De la Bête— part 2
At long last, I have the second part of my write up from my experience playing De la Bête. It’s been a while so this might be a bit briefer a summary than I’d originally planned.
If you can’t remember anything about De la Bête from all those many (many) months (*ahem* a year) ago, part 1 is here.
My character
I played Laure Fosch, a “galley slave”, basically a violent career criminal who had been sentenced to hard labour on an excavation site near Morsange. Yup, this Aussie was playing a convict. The galley slaves, and their guards, were flagged as in for a bit of a survival horror experience. We didn’t stay in the main manor, but in a ruined “chateau” down a wooded path away from the main game. Each night (and sometimes during the day) we were subjected to hauntings, creepy happenings, jump scares and general horror movie tropes. Needless to say, I loved that part of the game, even if it kept me awake past 1am each night.
Unfortunately for you, my dear readers, that means my game was rather different to what most players probably experienced. I never went inside the main “castle” building or the cafe in character, and didn’t get to interact with a lot of the regular plot. Not that I particularly minded, my game was still very good, just different.
The game
From the glimpses I had during and after the game, the rest of the larp involved a very wide variety of genres and plots. I saw snippets of beast hunting, rivalries, political drama, romances, witches, ladies who definitely were not witches but who might conduct seances on Saturday evenings, ghosts, secret societies, spies, immoral scientific experiments, smugglers, grave-robbers, religion (both political and genuinely felt), and at least two beasts. Ultimately, what the beast is probably varies greatly depending on the perspective and story of each individual character. Fitting all these different genres and experiences into one larp is a challenge, but Rolling seem to have pulled it off. The game was full of things to do, but didn’t feel manic or like I ran out of time to pursue the things I wanted to. In fact, there were many gentle moments of quiet introspection and one-on-one conversations that were moving and meaningful. There is real skill in getting that pacing right for such a big and complex larp, and that should be commended.
Horror and special effects
The convicts and guards at the prison galley had a very different game to the rest. Ours was very much a horror survival larp in a creepy ruined haunted building.
The ruined nature of the building meant the organisers could easily (and fairly invisibly) partition off sections of the building to hide NPCs and equipment in. They also wired the whole building up with discreetly hidden cameras and remotely controlled lights and speakers. An organiser, either in a secret room in our building, or back at the main house, could control the lights and sounds based on what they could see and hear of the game. So they could move things around and have the building seem to respond to us as we played. Ghosts and monsters could appear and disappear again without a trace. Paintings and furniture could be moved or replaced while our backs were turned. Ghostly moaning sounds would play while we were alone in a room, and then stop when we tried to bring someone else in to hear it. The effects started subtly at first, escalated in drama and violence as the game progressed.
I don’t want to go into too much detail, because this plot could easily be spoiled. Suffice to say, we ended up with a very cool group ritual scene that is probably the best such scene I’ve ever done in a larp. The player investment was huge and the scene felt dramatic, desperate and important.
Much of the success of the horror elements was actually due to some great advice we were given in the workshops. Emotions, especially fear, are felt in the body as much as the mind. When you are frightened your heart rate quickens, your hands tremble, your pupils dilate, your breathing becomes more rapid and shallow. But you can also calm those physical effects with your mind. Taking slow deep breaths, engaging in soothing self-talk, seeking reassurance from others that things will be okay, these will all help you to feel less frightened. But for a horror larp, part of the fun is feeling frightened. So they asked us to lean into the fear, to roleplay it even when we didn’t feel it. By going through the physical motions of fear your body will start to feel the things it associates with being frightened and your mind will follow. What’s more, fear is contagious. If you act unafraid, and dismiss the supernatural goings-on as normal, then not only will you calm yourself down, but you will start to calm down those around you. But if you seem to be frightened, talk about your fear and roleplay it, it will amplify the fear of others around you. The more people in the group start to roleplay being afraid, the more the rest of the group will start to feel afraid and it will snowball.
The group fear snowball worked to marvelous effect. Our greatest jump-scare of the whole larp happened when one of the other players totally mundanely walked down the stairs when a group of us didn’t expect it and were hyped up. About six of us screamed and jumped at least a foot in the air.
I have used this advice for other horror roleplaying games I’ve played in and run since then and it has worked wonders.
“Romance”
While the horror aspects of the game worked great for me, I can’t say the same about my character’s personal story, particularly the “romance” plot.
My character was written as a lesbian. All fine so far. The trouble is, a far as I could tell, she was the only lesbian in the 100+ character game. Her romance plot involved an obsession with another convict who was also being wooed by a male character. At first it seemed fine, the other male character even seemed kind of creepy and stalker-ish, so it seemed like she had a real choice to make. But as the game wore on it became apparent that the plot essentially required, or at least assumed, my love interest would end up with the male character. I was supposed to be playing a real villain in the bunny-boiling tradition of Fatal Attraction. I was the “evil lesbian.”
The whole plot was problematic, to say the least. I quickly went from feeling fine about exploring my character’s darker side, to feeling pretty gross about it. The other players and I ended up playing it out in a semi-tragic forbidden-love kind of way, which redeemed it somewhat, but I was uncomfortable about the whole thing for quite a long time afterwards. I felt like I’d been trapped into playing out a story that went strongly against my own personal politics in a way that reinforced some pretty nasty and harmful tropes. I know the Czech Republic is conservative, but I was still pretty surprised to see such a blatantly homophobic plot in a larp in 2019.
Pre-ordained plot
This is also where the pre-written plot style, and low transparency, of the game caused a lot of problems. Our characters weren’t really ours to interpret. There was a cannon interpretation already in existence that we needed to adhere to, and sometimes that wasn’t apparent at the start. Even worse, in several places the cannon story clashed with the story the players were telling through their experience and the cannon story always took precedence.
The needs of the story, and heavy steering required also added a mental load to the players. There were several moments in the game where I had to step back from my roleplay to think about what the story needed me to do, or to avoid stepping into someone else’s story inappropriately. Generally I am in favor of players engaging in a bit of steering and meta-thinking mid play. But the frequency of it in De La Bête broke down a lot of the immersion that the beautiful setting, costumes and special effects had created.
At one point the captain of our guard was poisoned. It was nothing to do with us, so despite roleplaying being terribly concerned about it, we had to stand back and essentially act like nothing had happened. I’m still not sure what this plot was about, and the player of the guard captain didn’t know when I asked him either. Presumably it was important for someone else’s plot.
The final hours
The larp also started to break down in the final hours. Different groups had their climax and denouement moments at different times, sometimes many hours before the large group end of game scene. I was definitely in this category. The climax of my game had been during the night before, and I had very little to try to wrap up the following morning. Nevertheless, we needed to sit around in character waiting for the final scenes just in case we were needed for someone else’s plot, or if something happened. We had a few interesting things happen, but the long waiting with no clear goal or activity meant that a lot of us dropped in and out of character a fair bit over the course of the final morning. Again, this isn’t great for a deeply immersive larp.
That said, it did allow a few moments to rest, lie in the sun in the nice surroundings or explore parts of the park we hadn’t had a reason to go to before hand. I wouldn’t necessarily change this part of the larp, but I would definitely be aware that it might happen if you play.
Conclusions
Overall I’d say that De La Bête was a good game, but maybe not a great game. It is certainly a remarkable feat of organization given the complexity of the many interconnecting plots. The costumes, setting and special effects make it look brilliant, and that alone can be fun. The workshops have a bunch of interesting ideas in them, like practicing story pacing and directing players to lean hard into roleplaying fear.
However, the pre-written plot was more heavy-handed than I would have liked. It required a high degree of player steering to work, which was immersion-breaking and sometimes clashed uncomfortably with player interpretations of their characters.
I am also still of the view that escalation mechanics (see part 1 or my review of Avalon for details) don’t really work in immersive larps when emotions start running high. Since that’s exactly when you need a mechanic to keep things safe, I don’t think they’re a useful tool and wouldn’t recommend them.
I’m still glad I played De La Bête, if only to experience a very different style of European game than the ones I’d played previously. If it seems interesting to you I would definitely recommend it, but understand the limitations of what you’re getting into and adjust your expectations accordingly.
I have tried to credit all the photos correctly, but if I’ve messed anything up please let me know so I can fix it.
