A long article--and not even all of it...It’s been a while since I talked about designing a steampunk world, so now I’ll go into a little more detail by examining creating a player character for such a setting. Like any fiction, a game can be designed either from the world down or from the character up—in other words, you can base your story on either how the world shapes people, or how people shape their world. This article looks at the second perspective

WHAT I THINK LARPING IS

Let’s start by looking at live-action roleplaying—LARP—and what I think it is.

LARP: A costume party of adults playing pretend, in order to simulate fictional worlds according to pop cultural images of those worlds—sometimes with real research, genuine acting/art, and “production values” in place. The story portrayed by a LARP is freeform and episodic, either a single stand-alone slice of life gathering or a series of gatherings forming a serialized narrative. The story may be coherent or incoherent, either imitating a solid piece of fiction (with beginning, middle and end, etc.) or simply reporting a series of events and actions that “just kind of happened.” Always bet on the latter, by the way.

We frame ideas in ways we find comfortable. People often compare the human mind to a computer, which is a pretty bad model for how the mind works. Similarly, the LARP is KIND OF like an immersive, interactive, improvisational theater in the round. But only “kind of.” We could also liken LARP to movies and TV, with television programs a very strong model, due to LARP’s serialized nature. But LARP really only borrows from these fictional narratives, and much more strongly resembles childhood “make believe” games.

Theoretically, all any LARP needs are enthusiastic, moderately capable people with a sense of fun, sociability and good sportsmanship—and a reasonably large controlled space that is comfortable and convenient to play in. It’s nice if you play in a space that really looks like the game’s setting, and do so with authentic-looking props and costumes, and that’s certainly the goal to pursue. But none of that is really necessary. ALL roleplaying takes place primarily in the imagination, whether it’s “tabletop/paper and pencil/sitdown” (verbal description/response) gaming or “live-action” (limited play-acting) gaming. The limitations of reality are moot for people agreeing to roleplay together, so long as all parties suspend disbelief.

In order to participate in a LARP—and a good LARP only has participants, no audiences—you need a character to play. This lengthy (probably much too lengthy) article addresses the design of such a character.


A FEW NOTES ABOUT LARPING AND HOW TO DO IT

Actual weapons are a bad idea in play. This includes real full-contact hand-to-hand combat. If you disagree, I don’t care.

Padded toy weapons (“boffer” weapons) or paintball are a fun and athletic idea for play. And if you want to limit players to only being able to do what they can really physically do, thereby holding back their imaginations and denying the less physical players the chance to play some roles, then feel free. It will create athletic leagues of a sort within your game… so enjoy yourself. It’s not even remotely “realistic,” it’s just a different kind of fun which limits storytelling.

For my part, I eschew either option. I find both clumsy and inelegant for my purposes, and potentially dangerous to different degrees. Your game may work better with these things in place, but that’s your business.



GENERAL PRINCIPLES OF CHARACTER DESIGN

The first principle of character generation is how the character is a part of your imagination. The second is how the character is a part of the shared imagination—the narrative, or game-world.

In the case of the Steampunk LARP I’m designing, I’m trying a somewhat novel approach: I’m allowing player character (PC) design to shape how the world around them is designed.

The process of character generation is deceptively simple. Decide what you think would be fun to play in the genre, make up a character that would do and be those things, and then play them.

If you’ve got Steampunk costume and prop pieces, then you might seriously consider laying out a costume and props first—and then designing a character to match them!


GIVE YOUR CHARACTER THE SKELETON OF A PERSONALITY.
While it pays to give your PC as well-rounded a personality as possible, to ease improvisation when you interact with other people’s characters (“I KNOW how my character would react to that!”), you should try to choose notes of personality and emotion that define your play for a given session. What is your character’s situation as you arrive at the game session? (“I arrive depressed about the murder of my partner… because I did it…”) Let your interaction with other characters change how your character feels and behaves, maybe even changing them permanently in significant ways, but begin the game with some broad strokes of characterization in place. Additionally, it pays to have a character you can sum up in a single sentence—“Doctor Leonard ‘Bones’ McCoy is the irascible but deeply caring chief physician aboard the starship Enterprise”—so that you can make them memorable and consistent from game to game.

GIVE YOUR CHARACTER SHORT-TERM AND LONG-TERM GOALS.
Roleplaying is not about winning. The closest you really get to winning is through having personal goals to achieve in a given game session, or over the course of a multi-part story. However, this is a useful tool for roleplaying, because it provides structure for your experience of the game and a clearer picture of what your character thinks, feels and wants.

CONNECT YOUR CHARACTER WITH OTHER CHARACTERS.
Ultimately, roleplaying is about interacting with other people who are also in the game. Give reasons for their characters to interact with yours. Even if you don’t know what other people will play, you can leave open-ended “plot hooks” in your character design to connect with other people’s characters—“I have lost my elixir of immortality, and it was stolen by (INSERT PC NAME HERE)” is an example of how you might do this.

PUT YOUR CHARACTER IN DANGEROUS SITUATIONS.
Roleplaying is not about keeping your character safe. Safe characters do nothing, see nothing, and don’t change. Adventurous characters do and see things that hold some degree of risk for them (physically, mentally, etc.)—and they change in some way and to some degree by the end of any given session of play.

GIVE YOUR CHARACTER WEAKNESSES, FLAWS AND LIMITATIONS.
All-powerful or invulnerable characters, similarly, are acceptable plot devices in small doses, but they’re poor choices for play because they overshadow all other PCs, obviate plot complications, and afford too little opportunity for drama, adventure, comedy or tragedy in the game.

DECIDE ON AN OVERALL TONE FOR YOUR CHARACTER
Characters have a tone, like the world around them: Tragic, comic, adventurous, grim, romantic, dramatic, etc.—they need a tone, and it should mix well with their setting. (Not necessarily in a harmonious way, however. They can be a note of dissonance in their world, or a counterpoint to it. But they should still be a part of their world, nevertheless. A character that is an American naval officer can hve a great deal in common with Forester’s Captain Hornblower, for example, but in a WWII setting it would need to be mainly a “spiritual resemblance.”

AVOID ACCEPTING LIMITATIONS ON YOUR IMAGINATION.
All roleplaying is playing pretend. You can be ANYTHING you can imagine—if others around you can also imagine it. This is a sort of social contract between you and your fellow players: If you think an idea will take them out of the mood, or annoy them, etc., you might want to reconsider it. But on the other hand, if you’re inclined to play something other than your own basic physical type and those around you can exercise their imaginations sufficiently, you may create a character of any age, sex, ethnic group, etc.

BUT BE A PART OF YOUR WORLD.
Genre is formula. It may be a very broad formula, but it is formula. Setting is also formula, broad or narrow. To play in a Victorian setting, even the Wild West, you must behave as you imagine Victorians behaved… and not necessarily as they actually DID behave. The goal is to convey a feeling, not slavishly reenact history with questionable degrees of success. For example, Victorian middle-class Englishmen almost certainly spoke much more like modern Americans do in lots of ways—using contractions, swearing if circumstances permitted or required, using slang (some of it surviving to this day). But saying “it is” instead of “it’s,” never swearing, and only jolly well using Victorian slang all FEEL more like a Victorian to us today. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend, and when fictional Victorians are your model, roleplay a fictional Victorian rather than the likelier reality.

THINK TWICE ABOUT BEING THE OUTSIDER IN THE STORY.
Some gaming groups are full of people who just HAVE to always play the “dark and mysterious stranger,” the “bad girl who does everybody wrong,” etc. But if every PC is a pariah or a maverick, then

a) No one represents a social norm in your story, which means
b) Your social norm is boring, restrictive, distasteful, etc.

A setting in which it is not only advantageous to your character but enjoyable to you as a player to be a part of society is a good choice for game design.

EMBRACE ARCHETYPES AND STEREOTYPES AS CHARACTER SHORTHAND.
Play the type to get the point across, as long as you keep it tasteful. This is one of the distinctions between roleplaying and real acting. A good actor would usually attempt a more naturalistic, understated portrayal of a carefully researched person. In a LARP, players take on sometimes over-the-top mannerisms and appearances to telegraph what their character is to everyone. Playing any nationality, for example, is to embody its stereotypes to some degree. Even if you’re actually British, you aren’t a Victorian, and there’s nothing quite so “British” as our modern idea of a Victorian Brit. Likewise, an American portraying a cowboy, riverboat gambler, New York captain of industry, or whatever, is going to be a bit more “regionally American” than usual in their portrayal (even if they really come from the region in question). LARP playing is to acting as musical theater makeup is to everyday cosmetics—it’s designed to highlight ideas so that “the folks in the back row can get it.”


SYSTEM CONSIDERATIONS

Actually, I’m not going to waste your time with a tedious discussion of the description of a PC in system terms. LARP game systems are designed to simulate how characters physically interact with each other and with their environments, in one way or another. Setting up a character within a system is really only a question of assigning values to their attributes and abilities. That kind of nuts and bolts will vary from game to game. Generally speaking, that system is best which is simplest, least intrusive, and most greatly promotes creativity and fun. Hopefully, you’ll get the opportunity to design your PC within such a system.


WHAT I THINK STEAMPUNK IS

Definitions of genre are hazardous, mutable, and limiting. But in general, I think of Steampunk as fantasy—not science fiction. This is a somewhat controversial position, but considered in these terms, you may disagree less than you’d think:

Fantasy is a literature of the supernatural, in which some form of supernatural component of the universe is openly understood to exist, to some degree or another. Magic, fabulous creatures, etc., are all known or suspected to actually exist in the setting. Ultimately, the point of fantasy is that it contravenes what we positively understand of the nature of the real life.

Science fiction is a genre based on reasonable extrapolations of what is currently believed is possible. SF eventually goes out of date as speculation is overtaken by real discoveries, but its intent is as important as its success. Jules Verne’s works offer many wonderful elements to Steampunk, but Verne did not write Steampunk. He wrote science fiction, much of it later made obsolete by real-world discovery and invention, but it was honest speculation and not romanticism.

Horror is a genre of tone and emotional reaction, but I think of it as being the dark side of fantasy and science fiction. Horror needs a fantastic element (which disallows slashers and torture porn), but it takes the fantastic down the path you hope it will not go and gives it the shape you fear it might.

Steampunk is a romantic subgenre that usually postulates a world in which technology functions in ways that we know are impossible, and in which societies form and shape themselves in ways that are fanciful or terrible, but rarely truly parallel actual history. The very idea of an armored zeppelin with steam-driven propellers is both beautiful and utterly impossible at the same time… and is no more probable than fairies dancing in a meadow or knights pursuing dragons (both of which were ideas beloved by Victorians, by the way). Steampunk is fantasy.

A QUALIFIER: A Steampunk world in which only a few changes occur, shifting it away from our real-world history in ways that actual science and engineering and social observation support as realistic (whatever that means)—such a world is science fictional in nature. But how often do we see that in fiction? People would rather have electric lightning cannons, steam-driven robots, and so forth.


THE CHARACTER AND THE WORLD IN BROAD TERMS

As with the article on worlds, I think it’s useful to begin with the real world as we know it, more or less. The 19th century is a very broad topic, and even if we limit it to the early to late Victorian era, that’s still about 63 years of a culture that was very much in upheaval. We like to think of Victorians in terms of propriety, stability and certainty. But consider that they are the heirs of power in a European and American cultural continuum that had been extremely improper, unstable and uncertain. Their mothers and fathers and grandparents fought the bloody Napoleonic wars and romped through the varying degrees of decadence that we associate with the Regency—literary artifacts of that time may include the very acceptable Jane Austen, but they also include the rebellious Romantics, the suppressed volumes of De Sade (albeit mainly after his death), Tom Jones, Fanny Hill, and so forth. The Victorians expressed a massive cultural pendulum swing against the world of the Enlightenment and of libertinage—they wanted industry, “muscular Christianity,” applied reason and sound living. No more gentlemen prancing about in skin-tight pantaloons, or ladies with huge powdered wigs and beauty marks.

Their parents and grandparents probably thought they were a bunch of boring prigs and drips…

The Victorian mindset can’t be comprehensively encapsulated by anyone, for the same reasons that Barbara Tuchman outlines in her book, _A Distant Mirror_: Every century is a patchwork of cultures and ideas that is bewilderingly varied. In our world, there are places and peoples that we would consider medieval or tribal in their outlook, yet it’s still the 21st century to us. And how different is the 21st century zeitgeist from the 20th century’s? Not as different as night and day, but there are a few changes. Many of them are changes that have happened in the minds of people whose lives bridge the two centuries/millennia, actually. It’s sort of like looking back at clean, bright-smiling propaganda films from the Second World War… that were made by people who were snorting cocaine and drinking rotgut gin with bra-less anorexic flappers in the 1920s. Or perhaps thinking of the millions of people who made SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER a box-office smash in 1977, and then turned around and chanted “disco sucks” in 1979. You can call it reform, or hypocrisy, or whatever you like, but people change with their culture in a way that almost resembles the changes of seasons in the plant world.

For Victorians, it was time to “be Victorian”—however each individual and their culture defined the term.

For our purposes, we’ll stereotype the Victorians in a broad, international way, and say that they thought and felt certain things as a culture—or meta-culture—that may have only been given lip service, or been official policies, but might have not really had roots in their hearts and souls. Or perhaps they did. The Victorians showed they were willing, whether imperial power or colonized victim, to die in their thousands for great causes. No one can say that the generations who lived in Queen Victoria’s long, long reign lacked backbone or determination.


GENERAL QUALITIES OF A CHARACTER
A Victorian/Edwardian character should be broadly defined in terms of these attributes:

Their nationality—issues of race as we understand them were parsed more finely than in the 21st century: Quite simply, a white person is not the same as another white person, if one is an Irishman and another is an Englishman, and so forth. This is true of non-Europeans as well, including tribal peoples. In the Victorian world, one might have a prejudice regarding all people of other skin tones, but even within one’s own “race” there would be significant distinctions. A roleplaying game should deemphasize the issues of prejudice that would arise, for obvious reasons, but national character and the benefits of living in one nation rather than another would be telling. (There’s a big difference between living in Austria and living in the Australian outback if you want to be a Victorian engineer.)

Their social reputation—how they are regarded by members of their own social class, their betters and their inferiors, for their family standing and for their own actions and achievements

Their financial standing—it’s a time of upward mobility and potential advancement, per Horace Greeley. Money matters as much as social reputation in many places, and it can buy reputation in some, as well.

Their religious position—interreligious prejudices are similarly as fine-grained national biases in the Victorian era, but the mighty club of Darwin has begin to crush the faith out of many people in the Western world. In retrospect, it seems silly to contemplate abandoning one’s religion simply because of a new scientific understanding of what could otherwise be called a miracle—the development of intelligent, tool-using life—but to many Victorians it shattered faith in a sensible universe. Many were left openly or privately stewing over a godless universe where “ignorant armies clash by night,” as Matthew Arnold put it. Those who retained their faith were certainly the majority, but their greatest thinkers were troubled, and the rank and file were concerned with religion as a definition of who you were… even more than it was a definition of what life meant.

Their marital status—old ideas about the ubiquity and automatic nature of marriage were not dead by a very, very long shot. Single men were not chosen for positions of great authority (despite the disastrous Buchanan presidency of 1857-1861, leading straight into the American Civil War) and single women were essentially regarded as social failures and misfits if they were over a certain age.

The elements of the fantastic found in their background, abilities and situation—it would hardly be a steampunk game without appropriate fantastic qualities in both the characters and their world. From Tesla-like electrical inventions to zeppelin pirates, chemically induced monstrosities to surgically created lifeforms, clunky automatons to table-rapping spiritualists, the Victorian imagination opens great vistas for character generation. Because the fantastic nature of my Steampunk game is intended to reflect the players’ choices made during character creation, this is especially important. If no one chooses a time traveler or a ghost-catcher or a wanderer in dreamworlds, then the fantastic element will be much more conservative than it might otherwise be. The players shape the game in many ways, and this is a crucial one.

[TO BE CONTINUED SOON…]

Tags: larp, player character, steampunk