Buckaroo Banzai Larp

I. Intro

I loved the movie. I loved the book. I loved the fanzines I read. I stole from them all for CthulhuPunk.

The larp was a blast. I wish the GMs had videotaped it. I'm sure most people who didn't play in the game would have found the hypothetical tape boring, but that's okay. We didn't do it for an outside audience.

Gregory Nagler was the GM. Several people showed up with generics. While the game had been sold out, there were enough no-shows to get many, though not all, of the generics a role in the game, including Patrick Smith, who was rooming with us. Josh wasn't in this game, as he had a Shadowfist tournament.

The game was set 2 years after the movie. Buckaroo had apparently died testing a rocket, and the game was set at his funeral.

II. Casting

There were 25 players and 25 roles, casting done on the spot.

GM: Okay, who wants to be Penny Banzai?

After a brief pause, I raised my hand. Penny's a fairly easy role, and I was pretty clear on what I'd be doing.

Greg ran down the rest of the cast list in order. We all had a copy of it, and each role had a brief description. This was one of many things right about the game.

Patrick wanted someone into zen, IIRC, and he played Bobby Spriggs, the director of the hippest funeral home on the East Coast.

When 2 or more people raised their hand for a role, a decision was made quickly, if not solemnly. Fr'ex, 2 men volunteered to play a Russian diplomat. The GM asked for their qualifications.

Player 1 (demonstrating): I have phony Russian accent.

Player 2: Give it to him -- his Russian accent is better than mine.

Three people volunteered to play New Jersey.

GM: Are any of you actually -from- New Jersey?

Player: I visited Atlantic City once.

GM: That's not good enough!

Fortunately, there's always rock-paper-scissors to break deadlocks.

Not all roles were equally in demand.

GM: 3 of you want to play a Lectroid, and no one wants to play an astronaut?

Still, as the GM pointed out, there were 25 roles and 25 players, and all roles were going to be filled. And they all were, right down to the government bean counter, handed to a man who never volunteered for a role, saying that the GM should just give him whatever was left.

III. The Game

No description could do this justice. Everyone was spot on, and with one exception, everyone had seen the movie multiple times. We all loved it, which, after all, is why we were playing. This was one of the few larps that did not have me thinking it ran longer than absolutely necessary.

In the background, music from the movie played constantly. Background music has never worked for me in table top games, but both here and in the Circus of the Spectacular larp I played in, where circus music played in the background, it worked surprisingly well.

Buckaroo Banzai had apparently died in a rocket accident, and everyone was at his funeral, including a Russian who asked one of his aids, "Who is this Buckaroo Banzai?" He was played by the one person who had never seen the movie, and he had added the ignorance of Banzai to the character. It worked well, fitting the quirky mood of the game.

As his widow, Penny Banzai, I just knew my husband wasn't dead. After all, Buckaroo just wasn't the dying type. And I stuck to this, despite the urgings of various Hong Kong Cavaliers to let go.

Patrick had a lot of fun as Bobby Spriggs, telling people to go with their feelings, and urging Penny to let her grief out. He also got agitated when folks knocked over the hors d'oerves. I gather this led to a brief consultation about whether Hot Pockets existed in the late 1980s, when the game was set.

Georgiana Albrecht, medium, confirmed that Buckaroo's ashes were not in the box. This, of course, proved nothing, as the box just held some random wreckage. The government bean counter noted that if Buckaroo were not dead, the funeral and other expenses should not be paid for with tax payer dollars.

We did an analysis of the contents of the box, without opening it, as it was a puzzle box. I simulated this by arranging styrofoam cups in odd patterns around and on top of the box, while folks urged me to be careful with the delicate equipment. The GMs found this hilarious.

Later, some of the Red Lectroids who had assimilated into human culture after the events of the movie decided to try to rescue Buckaroo from where he had to be, the Eighth Dimension. This was also where the city of Washington DC was, as the Russian had used an Infernal Device to send it there. The player did an excellent job of being a campy Cold War villain. The Lectroid players did a great job of playing Lectroids and arranging chairs covered with styrofoam cups to represent their machine.

One of the Lectroids balanced more of the cups on and around his glasses.

Greg (to one of his fellow GMs): One of my players is in ecstasy because he gets to put cups on his face. Do I attract this sort of thing?

Various hijinks ensued, including a tense scene where a grenade was let loose, but ultimately thrown out the window, far away, by Perfect Tommy, who did not even singe his clothes. Really -- we were using a card system, and he had excellent cards.

The psychic Georgiana found the box supposedly containing Buckaroo's ashes when it went missing. She also talked to the spirit of the Russian, who had been killed in the fracas involving the grenade, asking him where the code to prevent World War III was.

Player of Russian: Do I have to tell the truth?

GM: Nope.

He whispered the false answer to Georgiana's player, who then did a wonderful, over the top performance of the horrified psychic's reaction. For, one of the Russian's aids had been captured, and had then defected, and the Russian, in revenge, said the codes were in the defector's rectum.

Early on in the game, a note was discovered. It said, "There will be blood." No one knew who wrote it. To my surprise, this seemed to include one of the assistant GMs, who asked me if I had written it.

We were to learn the full story later, but at the time, New Jersey went to great lengths to get everyone's finger prints in an attempt to learn who had written the note. Someone hit on the idea of carrying a memorial plaque to everyone to touch. This worked -- Bobby Spriggs was delighted, and, IIRC, even the Russian, alive at the time, touched it.

Later, box retrieved, New Jersey tried to open it and was poisoned by a needle trap. Mrs. Johnson tapped the box exactly where the needle was, and she was poisoned as well. Somehow, we managed to revive New Jersey before he died, and he revived Mrs. Johnson.

At this point, Buckaroo arrived. You knew he wasn't really dead, right? He was being played by the guy who played the Russian, the one person who had never seen the movie. And he was great. Somehow, he got the body language and the quirky dialogue exactly right.

Buckaroo (mixing up an antitoxin for Mrs. Johnson and New Jersey): Get me oregano and windshield fluid.

In short order, Buckaroo had defused mounting tensions between Russia and the USA, ensuring there would be no World War III.

Then, Pecos, one of the Hong Kong Cavaliers, tried to shoot Buckaroo. She was gunned down, but she turned out to have been brainwashed by none other than Hanoi Xan, who was disguised as -- the government bean counter! He now revealed himself, and his other brainwashed minions opened fire.

At this point, the good guys were mowed down like so much grass. While they took the minions with them, Peggy Banzai was left facing Xan herself, with only her cute derringer. Unsurprisingly, she died, as did half of the Hong Kong Cavaliers. Afterwards, the guy playing Banzai noted that, despite having the ability to draw many cards for most abilities that would come up in the game, he had lousy luck with which cards he drew.

GM: So, Hanoi Xan, Buckaroo is unconscious. You've killed two of his wives and most of his friends. Do you want to kill him or do you want to let him live the rest of his miserable life knowing that he couldn't save the people closest to him?

Xan: I want to put him in an inescapable death trap, of course!

We agreed that this was a good answer, and there, the game ended.

IV. Post Game Wrap: What Happened

Greg noted the irony that the character assigned last was Xan in disguise. He also explained about one of the Lectroid's evil plans which resulted in said Lectroid becoming John Whorfin, at which point, the player took the microphone and did a good imitation of Whorfin-as-played-by-John Lithgow, explaining his evil plans and why they had worked.

It seems that, when the Lectroids created their Device to bring Washington back from the Eighth Dimension, Perfect Tommy installed a filter and turned it to the setting to screen out Lectroids, so that no Lectroids would come back to our dimension. And he had thoughtfully labeled the Lectroids Out position on the filter. The Lectroids thanked him for this, and turned the filter the other way.

Somehow or other, on its return to this dimension, Washington DC had landed on one of the Lectroids and on Ron, killing them both.

GM: That's the first time any of the PCs in any larp I ran died because a city fell on them.

Ron was actually a Black Lectroid with two advantages: He could not be detected by normal methods of detecting Lectroids, and, through intense psychological conditioning, had trained himself to answer to "Ron", instead of "John".

Georgiana's player said that the psychic had learned to do the crazy bug-eyed stuff because no one listened to her when she showed up in a 3 piece suit. I looked at the character sheet later, and this looks like something the player introduced. It worked well, I gather, as New Jersey, a total skeptic about psychic stuff, did a mental double take when she dropped the mask and yelled at him like a proper New Yorker would.

The player of the aid to the Russian lunatic said that he had tried to defect, but had, unfortunately, tried to defect to someone who was actually a Russian mole. Oops.

Some of the Hong Kong Cavaliers had already figured out that Buckaroo had wound up in the Eighth Dimension when his rocket had exploded.

Me: Hey, you guys never told me!

Player: The wife's always the last to know.

There was one mystery that had all of us baffled.

Player: So, Mr. GM, who -did- write the note "There will be blood" that New Jersey spent so much game time fingerprinting everyone to figure out who wrote it?

GM: Um, well, it was left over from the earlier Buffy larp, but by the time someone asked us about it, too many people had seen it. So, we decided it was officially in game.

And one final question:

Player of Russian and Banzai: Could someone tell me just one thing? What's a Lectroid?

(general hilarity ensues)

GM: Oh -- I left that out of my five minute summary.

V. Lectroid Dialogue

During the game, Penny was, um, sort of propositioned by one of the anti-human Lectroids, who very much regretted not having been there to see her getting tortured during the events of the movie. But, if she ever wanted to do that again, he urged her to give him a call.

Then, we discussed batteries. The Lectroids liked to eat 9 volts.

Penny: You know about the little batteries? The ones in watches?

Lectroid: Oh, those are great! You can keep one between your tongue and the wall of your mouth and suck on it for hours.

Penny: Kind of like a life saver?

Lectroid: Literally.

After the game, the Lectroids were delighted by Xan's actions.

Lectroid 1: Hey, Xan! You my all time favorite Monkey Boy!

Lectroid 2: But how we going to thank him?

Lectroid 1: Don't worry. We'll go to Hanoi. How many Xans could there be?

VI. Post Game Wrap: Larp Construction

This was the first run of the larp, although Greg has run others, including, according to my notes, a Star Wars larp called The Last King. He noted that, in creating the Buckaroo Banzai larp, the biggest problem was Buckaroo Banzai.

Greg: I mean, how can you have a plot with that guy? Buckaroo solves this. Buckaroo fixes that. Buckaroo saves this. Buckaroo should be dead! And then, I thought, "Hey! Buckaroo should be dead!"

Greg was kind enough to give me a packet with the characters and the GM notes. I have not gone over the character sheets with a fine toothed comb yet, but on a first read through, I noted that one minor plot thread I was sure would be thoroughly obscure might actually have gotten resolved. The information was out there. The only thing that seems to have gotten a bit lost is a bit of Perfect Tommy's background which is on his sheet, but does not appear on the character sheet of the other PC who should know it.

Greg also recommended a larp by Dave Collins, called Courting Murder, and he gave me some advice on running larps.

1. The last draft of a larp should be written by -one- person. This was the main piece of advice I took home with me. It makes a great deal of sense, but I had never thought about it before.

2. All the GMs should have everything they need. This includes all the character sheets, the synopsis, cheat sheets, faqs, and answers to anticipated questions.

3. Crib notes -- disseminating information in game. Short larps can avoid this issue. But there should be a central person, a key GM whose job it is to talk to the other GMs.

4. Keep the action moving. Stay positive and energetic. This doesn't just mean putting in miscellaneous activities. It can also mean giving stumped or stalled players a random clue.

5. When writing character sheets, attempt to give a character more things to try to do than can possibly be done within the space of the game. This is one I'd already figured out, but that makes it none the less true.

6. Usually, you want a 50-50 villain to hero ration, give or take.

7. Every single character needs to be interesting somehow. This is another one I'd figured out. Every character has to be a protagonist, although not all of the characters are protagonists in the same kind of novel, even though they are all in the same larp.

8. Remember that you have no control once the curtain goes up. All the preparation you do before the game is 50% of the game -- no more.

9. There is a large luck factor, especially for convention larps.

10. Player handouts and a cast list are important. These let people interact in their given roles. Focus on them. Don't worry about spelling mistakes.

The hardest thing for Greg to write was the one page introduction, with the background material. He explained to me that typos don't matter for that, and that he'd made the mistake of showing it to an English major friend of his. I told him that I was an English major.

Greg: You guys suck!

Me: That's our job!

Greg: But, do you have to do it quite so hard?

Game broke about 1:30 am, having started at 9:30 pm. It was after 2 am by the time I was back in my hotel room.