SHIFTED LANDS LARP SERIES

The Challenge had just three: Marconi’s Mumbling Masters, the Devil’s Dealers, and the Snifflers. The regular College of Wizardry has its student clubs – the A.R.M., the W.A.N.D., the Basement Beer Brigade, the Dueling Club, and whatnot. No “y’alls”, some French but less than I had planned. Étienne, in the end, spoke with a generic Southern accent that I’m pretty sure hit most states south of the Mason-Dixon at one point or another. Dialects are even harder, because you need to be able to use words outside your own active vocabulary spontaneously. To pull off an accent at a larp, you need to be able to dress it on whatever topics emerge in conversation. I don’t know what the specific process for learning an accent is for actors, but at least they get to practice their lines beforehand. Étienne, though, was from the South, and not only the South, from New Orleans, which has a very specific local accent.

I usually affect a British Received Pronunciation, sometimes Standard American English. I have a knack for accents, but they’re hard. He ended up rather what I imagine to be the archetypical Lakay Laveau.Īmong my prep, I also put in a lot of hours working on an accent for Étienne, using YouTube videos. I decided Étienne would be more or less a nice person and entirely unconcerned with anyone’s blood status, partly because I knew I’d get enough of that particular theme at Cabaret. Learning from my experience at CoW10, I went for something more outgoing, vocal, and outspoken than Charles Duke had been. So I did some reading on New Orleans and the relevant history. Lakay Laveau is named after its founder Marie Laveau, an actual historical person, who was known as the Voodoo Queen of New Orleans. I’d originally signed up for an organizer-written character, but especially the NWM writing team took their time, the majority of players had chosen to write their own characters, and the fairly recognizable popcultural touchstones of Lakay Laveau had started working in my mind, so I finally mailed the lead writer that I’d be creating my own character. Photo by Iulian Dinu / Dziobak Larp Studios. Étienne Rabasse and distant cousin Dárjá Rosenrot, played by my mother. I figured that this was pretty much my only chance for a very long time to get to play a NWM student, so I went for it. My character this time around was Étienne Rabasse, a third-year artificier from Lakay Laveau, one of the houses of New World Magischola. The Challenge was a good game and a great experience, but there’s work to be done yet. Not that a lot of the design issues were even visible to me until after the game. I see myself as a fairly ideal player for a first run of something like this, because I will let a lot of stuff slide before allowing it to impact my game, and it takes a lot to stress me out.

SHIFTED LANDS LARP SERIES

While my CoW experience was the tenth run of the series and there was a certain routine to the proceedings, this one hadn’t been tested out yet. The colleges all have five different Houses for students, but there is variation in the paths of the students and the subjects taught. NIMBUS itself is located in an indeterminate place but probably somewhere in the Harz Mountains of Germany. NIMBUS was the host school and the game was played at the Kliczków Castle in Poland. The three colleges were the Czocha College of Witchcraft and Wizardry, the setting of the main College of Wizardry games, Nibelungen Universität für Magische Bildung und Studien (or NIMBUS among friends), the school for the German-language spinoff, and New World Magischola, the North American college from the larp series of the same name.

Shifted lands larp