Games people play

FIFTEEN YEARS AGO, I helped run a live-Vampire game at Fayetteville’s first all-games convention, Razorbattles.

Actually, Gwen did most of the work. Our role-players had the run of the common areas of the hotel, plus the room we used as game headquarters, which also doubled as the local vamp “prince”s lair and meeting place. Gwen, with the help of a couple others in our club, was roving Storyteller, keeping the action going and mediating disputes.

My job, since I had had chemo just days before, was to stay put at HQ and be the Storyteller there. That way I could help without exerting myself, and stay in one place since I didn’t feel like moving at all.

Feedback in the days and weeks that followed was that everyone had a great time and were looking forward to the next year’s event during Razorbattles 1995. To whatever extent I gave plot points and direction and handed down decisions, I must have done a bang-up job. Oh, the stories I must have told. Wish I could remember it.

Sometimes the side-effects are unavoidable. Doesn’t matter what you and your friends have planned for months to do on a certain weekend. I’m not upset that cancer and its treatment stole away the memories of that weekend, I have other good times to remember.

Exactly 15 years ago, on Monday, April 4, I wasn’t feeling too bad, but Gwen was under the weather (this may have been the Monday after Razorbattles, such events are taxing even for the healthy) so she and I both called in sick.

We had spent the evening watching something on the VCR when suddenly we heard shouting and car horns and firecrackers outside. Puzzled at first, we suddenly remembered that it was the night of the NCAA men’s basketball finals, and that the hometown Arkansas Razorbacks were playing. Had they won? We switched the TV to live broadcast and sure enough, the Hogs had just won the national championship!

With us living just a few blocks from the U of A campus, you can understand the pandemonium.

We knew it wasn’t likely we would be in this kind of atmosphere often, so we ventured out and walked towards the University, ending up on Dickson Street, the kind of bar/restaurant/shopping street that most college towns have just off-campus, where students like to gather. There were so many people in the street that the police found it easier to put up barricades to traffic than to try to clear the pedestrians off.

We didn’t have money on us to buy a drink or anything, we just hung around a bit among the jubilant fans. There were also TV cameras there from local news and national networks. Since we were supposed to be “sick,” we avoided those – as did a couple of people from Gwen’s work she noticed. Seems “Razorback fever” had caused them to call in as well.

So we wandered back towards home. Feeling energized by all the excitement around us, we walked a little further to the house of Chris and Cheryl, friends we had met through the Camarilla (vampire club). They weren’t into basketball or native Arkansans, but they liked seeing everyone else around acting nuts. The four of us decided we could act out as well. Being fans of werewolves as well as vampires, we decided to howl.

So we stood out in their front yard, howling at the sky at the top of our lungs. And nobody noticed.

That was how we played our games, had our fun. And that memory I got to keep.

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