That's what it was set for on Sunday, though, since I had to get up, get dressed, load the car, and drive myself up to Boulder to meet up with my team at Denny's at 6 AM. What kind of team, you ask? Why, it's my IFGS team, of course! It's not like I participate in any kind of "normal" sport. IFGS is a LARP, or Live Action Role Playing game. The team was going into a game called "Kingmaker."

Breakfast took probably three times as long as you would have expected, since the team members arrived over the span of about 40 minutes. I was the second one to arrive. We did some planning for the game, familiarizing ourselves with our character's abilities, and introduced the characters to each other for those that hadn't met before. Then we all drove up to the Heil Ranch and started getting ready for the game. I was playing Varanus Pakys, my lizard fighter character. I put on my costume and had someone do my face paint. I have a hood, but paint my face to match rather than wear a full-face mask in 90 degree heat. The picture above is me in the costume, though this is from an earlier game and the face paint had already worn off part-way.

We were ready to go pretty much on-time and set out up and down the hills of the Heil. The game centered around determining the next ruler of Setse, a land that had just lost its king to a suspicious disease. The land does not believe in the tradition that the first-born heir should become king, but an heir is okay. Well, there were four heirs, one of which was female. Our task was to travel around and interview each of the heirs, as well as talk with the people of the land, and to come to a decision on who would be the next ruler of the land.

We set off and talked with each of the heirs. During our travels, we fought against some huge oddly-colored bears, talked with a witch, and had to cross an interesting ropes/cargo net course. There were four ropes going across a path in a zig-zag pattern. They were about waist-high. There was a fifth rope that cut across all the others, but it was probably 10 feet off the ground. The idea was to use the fifth rope to balance and walk across the other four. In addition, there was yarn "vines" on the ropes. If you touched them, it hurt. I hit one, but the vine's barb was unable to get through my armor.

In the end, we selected Margurite, the female heir. This, of course, angered the other three, and their representatives and gathered attendants attacked us, claiming that we were somehow biased. A big fight ensued. At one point during the fight, Matt (playing one of the "bad guys") and I were faced off. He pulled a "sacrifice throw," which knocked both of us down a moment. When we got up, I started chasing him. As I recall, we ran into another couple of people who were fighting, and Matt fell in front of me. I half tripped/half rolled over him and lay sprawled on the ground a moment. Once we knew everyone was okay, the fight kept going. In the end, we were victorious, but I was very close to having been taken out of the fight.

After the final fight, I actually had a bit of trouble breathing. I was coughing and wheezing and generally sounding horrible. I'm not sure if it's just because I'm old and out-of-shape or if it was the dust kicked up in the fight, but it took a few hours for me to feel really back to normal again. The other thing that was going wrong throughout the day was the fact that my shorts (which I was wearing under my costume) kept sliding down on me! I had to stop every so often and hike 'em back up again!

It was a long game - 9 hours on paper, and 7 hours for the team to go through - but great fun! I drove home and crashed on the couch. Taking inventory, I found that my feet hurt, my legs were tired, the top of my left leg hurt, my back hurt, my stomach was a little upset (since I think I ate too much when I got home), my lungs were not happy, and I had slightly pulled my left bicep. So basically from the shoulders down I was a mess!

Here it is the next day and I am much happier, with only some small residual pains remaining.

Labels: ifgs

posted by Brett @ 3:59 PM