Playing De la Bête — part 1
In September 2019, I played De La Bête, by Czech larp group Rolling . This is the first part of my discussion of what kind of larp this is, for those unfamiliar, a bit of a review of my experiences, and a discussion of a few lessons I learned for my own larps. In this first part I’ll focus on the workshops and practical elements. I’ll discuss my character and the story in a future post.
To set the scene, De la Bête (which translates to “Of the Beast”) is larp set in an 18th Century French adventure romance novel. Think the Count of Monte Cristo, The Three Musketeers, The Scarlet Pimpernel, Les Miserables, The Man in the Iron Mask and tales of the Beast Gévaudan. In this story, the village of Morsange has been beset by a strange beast that stalks the woods near the village and has killed several citizens. The king has declared a bounty on the beast and the royal hunstman, together with several groups of renowned hunters from across Europe, have come to Morsange to slay the beast. Meanwhile politics, romance, sneakiness and science are all going on in the village.
The style of larp is referred to in the Czech Republic as a “Czech content larp.” Essentially it’s a fairly scripted larp with a lot of pre-written back-story and detailed pre-written characters. The characters are largely written to be the main character of their own novel, and several different genres of novels may coexist and interconnect within the same larp. The plot and broad character arc of each of those novels is pre-written by the organisers and will be discovered and experienced by the player during the game. While players largely have control of their own character and can make meaningful choices that direct the outcomes of their stories, there may be some things that just “have to happen” or some scenes that may be completely pre-scripted. Players generally do not have transparency about what will happen in the game or about the secrets of other characters.
In many ways the larp style seemed similar what I’ve seen in some plot-driven Australian campaign larps. So I expected to at least broadly understand what I was I doing. After playing it, I wouldn’t say that expectation was entirely wrong, but the workshops, design document, and briefing materials all demanded a much stronger element of players leaning in to a certain style of play. We were specifically asked not to interfere too much in other plots that we might stumble across that weren’t connected to ours. We were specifically asked to play up certain elements of our character sheets that were required for the plots of other characters. For example, my sheet had a line saying “When x character approaches you, you will definitely want to help her with her problem.” And I did want to help her with that problem, but as it happened I wasn’t able to. But I’ll get to that a bit more later.
My husband Jason was also on the volunteer team for this run, playing various non-player characters and helping out around the place. So I got to see and hear about some of the behind the scenes goodness too.
Practical
First up, the practical stuff. De la Bête includes an evening and a day of workshops, followed by an evening and two days of play. So, a long game by most Australian standards, but fairly short by some European ones. Food, accommodation and costume is all provided in the ticket. Accommodations are pretty basic, essentially indoor camping in a semi-ruined (or actually ruined in my case) building with no electricity or running water. Some of the hunter characters were sleeping in tents. Toilets are port-a-loos. Washing up facilities are provided in a separate block. Showers are available for the desperate at a nearby football club. Players were asked to bring their own crockery, cutlery and bedding, including sleeping mat. Fortunately coming from Australia and needing to pack light meant I was prioritised for one of the few hire cots. Food was fairly basic, usually soups and stews with bread and fruit, but plentiful. I don’t think anyone went hungry. And there was a cafe on the site that people could buy additional drinks and snacks from. The organisers also ran an in-game tavern selling beer, soft-drink and toasted sandwiches.
Generally I’d say the practical elements ran pretty well, as you’d expect for a game that had been run nine times previously. But sometimes communicating how things would go was difficult. Most of the previous runs were in Czech for a Czech audience, so making the shift for the international runs probably required a bit more explanation than the organisers were used to. Hopefully they will get a bit better at that with future international runs. But if you’re thinking of playing it, I’d recommend asking any questions beforehand on the facebook group so other players can help provide answers.
My only other criticism of the practical side of things was the costumes. Having a particular aesthetic and standard of costume is obviously important to the organisers. And it pays off in the photos, which look great. It also meant that different groups were very easy to spot across the site, even from a long distance, because of the uniform and distinctive costumes. However, not all costumes are created equal. I was given a shirt, a pair of pants and square of cotton to serve as a scarf or headwrap. The temperature in the Czech Republic in autumn can be pretty variable, we definitely had some warmer days, but evenings, mornings, and even daytimes in the shade, were often quite cold. They’d said to bring thermal underwear, but not much else. Thankfully I had my whole suitcase stashed away in the organisers room so could get some extra pants, jumpers, scarf, mittens and hat to stay warm. The rest of my bunch of shady convict players and I also pinched a few spare blankets from the costume room to use as shawls. But if you feel the cold and are thinking of playing, I would suggest playing a male character (cross-gender play is completely fine), because men at least get a shirt, waistcoat and jacket. I’d also recommend bringing some things to wear under or in addition to your costume, regardless of the character you get.
Workshops
For me the workshops were a real highlight. I quite enjoy seeing how other people steer and prepare their players for their game, and I was not disappointed.
Before I get into the details though, I’ll make a note about how the workshop attendance was organised. There were a lot of workshops, about a dozen all up. Not all workshops were compulsory for all characters. If you were playing an elderly courtier you were unlikely to need to attend the combat workshop. If you were playing a lowly galley slave you didn’t need to attend the politics and history workshop. So some workshops were marked as optional for some players. On arrival we were given a pack with a list of which workshops were compulsory, recommended and optional for us individually. Then we were asked to sign up for our workshops ourselves on sign-up sheets in the organisers tent. Most workshops were running several times, some even constantly throughout the workshop period. Somewhere in our schedule we also had to make time to collect and try on our costume, and eat some dinner. To be honest, I don’t think this system worked all that well. While I can understand why they’ve gone with this model (even characters in the same broad grouping might have different workshops they need to attend), it created a lot of stress and anxiety for a lot of players and made the start of play more chaotic than it really needed to be. If I was running the game, I’d just work out a schedule of workshops for each character, including a costume and dinner break, and give it to the players on sign-up. You could still mark some workshops as optional, and let the player decide to skip those if they wanted to.
Safety and combat
The safety workshop went largely as expected. The combat workshop demonstrated, and got us to practice, some good techniques for safe theatrical fighting like face slapping against your palm, faux body punches and throwing people to the ground. All very much wrestling style so it looked cool and felt fun, but had a strong emphasis on working together on the fight rather than just rushing each other. We also played around with some foam larp swords and cap-gun pistols and rifles. I knew I wouldn’t get a chance to play with any of those during the game so made sure I got a turn in the workshop. The cap-gun in particular was well cool.The escalation mechanic was to go from verbal taunts to shoving to fisticuffs to fighting with weapons, and we were to always wait for the other player to respond in kind before escalating further. In practice this generally worked very well. I did have one scene where I escalated a bit too quickly and my partner escalated back even faster and we ended up shoving each other right through some of the props and equipment. No one was hurt, to my knowledge, but it’s another demonstration that escalation mechanics are great when play is relatively calm and can go at a slower pace, but break down a bit when tensions are running high.
Sex and intimacy
Obviously romance and intimacy are important themes for a larp like this, so there was a workshop on that too. Aside from the expected discussions about consent, and letting people know if you don’t want to play a romance that’s written into the sheet, they also had a pretty cool sex mechanic. Essentially you could invite someone to have sex by pointedly removing an item of your costume, like a scarf or bit of jewellery or your coat, or undoing a button. They could accept by also removing a bit of their clothing. Then you’d lie down next to each other, face each other with your hands on each other’s shoulders. You could have a little pillow talk, and then get back up and put your clothes back on. There, done, sex complete. I thought it was a really nice way to include the romance of sexual relations, without weird or uncomfortable sex mechanics. I also like that it inherently includes consent and precludes rape plots. For further LGBT+ and feminist points it makes sexual interactions genuinely equal rather than a powered dynamic of penetrator and penetratee. I didn’t get to use it myself, since my romance plot didn’t end up quite going in that direction. But I definitely had a moment where I could have used it. If I’d been a bit more on the ball I probably would have taken that opportunity to try it out, but it was late and I was pretty tired (see, just like real sex *lol*). I’d be keen to play another game with this type of mechanic to try it out.
Narrative structure
The final workshop I want to talk about was on narrative structure. As a content larp, De la Bete is quite heavily scripted. There is still player agency and choice, but the characters are written into stories that have a broadly expected arc. Deviating too far from that arc will disrupt the game and lead to unsatisfying play. So the organisers included a workshop on the kind of narrative structure the game was built with. They had cards for each of seven broad story “acts”, with a bit of description about what sort of thing happens in each act. They placed the act cards on the ground at various points along a bit of a trail of “stations” around the park. Then in pairs we were given a random story seed and asked to make up a story based on that seed. We’d walk to each act station and together work out what would happen in our story in that act, then move on to the next one.
We were encouraged to make these stories our characters might have heard before the game started, so they also contributed a bit to world building. But it was great to practice the story building rhythm and exercise the right mental muscles to be able to feel out the acts of the game. It also meant that they could give us some useful tips for play. For example, when you’re in the act where all seems lost and everything is going wrong, try to sit with that feeling for a bit rather than rush to problem solving. Let the solutions come the next morning, but spend the evening playing through the woe. Nominally the larp itself was divided into the same acts, and each was announced with some music playing over speakers. But I was often too far away from the main buildings to really hear the act change music, so relied a lot on this workshop and it’s discussion of what acts we could expect to happen roughly when.
I really liked this workshop, and almost want to run a plot heavy larp just so I can use it.
Next time
That seems like enough for one post. In my next post I’ll write a bit about my character and the specific game elements I saw and really liked. I’ll also talk about some of the things that made it a difficult game for me to play.
