adderslj | Thought For The [Old] Day: The Gathering (Reply)

Once upon a time, when the world was younger and years started with the number '1', I used to spent many of my weekends in a field hitting friends with lumps of latex-wrapped plastic or fibreglass tube. Yes, I was part of the world of live-action roleplay.

In particular, I used to attend an event called The Gathering. This was a huge event, that attracted around 3,000 people to a field near Derby, and it could be great fun. I was also heavily involved in spin-off events that took place throughout the year.

The in early 1999, for reasons beyond the cut, I stopped going.

The end of my association with the Gathering came at the end of a particularly bad period of my life. The year or so before my final event, I'd been busy appearing happy while being deeply miserable inside. My career had stalled, because my attention was diverted elsewhere. My girlfriend of the time had decided tp persuade me that I was mad, so she had a valid, no guilt reason to leave me for another guy. A member of the LRP group I lead was working actively to undermine me so she could take over. I was tired, stressed, unhappy, putting on weight and finding no escape at work, at play or at home. In the end, the shit all went at once. The girlfriend finally left "to spend some time on her own", I quit the group and I dumped LRP as part of a general life cleansing.

It worked. Over the next few months, my career took off, I started getting regular work from White Wolf, I made a new group of friends, shed weight, and developed a friendship with Lorna.

Still, for a while, I was convinced I would go back to LRPing, and that's where this thought process came from.

I always intended to go back, and spent a long time thinking about what character I would play when I did. After all, after five years playing the same guy, I was really looking forward to something different.

Now the Gathering was set in a world called Edreja, which was a sort of bastard mix of D&D and real world mythology. Fair enough. What made it really problematic was the open nature of the events - there was no moderating or control of costumes or characters. So, no matter how hard you and your friends worked to maintain a consistant and realistic tone in your characters, costumes and smaller events, the mood could be destroyed in a second by walking past a Space Marine, fat Xena, Pratchett refugee, incarnation of The Doctor, or time-travelling vampire hunters.

ephraim once describe Edreja as being somewhat like the underside of the plughole through which all the shit of other universes drained.

At the time, I adopted the same coping strategy as the the other "serious" roleplayers I knew: we ignored the extremes of silliness. The group concept was pretty silly to start with, but we made it work by playing the sillier aspects of the concept straight.

I think there's an almost reflexive sense of inferiority in people who are involved in one of the geek hobbies: comics, RPGs, LARPing, sci-fi and the like, that leads them to decry the silly and the childish and champion the adult aspects of what they're doing. Sometime that's healthy. And sometimes it leads to the slow death of that field. The move to make superhero comics serious has slowly throttled any appeal they had to kids, leaving comics a field for the adult hobbyist, for example.

Returning to the point of this post, for a while I just thought about new serious concepts. And then it struck me. Why fight it? If the whole structure of the Gathering made the setting inherently silly, anachronistic and inconsistent, why not embrace it? After all, one man certainly can't swim against the tide. I'd been part of a hundred or so people who were trying to do so, and I'd seen them fail.

Thus, I started thinking about fun concepts. Stuff that was a bit silly, that would be fun to play for a while, but which I wouldn't take to seriously. For a while I toyed with the very worst of English stereotypes, a Terry Thomas type with a deep belief in his superiority to all foreigners and a particularly camp lecherousness. My favourite idea was two 70s detectives transposed into the setting. They would have been dressed in a fantasy equivalent of a Starsky and Hutch fashion, complete with wigs. They would, of course, have run into combat in slow motion. A henchman to make "waka-chicka, waka-chicka, waka-chicka, waka-chicka, waka-chicka" noises during the slow motion running.

These ideas never went any further than my fetid imagination. I never returned to the Gathering. I never returned to the Gathering. In fact, I never returned to LRP. I did learn a lesson, though, and one which I hold dear to this day: just because something can be serious, doesn't meant that it always should be. Comics aren't just for kids anymore - but sometimes they should be. Live roleplay can be an intense, immersive and deep roleplaying - but sometimes just having a laugh in a silly costume is good enough. Let each thing be what it is, and enjoy it for that.

I've no idea what The Gathering is like now. People like

nortysarah are in a much better position to know. In retrospect, though, I'm glad I gave up the struggle to make the event something it wasn't. If I ever return, I will embrace the deep silliness of The Gathering with both hands.