HotBlooded

Today, I spent most of my day working on the costume of my latest LARP character: Rali Steele, Lord of the Scallywags and Scion of House Elk.

For those of you who don't know: Houses of the Blooded (HotBlooded, as it is called by fans) is normally a tabletop roleplay setting invented by John Wick. This system, in contrary to most roleplay systems, is based around the belief that the roll should come before you do your action and that after rolling your dice you can determine how your action turns out. An example: In Dungeons and Dragons you would state "I try to sneak past the ogre." after which you roll your dice, compare it to the ogre's detection roll, after which it is determined if you were successful in your endeavor. In houses of the blooded it would be: You roll first, after which you get to state something about what happens next if you are successful. So you could state "I successfully sneak past the orc" or "I fail to sneak past the orc". If you fail your roll, the storyteller gets to state what happens. (All monsters in Houses are called orcs, independent of what they actually are, the Ven would probably call a football hooligan an orc too for instance.) I must stress that this a simplified way of how things work, there are a lot more intricate things to it, but it is the basic way of how things work.

Houses of the Blooded is not only a system, it is also a setting. This setting revolves all around the Ven, a pre-atlantean race that supposedly existed eons ago on this planet. I must say that John Wick is kind of pretentious in this area, because he keeps stating that he did make up these marvelous creatures. Riiiight. So what is a Ven? Personally, I would describe them as drama queens. The entire race is based around causing as much drama as possible. I mean, the words for romance and revenge are exactly the same thing! (The saying: "Make love, not war" suddenly gets a very weird twist). For the rest, they are kind of sort of human. They look like humans, but prettier. I would kind of expect them to sparkle or some shit like that.

Anyway, for the Knights Winter Weekend, we are going to have a Houses of the Blooded LARP. Because the system is normally meant for tabletop, some parts of it have been adapted or simplified. So, in the LARP it is all about style. Not only in the literal way, of being stylish, but also in the way of the in-game currency, called, well, style. Style replaces the dice from the tabletop version, allowing people to barter for character actions. Which is interesting start with.

Unfortunately, the system is far from perfect. Even though it is kind of easy, it still intimidates some of the less rules-focused players, especially because it is nothing like they have seen before. And the setting also gives some issues. John Wick added this subsystem which allows people to harvest things from their land, which is fine for a periodic LARP, but for a one-shot, it can give some issues. And then there are the colors. John Wick wrote that colors have a lot of significance in the setting, which is fine and dandy. Unfortunately, this also results into some characters dressing up in clashing colors. I guess that the Ven are just colorblind. That, or they just have horrible taste in fashion.

But, these are just minor gripes with a good settings. Further, let's add on top of a system that allows you to bribe other players so they allow you to do awesome things, an awesome cast. Poor Daniel has spent weeks/months on creating this interesting cast of characters. Most player's received their sheets last week, and this resulted in this amazing pre-LARP fun. As is usual with these kind of LARPs, people start plotting weeks before the actual LARP. I don't think that I've spent a day at the Knights yet without someone discussing what his character would do in situation X, or when person Y does Z.

And then there is my own character, Rali Steele, who in my own opinion will most likely be one of my most awesome characters, evar. It is just a pity that I never thought of this character myself :P