Conquest of Mythodea: why I went twice and why I didn’t go this year

Conquest of Mythodea (CoM) is the largest larp event in the world, with roughly 7000 participants. I attended it in 2010 and 2011, but this year I decided not to and organized a larp for 4 people instead.

Why I originally went

• Curiosity: what could a larp with several thousand characters look and feel like? I just wanted to see it to believe it.
• Peer pressure: not direct pressure, but since larpers I liked talked about it, about their costumes and about their custom-made weapons for CoM all year round, I really felt like I should try it.
• Accessibility: the Tonneau Joyeux (TJ), a Swiss group of larpers, coordinates registration and bus ride, and helps with explaining the rules, creating a character etc. It’s always nice to just sit your ass in a bus and be driven to the right place, especially when it’s far and foreign.

What I discovered there in 2010 and came back for in 2011

• A unique experience of scale: the first shock came from a walk through the town. As I took a 360° look around one of its main squares, I was fully surrounded by dozens of people in really good costumes, merchant tents that looked the part… the size and detail of it really made it feel like being in a movie. I even got lost in the town the first time. Lost in a fake town. How cool was that?

The baddies had towers? The vikings brought a siege tower.

• The second shock came from my first mass fight: just seeing hundreds of people everywhere, realizing the importance of a banner to just understand where your buddies are, feeling the crush of bodies against yours in tight lines, the size of siege engines, the noise of metal armors, the sky turning dark with volley fire… again something completely different from fights at the local fantasy larp.
• Impressive logistics: space for your tent, 24/7 showers, good, cold beer, usable toilets, good, affordable food etc .
• A fantastic playground and stage to make your larp fantasies and stupid experiments come true.

In 2010, we did various things including an impromptu postal service shooting letters behind enemy lines, but our 15 minutes of fame (or infamy) where probably the improvised ninja attack

In 2011, a high point was when I provided hype man and alchemical smoke services for a slaneeshii sexy dance show in the Mad Gobblyn’s cage. Kudos to the manager who was really working to make this place different from the other “nice and friendly” inns in Mythodea.

• Fun mercenary actions: the Tonneau Joyeux was a very large mercenary group, so entering a camp all at once always made an impression. It also featured all kinds of exotic creatures, from really good-looking orcs to skavens. In 2011, this fun was a well-synchronized all-city havoc to make a massive diversion to keep all the city guards busy while some demon was having a very special face-to-face with their captain.

Running and spreading smoke while the others were staging fights all around town.

What I discovered in 2011

Sornob, dressed to kill.

• Looks will get you game. Foam latex prosthetics and Kryolan Dermacolor makeup can stay on all day, even through mass battles and meals. They take about one hour of play away every day (about 30 minutes to put on and about the same to remove) but being noticed thanks to those and triggering in-character interactions was really worth it. Sigmarites would spit on the floor when I walked by, alchemists wanted to discuss body parts, and people were just interested in the smoking basket.
• Mass fights can be fun: in 2010, I was bored to death by the line battles. My 18th century swashbuckler had a saber & main gauche combo and just could not get in range of anyone without being hit by hafted weapon, an arrow or a spell. So mass fights were very short, the rest was watching and being bored. Even the flintlocks were pretty much useless as most people didn’t notice they were being targeted and others just refused to roleplay the “windstoss” effect. My only fun fights were those that happened away from the lines, either when running and flanking, or just chasing people outside of battles for mercenary contracts. So in 2011 I created a new character, bought a naginata and made soft alchemical grenades. This completely changed my battle experience: it is much more fun when you can hit people from a distance and thus fight for more than 5 minutes.
• Finally daring to impose my English onto Germans: they did not mind, we all kept it IC and it enabled nice scenes.
• Hot tubs. Between CoM and Solmukohta, public nudity in a watery environment isn’t an issue anymore.

So why didn’t I come back this year?

• The weeks of preparation in 2011, with basically having a second work day after the official one were just too much. I was stressed out, wasted time and money on my most important prop, and the kicker was food poisoning a few hours before departure and arriving late at the bus. Upon my return, the messed up apartment stank of latex and chemicals for months. There was about as much stress with the props preparation for Technocculte this year, but the result was a success.
• 99% OOC time within the TJ. Roleplaying only with people outside of the group was really lame. In 2011, people said “sure this year we’ll involve ourselves in quests, we’ll roleplay internally, we’ll get organized” but this vanished within 5 minutes of setting up the tents. When part of a group is out of character, it becomes the de facto driving force, and having nice OOC fun with your camping buddies still is the main reason for many members to attend CoM.
• Absence of unity in the group, fake leaders, differing interest in subgroups, combined with out-of-game dislikes, badmouthing etc made the whole “group” thing a bit moot. There were some rare successes at group actions as described above, just not enough.
• Too many uninteresting activities took a too large portion of the time: long walks for nothing due to misunderstandings, hours spent looking for work, for meetings to start etc. When I’m at a larp I want things to happen all the time.
• Some very, very lame plots, boiling down to “free the princess from the dungeon”. This is a larp, not Super Mario, so thanks, but no thanks.
• The difficulty to latch on to the main plot: why did A attack B, how can we investigate? Asking dozens of people and not being given any satisfactory answer gets old pretty fast. It seems the best way is still to speak German and play in a year-long campaign, two things I just can’t do. When I larp, I want easy and fast ways to latch on to plot, I want stuff given to me. I may be a lazy bastard, and I know mass larps should be considered as sandboxes first, but this was just too much “bring your own game” for me. And when there was an opportunity to get something interesting going, all too often it got lost in the inertia of long-running campaign group politics.

So while as a human being, I had fun with friendly people I didn’t really know out of game, I learned crafty tricks on the preparation to the game, I partied, I drank etc… I can do all of this at home: I do not need to take a week off and ride a bus for 20h to experience this. As a larper, it was a rather poor plot and roleplay experience, i.e. I would not attend such a larp if it were smaller and local. So no CoM for me this year, and I had mad fun in my French gaming vacations.

What about next year?

As I am posting this, two groups are coming back from their first “splinter from the TJ” experience, one made of depraved druchii, another of scholars in the Wayfarer’s Arrival. I really liked their concepts of working together to bring their own game to the sandbox as a like-minded group, so I am curious to see how that went. If they convince me that some of the issues I listed above (that also affected others, see the latest Larpzeit International) were fixed by the Wayfarer’s Arrival concept or other pro-active group efforts, I’ll gladly join next year.