You’re out for a walk in Hog’s Back Park on a glorious Sunday afternoon.
The birds are chirping, children frolic in the playground, and in the fields, two opposing armies in full combat gear charge at each other shouting battle cries and brandishing foam weapons. Strange as it may seem, this sight isn’t at all foreign to Hog’s Back Park. The Kingdom of Felfrost appears there, every Sunday at 1 p.m, as it has for five years. Don’t be too alarmed.
Welcome to the world of live action role-playing.
What is LARP?
Live action role-playing (LARP), or “larping” as players call it, is an interactive game in which the participants take on a character that fits into the rules and laws of a specific fictional world.
“We’re not doing re-enactments,” says Ken Walker, a Felfrost larper.
“There’s a lot of things you’ll see on TV, where people are re-enacting the war of 1812 or they’re re-enacting some battle, they’re dressing up exactly in period garb . . . that’s not what we’re doing.”
Video produced by Fraser Tripp and Oliver Sachgau.
Video reporting by Clarissa Fortin and Oliver Sachgau.
The Felfrost Amtgard Barony is described on its pamphlet as a live action fantasy role-playing game featuring “combat with foam boffer weapons, magic, battlegames, and quests.”
Matthew Bean, who goes by the name Ozark Blackwolf in the world of Felfrost, is a committed veteran.
“I started playing six years ago. I was playing with a D&D [Dungeons and Dragons] group who wanted to start playing by the rules . . . we started a park in Toronto called Twilight Peak,” he says.
“When I moved out here for school, going to Carleton for electrical engineering, I started a park here, because I didn’t want to stop playing . . . that was five years ago.”
Bean explains that Felfrost is an Amtgard game.
This means it follows a distinct set of rules that many other larping groups also follow.
“Every other [Amtgard] park plays by the same rules,” he says.
“So anywhere you go as far south as New Mexico and as far west as California, all play by the same rulebook.”
The varieties
There are different styles of play, according to Bean. “Most games we do are either ditching, which is just the basic combat mechanic for practicing fighting, or there’s a type of game called a battlegame where we use all the magic, all the armour, all the arrows, everything . . . there’s also quests where we try to act out different roles, save the princess, fight the dragon, all that very typical Dungeons and Dragons stuff.”
The weapons used are made by the players themselves, often out of broken golf clubs and Styrofoam.
“It’s mostly pool noodle,” Walker says of the various pieces of battle gear.
“They’re pretty light.”
Safety measures are important within the games, as are rules. To an outsider, a battlegame, with foam arrows being shot and participants throwing spells at each other, might seem like utter chaos. However, Walker’s son Shane, who also participates in the games, insists this is not the case. Within a standard battle the points gained and lost depend on the amount of armor a player wears, and the hits they take, he explains. “If you’re wearing armor you can ignore certain amounts of hits,” he says.
The Amtgard style isn’t the only form of LARP played, and certainly not the only style played in Ottawa. Many LARPs also focus heavily on the role-playing aspect to determine hierarchy and advance the plot.
Olivier Martin, the creator and organizer of Fallen Kingdom, another Ottawa-based LARP explains that his game is “RP- heavy,” involving 24-hour camping trips and elaborate costuming.
“The stories are very much based on the people that are coming to the games, and what kind of characters they have. It’s the players writing the story for themselves,” he says.
One begins in the world of Fallen Kingdom, much like any other LARP — by creating a character.
“You create a character and with that character you get to pick your job as an adventurer,” Martin says.
“From that point on you are basically just thrown into the story and you’re allowed to decide what happens to your character depending on what abilities you have.”
The rules
However, while the game does “thrive on chaos” as Martin says, much like Amtgard, there are rules that must be followed, surrounding the way spells are cast and blows are dealt.
Many of these rules are role-play driven and emphasize the need for a semblance of reality within the world of the LARP.
“Our combat rules are fairly simple,” Martin says. “You pull your blows -—safety is paramount . . . [but] we do full swings. You have to make sure your swings have the semblance of full body weight behind them or it doesn’t count for damage.”
Similarly he says, a spell must be cast “with grand gestures, as if you were actually casting something” in order for it to take effect.
Some participants, such as Martin himself play the part of storytellers, who he describes as “referees for the game,” whose function is to provide a safe space in which players can act.
While Amtgard has a focus on battlegames and Fallen Kingdom leans heavily on role-play, the previously running vampire LARP, Ottawa By Night, depended greatly on a hierarchy, described playfully in its pamphlet, as “unfair, inflexible, unforgiving and deadly.”
Helene Devost, who partly ran Ottawa By Night, explains in an email that the hierarchy of the game was a part of the characters.
“It was tied to positions and something called ‘status’ which is a measure of the characters’ ‘street cred’ amongst vampires . . . characters could gain and lose status based on their actions and those of others,” she says.
Ottawa by Night, like Felfrost and Fallen Kingdom was a long-term game, played once every two weeks.
Devost goes on to explain that not all types of larping are long-term like this. The game Le Fantôme De Vérité she says was a one-shot game, taking about 30 hours, based on the works of H.P Lovecraft.
Characters were randomly assigned to play a very short game.
“The game took place in a fictional hospital in France and players took on the roles of the people there,” she says. “The hierarchy was mostly based on what kind of character you ended up with.”
Why LARP?
What is the attraction of this unconventional hobby? Felfrost participant Katie Dean has a very simple answer.
“It’s fun,” she says. “As long as you can get past the fact that it’s pretty geeky, and it can be a little silly, you’re meeting tons of people, you’re being active, trying something new . . . you can learn so many different life skills.”
Dean, who is an employee at David’s Tea during the week, goes to Hog’s Back every Sunday to take on the role of the newly-knighted Diana Starfall.
“It reminds me of my theatre days,” she says about playing a character.
“You get to act, you get to take on a personality type and maybe get out some issues you have in everyday life . . . if you’re really stressed you can play a hilariously fun character and just have a day to laugh.”
She also says that she enjoys the international Felfrost community. “I’ve been to California and New York . . . playing with different groups and making friends all over the country.”
For everybody else
When asked for an opinion on what non-larpers should know about larping, the responses from participants are quite similar. Many talk about its undeniable whimsy and escapism.
Felfrost’s Roger Pitre, who runs larping groups in Sudbury and Toronto, says that larpers are all normal people.
“It’s like all the make-believe games you played as a kid,” he says.
“No matter who you are or what you do in regular life you can come out and be equal on the playing field. What’s most important is everyone has a good time.”
Bean says he hopes those who don’t know much about this pastime keep an open mind.
“There’s a group of people here, sometimes as many as 50 at a time, every week, just having fun.”
It’s hard to argue with him there — especially if you’re lucky enough to catch sight of the citizens of Felfrost, battling together on a glorious Sunday afternoon.
