Trashy Daytime Soap Opera LARP (in development)

After the fantastic time everyone had at the 1930s LARP, I’ve decided to finally get my a into g and develop my often-pondered trashy-soap-opera one-off LARP, to be run in Auckland mid-next-year.

I’ve got a basic plot, and in lieu of actually studying for my Linguistics exam I’ve formed a few basic family trees. What I’m after now are crazy miniplots, twists, and character traits to make the whole thing as ludicrous as possible.

I thought I’d made it pretty weird, then watched Days Of Our Lives today (for research purposes, obviously :stuck_out_tongue: ) and realised I wasn’t even close.

So far I’ve covered:

  • amnesia
  • illegitimate children
  • illicit affairs
  • baby-swapping
  • secret identities
  • covered-up murder
  • the family drunk
  • enough half-siblings to form a baseball team

Any other ideas/interest?

I’m so in.

And I know there’d be quite a few others pawing at the gates to be involved too. When would it be set? 80’s? 90’s? It sounds like an awful lot of fun.

Identical twin returns from jail to discover that their sibling drove off a cliff in an ambulance in an apparent murder-suicide. Suspecting foul play, investigates by sleeping with everyone in the cast and then accidently falls and love and marries their missing parent who also turns out to be their older sibling. Then finds that twin wasn’t really dead, but faked death to join underground cult living in abandoned tunnels under Paris. Travels with parent/sister/wife to Paris and infiltrates cult, kidnaps twin and legally adopts them together with parent/sibling/spouse, in the process becoming their twin’s uncle. Tragically, all three then apparently die in doughnut factory industrial accident.

Um. There’s a tabletop game out there called SOAP that might give you some better ideas. I thought it was a free PDF, but now it seems to cost something (unless this is a different game with the same name and concept: leisuregames.com/acatalog/So … ames_.html

Would you mind if I moved this to ‘Game ideas’, Stephanie?

No worries at all.

Setting-wise, I’m veering towards late-80s: stupidly bright colours, big hair on women, bad hair on men, and everything was just crazier back then.

As exel would say:

“I love you so f%^king much”

ooh how about demonic possession: i kid you not, it was done on days of our lives.

you need the brooding bad guy out to ruin a relationship (stefano or victor kerieakis-esquue) and there definitely needs to be a doctor who has to perform a risky and potentially life saving surgery after a cast member is diagnosed with a rare and usually fatal illness…

ooh and someone can marry the wrong person by accident or by being tricked into it, like sammi and carrie on days of our lives! not that I watch soaps… at all…

80’s is awesome. layer up those shoulder pads and dig out your blue eyeshadow.

I call brooding preist tempted away from hte church by a women.

Somebody requiring an urgent organ transplant/blood transfusion, and the only person with the right blood-type is… Their Worst Enemy, who turns out to be a long lost relative or something.

Someone with multiple personalities or mysterious memory blanks…

Cool, finally an excuse for a LARP to include bad acting and totally hamming it up. Anyone can make SHOCK REVELATIONS at any time. See if we can even follow what’s going on by the end.

Could be hysterically funny, or totally confusing chaos. Either way, should be lots of fun.

you could incorporate some sort of device like every ten minutes the ‘climactic music’ starts to build which signals the scene ends in a minute- that way you get the big cliffnanger statements and the soul searching stares into the distance… once the music stops everyone has to pose/pause- then disperse and come back for a new scene/new location

think of the great quotes people would end the scenes on- shameless ham acting.
“stop the wedding! Britney, you can’t marry kevin he’s-… your father!”

You’re all fabulous. I’ve just had a brainwave: the venue needs to have several rooms. Each room is a different scene: probably one big lounge-type room for the main social gathering, possibly an hospital room (if I throw originality to the wind and just steal plots from Days of Our Lives), a boardroom, and probably someone’s house. In accordance with the laws of soap operas, travel between scenes is assumed to be instantaneous, no matter geographical distance.

Will it have a cliffhanger ending between games?

Hmm. There will definitely be a cliffhanger ending, but whether it ever gets resolved depends on how successful the game is. If it does anything like as well as the 30s LARP, it may get sequelized. In which case, of course.

I think you need a venue with 3-4 different rooms which are all stereotypical soap stage settings.

  • The hospital ward
  • The bar
  • The bedroom
  • The boardroom/lawyers office

or:

-poolside at the mansion
-the police headquarters
-fancy restaurant on the top of big tower that anyone who is anyone goes to…
-church, with priest. (and confessional!!)

[quote=“Derek”]I think you need a venue with 3-4 different rooms which are all stereotypical soap stage settings.

  • The hospital ward
  • The bar
  • The bedroom
  • The boardroom/lawyers office[/quote]

I’m thinking 5 separate rooms (and I had a fantastic brainwave, so I demand feedback)
3 rooms are US settings. There’s the lounge at the mansion, the boardroom where the will-reading is to take place, and a third location being probably either hospital or Church.
The other 2 rooms are . . . in Europe! (Nowhere specifically, Europe is just one big country over the sea in soaps).
Mechanics work thus: travel between scenes in the same country are considered instantaneous. During the night, every character may travel ONCE, ONE-WAY between the US and Europe, and have to take at least 15 minutes out-of-game to account for the 12-hour flight.

So obviously some characters will start in Europe and some will start in the US. It’s going to be stupidly complicated. shrugs

I like the idea of occasional climactic music as a signal that you have 1 minute/30sec/whatever to end in a cliffhanger, followed by a 5-min ‘advert break’ during which you can move to a new location, change costume, plan OOC with other players, etc. Although every 10mins is too frequently, how about every 30mins or hourly (like a normal soap length in fact)

Various rooms is a good idea, although one big room with different corners (with appropriate scenery) would probably work better as we’d all know what was going on everywhere else.

But not knowing what’s going on would be part of the fun! That way secrets can be revealed.

I reckon combining the multi-room idea with the music timer idea would be great, say 10-15 minutes per “scene” and then everyone has the option of travelling to a different location. Getting everyone to change locations at the same time would stop “time-travelling”, and a short period for that scenes would make it fast and frantic so that people will be forced to reach conclusion quickly rather than just chewing the scenery forever. You don’t need to put in breaks, people who need a rest could leave a scene early and then sit around waiting for the next change before entering another scene.

Weirdly, most daytime soaps don’t have any music. The soundtracks are just voices and bad foley. So music wouldn’t be genre-appropriate, but it would make the game more fun.

80s is excellent - that way we can make it even cheesier… :stuck_out_tongue:

Personally, I’d lean towards the ‘lots of rooms’ idea, as that way we can do lots more dramatic ‘revelations’.

[quote=“CiCi”]So far I’ve covered:

  • amnesia
  • illegitimate children
  • illicit affairs
  • baby-swapping
  • secret identities
  • covered-up murder
  • the family drunk
  • enough half-siblings to form a baseball team[/quote]
    And all the common-or-garden soap-type stuff like:
  • the maneater who falls for a complete geek
  • the guy who likes one woman but sleeps with another
  • the bad guy having a temporary change of heart and being nice, then blackmailing (or killing) someone to cover up his moment of weakness
  • the totally sweet, naive girl who discovers that she has an unusual kink
  • the tragically orphaned guy who falls in love with one of his (previously unknown) relatives

…can I please help with the plotting? :smiling_imp: