EDIT: Shoot, I missed my 18,000 pageviews mark!  Oh well - thank you everybody for lookin' at my page and such!

Writerly fellows: this game is awesome for stretching your typing fingers.  It's also surprisingly nerve wracking.

Anyway, I went LARPing for the first time last weekend!  _{I can't believe it's taken me a week to get around to writing about it ...}

For the unintiated, LARPing is kind of like a cross between a murder mystery game and paintballing.  You make a team, dress up as characters and go out shooting people with Nerf guns in the forest all day.  It is wonderful.  For the semi-initiated, we were told before we even started that the first person to shout lightening bolt would be thrown out of the woods.  No seed packets were thrown in our games, no siree.

I went with a fab steampunk society and got to play the quatermaster, wear a corset and goggles all day, eat real sailory food, and play with this thing:





I want one.

Yeah, I picked the flintlock musket as my weapon, which sounded like a spectacular idea until it was explained to me how long it takes to reload one.  And that the LARPing club intended to recreate that frustrating loading time, despite it not being a real musket, by a system of threading half a party popper string through a hole near the trigger.  I had to pull the popper to make the bang and ... well ... shoot.

Luckily, the musket was padded with foam, so after I only managed to shoot one person in the first skirmish, I was told just to whale people over the back with it.    Also, when I did manage to fire a shot, it felt kickass: the Nerf guns were cool, too, but nothing beat the loud noise and the satisfaction of deafening your enemies (and, admittedly, yourself).  Unfortunately, all of the tissue strings were removed from the poppers, so I didn't get to be showered in fabulousness every time I killed someone.

Being a steampunk crew, 'MAN THE HARPOONS!' became something of a motto for us, especially as our captain was carrying one.  We also kept trying to think of ways to get ridiculous weapons into our next LARP event, prompting the gamemaster to yell, 'WHO SKIRMISHES WITH A SIEGE WEAPON!?' at us as we contemplated making a steampunk gatling gun.


_{We're going to spray paint it bronze and it's going to be awesome.}

Long story short: LARPing is awesome and I am going to go again.