Firefly/Serenity LARP

Most of you should know that I'm a big fan of the shortly-lived television series Firefly and the movie Serenity that followed a few years later. My friends Linda and Good Mandy from the Greenville Browncoats have spent months organizing a weekend long Firefly LARP that took place this weekend at Camp Buckhead in Paris Mountain State Park.

For those of you not familiar with the term, LARP is an acronym for Live Action Roleplaying. Instead of the usual roleplaying game where you sit around a table and use dice to determine success or failure at a LARP you dress up as your character and are in game for most of the weekend.

The game was set in a small town on one of the planets on the rim of the Firefly 'verse. We had set up a judge's/sheriff's office, a restaurant, docks, and a bordello /bar.

My character was Samual Seamus McGee or "Sam the Sham". He is the bartender at Red Annie's, which is the local house of ill repute. Since alcohol is verboden in SC state parks, I served varities of soda with Firefly-esque labels: Tsunami Cola(Coke), Diet Tsunami Cola (Diet Coke), Blue Lotus Soda(Sprite), Wasabi!(Ginger Ale), and Ju!(Diet Sunkist). I also sold coffee, biscotti, and desserts when our kitchen could provide them. When you check into the game, you receive a character packet that has the rules, health coins, your deck of cards (more on this later), and your "cashy money", custom made currency to use to buy drinks and meals, item cards, services at Red Annie's(backrubs, hot towel shaves, and foot washings), and a few miscellaneous things. We also gambled quite a bit, as I ran games of blackjack and Texas Hold 'Em when the bar was slow.

The plot of the game revolved around a missing Alliance ship that supposedly crashed near the town years ago during the war that carried a vast amount of unusual plat coins. It's been a local legend for years, but just now a few of the coins have shown up and all kinds of untrustworthy folk are in town making life more interesting than it generally is. I won't go into all the happenings here, but if you go the this thread at UpstateGeeks.com you'll find more information.

Saturday night we had the annual "Festival of Lanterns" which wrapped up the game with a filk concert and an improptu drinking party in cabin ten. While we didn't have real alcohol in the game areas, many people discretely brought beverages to share in their cabins once the gameplay stopped for the night. I brought an entire cooler full of discrete: 1600 Reposado Tequila(a new thing for me), Old Rasputin Russian Imperial Stout, Maudite Belgian-style Ale, and the surprise hit: lots of mini bottles of various flavors of Smirnoff vodka that were $0.50 each. Next time I'm not going to get a large bottle of liquor, I'll just spend $25 on those mini bottles and get some decent beer. If I did that this time I would have spent about half of what I did on booze.

Anyway, a good time was had by all and Linda might throw another one in 6-9 months.