Initially run by Rob Conley, the game was eventually sold to Bill Hoffman and Matt Armstrong. It was then sold to Beren Olean, who ran it until selling the game to Jason Deleel, under whom it still runs as ARGO FLAG, an Accelerant game.
Rob’s early work running the game has been some of the most positive times that I had LARPing. Rob’s earnest attempts to run a believable world made the game memorable. I ran two one days at Cora Clark park and I will always be grateful for the chance that I got to experiment. I was assigned a plot review but I did not work well with them and did not do a good job of integrating the setting.
When Rob retired from running the larp, he sold it to Bill Hoffman and Matt Armstrong. Bill used to play down in WAR and Matt was a long-time traveling player. Initially they continued with the same groups as under Rob’s tenure. They ended up leaning on Chris Conley to GM the game and manage the long-term plot. Under Chris, Russ Eaborn and I ran 3 or 4 weekend events focusing on a group of Dark Elves that worshipped a bat. We did a lot of cave modules using the dining hall tables and plastic sheeting. Eventually Bill and Matt realized that running a 30-person larp is not actually a business and sold the game to Beren Olean and Brian Poprick. Early into the tenure of this new group, Brian pushed his then-wife into a sliding glass door because she was “out of line” during a staff meeting. I quit staff of the game at that point when I found out.
I went a few years before attempting to work with Beren after Brian Poprick quit playing NERO. That attempt did not work out well. In retrospect, I had thought that I was respected as a peer, but the work that Beren prefers is one where I work for him. I chafed at that and did not conduct myself particularly well there. The feeling that I had of my tenure with the organization and the time that I had put in in the past was being overlooked. I felt just like Anton did in the film “No Country for Old Men”.
Several years later, in 2012, my friend Kevin asked me to go with him to Elkins, West Virginia (3.5 hours’ drive from Pittsburgh, population: 6,500) to game for a weekend. He had been playing at North Coast NERO, but I had not been to a game since I went to NERO Cincinnati a few years earlier.
When I arrived, Eric Rollins was the event director. Sadly, something happened that caused Eric to not run the game, and he had no notes. What followed was a larp experience that will stay with me for the rest of my life. Matt and I improvised the whole event, closing off old plotlines and running really neat modules. At the end of the event Matt stopped me and handed me a magic sword item tag for “Saving the Event.” His kindness and grace were a huge inspiration to me and made me a fan for life. At the next Elkins event we came back with a crew of people, but once again the event director had basically no plan for what we were going to do. At the next event he and his wife had an argument and he just stayed home. In order to make this thing work, Kristen Brumly and I improvised the whole damn event. It was wild. The following weekend Kevin and I went to North Coast NERO to NPC for Kristen when she ran a wonderful event. Kevin played a great arc of an NPC duke who was a washed-up alcoholic, defeated and cruel to his second in command, but who eventually had a change of heart and became the leader the town needed.
The following year was the year that Chris and I took over running the game from Matt Taylor. Matt needed to step back due to some mental health struggles and the need to spend more time at home. We saw the challenges that we had encountered the previous year and vowed not to let that shit happen again. We also got most of the crew that had NPC’d to write as well. We ran the full season of modules, but the following year Matt was not comfortable being involved at all, and given the large cost of transferring the NERO license and the distance from Pittsburgh or Morgantown that the Elkins license allowed you to run in, it was not worth it for us to buy the game from him.
During this time I NPC’d at two ARGO events. The first event was probably my worst larping experience. I arrived and, free from having any responsibility, I had decided that when there was downtime I would write notes about larping while I waited for content to run. I started the event by asking all of the players around if they had any “goals” for the weekend and was met with quizzical stares. Turns out at this incarnation of ARGO you just kind of wing it as you go. I was then met with an angry “what the fuck are you doing” from Vince Errico. It was at this point that Vince thought that I was “stealing his secrets,” and being that I was unaware that this man had any secrets, I did very little to give him the impression that I was writing about “the nature of the gamemaster” rather than the particular story he had for his orcs. I need to see if I can find that notebook and write out what I had written at the time. Eventually Vince’s paranoia took over and he could not stand the sight of me writing any longer. His secrets were being extracted. I do not recall the exact phrasing he used because I was so shocked that he exploded like he did. It was something like “PUT AWAY THAT GODDAMN NOTEBOOK.” I went to talk to Clinton Snyder, one of the ARGO marshals. Clinton explained to me that “Vince has quite a temper” and that was that. Later that event I spoke to my mom and explained that this crazy guy lost his shit on me. I did this in open view of the NPC shack. Vince took this to mean that I was intentionally goading him. Rather, I was hurt and shocked that I was verbally abused and the game had no mechanism to do anything about it. Vince went to a marshal to report my bad attitude, and Clinton “smoothed things over” between the two of us.
Unbeknownst to me, Vince had decided that I was his mortal enemy.
The next ARGO event that I attended was supposed to be Jamie Jamruska’s event, and Kevin invited the whole Elkins staff out to be there. When I arrived, Jamie was present, but John Thompson was also running the event. John Thompson had an arrogance unlike anything I had ever seen before, but he also sadly did not have the writing chops to back it up. The event was a disaster. I was uncomfortable with the basically-no-writeup approach that the game had, and the macho attitude of folks like John Thompson and Joe Tate.
Eventually my terrible attitude was brought to the attention of the staff, and they decided that the way to deal with this was to get the entire staff to explain to me that I have a terrible attitude. This made me super uncomfortable and I went home in a huff.
At this point I went several years without larping again. I always intended to get back to it, but life was busy and I needed time to clear my head and think about what a worthwhile future larp would look like. I was paralyzed by the options and really struggled creatively during this time. I attended Dragonhold, a small custom-system larp that I played at for about 6 games, initially with Kevin and eventually with Chaz. The game was a real eye-opener in that it did not allow outside NPCs; the game was staffed by a tight creative team that ran out of an Ohio renaissance fair. These folks knew jack shit about running a larp, but they had a ton of experience running a ren faire. It was a wild experience realizing that they didn’t know how to fight with boffers; they were used to play fighting and would be easily picked apart if you fought them for real. It was also a game where the importance of the props that are used was reaffirmed. I had attended with a large PVC mace that I had from the NERO Elkins NPC shack. Many of the other attendees would attend with latex boffers that were much more lightweight than the PVC mace that I had thought was the norm. If I had attended with a lighter weapon I would have eaten these people alive. Eventually I stopped going to Dragonhold after Kayte had severe PTSD due to an NPC doing self-harm during the game with no warning.
During this time I went and NPC’d at two PRO events with Mike Fife. He and I found that we just kind of sat around, and that the game runners really struggled to assign work out efficiently.
My friend Stephen had been talking to John Thompson about staffing at a NERO chapter. I told Stephen, “For god’s sake don’t do anything with John Thompson, that guy sucks.” Stephen didn’t listen to me and kept talking to John.
At this point the old coronavirus hit and Kayte’s health took a huge turn for the worse.
I never thought that I would have the chance to do larp stuff again. Stephen kept talking about how, slowly but surely, he was becoming involved in this POLAR game. I knew that I didn’t particularly care for the crew that was assembled, but when Stephen asked if I could do some props, I joined a few staff meetings. These meetings were some of the most unproductive meetings I have ever attended. John was not involved at all. He wanted to be the face and the money guy. The people that were actually working on the game were Donnie Leight and Devin Pusitrani. I found them to be head-in-the-clouds idea guys but very difficult to pin down on specifics. Eventually Stephen decided that he was running the first event. He then realized that he had not played at a larp in 20 years. He asked me for help in running the game, and I invited Chris Colland to come work on it with me. We worked like maniacs writing dozens of modules, planning to kick the game off with a bang. I made props and boffers and edited the modules together. The day of the event came and Chris was at the event with our preparation. 7 NPCs that were going to come didn’t make it. The event was terrible; we had no ability to run the things we wrote. Even worse, the people that decided to help run the event with us at the last minute, such as Jeremy Reel, were absolutely unhelpful, offering Chris writing tips instead of working from the writeup. Stephen was also in the pivotal role as the Mayor of the occupied dwarven town, a role that was very challenging for him to play. My electronics also took me far longer to work on than I expected, and many of them were duds.
The next event we brought on Brittany Perry and really hit our stride as a writing team. I feel the writing on the second event was some of our best.
We then ran the vampire event.
The prison event.
Then I quit to work with Crestfallen because John Thompson is a fucking creep and sexually harassed one of the staff members.
Currently ARGO runs as a game.
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