Barking Mad Productions - LARPs: Masks





LARPs Masks: Super Heroes Have It Damned Tough ... A long time ago at a not very good larp, Craig Trader, Jim MacDougal and Tad Pierson were having a meal, looked at each other and said the immortal words, "We can do better than this." Then a discussion broke out as to what we could write about that would be "better than this." Someone famous once said, "Write what you know about." It was agreed rather quickly that we all knew about comic books and Super Heroes and that we could write a larp about that. It was decided we would need a few things: more people to help spread the blame...er, work around, some plot lines and a catchy name for the group. We managed to find some ~~victims~~ volunteers rather quickly, who helped come up with plot lines. The group name was decided relatively quickly too: Barking Mad Productions, Barking Mad being a polite British phrase for crazy, and you have to be crazy to write and run larps. Ask us some time for our writing road trip stories: Craig lived in NJ at the time, Jim, Tad and Fast Eddie in VA, and Kevin and Art were in Philly. Many trips were made to Craig's apartment in NJ for writing and brainstorming sessions. The result was MASKS: Super Heroes Have It Damned Tough. Well, after a year of writing we were (almost) ready to face the world with our game. But where to run it? At this point Frank Ney had joined our merry band of cutthroats and he suggested we contact Irv Koch while we were at Balticon. Irv was thinking about running WeaponsCon and needed a larp to be a draw for his convention. We met with Irv at Balticon and Irv decided to throw himself upon the grenade and run WeaponsCon, thus providing us with a venue for our larp. Now we had a definite venue and date, so we started advertising. And badgering our friends to play. And advertising more. And threatening our friends... 8-) I would like to brag a little bit at this time... We were one of the first larp groups to promise to mail the complete character packet to all pre-registered players. We did not meet our target deadline of four weeks prior to the game, but we did get them out three weeks prior. This has always been a pet peeve of mine and I wish more groups would take the time to do it. There is nothing worse than arriving at a hotel at 8 PM on a Friday, after having worked eight hours and driven three hours, and being handed 55 pages of material to read and absorb. Being our first larp we made some mistakes, big and small, but overall the game went rather well. Dates: *Masks 1:* WeaponsCon IV, Towson, MD - October 1990 *Masks 2:* Washington University, St. Louis, MO - February 1991 *Masks 3:* ICon, Long Island, NY - May 1991 Masks 4:* Sterling, VA Return to LARPs For more information, contact us.
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