The weekend before Halloween, I attended a live event in the mountains of West Virginia for the alternate reality game Eldritch Errors. This event was the culmination of Book 2 of Eldritch Errors, titled "Scream in the Mountains," which took place over the month of October.

Almost the whole of chapter two was dedicated to building up the importance of "The Feast," an event held in the middle of the National Radio Quiet Zone where players could go and meet several of the main characters in person.

It's not often a designer gets to attend a major live event for another game, so I have quite a lot to say about it (as evidenced by the "Part 1" up in the title). In this part, I'll talk about the things I loved about the experience.

1. Location, location, location

The Feast is probably the most ambitious live event I've ever seen. Sending players into the middle of nowhere for twenty-eight straight hours of character interaction in multiple locations would fray the nerves of most any game designer, and I applaud them for the amount of work they put into it. Also, naming a location and asking your players to go there instead of picking a location near your players was a very gutsy move, but I think it worked for them.

2. "Hi, I'm Bridgette."

Eldritch Errors is a game based heavily in story, and the actors all did a great job representing their characters, especially the actors who were improvising already well-defined roles. They stayed in character for two days straight, even when the players threw some curveballs at them. Little touches, like a character introducing herself by her first name instead of her online moniker "B.A. Saint-Feline" while another character only calls her "St. Feline," really added a personal side to the characters that made them feel all the more real.

3. Everybody do the Locomotion!

Okay, I'll admit that I'm a bit of a sucker for gimmicky things, and giving the players free tickets for an old-time train ride definitely fits the bill. But even so, it was done very well from a story perspective. The players got to spend the train ride with just one of the characters, so we could build a relationship with her before the drama of the other characters came into play. It worked great.

4. The Feast begins! I brought chili!

It's kind of amusing that so much effort went into making The Feast sound very ominous, but it ended up being more like Thanksgiving for Weird People. However, it wasn't anticlimactic. We were getting along so well with the characters, it would have been very awkward had they tried to start acting mysterious. We were in the middle of the woods, with no way to leave, and no way to contact emergency services. It would have been a poor design choice to include any activities the players might have been unwilling to participate in due to being too uncomfortable or to dangerous. Instead, we all had a great time sitting around our collected foods swapping stories. Dramatic stories don't have to be dramatic all the time.

If you're interested in reading about the weekend's happenings, Mapmaker, another one of the attendees, wrote an extraordinarily detailed account of the experience (part 1, 2, 3, 4).

In Part 2, I'll talk about what I learned as a designer.