The moment of truth, the precipice of change, rarely comes at a convenient time and place of our own choosing. It is our hope that Mind’s Eye Theatre: Immersion Secrets marks the phase of a new evolution, perhaps even a revolution, within our community. This anthology features fourteen essays that introduce methodology and metatechniques designed to encourage deeper immersion and enhance safety calibration within your local chronicle and the greater Mind’s Eye Theatre (MET) community.
Many of these inventive ideas and concepts were pioneered in other live-action roleplaying (LARP) traditions, but the terminology and examples within this anthology follow the Mind’s Eye Theatre branding and terminology. So you might be asking, where does this anthology fit into the scheme of Mind’s Eye Theatre, and why might it be important to you? Since the publication of Mind’s Eye Theatre: Vampire The Masquerade in December 2013, Studios has watched in awe as the game’s community built chronicles and shared stories.
We’ve grown with you as we progressed to other books, including MET: Storyteller Secrets and the mammoth MET: Werewolf The Apocalypse. Our future together continues to look bright with MET: Vampire The Masquerade, Volume 2 and Mind’s Eye Theatre: Changeling The Dreaming in development. Our primary goal has always been to serve the community we love. The last four years, we’ve engaged with players and Storytellers. We listened thoughtfully to your questions and feedback. We’ve engaged in the debates and discussions on how to improve the community and address some of its problems.
Initially, our general gut feeling was that this topic was something for each community and chronicle to determine for themselves and discover their own preferences. As we listened and engaged with you, the community, we realized that sometimes people need the language to discuss a concept and understand it in the fullness of time. The primary goal of the Team is to create an ever-expanding toolbox for players and Storytellers alike to use constructing the chronicles of their dreams.
Our metaphor to encapsulate this primary design principle is simple. Imagine the rules of Mind’s Eye Theatre as a cup. The purpose of a cup is to hold liquid and give it form. Story is the liquid. It is given shape by the rules, but ultimately it is the reason the cup exists. We’ve since learned that there are two additional parts to the metaphor that aren’t as self-explanatory as we once believed. We realized that the community needed tools, tips, and guidelines in order to calibrate the level of immersion in their chronicles and ensure the safety of all participants.
Immersion is a word thrown around a good deal in multiple LARP traditions and interactive entertainment venues. Mind’s Eye Theatre defines immersion as the emotional bleed that a player feels based on the events her character might experience and suffer. This concept is granular in scale and can and should be calibrated to the needs and desires of each specific troupe. Some chronicles might crave a high-drama, emotional experience. Other chronicles might prefer blood and gore and frights.
The subtle choices are nearly infinite, and they can be made to tailor the experience desired. To extend the previous design metaphor, immersion is the flavor of the liquid (story) held by the cup (rules). To fully explore immersion and the opportunities it presents, we realized that we’d also need methods beyond the Golden Rules of Mind’s Eye Theatre LARPs. To return to the design metaphor, these new safety methods would be the handle of the cup, ensuring no one is burned. Buy the Ticket, Take the Ride A Meditation on Immersion and Safety Calibration in Mind’s Eye Theatre Andrew “Buy the ticket, take the ride…and if it occasionally gets a little heavier than what you had in mind, well…maybe chalk it up to forced conscious expansion.” — Hunter S.
Thompson Studios sought unique voices from both within the Mind’s Eye Theatre community and outsider perspectives from experts working in other LARP and immersive traditions. We’ve included several perspectives from experts in this anthology. Each essay represents a distinct approach that Storytellers and players can leverage to calibrate immersion and ensure the safety of your troupe. The moment of truth, the precipice of change, rarely comes at a convenient time and place of our own choosing.
This is our time, and the choice for our fellowship and community is ours. We’ve come a long way since that first boxed set titled Masquerade, and now it’s time to take the next step in our evolution. Permit me, if you will, a brief indulgence, a meditation on my own past, what this anthology might mean for our community, and a roadmap for the future. Mind’s Eye Theatre changed my life. I started playing more than twenty years ago in Seattle, Washington. Here in this community, I met cherished friends and life partners, learned valuable skills, and happily wandered into a career I never imagined.
Two decades ago, I was not the same man that’s writing this essay. I was an angry, bitter young person who held up the World of Darkness and playing in its beautiful horrors as a badge of honor. I endured and thrived the great killboxes, epic character feuds, and gnarly tales of gore and grimdark. My favorite chronicle to this very day remains the immortal Race to Cain 2000, a blood-soaked diableriefest, competitive game between my closest friends and I. Feelings were often needlessly hurt those days.
It wasn’t that we lacked the human empathy to prevent such things, but rather we lacked the basic vocabulary and tradition to properly communicate. Studios has been using a version of some of the meta-techniques found in this anthology in our boutique chronicles (Blood & Betrayal and Rage & Retribution), but it didn’t initially occur to us to document them, because it was simply how we learned to run games over the years. If we can internalize these new methods into our community, we can potentially increase the fun for everyone and keep people feeling safe.
Some have vocalized the fear that this new wave of change will dilute the flavor of the World of Darkness. Others are concerned that unscrupulous players will attempt to use these meta-techniques to avoid game consequences or skirt around the spirit of the rules of the game. Speaking as someone who loves Mind’s Eye Theatre, I am excited to have more tools in the box to build future chronicles and tell better stories. We can have rules, story, immersion, and safety calibration; we don’t have to sacrifice any of these things for the sake of the others.
We can have intensely emotional scenes side-by-side with the merciless killboxes at convention games. Each chronicle can have it exactly the way they choose. Johanna Koljonen said something at her workshop at the 2017 World of Darkness: Berlin event that has stuck in my head, “People are more important than games.” It will take time for players and Storytellers to digest this material and figure out the best way to incorporate what works for their chronicles, but if it helps even one player feel more comfortable and safe, then isn’t it worth it?
You’ve bought the ticket. You’ve put countless hours into your characters and your chronicle. Let’s take the ride together and see where it might take us. Welcome to Mind’s Eye Theatre: Immersion Secrets. Biography Jason Andrew is a writer, editor, and game designer. He lives in Seattle, Washington with his two partners Lisa and Andrea, and his pug, Otter. By day, he works as a mildmannered technical writer. By night, he writes stories of the fantastic and occasionally fights crime.
As a child, Jason spent his Saturdays watching the Creature Feature classics and furiously scribbling down stories. His first short story, written at age six, titled “The Wolfman Eats Perry Mason” was severely rejected. It also caused his grandmother to watch him very closely for a few years. Jason is a rabid gamer, having written for several roleplaying games, including as Call of Cthulhu and Shadowrun. He serves as the Line Developer for Mind’s Eye Theatre for Studios, producing a number of MET products including MET: Vampire The Masquerade, MET: Werewolf The Apocalypse, and the upcoming MET: Changeling: The Dreaming.
Originally published in Mind’s Eye Theatre: Immersion Secrets by By Night Studios. Presented here under Resources for chronicles and live play.