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Title: Mind's Eye Theater: The Book of Props
Author: Mark Juran and Fran Donato
Genre: RPG supplement
Thingummies: 2
Synopsis: Theater 101 for the LARPer.
Thoughts: My mother-in-law will very cheerfully tell you that she's a hack. She's an excellent English professor with a PhD and has written a number of excellent writing and grammar books, but she will happily write on any topic at all. When called up to discuss, say, collecting or antiquing or any other exceedingly random activity, she'll do a little research and then slap together some knowledge from assorted sources in a vaguely organized fashion and call it a day. (Which is what the editors want--if they wanted an in-depth treatise, they would have gone to an actual expert on the topic. They want the bare basics in readable prose, with some cute jokes thrown in.)
Anyway, this book pretty much feels like that.
We picked up for something like $2, so I don't so much mind. If I'd paid the original $15 cover price, I'd probably have been upset.
This is an attempt to cram basic theater know-how into a form that live-action roleplayers might be able to use. It's semi-successful. They cover some extremely basic acting techniques, makeup, costumes, props, and set building.
The problem is, you don't get the feeling the writers are quite qualified to do this, have any sense of how to teach, or had enough ideas to fill out the entire book. In the section on getting into character, you get the kind of exercises that you have middle-school kids do at theater camp. There are meditation exercises. There are exercises in which you decide what kind of animal your character is and move around the room pretending to be that animal and thinking about what noises your animal makes and what your animal eats. There are admonitions not to have dairy before a game because it makes you phlegmy. If you haven't had several years of actual theater training, most of this isn't going to help you. If you have...well, most of this isn't going to help you.
Costuming starts off too easy and then jumps into too hard. There is an explanation of how to make peasant shirt, which is a pretty good starter project. It's after the explanation of how to make an Elizabethan dress complete with farthingale. Which is not a good starter project. Also, really random and not terribly versatile. Mostly, you get the sense the authors put in a project that they once did, without any thought of what a reader would be able to learn from this or how likely it is to be helpful.
Similar problems with set design--you get a step-by-step walkthrough explanation of how to make a fake marble arch. But no explanation of, say, how to counterweight something so it doesn't fall over. Or how to make textures other than marble. If you want to make the exact giant random prop they made, you're set. If you want to learn skills that will allow you to improvise, not so helpful.
Their props section, on the other hand, explains how to make some amazingly lame sounding props. If I want to have my character carry a grappling hook, I either want to invest in buying or making a realistic looking grappling hook or I just want to use a damn prop card. Dangling salad tongs off my belt with yarn (an actual suggestion) does not get me into the mood, it makes me look silly. Especially if I spent 20-some hours sewing a farthingale and two hours applying handmade prosthetic scars to my face.
(Their makeup section is actually fairly descriptive, but the poor quality of the photos makes me wish they'd just stuck to verbal descriptions.)
Not their fault, but less than useful, is the fact that this book was written in 1994 and much of their advice has been invalidated by the internet. Where you can buy pretty much anything you want.
In conclusion, if you want to LARP, either just play with what you know and can scrape together, or buy some damn theater textbooks. Because there are people out there who can tell you how to actually do anything you're interested in, in great detail. This, however, was slapped together because White Wolf thought they could make some money off it.
Author: Mark Juran and Fran Donato
Genre: RPG supplement
Thingummies: 2
Synopsis: Theater 101 for the LARPer.
Thoughts: My mother-in-law will very cheerfully tell you that she's a hack. She's an excellent English professor with a PhD and has written a number of excellent writing and grammar books, but she will happily write on any topic at all. When called up to discuss, say, collecting or antiquing or any other exceedingly random activity, she'll do a little research and then slap together some knowledge from assorted sources in a vaguely organized fashion and call it a day. (Which is what the editors want--if they wanted an in-depth treatise, they would have gone to an actual expert on the topic. They want the bare basics in readable prose, with some cute jokes thrown in.)
Anyway, this book pretty much feels like that.
We picked up for something like $2, so I don't so much mind. If I'd paid the original $15 cover price, I'd probably have been upset.
This is an attempt to cram basic theater know-how into a form that live-action roleplayers might be able to use. It's semi-successful. They cover some extremely basic acting techniques, makeup, costumes, props, and set building.
The problem is, you don't get the feeling the writers are quite qualified to do this, have any sense of how to teach, or had enough ideas to fill out the entire book. In the section on getting into character, you get the kind of exercises that you have middle-school kids do at theater camp. There are meditation exercises. There are exercises in which you decide what kind of animal your character is and move around the room pretending to be that animal and thinking about what noises your animal makes and what your animal eats. There are admonitions not to have dairy before a game because it makes you phlegmy. If you haven't had several years of actual theater training, most of this isn't going to help you. If you have...well, most of this isn't going to help you.
Costuming starts off too easy and then jumps into too hard. There is an explanation of how to make peasant shirt, which is a pretty good starter project. It's after the explanation of how to make an Elizabethan dress complete with farthingale. Which is not a good starter project. Also, really random and not terribly versatile. Mostly, you get the sense the authors put in a project that they once did, without any thought of what a reader would be able to learn from this or how likely it is to be helpful.
Similar problems with set design--you get a step-by-step walkthrough explanation of how to make a fake marble arch. But no explanation of, say, how to counterweight something so it doesn't fall over. Or how to make textures other than marble. If you want to make the exact giant random prop they made, you're set. If you want to learn skills that will allow you to improvise, not so helpful.
Their props section, on the other hand, explains how to make some amazingly lame sounding props. If I want to have my character carry a grappling hook, I either want to invest in buying or making a realistic looking grappling hook or I just want to use a damn prop card. Dangling salad tongs off my belt with yarn (an actual suggestion) does not get me into the mood, it makes me look silly. Especially if I spent 20-some hours sewing a farthingale and two hours applying handmade prosthetic scars to my face.
(Their makeup section is actually fairly descriptive, but the poor quality of the photos makes me wish they'd just stuck to verbal descriptions.)
Not their fault, but less than useful, is the fact that this book was written in 1994 and much of their advice has been invalidated by the internet. Where you can buy pretty much anything you want.
In conclusion, if you want to LARP, either just play with what you know and can scrape together, or buy some damn theater textbooks. Because there are people out there who can tell you how to actually do anything you're interested in, in great detail. This, however, was slapped together because White Wolf thought they could make some money off it.
