WARNING: This game is the ancestor of the Clerical Error game written more recently by Kathleen De Smet. The newer game has undergone heavy revision. If you read this game you will both spoil some secrets and end up with some wrong information, ruining your ability to play the newer version.
In July of 2006 the hard work of Katherine Zenke, Kathleen De Smet, Vivian Obarski, and myself finally came to fruition in the form of the Clerical Error LARP. We ran the LARP three times in one weekend. Our Friday session was comprised of mostly our close friends. The Saturday session was filled by the Freedmens and their usual Whately crew. We were very apprehensive about this, since the Whately games had inspired us in the first place. The Sunday session was held in the afternoon for more of our friends.
After it was all over and the "set" torn down, all I had left was a closet full of props and a set of photographs to remember the game by. Kathleen put up an awesome photo gallery where she talked about the game and the people who played in, but I still felt like there was more that I wanted to say. If you want to see large, lovely photos, you should go to Kathleen's page. I'm only going to use the pictures as added color and illustrations of the things I talk about.
After the game. From left to right: Viv, Eva, Kathleen, and Katie.All four of us put a huge amount of time and work into this game. We also got a huge amount of help from Mark De Smet. He was amazing. He built our most impressive prop related spectacles as well as playing two NPC's in every game.
If you've got comments, questions, or criticism about the game the whole team would love to hear them. I think we all want to run more LARPs at some point, so any feedback will hopefully make us stronger.
When we first announced that we were going to be running Clerical Error we got a great email from the Freedmens saying they wanted to play and offering us some hints and tips. I must admit we repeated one of their pieces of advice over and over in the following weeks. It became a mantra, intoned at every decor and puzzle pitfall. Ultimately it made us feel a lot better about our debut game, because no matter how badly our props, puzzles, or ambiance came out:
'Everything looks better in the dark.'
