February 2001. We had arrived at NERO ARGO, a Live Action Role Playing Game which took place in the mountains of Pennsylvania.

A Live Action RPG generally takes place at a campsite in the middle of nowhere. The organizers rent out the space for the weekend and people pay to attend. Over the course of the weekend, a little fantasy novel unfolds. The players fight monsters, solve puzzles, rescue damsels in distress, and do other exciting things you’d normally only experience in a video game or read about in a book. If your character survives the weekend, you gain treasure and experience points and becomes a little more powerful.

ARGO is a chapter of NERO, which means that you can play your character at about 40 different locations in the country. Each “chapter” is a place you can visit in the game world. The cool thing about NERO is that you can play your character anywhere – you can travel all over the country meeting fascinating characters and getting into exciting misadventures.

I had arrived at ARGO with the Lawyk Clan. This was a group of about 12 people, many of whom I had grown up with or gone to college with. At the time, the Lawyk Clan had a goal: to be the most notorious group of magnificent bastards on the east coast. They traveled to chapters in Connecticut, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Virginia… all over the place! And everywhere they played, they generally left with pockets full of other adventurer’s treasure, and a trail of dead bodies behind them.

In the game world, ARGO is known as the Duchy of Greyhorn. It is a region with a long history of undead monsters showing up and messing up everybody’s day. This weekend, the story was that a powerful undead creature (whose name I have forgotten) was threatening to do something horrible to the Duchy of Greyhorn. And he promised that he’d spare us this terrible fate if we collected these specific magic items for him.

The Lawyk Clan wanted nothing more than to screw up everything by stealing as many of these items as possible and keeping them for ourselves.

Fast forward to Saturday night. It was cold, and we had just finished murdering a bunch of other players inside the tavern. With pockets full of loot, we decided it was time to skip town before anybody could figure out what happened and arrest our characters. We headed for the woods.

According to the game rules, if you’ve robbed or murdered another character, you have to stay in-game for two hours to give people a chance to find you and bring you to justice. After two hours have passed, you can go “out of game”, meaning that your character successfully escaped. You can’t play for the rest of the weekend, but at least you got away!

It was snowing  and it was starting to get dark. We knew that in a few minutes, a party was going to be sent after us. This region had a reputation for lots of player-versus-player conflict, so we knew that the people following us would probably know the trails and hiding spots in the woods better than we did.

So we took precautions. My buddy Don (playing his character Lecorr Lawyk, one of the most notorious murderers in the Kingdom of Evendarr) took steps to cover our trail. He made false tracks going in circles through the snow, then cut a pine branch and covered our real trail, sweeping the freshly fallen snow as he walked backwards.

We were hiking along a trail next to a raging river. We had two scouts, one about 50 feet ahead of us, the other trailing behind our party. Our rear guard clapped twice – that was the signal meaning “I spotted them behind us – move double time!” The party jogged through the snow along the water. Up ahead, a tree had fallen across the river. It was slippery, covered with snow. We shimmied across it on our bellies, deliving deeper into the woods in the snowy February twilight.

We made a little encampment miles from civilization, . We were at the top of a steep hill. Fallen trees were stacked into barriers, making sure that anybody who came at us had to pass through a narrow entryway. We were getting cold and hungry, and we weren’t entirely sure where we were. Somebody in our party needed insulin. Bastard. So we began to hike back towards the campsite.

“I think we’re probably safe,” I said to Don. “We’ve only got half an hour left before we can leave game.”

“No,” said Don, “We need to stay sharp. Because the people looking for us are murderers too.”  We sometimes make a game of trying to say the corniest fantasy one-liners possible, and Don could have won an award for what he said next. He looked me square in the eye and said, “It takes a rogue to catch a rogue.” Our scout started laughing.

“Hey wait,” said Alan, the guy carrying the bulky team treasure chest. “Why is our scout here? Dude, why aren’t you  ahead of us?”

Suddenly, we saw a silhouette emerge from the snowy fog.  It was a barbarian in studded leather armor. Another person was behind  him – and another — the search party was at least twice the size of our party. The barbarian pointed at us, “There they are!” Then all hell broke loose.

Don yelled “Scatter!” and we all ran in opposite directions. I sprinted deep into the woods, a group of people in hot pursuit behind me.

Sylvia's fate

My friend Sylvia was with me – this was her first weekend at a LARP. I heard her get hit in the back with a taint blood spell – necromancy! I looked over my shoulder and saw her fall. She was quickly surrounded by the search party. That’s when I realized that this wasn’t the sheriff and his men coming to round us up and bring us to justice. No – we were being chased by a violent lynch mob with a taste for our blood. Sylvia’s death at their hands had bought me enough time to get away. I regret leaving her behind, but she did make a good speed bump.

The chase went on forever. My heart was pounding. I couldn’t tell you how far I ran or how many times I crossed the river during the chase. I got separated from the group, and managed to elude the three people chasing me. I remember lying on the wet rocks next to a stream, pulling my cloak up over my head, and letting the snow fall on me. I could hear them standing less than ten feet from me, frustrated that I had gotten away.

Ten minutes later, I stood up, confident that two hours had passed since we had murdered those people in the tavern. I put on a white head band, signaling that I was “out of game”. Now I was just a 19 year old kid lost in the mountains of Pennsylvania. The sun had set. The falling snow had covered my tracks. I had no cell phone. No flash light. No idea what direction the campsite was in.

So I did what you shouldn’t do in that situation — I panicked.  I ran through the woods screaming and getting myself more worked up. I ran for miles with no idea if I was getting closer to civilization or just going deeper into this gigantic state park.

I was very scared. I had been warned about bears at this campsite. And I was getting worried that if I didn’t find civilization soon, maybe I should just make a camp and try my luck at daybreak. I wasn’t really dressed for sleeping in the snow in the woods though – this was going to be rough.

So as my energy started to fade, I decided to climb one more hill and then see if I could find a good spot to make camp. I pushed through some thick brush and emerged onto a large flat field. In the distance, I could see a tiny farm house! Success!

I approached the tiny wooden farm house. I took off as much of my costume as I could, stashed my foam sword around the corner, and knocked at the door. A woman wearing a blue dress and bonnet answered the door with a candle in hand.

My first thought was “What kind of crazy LARP did I wander into?”

And then I realized that this was no LARP. This was for real. This was Amish country.

The Amish are a kindly people. They took great pity on me being lost in the woods.  I asked them for directions back to the camp. They said that if I took the road next to their house, I was only like three or four miles away. But they wouldn’t let me walk – they insisted on giving me a ride back.

Stephen and Levi, two strapping Amish lads who were about my age, woke up the horse and hooked up the buggy. I climbed into the carriage with them and they started to take me back. I was so relieved to be out of the woods, but I had found myself in an even stranger situation.

“You don’t see many Amish up in Connecticut, do you?” asked Stephen.

“No,”  I said, “Not many.”

“Hey, what’s your name again?” asked Levi. I told them my name was Dan and they both laughed.

“My father’s name is Daniel,”  said Stephen, “but we don’t call him Dan.” They shared a knowing chuckle.

“I never been lost in the woods before,” said Levi, “I bet it was really scary.” I nodded and they laughed again. It occurred to me that these Amish kids were making fun of me! But that was fine by me – I was just happy to be riding back to the campsite and not sleeping in the woods.

For the life of me, I could not explain what I was doing out there. “Have you ever heard of a Renaissance fair?” I asked. They hadn’t. “Have you ever heard of Dungeons and Dragons?” They hadn’t. I wanted to say, “We pretend to live in a fantasy world where there’s no technology.” –but thought that might not be appropriate.

The horse and buggy pulled up to the campsite. I thanked Stephen and Levi warmly, deeply grateful that they had delivered me from a very cold and scary night.

The people who had chased me into the woods were sitting on the front porch of their cabin, eating pie and patting themselves on the back. As I got out of the carriage, I heard somebody say, “Holy shit, is that really happening?”

I reconnected with my party. Our characters had escaped, so we were going to play as monsters for the rest of the weekend.  Of our party, only three people managed to escape the lynch mob – me, Don (the head of the clan), and Alan, the guy holding the treasure.

To this day, I will not tolerate people talking trash about Amish people.