Tyrant Lizard Kings

RPG system: LARP
Participants: 5 players

By

Description

Years ago, when you were in college, you were a Shaman of the Dead World.

It was a strange little group that you joined, and you engaged in strange spiritual practices. Guided by a self-proclaimed visionary teacher, you sent your consciousness back into the distant past, and you communed with the totem beasts of a bygone age. From them, you hoped to attain an enlightenment that could not be found within the world of men. You hoped to learn how to face down the greatest, starkest, most fearsome truth of all: that all things die, even the world itself.

...it seems hard to believe that any of it was real. Even at the time, when it was the most important thing in the world, it was all shrouded in a murk of madness; your existence felt like a dream, back then, and you were always wondering when you would wake up.

But you know what you saw, and you know what you did. However strange it might seem, however implausible -- you lived amidst the ghosts of dinosaur gods. One of them reached into your heart and claimed you as its own. For some time, you were the chosen voice of an unfathomably ancient spirit, and you walked in its ways.

\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*

It ended as these things always end. There were fights. There was drama. Some of the Shamans tried to dive ever further into their visions, seeking an ever-closer identification with their totemic patrons; others thought that the group had gone too far already. Supposedly you were all brothers-and-sisters-in-spirit, but not everyone trusted or liked everyone else, and such tensions cannot be quietly ignored forever.

Eventually someone up and left, and after that it wasn’t long before the whole group splintered and broke. You all went your separate ways. In the years that followed -- well, it was different for everyone, you know that much. Certainly, whenever you looked back, you shook your head in wonderment.

\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*

Now, they tell you, the world is in fact going to die. The real world, the everyday world, the world you know. For all the mumbling about carbon dioxide and nuclear missiles, it seems as though it’s going to be the same thing it was before: a giant rock from space. There are only a few months until impact.

Society has gone mad. All sorts of cults and churches have arisen from nothing, as people desperately grasp at any greater truth that might guide them through the nightmare. You cannot help wondering whether, maybe, you actually know the greater truth that they all seek.

A few days ago, your old teacher -- Tiberius Rehoboam, the first Shaman of the Dead World -- was on the news. He killed four people before the police managed to take him down. The world thinks that he was just one more apocalypse-drunk madman, and maybe he was, but you have no doubts about what he was actually doing: he was giving himself over completely to his own totem, seeking out a pure and perfect communion, hoping to become one with Tyrant Rager in the life-beyond-life.

And now the rest of the Shamans have come together, for the first time since college, summoned by the plea of the youngest among you. Notionally, this is just going to be a reunion. You are going to talk about your lives, about your memories, about the coming doom, about the weird horror of TR’s fate. Probably you will say some awkward, painful goodbyes.

But you wonder, and you know that all the rest are wondering as well:

Have you truly put the Lizard Kings behind you? In the face of extinction, will you not seek to return to the profound wisdom that once you knew?

---------------------- ----------------------

_Tyrant Lizard Kings_ is a game about loss, reunions, memory, facing down death, and the difficulty of caring about something for which the wider world has no use. It is also about the majesty of dinosaurs. It discusses violence, drug use, and spiritual abuse; it is suitable for players 16 years of age and up.

Be aware that the game contains a ritual mechanic that calls for some on-the-spot player creativity.

Played at