Marin County New Age Society Cocktail Party is a Rules To Live By live action roleplaying [LARP] game. This LARP has been around for years. Interactivities Ink picked it up for their Rules To Live By system, and republished it in 2001. I played in it years ago and enjoyed it. This review is about the book from a GM’s point of view. The game basically requires 10 players for the core characters, and 1 GM. It also has secondary or replacement roles for 8 others.
Physically, the book is a series of pages folded in half and stapled down the center. The paper stock is nice and thick. The cover is in color and laminated. Having the book be folded pages is a bonus, because the first thing a GM needs to do is remove the staple and photocopy the book to make all the handouts for the game. The interior artwork is black-and-white drawings that depict the characters in the game. The artwork is good, as each gives a feel for that character’s personality. That is, each drawing is a visual, one-sentence character summary. The layout of each character sheet is good and clear, it basically follows the standard for LARPs.
GM Information
The GM information covers how to take all the material in the book, from the character sheets to the item cards, and collate it for play. This, again, is fairly standard in LARPs. For those who’ve never run or played in one before, it is clear and concise in the instructions. Most of the rules information a GM needs, however, is in the RTLB rulebook and thus not covered in this LARP module. The special rules for this specific game are listed in this section, along with a cheatsheet of character stats and summary. One very useful inclusion is a table to assist in casting players and characters.
Character Sheets
Each character sheet gives background information and plot hooks, other characters known and opinions about them, items, stats, and abilities. Again, the format is basically the standard for LARPs. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. What is notable is that the character backgrounds are meaty and well-written.
Item Cards
What can I say? Item cards are item cards. There is a distinct lack of widgets, which is refreshing.
A LARP boils down to the plotting and the characters. Marin County has 4 major inter-locking plots for 10 main characters. That's nearly 3 of the major plots per character. Then the minor plots pad this even more. Every player always has something to do. The whole story is well-designed, in that people won’t want to talk about some topics outright, so they’ll hint about things. Of course, with all these different plots and secrets, the person you’re hinting too will likely take it a different way, and talk back in veiled comments that the first person will misinterpret. There’s a lot of fun and humor to be had in discussing and deconstructing it during the after-game drinks. That isn’t to say that players can’t succeed. They can. It just means that somewhere along the game, a player will get a revelation and go ‘Oh! That’s what they were talking about!’
It is these feelings of accomplishment and revelations, along with all the intrigue and wacky characters that makes this game so much fun. This cocktail party is one you want to attend. The only downside is that, unlike the host of the party, the host of the game can’t play.
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