After action report: Bothwell 7 “Write no wrongs”

Just back from Bothwell, and really so impressed. It’s a Wizard School larp, so you spend the weekend pretending to do just that – you’re all in Houses, taking classes, maybe playing a wizardy sport, earning house points, being professors, 1st, 2nd and 3rd years… All recognisable from a long lineage of fiction.

First things first – they keep their promises. I got the themes and experience I read about and the player handbook is really well-written.

Yes, Bothwell takes a stack of inspiration from the original designers of College of Wizardry – (Dracan Dembiński and the Polish Liveform team, Charles Bo Nielsen and the Danish Rollespilsakademiet and many many others. (The Witchards Society keeps a list here.))

But. Bothwell is different. More whimsical, for sure, and I think *slightly* more about magic as opposed to school than the original college is? Certainly, there’s a wide range of magical activity going on. It feels a touch more wholesome too? Certainly, relationships between staff and students are accepted off-game at Czocha, banned at Bothwell.

The advice on feel here was spot on. Particularly “Personal rather than epic – the stakes for the stories in this run may have a significant effect upon the people in the school, but are not going to concern the end of the world.” and ‘Victories & failures are significant but small – successes and mistakes are important to our characters, but are not likely to be grand or world shattering.” This – I think – is the most important way this is absolutely, 100%, definitely NOT a “Harry Potter larp”. There is no Chosen One. The world is not there to be saved. There is no One True Story – everyone is a protagonist. Yes, there’s a determination not to cross Her copyright, but it’s deeper than that. Harry Potter would be a terrible larp character. Bothwell does it better.

If you’re interested in Czocha which is the same in this respect – CoW 27 – Wintertide tickets are on sale now.

Ultimately the larp is like playing a sandbox though! Do what you think is fun, play with who you like, and roleplay the scenes and moments in a way that sparks your joy.

I’ve really only though about this on the way home, and I absolutely should have before. This was my 8th “wizards school” larp, I think – crew and play. It simply hadn’t occurred to me that the what orgas and players need for this model to work is trust. Now that’s generally true about larp, ofc, but I think it’s even more so when it’s *such* a collaborative model. When what happens is the sum of orga themes and player scene requests. Many larps I go to don’t have that explicit equity of creative input, even before the players start actually portraying their characters. I think the orgas of this Bothwell really, truly, trusted their players – and I think that trust inspired players to trust them in turn. Their love for their players was just really, truly, obvious.

This time we delve into the world of stories, memories, and the power of words. What makes a tale into a legend? And what happens when we forget or lose the words to our own story?

I think the strength of that theme helped too – that’s a cracking thing to put in front of a playerbase. It’s got a lot of flexibility, a lot of space to do something that resonates with you personally, and something of a boundary? Anyway, solid, thoughtful design.

The SchWiz

You get to show preference in path: would you rather be new to the school, or about to leave into the wider world? Staff or student? Or Schwiz.

A SchWiz is awarded to the best and brightest Witchards after they complete a rigorous research programme in their area of expertise to better the witching world with their findings.

The promised experience for a SchWiz is a 15 minute presentation on your chosen field of magical study, in front of any students who fancy turning up, judged by the faculty.

It’s a promise that you get 15 minutes of spotlight time. About something you invent, something truly yours. It’s unique to Bothwell at the moment, and I’d never played Bothwell before, so what else to choose?

The genuinely beautiful bit of design though, is that in order to shine in that pitch – you really need to have done some research. Or, to put it another way – made a load of game for other players.

I chose ritual magic. I thought it’d be interesting to play a specialist in “putting a team together at no notice” at Bothwell. A friend put me in touch with Erik Fatland, who wrote the definitive blog post on the subject. He shared some hand gestures, to show when something the then leader was saying should be Remembered or Repeated, and underlined the importance of opt-in action. So I wrote and delivered a workshop “inspired” by his. To the degree I used the example story he mentioned on ur call – the three little pigs. Which hit the right note for Bothwell, I think. I’ve been a larp ritualist for 30 years – although I’ve not practised for a while. – so this was pretty much home turf. I used the story of Boudicca for the actual presentation, and picked a team pretty much at random from the audience. They got to call “We are older, we are wiser, we are stronger, we are one” against “We came, we saw, we conquered” to represent the Roman vs Iceni, and Camlodunum, Londinium ad Verulanium all burned. I have to say – they aced it. I’d hardly exchanged a handful of words with the character who I chose to be Boudicca before the ritual, and she was amazing. Some fellow players said some lovely things about that presentation, and I had to say I’d been using some of the call-and-responses for 30 years. Before they were born…

If you feel the need – here’s the fuller character concept. I should add that they orgas didn’t leave you to sink or swim – you had lessons with the Heads of School, which were genuinely useful and marvellously in character. Beautifully, thoughtfully done.

And finally…

Schwiz was only a part of it, ofc.

The density of great play, and sheer level of “Yes, and” was amazing.

A load of new larpers really, really hit the ground running. One newbie had the character name “Ramon” Blakemore. I am told the inspo was this guy. I have never ever heard of “pro-wrestling fan” as a gateway drug to larp before.

I liberated a gnome from its captors; a pair of loosely based on US mountain cult. Excellent work; and they never backed down from the position that all gnomes would be happier as garden furniture. (I say liberated, I went to complain about them at dinner, dropped my orange hi-viz over their gnome, got Ramon over to have a row with them, then walked off with the coat and its gnomish cargo. Old school.)

The “Lost Souls Collective” was a student poetry society. The first night, I went in with the lyrics of “Relight my fire” as I have done elsewhere. The usual cheap gag. What I wasn’t expecting was meaningful, moving, poetry – either read from “mundane” poets or actual original work, one written during the meeting. In a beautifully welcoming atmosphere. For the second meeting, I figured a filk would work out. And a generous pack of Lost Souls and punks stepped up to perform it as a song at the school ball: “Bothwell Never Ends”…

One last thing – the Bothwell “magic system” is pretty much Du Kannst, Was Du Darstellen Kannst. `So you can always take a magic effect, which are communicated far less formally than they are in larger UK larps – and you should always open suspicious envelopes that are left on a bench next to your gear.