On a lark I picked up the new Mind’s Eye Theatre. I always managed to avoid LARPs as a kid but for some reason the idea is appealing to me now - perhaps due to the fact that 90% of my friends in Ottawa have scattered to the four winds over the past two years and I could use to make some new local friends. ANYHOO… I gave it a quick browse last night and found the similarity to the tabletop whitewolf stuff to be welcoming to the extreme. Borderline enthusiastic, I set out today to investigate whether or not there were any local Camarilla chapters or, if not, some independent games that I could join.
Unless I’m totally off the mark, some kind of nuclear weapon has detonated in the LARP world or at the very least their online presence. Pretty much every LARP website I went to is either dead, either utterly (404s) or effectively. This includes the Canadian Camarilla franchise. Their webserver seems to have lost all content and is tossing back default Apache content for all requests. Hell, even White Wolfs official Camarilla website is seemingly dead - half of the links don’t work! I did manage to find an old World of Darkness LARP in Ottawa that seems to be at least remedially active but I’m not very enthusiastic about the oWOD - I’m one of the few people who though the reboot was the best thing they could have done. All the same, I may give them a looksy - given the state of the landscape I don’t think I can afford to be too choosy.
I’m not surprised the LARPs are suffering. World of Warcraft is a brutal foe who’s impact on tabletop gaming has been observed (although I’ll be damned if I can find my references for this one) for some time now. Additionally, I have to wonder if Second Life is eating into their participation at all. It seems to be an ideal medium for moving LARPs into the online world. Perhaps it’s worked too well…
