Three months ago, the written histories of Katalossa bled from their pages. While the world’s residents reckoned with the loss and sought to preserve their stories, strange portals began to open and deposit monsters throughout the land.
While the world of Katalossa is fit for a novel, movie or video game, its story is the plot of a local, live-action, role-playing game called Crestfallen. A live-action role play — often called LARP — is a game where participants create and embody characters who interact and tell the game’s story in real time. It’s essentially a play with no script and no audience, save its participants.
Beren Olean has been a part of the Western Pennsylvania LARP community for more than 20 years. For nearly a decade, Olean owned and operated the local chapter of the New England Role-Playing Organization — a nearly 40-year-old game with chapters across the nation. Olean and other former participants refer to it as “the national game.”
Alongside writers Dade Matthew and Brittney Perry, Olean launched Crestfallen in 2022 to creatively and technically freshen up the local LARP experience.
“A lot of it is having that core fantasy vibe, but then also breaking the norms that we’ve gotten used to in the Western Pennsylvania LARP scene and turning them on their head,” Olean says. “I’m a big fan of tabletop [role-playing games], but also I grew up with Chrono Trigger and all the Final Fantasy games.”
A Crestfallen LARP rule book sits atop blank character sheets. Photo by Roman Hladio.
While many other LARPs stick to faux sword warfare, Crestfallen allows NERF blasters on the battlefield for characters who associate with a cowboy-like society in the world — a feature Olean borrowed from a Wild West-themed LARP he attended ahead of Crestfallen’s launch.
Aside from genre shake-ups, Olean and his player base created a new, simplified rule set.
“Lots of games … had that very old-school level-up system — you gain a level, you get this many hit points, you get this many skill points, all that kind of stuff,” he says.
The old system inadvertently promoted a “combat monster” play style, since the number of experience points you earned was dependent on fighting monsters or other players.
Crestfallen is written for slower progression. For every session a character attends, they receive two character points. That means for one-day events, like the one on Sunday, Sept. 14, characters received two points. For the regular two-day weekend sessions, characters receive four points.
As players accumulate points, they can spend them on skills in different categories: combat, academics, mercantilism, crafting and thievery. Since they receive points no matter what they accomplish during a session, Crestfallen players are more inspired to branch away from combat play styles to fill other roles.
“I wanted to build that town feeling,” Olean says. “You can have a fighter that’s really good at what he does, but if he gets stuck with an entangle, … he’s a sitting duck. You need the doctors or healers or craftsmen to get rid of those conditions.”
Chaz Linn played the national game alongside Olean and is now a Crestfallen staff member and player. His character, Oz, is a shady crystal salesman turned researcher of the arcane and existential who has plunged headfirst into all manner of the game’s softer skills.
Instead of spending stamina points for combative purposes, for example, he can use them to ask the game’s writers three yes-or-no questions about the world — a powerful boon in a world that has just lost all of its written history.
Crestfallen organizers provide a slew of character masks for devils, goblins, gnolls, spiders and more. Additionally, they have masks for so-called “kinfolk” characters, which are anthropomorphic animals. Photo by Roman Hladio.
A container of visually-modified NERF guns. In the lore of Crestfallen, a faction of humans wield the weapons in Wild West-esque fashion. Photo by Roman Hladio.
Oz is an unpleasant character to be around — Linn’s wife even despises the character — but his in-game intellectual prowess often assists other LARPers. Oftentimes, players must solve Escape Room-esque puzzles to progress the narrative.
“One of the research guild members approached me and gave me this box,” Linn says, reflecting on a previous event. “In this box, it was just a bunch of tattered, dirty, crumpled-up paper. They’re like, ‘We need your help finding out what’s written on these pages.’”
Through play, Linn accidentally gave himself a crash course in document restoration. He found he could hold them up to sunlight to allow some of the text to shine through, and then made use of the soft makeup brushes that Oz has in his disguise kit to clear off the dirt.
John Williams also followed Olean and Linn from the national game. In fact, one of the characters he plays, Gill, is a “traveler” to the world of Katalossa from one of the aforementioned portals that opened across the land.
“In that world, he was pretty much a follower, and not really ruthless, but didn’t have any qualms about violence,” Williams says.
Crestfallen gave Williams a chance to reestablish and reframe Gill’s character motivations for serving as a warrior. At the same time, Williams used the change in game to create a second character, Billy.
“He’s actually an incarnation of the Yule goat, and was sent here by Odin to protect this world,” Williams says.
Narrative beats often lead Williams to pick one character or another at events, but most of the time, he chooses which to play based on the effort they require.
Gill, for example, requires only some light armor, loose fantasy garb and a sword. Playing Billy requires more — and larger — costume pieces and weapons.
“Gill fits in this bag,” he says, gesturing toward a backpack. “Billy is two crates and a duffel.”
“I had a bit of a hiatus for a while where I was job hunting, and I wanted to come back into it easy.”
Like Olean, Williams has been LARPing for decades. He started when he was 19 — that was 23 years ago.
But Olean has built Crestfallen to be accessible to new players as well as veterans. Creating costumes and buying prop swords can be expensive, he says, which is why he intentionally added Wild West themes and technological advancement to the game.
“It’s real easy to buy a pair of blue jeans and a flannel shirt and come out and try it without spending a lot of money,” Olean says.
Beren Olean holds a foam armor piece Crestfallen provides to some players during events. Photo by Roman Hladio.
At a one-day event on Sunday, Oct. 19, New Kensington resident Mike Santucci made his Crestfallen debut — wearing a flannel to boot.
Santucci, a fan of Dungeons and Dragons, “The Lord of the Rings” and other fantasy media, says he first saw LARP while attending Indiana University of Pennsylvania. It’s been a bucket list item, so to speak, ever since.
Earlier this year, he bit the (NERF) bullet and began searching online for games near him. Crestfallen was at the top of the list.
“I thought it’d be fun,” he says.
As he created his character, Santucci was leaning toward some type of sword-swinger, harkening to his love of J.R.R. Tolkien’s characters. Still, his creative intuition was a little less obvious.
“Everyone wants to be, like, Aragorn,” Santucci says, referencing the broad-shouldered ranger with long locks and a mystical sword. “I want to be Samwise. I want a frying pan.”
With few skill points, though, he’ll have to attend a few more events before he can fully embody the culinary-inclined hobbit.
“I think [my character] is just the basic, boring human fighter for now,” he says. “I think most importantly is learning the system they’re using as a first-timer. I really want to see where this goes.”
Crestfallen’s next event runs from Friday, Nov. 14, to Sunday, Nov. 16, at the Knotted Pines event center in Jefferson County. Registration for the weekend is $60, or $30 for a single day. Registrants can also sign up to be a nonplayer character — a stand-in guard, merchant or enemy — for free.