This is yet another one from a convention LARP in western Kentucky in the late ’90s or early 2000s.

I was playing in this one, not running. The game staff did not share my view of having a coherent plot, so they were allowing players to bring in their own characters rather than providing pre-gens. I chose to run an Assamite (Child of Haqim to you new kids) vizier. I honestly can’t remember if this was before or after I was tapped to do the revised Clanbook: Assamite, but I’d roughed out a lot of the work I wanted to do on the castes a couple of years before that contract, on a late-night drive with Little Sister, so this was definitely a time at which the viziers were front-of-mind for me.

Old man rambling. May yell at cloud next. Anyway…

This LARP’s plot was the predictable and painful “Camarilla and Sabbat vampires put aside their differences in a neutral city run by a ridiculously powerful neutral Methuselah to deal with an existential threat to all vampirekind and/or consensual reality and/or the world.” I’d attached my character to the Camarilla delegation because I figured they’d be less annoying, if also less competent, than the Sabbat. They were glad to have me, because this was still a time when the player base assumed “Assamite == murder machine,” and I certainly wasn’t going to correct them by stating that I was here to study their dumb-ass antics. But I wasn’t completely defenseless.

So we’re wandering down the hall of this hotel when we come face-to-face with the Sabbat bishop and her retinue. Thankfully, by this time, the LARP scene had evolved enough that it was accepted practice to use index cards as item representations, rather than hauling around prop Kalashnikovs and Molotovs and battleaxes and whatnot in public. The bishop is holding a sheaf of index cards in her hand, but doesn’t say anything about them. Okay, whatever, that outfit doesn’t have space for her assets, let alone her inventory.

Dialogue ensues, and things are not too incredibly tense when the bishop’s player suddenly remembers that one of her item cards should be evident to any observer. But how she expresses this… is by brandishing the card toward our faces and announcing, “oh, by the way, this is a five-foot broadsword.”

Okay, then. My hand comes out of my pocket, where I’ve been holding one of my own item cards, and points a 3×5 straight between her eyebrows. “Cool. This is a .357 Magnum.”