My time at Avalon — A College of Wizardry larp
In September 2018 I attended Avalon, a College of Wizardry spinoff larp by Avalon Larp Studio in association with Dziobak Larp Studio. The basic idea is that there is a magical island, shrouded in mists, somewhere off the coast of England, where young witchards can learn a more primal and darker kind of magic than they can in the structured classes of Czocha College of Witchcraft and Wizardry.
TL:DR version
It was awesome! Avalon was one of the most intense roleplaying experiences I’ve ever had. The way they handled plot was fantastic. However, you should probably approach it as a full contact boffer larp, with all the safety and accessibility risks that entails.
Setting
The basic setting for Avalon is a mystical island off the coast of Britain where a select few learn magic. The island, and its teachers, are harsh and unforgiving. The students live rough, in tents and huts, and often get into violent and dangerous situations either from each other or from the challenges the island itself throws up. The theme is “broken and reborn.” The idea being that Avalon first breaks its students and then remakes them stronger than before and ready to become the badass leaders and warriors of the witchard world. I’ve had friends describe it as druidic Lord of the Flies.
I haven’t played College of Wizardry yet, but I gather that the tone for Avalon is a lot darker and more mysterious. Violent accidents happened. Souls were lost and found. Characters died. Characters were carried off into Faerie.
Permanence was another key feature. Once a character had started on a magical path of learning, they could not change it until that path was completed. Once you joined a warband you weren’t supposed to leave it or join another warband. Decisions had lasting consequences and sometimes those consequences were not negotiated or based on consent. Nominally at least, things could happen to your character without you agreeing to it.
There was a lot of emphasis on nature, with the paths of study broadly corresponding to the elements. Relationships with other groups of students, called warbands, were intended to be combative and competitive. There was also a lot of emphasis on the Fae and Fomorians as dangerous opponents/allies.
The character creation also included a lot of emphasis on class differences between rich old hexborn magical families and poorer lower class students from mundane families. However, apart from a few instances of unfairness from teachers, this didn’t seem to make much difference in the actual game.
Characters
At Avalon you could play a new student, called an initiate, who was coming to Avalon for the first time; an older student already assigned to a path and a warband; or a teacher.
I gather that the character selection/casting process was a quite similar to College of Wizardry or Convention of Thorns. Players could nominate preferences for teacher, new student, older student, etc. and which paths and warbands they were interested in, but characters were assigned in a way that provided game balance. After that point character backgrounds could be written by the player or by the organisers.
I signed up late so got one of the waitlist characters and didn’t have any choice about what I got to play. My character was pre-written, but the organisers were very happy for me to add to it with relationships with other characters and additional backstory and personality elements as suited my interest. At the prompting of another player I actually ended up adding in a relationship and backstory details that touched on some real life issues for me. This was my first time making the deliberate choice to play with bleed, letting my real feelings affect the larp and letting the larp feelings affect my real feelings. I should note, I wasn’t pressured into this, but rather finally felt ready to do it. I’m glad I did, I got some of my most cathartic and meaningful play from this relationship and it added a lot to my game when other elements broke down.
Venue, scenography and special effects
Avalon was played on a farm in the hills of South Eastern Poland (yes Poland has hills). The farm has a number of traditional style huts, a small walled “village” with more huts and gardens, a circle of standing stones and numerous fields with meadows and forests.
Needless to say it was an amazing space to play in. It felt big enough to explore and get a bit lost in, but laid out well enough that I never felt in any genuine danger of not being able to find my way back.
Some great scene dressing added to the already awesome venue. In particular by turning one of the more densely wooded areas into a dark and creepy labyrinth.
The Avalon team also used some significant pyrotechnics. Flares and smoke sticks were used to create mists to shroud the island and signify large scale magical effects, the night was lit with flaming torches, fires and candles and the final ritual had some impressive fire-twirling and effects.
Some effective, but relatively simple, costuming made dealing with NPCs a treat. I was never in any doubt about who was a human player character and who was a magical creature sent to mess with us.
Workshops and mechanics
Similar to a lot of Nordic-style larps, and increasingly most blockbuster larps like Convention of Thorns which I played last year, the game started with a few hours of workshops. We covered safety, escalation and de-escalation mechanics and some basic larp sword fighting.
Magic was handled with Dziobak’s “liveform” system where you point your wand and say something that sounds like a spell. Your target then decides on the effect. Generally I’d say it worked pretty well when things were moving at a conversational pace. However it could sometimes be tricky to think of a suitable spell or interpret what someone else probably intended when the action was moving quickly.
The escalation and de-escalation mechanics used in-game code phrases to signify either an invitation to play more intensely or a command to lessen intensity but not stop play. A player could respond to a verbal conflict with “is that all you’ve got?” to signify a desire to escalate the intensity and level of physicality of the interaction. “Lay off” was the command to back down and de-escalate.
In practice these were pretty hard to use. I only used the de-escalation mechanic once and I never heard anyone using the escalation mechanic at all.
Partly the trouble is that Avalon is a very intense game and adrenaline is high a lot of the time. This is especially true in any scene where combat is likely to break out. Once that scene starts and the adrenaline is pumping it becomes pretty hard to even remember all the admonishments from the workshops to “take it slow” let alone try to follow that instruction. This was exacerbated by Avalon’s rule of whoever has the greater numbers wins, which encouraged group fights rather than one on one. This was further compounded by the fact that those who broke the rules and acted quickly would usually benefit as a result, creating a strong incentive to move fast and strike first. I was whipped about the legs in rapid succession on several occasions, with no real chance to respond or roleplay it as a scene. I just fell on the ground and waited for them to stop.
Adding to all that is a peer-behavior effect. If one person starts shoving someone without using the escalation mechanic, and no-one says anything about it, then everyone witnessing that will start to feel that this is normal and acceptable behavior in this social context.
Pretty soon we had people being crash-tackled to the ground and grabbed around the neck from behind. There were a few injuries — and some exacerbation of previous injuries — caused in reckless fight scenes. That the injuries weren’t more serious seemed more due to good luck than good management.
Structure and sandbox adventures
Like College of Wizardry, there was a certain amount of sandbox style play at Avalon. The game was structured into sorting initiates into warbands on the first night, followed by initiation rituals for each of the warbands.
The next day was classes organised by the teachers, then choosing paths for the initiates in the afternoon and initiating them into their paths with the teachers. Classes were mostly very practical, and for me involved a lot of summoning and binding various creatures. I got to do a group ritual of Storm magic in the standing stones in the middle of the night in an actual thunderstorm, which was exactly as awesome as it sounds. I got to poke some sheep entrails with my wand. A bit bloody, but very on theme.
The final afternoon was “the Run”; a competitive scavenger hunt style event between warbands using the full extent of the very large play space. This event was very much based on warbands, and due to some out of character incidents with a couple of players I wasn’t able to participate in it (more on that later). But from what I gather it was an exhilarating, if quick, affair.
Like in many large scale games, players had a certain amount of responsibility for creating and maintaining their own fun. Within the basic structure, players could pursue and create their own plots and many did. Some people had friends and siblings captured by the fae or missing on the island, others had more personal relationship play to resolve. Most of this was set up before game started, as there wasn’t quite as much freedom to ask for additional NPCs and adventures from the organisers as in a usual College of Wizardry game. That’s because the organisers were already busy with some pre-written plots…
Plots and preplay
Unlike College of Wizardry or Convention of Thorns, Avalon had a lot of organiser written plot. There was an overall arc about the need to renew the alliances with the Fae and Fomorians that kept the island safe, as well as story lines for each of the warbands about their founding and the history of Avalon.
Plots started even before the game began through pre-play. The Avalon team ran several pre-play plots in the weeks leading up to the game through the facebook groups. You could sign up to an appropriate pre-play by joining the relevant group and then interact with each scene by commenting on the post about that scene. As the story progressed the organisers would make new posts describing the next scene. In my favorite pre-play, titled The Labyrinth, the scenes branched as we followed different paths in the labyrinth, much like a choose your own adventure novel. Scenes were numbered and titled to make it easier to follow which scene you should join next.
However, pre-play obviously took a bit more time and effort than the organisers had expected. Some of the pre-play sessions started but stopped without being completed, and one was only completed in the few hours before game started. I think the ambition was maybe a bit high. But even the couple of pre-play games that completed before game started were entertaining and very well received.
While the pre-play games were interesting and fun in themselves, they were also a great opportunity to try out our characters and relationships with others. I know my character ended up having a much closer relationship to another character, and even scored a knife from him, in preplay that added a lot to my actual game. Even better was that these pre-play plots ended up being prequels or introductions to the plots we would follow in game.
The organisers seemed to keep a fairly decent track of who had done what in the pre-play and which plots people had interacted with, as several times my earlier interactions became relevant to the experiences I had in game and the way the plots responded to me. So I never felt like I was being thrust into a plot scene I didn’t understand the importance of because I’d missed the beginning of the story. And I felt that the organisers gave me good opportunities to to participate in the middle and end of plots I’d been involved in the beginning of. Missing out on the end of plots because I wasn’t in the randomly selected group of characters to go fight the big bad is one of my pet peeves in larps, so I really appreciated this effort. I think keeping plots loosely organised along warband lines probably helped to make this a bit easier on the organisers, but I suspect they still must have had a reasonably good record keeping system to support their decision making.
Practical and logistics
These guys are professionals when it comes to logistics. Catching the bus from Prague airport was easy and got us to the venue in plenty of time. Food was plentiful and varied, along with tea and coffee. Vegetarians, vegans and gluten free were all catered for. A buffet of snacks were available at all times, so when I missed a meal because I was too busy roleplay I didn’t need to go hungry.
Alcoholic drinks and softdrinks were available for sale in the tavern too. Although with the safety issues involved in a larp like this, perhaps the sale of alcohol should have been restricted a little.
Sleeping arrangements were in huts for the teachers and tents with camp beds for students. The organisers provided basic blankets and straw for floor insulation of the medieval style tents (no ground sheet). We were strongly encouraged to bring sleeping bags and plenty of warm clothes, but generally I felt we were pretty comfortable for a camping larp.
The idea seems to have been that the tents and huts would still be considered game spaces where we were expected to be in character. However, I think most people ended up agreeing with their tent-mates that the tent would be considered off-game. As far as I’m aware no-one ever invaded another tent in the night or stole anything from anyone’s tents during the day. For a larp as intense as this one, I think most people felt they needed a small relatively private space where they could have some quiet and private downtime.
Some people brought their own tents, set up in an off-game area if they didn’t match the medieval aesthetic. I believe they got a cheaper ticket price for doing so. That said, I would probably have paid the full ticket price just to have someone else set up and pack down my tent. But if you’re not traveling from Australia, maybe that’s not such a big deal to you.
Theoretically you could also sleep in the “lesson huts” where classes were (at least nominally) held, so long as you were out of there before classes started and the teachers didn’t catch you. But I think most people were too exhausted at the end of each day to bother.
Dealing with problem players
So…
The thing I’ve alluded to in a few places above is that a couple of problem players behaved in very much not-okay ways and affected my game. There were some early warning signs in pre-play and relationship building that we weren’t going to get on. But that quickly escalated into some unpleasant and potentially quite dangerous territory after game started. Given the non-use of the safety mechanics, I was pretty worried.
When I made my complaint during the game I was listened to, believed, and even thanked for bringing it to the organisers’ attention. After hearing my experience the team affirmed that the behavior was definitely not okay and told me that the player would be spoken to and have some restrictions placed on his play. Gold star for the initial response.
The follow up during game was a bit lacking. The promised restrictions on the player didn’t seem to eventuate and I ended up withdrawing from some plots and events, including The Run, to protect my own safety. While, the team did their best to work with me to come up with ways I could still have an enjoyable game while avoiding the problem players, the replacement plots and events often didn’t happen. That’s understandable, given how busy and chaotic the last stages of any larp usually are. But it was still a bit frustrating for me, when the problem players were able to enjoy their game fully. However, I’ve been told those players will not be welcome at future Avalon Larp Studios events, which is a good outcome.
Dealing with problem players is always a fraught issue for any larp organiser. You want your players to be safe and have a good time, but you also don’t want to disrupt play more than necessary. It’s difficult to judge how much intervention is really needed when you are also in the middle of running a very busy larp. Often the full significance and seriousness of incident often doesn’t become apparent until late in the game or even after the larp. However, I think the earlier an intervention the better. If there are signs before game that someone might be a problem, that’s the time to give them the sternly worded warnings. That way you can pull them out of play the minute you see something not okay happen at game, and before the game becomes to busy to allow you the time to deal with problems properly.
Overall impressions
Even with the limitations on my game caused by problem players, I still had a great time. It was probably the most emotionally intense larp I’ve ever played. I cried; I screamed into a thunderstorm; I ran and fought and fell and got up and ran again. The plots were some of the best and most satisfying I’ve seen in a larp, and I’m only sad I didn’t get to enjoy them fully. The venue was amazing and enhanced with skillful use of set dressings and pyrotechnics.
The Avalon team don’t have any current plans to run it again. The plot heavy nature of the game probably makes re-plays more onerous than for something like College of Wizardry. However, it should be possible to run it again with the same plots, just noting that players who have played before will need to contain their out of character knowledge about the secrets of Avalon. The idea of a sequel game with new plots has also been floated, but we’ll see what happens.
However, if they do run it again I will hesitate to recommend it because of the safety issues with the mechanics. If you’re okay with approaching it as a full contact larp where you take responsibility for your own safety, then it’s probably fine. But most people I play with expect more safeguards than that. I’d only recommend it wholeheartedly if the team revises the escalation and de-escalation mechanics. That said, I’ll still be keeping an eye on what Avalon Larp Studios runs next.
All photos are courtesy of Avalon photographer Nadina Dobrowolska.
