Centre of the Chaos

Welcome Package - Backstory of the Game

In-Character

Winnipeg was once a thriving metropolis for the supernatural creatures of our world. Creatures of all types came to live here. It had a lot of advantages but the biggest thing it had going was its location, being the geographical center of North America.

What most of the "common folk" do not realize is as the centre of North America, Winnipeg is also the nexus of many of the continent’s Ley lines. During the flood of 1997, along with the physical damage that wiped out much of Grand Forks and Fargo/Moorhead, a great surge of energy was forced along those Ley lines. The different supernatural groups in the city each believed they knew where that energy would peak. When it did, all contact with the various groups was lost. Even now, no one truly knows what happened.

No supernatural creature that went to Winnipeg returned, until October of 1998, when a lone Gangrel scout found his way in and out again.

A little over a year has now passed. The Camarilla has a strong hold on the city, but other groups have also entered the city and seem to be craving out a place for themselves.

A dome was discovered covering the city in the Shadowlands and it has been slowly shrinking for the past year. An army of wraiths stands just outside and no one knows what will happen when the dome shrinks away to nothingness.

Out-of-Character

It all started a little over a year ago. Alex and I had been LARPing for close to two years in a number of different games around the city and in other cities. All the different games had pluses and minuses. We had been tossing around the idea of starting a game for about a year. Most of the games had died off over the summer and seemed unlikely to start up again.

We had traveled to Valleycon in Fargo and LARPed with them over the weekend. The ride back was filled with talk of starting a LARP in Winnipeg. We sat down that night and made a list of the things we liked and disliked about the various games we had played in. From that list we decided how we would do things differently in hopes of making it the best LARP possible.

We decided that the minimum number of players needed to start would be 15. A list was made and people contacted, and it did not take long to get the 15 people interested. We had our first meeting in late October less then a month from inception, and the first game was November 8th held upstairs at Pendragon.

Over the course of a month the game grew to 20 players. Everything was going great. We were only meeting once a month, but people were doing a number of out of game scenes and were getting together as friends as well. Then suddenly, interest in the LARP waned with only 7 people showing up. Alex and I decided that even if we only had 7 actors that we would keep it going. We rode out this dry spell over a month and a half before the numbers rose back up over 25. From that point on our player base has been growing and we are now the largest game in the city with roughly 50 people.

The rest, as they say, is history.

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