Credits

In May 2013, Jeff was thinking about potential additional Tales for Across the Sea of Stars while struggling with serious writer's block. Looking over his notes, reading Charles Stross and spinoffs from Isaac Asimov, the cosmic ray struck just the right neuron, and the Irnh were born. They weren't actually called the Irnh - they were in the notes as <IRNH>, which was a placeholder meaning "Insert Race Name Here". "The Passing" Tale followed relatively quickly.

The Irnh wouldn't let go, and a list of potential Tales outlining their history started growing. TNT - Susan Giusto, Charlie McCutcheon, and Barry Tannenbaum - added even more Tales to the list of historical ideas. Since everyone kept referring to them as the Irnh, and we couldn't come up with a better name, Irnh stuck.

The actual writing was harder. Jeff only managed one more Tale in the next month. In July, Jeff wrote the Tale part of "My Ferrous Lady" in about 15 minutes, free form, as the off-the-cuff weekly "It's Tuesday, here's the TNT plan" email, but that was the only progress. What appears in the game has only been edited slightly since then; the dialog is as originally written. The guts of the Tale refused to gel, despite many nights of discussion at TNT.

The summer was busy for everyone. Jeff led a different team of writers at the NELCO Build Your Own Game to write The Night Queen Princess Fluffykins Passed. That seemed to kick Jeff's writing into some semblance of motion, so he kept noodling away at the rough Tale ideas in the outline. Jordan Diewald was invaluable to the process, with long, involved brainstorming discussions while out running family errands. Many of the ideas in this game came from him. July was a productive month, as was the first part of August. Jeff kept writing quietly, to fend off the writer's block. TNT talked about other ideas in the historical outline, which informed Jeff's writing.

September was slow, but Jeff continued to make progress.

In mid-October, a nasty stomach bug sent Jeff to the ER, and then kept him home for a week and a half. There was time to write. There were no TNT meetings, so no time to discuss progress. "My Ferrous Lady" finally clicked, and it poured out of Jeff's brain in two days of writing. Many more words fell out of Jeff's brain and into the computer.

There were too many Irnh Tales to fit in Across the Sea of Stars. Charlie had raised the idea of an all Irnh Tale game at one of the TNT meetings, and suddenly that structure fell into place in Jeff's head. Jeff knocked out the supporting pieces surprisingly quickly. All of a sudden, there was a game staring back, with all of the pieces ready to playtest. With the Intercon bid deadline prior to game signups staring Jeff in the face, it was clear that a playtest was needed just as a sanity check. Jordan read everything as a first-level consistency pass, and declared it interesting and good.

The dilemma: TNT were the Usual Suspects for playtesting, but they knew too much about a few of the Tales. They didn't know enough about the other Tales to GM them. They knew too much about the structure of Across the Sea of Stars, and this was subtly different in some important ways. It was not even clear to Jeff how the game would run, so unbiased opinions were needed. (Was there too much material? Not enough? Would the Tales work? Was it too dark? Too philosophical? Would the packing of the game be another "Week of a Thousand Papercuts©"?)

In early November, Jeff held a quiet private playtest with Lily Benderskaya, Christine Carpenter, Matt Kamm, Alison Joy Schafer, and Brad Smith. They'd all played in Across the Sea of Stars. They are also all accomplished LARPers, with a great deal of playing, writing and GMing experience between them. They were brilliant. Jeff learned a lot about The Tales of Irnh at that alpha run, seeing some amazing play in the process. There was excellent feedback and constructive suggestions that make the game better. (Kudos also to Josh Rachlin, who, as #1 on the playtest waitlist, made sure that Jeff had a backup in case of emergency.)

TNT got their chance to playtest the game just after Christmas, and it was brilliant.

Our thanks to Adina Schreiber for suggesting the costuming scheme for the game. She had several excellent ideas, and we appreciate her input to the process.

Susan Giusto created the amazing props and costuming bits for the Intercon N run and beyond. You'll know them when you see them, and then you'll know one of the reasons why we truly appreciate Susan's talents on the team.

Jeff had struggled with the words for the final interlude. When Tim Lasko ran the game for the first time at Intercon N, he improved those words dramatically and poetically. Jeff took them to heart and was inspired to make them even better. They are good words, the result of a strong collaboration.

The Intercon N and Brandeis runs would not have been possible without Tim Lasko, Charlie McCutcheon, and Barry Tannenbaum, who stepped into their own spaces to run the game in parallel with Jeff. The TNT GM team has always been a good one together, but now everyone is on their own. We've had a lot of happy players come out of the game; it's just too bad we can't all see all the amazing play that happens.

One of the happy players was Daniel Zaharopol. He asked to run the game for some bright high-school students at a Mathcamp in the summer of 2014. This gave Jeff the opportunity to figure out how to package the game for others to run. The pictures from Daniel showed some very happy players in two interesting runs.

The Heroic Consequences runs were the result of a collaboration with Brian Williams. In exchange for Brian running one group through The Tales of Irnh, Jeff ran a group through his marvelous Hello, You Must Be.... As always, it was great fun to watch a group of players in the game, and it was all done with English accents. (And you need to play Hello, You Must Be..., too!)

The Intercon O runs were the result of Jeff asking Daniel if he would run the game at Intercon, because Jeff was already running games all Saturday. (Hello, You Must Be..., with Brian Williams, and Across the Sea of Stars, with the Usual Suspects from TNT.) Intercon, larger than ever, really needed more games. The Tales of Irnh was an obvious choice, and Jeff even promised to cram the really cool Irnh props into his overloaded car. During the last Brandeis run, Stephanie Davis had had a great time, and she'd asked to be able to run the game for some of her friends. Jeff asked her if she'd also like to run at Intercon - and so there were two more wonderful runs of the game, helping to satisfy the growing throng of Intercon attendees and their voracious desire for LARPs. This has been an experiment, of sorts, letting others who've played have the opportunity to run the game themselves, reporting back on the details of their run, providing feedback. So far, it's been great.

We really enjoy running this game, and to show off our cool props, which is why we bid it for Festival 2015. Jeff, Tim Lasko, Charlie McCutcheon, and Barry Tannenbaum were lined up to make it happen. We got fifteen players, which meant Charlie could deal with some other issues while the three of us ran the game. We had several things happen that were new and interesting, different from any of the previous 16 runs.

Before Festival, Jamey Patten and Katie Gordon, who played at Intercon O, asked if they could run the game for their friends. They had ten friends who wanted to play, so Jeff was happy to send them the materials, let them run one run, while he ran the other - all with the cool props for the game. The Day of Tales, because they also ran Intercon's Iron GM winning Compost Tales after The Tales of Irnh, was a lot of fun and another beta test for the GM materials.

Philip Kelley has been looking for easy ways to introduce more diverse theater style LARPs to a crowd of people who started with White Wolf and the Vampire genre. He'd already gotten Jeff to send him a few Tales from Across the Sea of Stars. The Tales of Irnh was the next logical step in Jeff's Master Plan, so Jeff played The Curse of Whately's Mysterious Island on Friday and ran Irnh on Saturday. Now The Tales of Irnh is also in Philip's hands.

Late in 2015, Malcolm Harbrow, a "Random NZ larper", sent Jeff an email asking if he could run some of our LARPs. Given that Jeff had done a lot of work to box the game, with instructions for how to run it, a blind playtest seemed like the next step. Malcolm ran the game in New Zealand in March, 2016, with some very nice review comments. We have incorporated many of his suggestions into the GM materials.

Stephanie Davis loves the game, and she loves running it. She bid it for Festiväl 2016 at Brandeis. She convinced Marsha Gershon to help run it. All Jeff had to do was drop off and pick up the props. We saw a lot of excited faces talking about the game after it was done.

Alison Joy Schaefer wanted a LARP for Summer LARPin' 2017 and Jeff's daughter Julie hadn't played Irnh, so it seemed a natural choice. This was the first run that Helen (played by Julie) had the entire Tale in a dance routine. It was amazing!

After the success of Across the Sea of Stars at Troy in 2019, it seemed only natural that Irnh should run at the next Dice Bubble, in 2020. Since Julie had played it, she was ready to GM it, and she did so wonderfully. Jordan Diewald helped with the packing and stuffing of the game.

Tales from the Cradle was also on the schedule, one of the LARPs inspired by Irnh. Rain Wiegartner played an earlier run of Irnh and played with the structure of a Tale game. You should play Irnh and Tales from the Cradle if you get the opportunity.

My thanks to Will Fergus, who helped me run Irnh at Time Bubble in 2023. I'm grateful for the assistance of Melanie Saunders and Allan Pendergrast, who helped with the planning. Jordan Diewald was invaluable, as always, in casting, packing, and stuffing the game.

The beautiful Alien Horizon image used as a header is by Argothar on DeviantArt.