The crew room at Victoriana and four lovely ladies.
This without a double is a massive undertaking. In fact, this challenge alone was the reason why I did very few other challenges in 2011. Essentially the first 9 months of the year were spent planning for the game and the remaining months of the year were spent recovering. I still have boxes in my living room filled with costume, but I’m getting a head of myself aren’t I?
Victoriana is something I’ve been taking about for a long time. Ever since I got into live action roleplay when I was at university I’ve wanted to run a Steampunk game. Steampunk has been my passion for a long time, sadly back then, it was not the mainstream and wonderful movement it is today. Interest was slight and the project was shelved repeatedly whilst we ran other, exciting, more in vogue projects. The Challenge I was set on Ruin Mikey’s Life was a perfect excuse to actually try and put something into action and I ran with it.
Steampunk had developed into something decidedly more appealing to the average larper and it became clear that we had a decent potential for bookings and for a game. I assembled a team of wonderful, wonderful people and must thank Ed, Paul, Dave, Gemma and Adam helping write the plot. Marcus, Geoff and aforementioned plot writers for helping with the Rules. Fairy and Nikki for making costumes, Ant for setting up the website, Scott and Jordan for cooking at the game and countless other people who helped make the concept a reality.
I will not bore you with the details. Trust me when I say that setting up a larp is a time consuming and relatively dull prospect. Suffice to say an amazingly large amount of work went into it. We booked up amazingly quickly for a new game, having filled all of our spaces within the week.
A Maxim gun on a tea trolley.
Costumes were made and props designed. Characters for the players to interact with were written and motivations and story added. Menus were arranged (we had nine meals over the two days) and player backgrounds were combed for interesting plot points to play with. The fun bit happened on September the 2nd 2011 when 50 players and 28 crew got together to play Victoriana Event and if I do say so myself the event was a huge success. It was a mammoth effort but all in all I think everybody enjoyed themselves. In fact, in a fit of pure madness, I’d decided to run a second event in May of 2012. Check out our Website for further details. Better still and as to a testiment for the first game, we booked up event 2 as fast as we booked event 1.
We must be doing something right then.
I actually feel kind of bad writing so little about Victoriana on here seeing as it was such a massive part of my life in 2011, but there is quite positively too much to write about to do it any sort of justice. If you’re interested, we have a forum on the website and the website gets updated regularly. Literally hundreds of man hours were thrown into the game and I hope that this made it special.
Happily I suspect Victoriana is going to continue to be a part of my life for the foreseeable future and armed with only that fact I’m happy I started trying to ruin my life.
