Iron GM Postmortem Jul 17, 2006

Short summary for those who don't feel like reading behind the cut:

I went to Dexcon 9 with and 2 other people. (If those other people are reading this, and don't mind me posting their names, let me know and I'll edit this post.)

We participated as a team in the 2006 Iron GM Competition. This is a competition to write a complete LARP in 24 hours.

Amongst 4 teams, we were awarded first prize. Details behind the cut.

OK, so a few more basic details about the competition:

• It was a joint production of LARPA and Double Exposure.
• The contest sponsors put up a $500 cash prize for the winner.
• Each team was locked in a hotel room for 24 hours. Before entering the room, we were frisked, all electronics and media were removed from the room, and security guards were posted outside.
• The LARPs were played by groups of 12 players each. Most of these players were the same between games. Afterwards, the players anonymously rated the games against several criteria.
• The LARPs were required to run for 2 hours, and take anywhere from 5-12 players.
• The game with the highest scores from players won.
• Upon starting the competition, the "secret ingredients" were revealed to all the teams simultaneously. These are elements that are required to be present in all of the games. For this competition, the secret ingredients were fascism, children's music, and drugs.

We spent the first 6 hours of the competition working on an idea we eventually scrapped, primarily because it was pretty terrible. (For those curious, the idea involved children's singer Raffi as a crypto-fascist bent on converting the youth of America to Canadian fascism. His followers were called Raffistarians, and there were a couple other groups involved too, including a suicide cult and an evil corporation called Contenta.)

The game we eventually wrote was called, in full, The Free Animals Republic of Macdonald presents the Trial of the Big Bad Wolf, to be immediately followed by his execution, in honor of our First Anniversary. Or, just The Trial of the Big Bad Wolf for short. It is a crossover of characters from multiple children's novels, songs, and nursery rhymes, with a setting inspired by George Orwell's Animal Farm. It was a lot of fun to write, and even more fun to watch people play.

When all was said and done, we won by a margin of only ONE POINT. Kudos to Foam Brain Productions for their game, the runner-up, which was titled A New American Songbook. I haven't read it yet, but from everything I've heard, it makes you feel dirty after playing it, which I definitely approve of in LARPs. :-D

We're planning to tidy the game up a bit and then publish it online. Anyone who wants more details on how to get the game should email me about that.