LARPing

This was a write-up to a session from slightly over a year back. I hadn’t gotten around publishing it until now. Enjoy.

There I stood, at the top of a snowy hill with the gloomy, overcast clouds that often plagues the British weather filling the sky. I was wearing a not-so matching elven ear prosthetics and a plain green shirt and wielding a foam covered stick made to resemble a sword, but it was as close as I could get in looking like an elven ranger on a shoe-string budget. I’m not so sure why, but just love imagining myself as an elven ranger, archer, or variations of that. It could possibly be because my scrawny appearance is a close fit.

Down below, the scene isn’t pretty. I can hear people calling out numbers. Big numbers. More often than not I see it as an incoherent jumble of mess that I can only vaguely decipher. My way of getting by is to imagine those numbers to be the momentum behind those swings, and by fudging numbers until things felt right I knew I would lose a limb in a hit or two. At the end of the day, that’s the only thing I really need to keep note of.

When LARPing the logical part of my brain takes a vacation, and the imaginative part sees this as an epic adventure. For the hours that I am here, I can forget about the toils of everyday life and worry about those pesky zombies, skeletons and ghouls. Even better is that I have friends to fight alongside. And with the battle taking place, involving characters much, much more powerful than I am, I did the only thing a heroic adventurer would do. With one of my legs extended, I slid down the snow covered slopes, ran towards the closest enemy, swung my foam sword and shouted “FOUR!”.

And then I scampered away, because elves are squishy folk.