Gamemasters Vision

Theme

The Roulin' Moose is a wartime larp, for sure. But it's not ONLY a wartime larp, as we wanted to have a full spectrum of human emotions involved. In a normal wartime environment feelings are often very subdued. This is not our idea of good larp, as strong emotions like hatred, love, passion, greed and most of all fear etc. are all required in the kind of drama satire we're aiming at.

Satire

To bring up emotions and actions of a dark time, but to avoid drowning in the carnage of utmost human behavior, we have chosen to use a powerful but difficult tool - satire.

When dealing with violence of war, abomination of concentration camps, personal horrors - but also with personal heroism, great goal beyond individuals, blind love and the absurdity of human irrationality, estrangement without indifference is needed.

How is this done? By a casual glance, everything is normal. But looking closer, you notice that the evil ones are more evil, the heroes are more heroic, the ordinary boring people utterly burdened by totally insignificant concerns. And by putting them together, you notice the preposterousness of it all, and can gain special understanding.

Satire does not mean rolling on the floor laughing. It is about understanding the incomprehensible.

In Roulin' Moose the satirical elements have been written in to the characters. We expect players to read their characters well and play them up the their limits, but not trying to make 'more satire or comedy'. We have to also stress the point that this larp is not in any means pro-nazi and is trying to show the horrors of that era in satirical ways.

Historical Accuracy

Roulin' Moose is aiming to semi-accurate history line. We have used all possible resources to dig the accurate historical storyline, what actually happened, how it was back then and so on. That information we have used as our baseline, that we have twisted in places where twisting the history has created more interesting and more playable game.

All social relations and vast majority of characters are completely fictional, though many events in the histories of those characters, background materials given and such are historically accurate or very close to it.

One could call Roulin' Moose to be an alternate history game, as it does not completely accurately follow historical facts.

Why Roulin' Moose?

The idea of Roulin' Moose was found in hangoverish brainstorming session like most of games I've been involved. We wanted to do a game which is not Wanderer and not Wappu, nor little christmast game what we have done in quantities over the years. Somehow we felt that it's time to do something dramatically new. We also had an intention of trying movie effects in larp and this particular scenario seemed to allow that as well.

After a while of going through ideas and thrashing those after a little bit of pondering, we noticed that Baz Luhrmanns “Moulin Rouge” as a movie offered sceneries that would be nice – even a bit too sweetened and too nice. Something had to be done for that. The decision was to set similar theatrical setting in to occupied Paris, just to turn the time 40-50 years ahead.

Level of propping and how to get the props?

The gamemasters are arranging uniforms to have soldiers in UNIFORM clothes. However, shoes and underwear are for everyone to handle in any and all cases. For most characters, however, players are expected to make their costumes, props and stuff all by themselves. This is not one of those jeans-and-nametag games, so please prepare a costume that fits for your character. We try our best to provide you help on making, acquiring and buying such clothes that fit for the game, but we can not arrange all costumes and props for all characters.

Only safe assumption is that you're expected to arrange almost everything for your characters appearance.

What it comes to you longhaired guys, you have no place in our German army. All German soldiers must look more or less "aryan" ;). You could take part as members of some French underground, dissidents of some sort or something close to that, but we do encourage people to get a haircut or at least be prepared to hide your long curlies somehow. Having a long hair was very rare for men in the 1940's.

Stress level and effects?

It has come to our attention that some of our previous games have been mentally challenging. This game differs from past, as in this game there're no simulation levels. It's the same level for all. If you felt that our past games were too rough, there's a good chance that you don't like this either.

Keep in mind, that we do intend to create a believable illusion of wartime atmosphere. Depression, sadness, fear, sadism, pointless orders, patriotism, heroism and so many other faiths might be reserved just for you, but like in a real war you never know when such events hit you until it's too late.

We expect every character to immerse in to the feeling:"Calm before the storm"...

Ideology

The Roulin' Moose does NOT support nazi ideology or any pro-nazi organizations. Our game is merely trying to depict the era and it's horrors to provide modern people better tools to understand the wrongdoings of WWII and war in general.

Roulin' Moose is against war, nazism, ideological brainwashing regardless of nature and is aiming to provide similar snapshot of time as the theatre play Albert Speer in Helsingin Kaupungin Teatteri.