Middle Earth Ranger Forum

We all become someone else when we kit up this is just a brief description of me.

Born to parents I never knew I grew up in a strange place for even a Dunedain. Where you ask? I was raised in the halls of Thranduil my parents must have been friends of the king for never except for myself have I heard of one of the race of men being raised in such a way. I adopted their way of living and their way of dress as my own. I also learned much lore of the elder days much more than a person is normally expected. I left from that place at the age of 40 and now I range from the newly rebuilt city of Dale to the northern borders of Rohan. I travel with both bow and sword of elvish make and am often mistaken for an elf of mirkwood. Sometimes I wonder and search for answers for who my parents were but noone seems to have ever known of them. I continue to search but something weighs on me as the years go by is it the sound of the sea I hear.

Nice. I have somewhat of a persona if I'm helping out with any type of LARP event just the small details change per different event. I just have an overall idea about the personality because he's me. I don't play him different, he just lives in a different time/ place and his skills are more advanced because he gets to use these tools everyday not when he has some spare time away from work like I have to

Rifter wrote:Nice. I have somewhat of a persona if I'm helping out with any type of LARP event just the small details change per different event. I just have an overall idea about the personality because he's me. I don't play him different, he just lives in a different time/place and his skills are more advanced because he gets to use these tools everyday not when he has some spare time away from work like I have to

I hear ya. In the personas I've done over the years it's always more natural if you're just 'playing' yourself, albeit in a different temporal setting. Although I do find it helps (for me, at least) to adopt a name that's an equivalent to my actual name in each persona's culture.

If I might quote myself (from an old a blog piece contrasting role-playing with reenactment (and living history specifically):
"That guy at the rendezvous walking around with the longrifle and muddy leggings won’t tell you he’s <insert made-up name here> and has +10 accuracy; (unless he's interpreting a known historical figure) he’s just himself, wearing an old-timey outfit, and he has a steady hand, a sharp eye, and can hit something at 200 yards with a piece he most likely made himself (there's those useful skills again!)."

Of course, where this got confusing for me was a few years ago during my gig at a livinghistory museum doing first-person interpretation of a 'composite' common individual. Aside from the name I was given, 'Matthew' had a very skeletal backstory, which in the broad strokes was eerily similar to mine--he was from central Kantuckee (as am I), learned blacksmithing from his pa (as I did), and had spent the last several years moving around the Northwest territories from job to job (as I had)... Which was good for my interpretation, because it meant I could very naturally tell stories about things that really happened to me!