Waller

Tell us a bit about yourself and what got you into larping

About me, I am 40, I work in the tech field for a European company, and I am generally pretty boring.

As for getting into larping, I worked at a comic book store in the late 90's and some of the people I met there were like: "Hey, you do martial arts and play TTRPGs. Do want to try this larp thing?"

I was super into the idea, but it took some time to get a weekend off from work to try it. Not long after that, the shop closed down and I had all my weekends free.

So, I played 45 events in my first year of larping, including multiple 9 day events and have gone to around 40 different chapters, in total. You could say I was hooked.

Here I am, nearly 22 years later, still playing pretty regularly.

What are your other interests?

I am generally running a stupid amount of D&D for most of my free time.

Otherwise, I watch a ton of anime, read many books (lately mostly light novels and manga), play video games, and am pretty into tea.

Tell us a bit about your character(s)!

Arai - Is a character that I originally started as mostly a joke. He was supposed to be this like super mangy tiger and annoying guy that I was just going to play in Alliance until I had a better character idea. Here we are like 15 years later and I am still playing him.

Coming from a Sarr clan that is nearly extinct because they live in a jungle not really fit for sentient or sapient life and having to scrape for survival every second gives him a different outlook on things from most people.

Much of his identity in game and out was from the Sarr race. So, when that got folded into Wylderkin with Alliance 2.0, he has been having an identity crisis. I have some ideas related to that for Convergence, so we will see how that goes.

Komeayaso - A once snake Scavenger who switched over to a desert Elf when 2.0 happened, most of his life was spent as essentially a video game NPC. He stood around guarding a castle for some lord and never did anything else.

Started adventuring on a whim to emulate all the people who kept trying to ransack the castle and ended up as a healer/ritualist.

True to his roots, he is usually happiest sitting in a Circle of Power and not moving.

Not sure where he is going to end up in Convergence, maybe some sort of healer/envoy/warrior nonsense.

Atchigo Kiride Masakari - A Dark Elf who ended up being used for about every in character Chuck Norris joke. Most of my time was spent glaring at people.

He was also a multi-master Blacksmith and it was canon that he never actually forged anything. He just glared at the materials until they formed the item he wanted to make out of terror.

Horatio Ventus - My first character, a panther Sarr who Spirit Forged probably a million times. Was some variety of Templar/Spellsword for most of it though.

Did some cool stuff, joined the OEF, did some other stuff, and then permed.

What is your favorite larping memory?

I don't know if it is my favorite memory, but pretty much single handedly getting ultralight weapons first allowed to be used in the many Midwestern NERO chapters and then getting a lot of people to use them was a pretty lasting impact on the game. And, as a plot person, it was so nice to not get hit with the 50 pound logs that everyone used to use as weapons.

Except for Silvey, when he broke my finger with an ultralight. Then, someone managed to hit the same finger again a couple minutes later while standing in front of me when I had my arm behind my back.

A pretty good memory, that Inger made resurface by telling a similar story in the Discord, was when I was playing my Dark Elf at an event where we were fighting waves of undead down a path at night. Atchigo was very high level and the mod was fairly low level, so I was only killing the death knights that came out with every couple waves.

After several times of coming out of the dark woods and killing the death knights right as they spawned, the people playing them were talking to each other saying that "We aren't going to let Waller kill us instantly again". They didn't notice that I was standing about two feet from them in a shadow. They 3 counted in and I instantly crumbled them.

Getting called for cheating because I had so many racial resist skills has several fun stories attached.

I was also on plot quite a bit and ran events at several chapters, so I have a lot of good memories from that side of things.

I think running the blood magic were creature plot for Gabe has some of my favorite RP interaction memories of all. Hopefully some day he actually gets to finish one of his transform story lines.

When someone meets you at larp, how can they best get to know you/engage with you?

In game, that is a bit tougher as both of my characters are fairly prickly.

Arai is more for the quiet companionship, so just sitting nearby is a decent start. You might be able to draw him out if you ask for some tips on how to fight better.

Komeayaso is more personable, but is not likely to be the one to start a conversation. If you tell him "I like swords", he will respond "Welcome to Corneria" and you can go from there.

Out of game, I am happy to chat about most topics. If you want to talk weapon construction, story design and game running, rules questions and interpretation, and so on, I am your man.