Last weekend I went to Blackbox CPH. It was my first RPG experience in 2020 and probably my first larp experience in a couple of years. I was working on a particularly tooth-pulling game project for school when tickets went on sale, so I opted for three larps I thought would be pretty intense — you know, for catharsis. I’m gonna try to get my thoughts down while they’re still relatively clear in my mind. This post is about the sci-fi relationship game Hard Weapons & Soft Hearts by Karin van der Heij and Michael Such.
Parties where you don’t really know anyone and have to bounce from conversation to conversation hoping someone will talk to you for an extended period of time is probably the definition of my own personal hell, and I’m very impressed that Michael and Karin managed to recreate it so faithfully. Thanks, you two. You really came through on this one.
In all seriousness, I was enamored with the idea of focusing on the parties happening between cool space missions. Bar scenes are some of my favorites in sci-fi media, and between moments of feeling really uncomfortable (is it bleed if the scenario is straight up activating your social anxiety?) I had a lot of fun trying to have angry, anonymous sex with a bunch of bio-mech pilots.
Hard Weapons played out as a series of parties all mashed together in about 90 minutes. The room was divided into a few different zones such as the bar, the dorms, the war room and the hot storage room where pilots go to have anonymous sex. Players all portrayed pilots belonging to one of four habitats with their own fashion styles, customs, and ways of flirting. Once play started we were left to flirt, fight, fuck, and whatever else we could think up. I played Stinger, a pilot with a victim complex and a lot of hurt in their soul from the Faku habitat. Highlights included being gently but firmly seduced by a pilot insisting I talked too much, breaking down in front of the Faku pilot I had just spent five minutes yelling at, and some kind of weird ritual going on with one of the commanders who had a mental breakdown following a botched mission? I’m not quite sure about that last one, it always seemed to happen in the periphery of my scenes.
Giving us all a faction (or habitat) with its own customs and ways of flirting as well as a character with prewritten goals and scene prompts (I had “get into a fight and do not back down”, for instance) and then just letting us loose to see what happened worked really well; it felt a lot like playing Monsterhearts. It’s the most sandboxy black box larp I’ve ever played, and it was very cool to see that kind of emergent gameplay in a short-form larp.
In retrospect I think I sabotaged myself by picking the Stinger character, though. The Faku faction was fairly passive in the first place, valuing reciprocity and politeness and disliking pushiness, and adding the classic “anti-hero who just wants someone to see through their tough exterior” trope to the mix was just asking for trouble; it’s a lot of inner world stuff that’s super hard to express in a measly hour and a half. The character sheet even said something amounting to WARNING: People might not like you very much if you play this character at the very top, so I guess I deserved that one.
I suspect it was a conscious choice to not let each habitat know how the other cultures usually flirt in order to maximize the potential for interesting miscommunication, but in the case of the non-initiating, reciprocal Faku culture I’m not sure it worked quite as well. It’s really hard to place yourself in a space in a way that communicates I’m not being awkward, I’m actually being shy and brooding on purpose, please come talk to me! to an outside observer. Maybe letting the other players know that we really wanna party, we just need someone else to give us permission! would have helped? My impression was that all of us playing Faku pilots ended up dropping the Neo-Neo-Neo-Victorian act and just tried to participate in some fun scenes. I ended up walking up to someone and just loudly saying “Ask me what’s wrong!” and then launching into a spiel when they did — I thought that was very funny. I’d love to hear how players from other habitats experienced the flirting component.
Hard Weapons featured a game mechanic I thought was kind of neat, but unfortunately didn’t see much in play: “fluid time” which let players walk away from a scene and meet again later, pretending days or weeks had passed. I really liked the idea of not enforcing a timeline and letting us skip all the “boring” parts, but most scenes I participated in seemed to all take place in the same evening. I suspect the club lighting played a part here, placing us within a pretty standard diegetic sense of time. Here’s hoping someone made good use of the mechanic.
Finally, I gotta address the fruit sex. Each player received a piece of fruit (everything from lychees to a whole-ass pineapple) representing their sexuality. Holding your piece of fruit while interacting with someone meant that you were making the interaction explicitly sexual, and actually touching each other’s fruit meant having sex, with the quality of the touch representing the quality of the sex.
This worked really, really well! The far-future setting and the “fruit sexuality” neatly sidestepped issues of gender presentation (Stinger had a green apple and was attracted to people with non-green fruit) and allowed people to clearly signal a change in tone without having to break into out-of-character talk. I had a few very different fruit-touching experiences, all very intimate, and felt very safe the whole time. Good metatechnique.
All in all, a good play experience even if I might’ve enjoyed it more as a more gregarious character. Oh well! Play Hard Weapons & Soft Hearts if you get a chance. Some really nice ideas in there.
NMBJ 