The Five Senses & LARP

We all know the senses by now. We grew up differentiating and categorizing the ways in which we experience this world from a very early age. As such, these senses are paramount to every single thing that we do in our lives. Larp is no exception, and immersion has always been so much more than "what does this world look like". 

I don't like the term “Visual Designer” or “Visual Design Gamerunner” due to the simple fact that sight is only ⅕ of my role. My job is not just to make the things that you see, it is to ensure that while playing in Dystopia Rising SoCal you are in this wasteland world. My hope for you is to be in every sense living and breathing in a world that is different from our own-- that you become so immersed that while over a weekend, you can leave the qualms of the real world behind you. 

If you were to only put those visual cues into our setting, then that would mean that you would hear the everyday traffic sounds, you might smell gourmet cooking, you might feel surfaces that have not known dust for a long time. But this is not the world that we give to you in dystopia rising. Ours is a world that knows dust intimately, that knows the sound of battle and the taste of bile and blood. The separation between these worlds is built on more than just what you see.

A goal of mine, though crawling in its existence, has always been to engage all of the senses. Some of  the biggest of my goals include a deep rumbling base coming from the morgue that makes your heart thrum, the smell of brine and salt inside the mazes that makes you forget that you've ever been inside of that maze before, and to take your outstretched hand into the mass of Delphini eggs, horridly slimy and repulsive to the touch.

A living and breathing world such as this begs for more than just a character costume. El Dorado has always been famous for its setting: a Golden City in the middle of the wastes made from the ruins of old TV sets, with a great crystalline spire looking over the land.  So how do we bring this setting to life inside of our actual play space?

Vision

This is the sense that we are all the most familiar with, and what we talk about when we say to genre your items and gear and camp.  With that in mind the most engaging and most realistic thing that we can do as players and as characters in this play space is to think of the small details as well. What do you drink out of? What do you eat out of? What are some small trinkets that your character owns? What do you actually use to hold your tickets and would that be something readily available in the wasteland? The best tip that I can give for players who want to amp up the visual quality of the game is to not forget the smallest details. Even as staff we've worked hard over this last season specifically to revamp the things that players see. We took back all of the zed garments back when we first came into live game again and dyed them to go away from the stark white that wouldn't make sense for a Zed that has been roaming with the land for who knows how long. We looked at every crafting place and one by one went :how can we improve the looks of this place? We meticulously went through our storage closet and got rid of the things that we thought weren't genre and wouldn't add to the experience. This is a natural thing that all of us larpers do over time, and I think the reasoning for this is because visual inconsistencies tend to be the most obvious and can most easily break that sense that you live in this world. ( I'm looking at you water bottles)

Smell

This is one of my favorite senses to bring up when it comes to LARP because I feel as though it is the one that is most overlooked. Scent can be an extremely powerful tool; it is cited as one of the most powerful things to bring back a memory of a certain time and it is also an indicator of the things that lie around you. Coming around a corner and detecting a smell is almost like having eyes that can peer around places that you wouldn't possibly be able to see. 

There are a few ways that you can incorporate smell into the LARP.

The most obvious is choosing a smell for your particular character. What is the area that they commonly come back to after each trade? What kinds of things do they eat? Is there a job that they have that would make them smell a certain way in the world? One of my favorite examples of this is a character from Bravado, who I know puts on the smell of the flower that blooms and reeks of dead bodies. Every trade. A whiff of this and your nose scrunches up and immediately you want to get away because your body knows that that smell means that something awful is nearby. But is that not a vibe? Perhaps when people meet your character, you want to invoke a certain emotion. Perhaps you want to hint that your character travels a lot by smelling of gasoline, or that you're a very good cook and as such, smell like rosemary and basil. Perhaps you're a Jones, and smell of a damp cave and water on rock.

El Dorado specifically will always smell of dust and a little bit of pepper, and we can even carry some of that when we go and travel to other chapters. At the Tribe of Seasons shrine, the toolbox where we used to put our incense had a small swath of fabric inside. When I would travel, I would take that fabric as something my character could remember home by and even offer to travelers to get some sort of sense of what that specific area smells like. Smell can give a unique glimpse into things that no other sense can convey.

Touch

The human hand contains around 100,000 nerves. Each fingertip has more than 3,000 touch receptors. Some things that you feel can even cause a reaction that happens before you even know about it, also known as a reflex. 

We lovingly call some of our mods splash mods, meaning that at some point you're more than likely to have some foreign material make contact with yourself. Sometimes this can mean fake blood or water. I remember fondly a mod where people had to reach deep with their fist into grave mind pustules filled with thick blood. I remember going to the beach at 10:00 p.m. to gather trash bags full of wet seaweed,  that we would spray every day with water so that when packed inside of a mesh bag filled with water balloons, some unlucky player would go to pick this amalgamation-of-a-delfini's egg up and create a truly disgusting texture/ smell wombo combo.

 So, how  do you bring this in to your everyday larp? Well, we can start from the basics of just yourself. It's important to think about things such as the materials that you use to make your kit. Did your character come from out east in the scorching desert and thus have a thin film of crunch to every fabric and dirt clinging to their armor? Do you have claws that gesture at other people in town whose hands grip onto the arms of people you are trying to save? And what about the very fabric that makes up your clothes? Why did you choose what you chose and what type of textiles would be available for your character to have? 

And then you can move on to things like your camp. Are the fabrics that drape over your tables pristine or do they have rough burns along the edges that tell the story of a fiery escape? Did you cover your tool phys-reps in "rust"-- cinnamon sprayed with matte spray? The trick with touch is intention. These details tell the story. 

Sound

Sound is something that is both used and also unused. We are all well accustomed to the sound of screaming help across the town. The tone of our voices when it comes to sincerity and seriousness versus satire or sabotage is a great tell for what is happening in the world. The way in which you speak or in the way that you fight plays a part to portray this world. In fighting, something that has been touched on for a couple months now in our announcements before “Game On” is to actively roleplay your damage. The reasoning we give is that it acts as an indicator for the person you are fighting to know that you are actively taking your hits.  Meanwhile on the immersion side it also grants us a look into what's going on  with that character  in the moment. If you were truly bleeding out, praying that someone would hear and save you, would you be speaking in a monotone voice? Not quite yelling, not quite begging? Changing the way in which your character is heard in this world has a fundamental impact on the immersion of the game.

Beyond focusing on your character, Dystopia Rising SoCal has been always willing to work with characters to set up areas that have extra sound. Not only that, but even in settings we've strived to add ambience to certain areas. When we can, one of my favorite things to do is to grab the mini speaker to play the far off sounds of a writhing and breathing grave mind in the morgue. One day my goal is to combine both sound and touch to have something that will cause such a deep bass noise that not only will you hear the deep humming but you will also feel it in your toes and in your fingertips and most of all right in your chest.

Sound can even be incorporated into your camping space. We ask that you run audio by the settings or story game runner merely so that we do not have undistorted tracks of music that is commonly recognized, but this aspect of our game can absolutely bring life to your camp. Ambient tracks of hammers in the background or drumming or even setting up a speaker behind the corner to help indicate that you've set up an area populated by hellions or otherwise can all hint towards a world that is rich with detail and life.

Taste

Taste is  often the most overlooked of the senses and LARP. There are many people content with eating canned ravioli and for the most part, things like this are absolutely within the bounds of this world. Preservation is key for people who scrounge remains, after all. But if you are in a position to truly go off the rails, then taste is an added measure to elevate the immersion in your camp. Something that was always very fun to me every month when we would make a shrine meal was thinking about the various foods that my character would have brought from where he came from. I always tried to think of what was readily available to the people at that time. Does your character own a buffalo chicken? Can those buffalo chicken lay eggs? It's kind of cursed if you think about it, but I'm not sure it would be for our characters. I used to only bring foods that I knew were readily available in the desert as I knew that my Rover had come from the East. The opportunity even exists in the mechanics of certain meals. If you want to phys rep a meal a good start would be to look at what goes into it. 

In conclusion…

Making a believable setting and character can sometimes be tough, especially for a LARP that has a changed world. Hopefully, the process can be easier as you think about what they look like, smell like, feel like, sound like….. And taste like? (A Zed wrote this.) 

Be on the lookout for future posts on more tips to genre your kit and camp!