Game Credits

I am an incredibly fortunate man.

I have some amazing friends. Two brilliant LARPing kids, too, now.

A Night at Club Ivory is evidence of that. This is the third incarnation of the game. The original version of A Night at Club Ivory was the work of Cameron Betts and myself. Between May 28th and June 5th, 1997, the two of us put together thirteen characters in a film noir framework. We stayed up long hours, got little sleep, typed a lot of words, and drank a lot of Diet Coke and Diet Dr. Pepper.

Because we love to role-play. Because we love to run games for our friends. Because we've each made a lot of great friends through the games we've played. That's how Cameron and I met, and I, for one, greatly appreciate that fact.

Because early in May, Jim Ghiloni of Archon Games put a request for people interested in playtesting a LARP in rec.games.frp.live-action. Always on the lookout for new LARPs, I volunteered. Shortly afterwards, I was sent a copy of the Noir Live-Action rule set. It was a LARP system, and not a LARP.

That meant if I wanted to playtest it, I'd have to write a LARP. Making the playtest deadline Jim asked for made it tough.

I'd started a film noir style LARP several years ago with Tim Lasko. The project had stalled, for a lot of reasons, none related to the genre or the period. It was a time I'd wanted to use as a setting.

Because I was the con-chair for Intercon the Thirteenth, the very first of the modern northern Intercons. As it was our first convention, we weren't quite sure of what it was we had underway. All we knew was that our costs seemed enormous and our income, while steady, didn't seem like enough. Cameron was in charge of fundraising events to help the con. A new LARP would be a great, easy fundraiser. So, we decided to write one.

The previously-mentioned incomplete LARP with Tim Lasko is partially the story of Club Ivory later in the 1930s. Carmine Fortuna comes from that LARP as well. With a setting and an interesting character idea to start with, Cameron and I had a base to build on. The Noir Live-Action rules gave us some templates to add to that base.

The rest was just good chemistry. Over the next week, all of the other names, faces, and plots emerged and went into the computer. We had a little outside help; on one of my lunchtime walks at work, Charles McCutcheon prompted several clever ideas. Mostly, it was Cameron and me, in a long, very productive week.

Writing a LARP is an insane process. Doing it in a week is even crazier. I want to thank Cameron for sharing the insanity. I really want to thank him for commuting to and from Chelmsford in the process of writing this. This was a lot of fun, Cameron. Thanks again!

Well, I had a great staff for Intercon the Thirteenth, and they got the first crack at this game, as a reward for their work. They're also a strong group of role-players, so that made it a lot of fun. I'd like to thank them for running wild with our game and taking it to interesting places Cameron and I didn't know existed. Scott David Gray, Sharon Tripp, Tim Lasko, Ilene "Murph" Tatroe, Jim "Wombat" White, Christina "Kat" White, Keri Reuss, Scott Lutz, Carolyn Day, Susan Giusto, and David Shera are always welcome in my games. Ryan Smart also deserves thanks, for creating the bartender character of Joey "Rabbit" on the fly and stirring the plots even more. These are the kind of players that can and will take a game to new heights; I, for one, am glad they came to play.

Scott David Gray gets an additional thanks because he came over and helped set up the club, making interesting props the night before the game. He also did the first cut at the wanted posters.

Nope. You see, Intercon the Thirteenth continued to grow. Between December of 1997 and the end of January of 1998, it was clear that the con was going to be much larger than anticipated. We were going to need two more tracks of games to satisfy our demand. As con-chair, I started looking everywhere I could for more games.

A Night at Club Ivory was something I knew I could count on. But, as con-chair, I needed a bigger game. Cameron, in school and working on the Inquiry vampire game, was just too busy. So was I, for that matter, with the incredible growth of the con.

That's when Tim Lasko reentered the scene, along with Susan Giusto. Tim brought with him more of the back story of Club Ivory. Susan brought... well, she brought some really twisted ideas. The three of us put it all together. There were many a long night, many a very strange discussion, and many a glass of (now-legal) wine involved. It was still an insane process, still done in not enough nights that were too long - but it was a hell of a ride.

We've came to know these characters, and what they were involved with. We knew a lot about them, and where some of them were headed in the future. It was my hope that some of these people would surface again, in other LARPs.

There were other games to write. TNT Productions formed somewhere around this time, to write LARPs. A Night at Club Ivory sat on our machines, gathering binary dust. Every now and then, we'd talk about the LARP, or plot what might happen at Another Night at Club Ivory, but other things were of greater interest.

Fast-forward to 2017. Intercon R is looking for games. TNT Productions is thinking about what we could run at R. My son Jordan was 6 years old at the time of the first run. He's now an adult, and he has brilliant LARP ideas.

Yes, it boggles our minds, but we love it.

Life has been busy for all of us. There's a new TNT Productions LARP project underway, but it won't be done in time for R. We're not going to bid a LARP before it's done. That way leads to sorrow, grief, and the Dark Side of the Force. We've run a lot of our popular LARPs in the last few years, and TNT wants to do something new.

We can run A Night at Club Ivory again! It's 20 years old and deserves to run again. So we bid it. We're in the process of going over the game again, modernizing it, adding a few plots where characters were thin, and just getting to know what's in it. Tim and Susan still drop into their favorite Club Ivory character accents if we aren't careful. We have a fabulous cast of players, and we can't wait to see what they'll do with the game.

And then it all goes so horribly, horribly wrong.

The complete and necessary LARP rewrite is finished, late, but done. The game runs, mostly. We do not speak about it again.

Ivory Fade Productions is Cameron Betts, Jeff Diewald, Jordan Diewald, Julie Diewald, Susan Giusto and Tim Lasko.