Rage Action Theater players, from left to right, Guinevere Plume, Kim Madsen, Ben Nelson, Eric Plume, Lizzie Matthews, Cassandra Nettle, Tnisha Bowerman and Susie Delgado. The group participates in live-action role playing every Saturday night in Miller Hall. photos by Paul Moore THE WESTERN FRONT

Rage Action Theater is an Associated Students club that offers its members a chance to participate in live-action role-playing events.

The club is based around the role-playing table-top game “Werewolf: The Apocalypse,” produced by White Wolf Publishing.

During club meetings, members take on the roles of werewolves, creatures with the ability to shift from human form to wolf form at will. 

Werewolves that exist in the universe created by the publishing company call themselves Garou and live in societies kept secret from humans.

Each member of the club creates a Garou character based partly on his or her own personality, Western senior and member of Rage Action Theater Kim Madsen said.  Each Garou character is entirely unique to the club member playing it.  On average, 14 to 15 people attend each meeting, Madsen said.

Unlike the werewolves in European folklore and Hollywood movies, the Garou are rational creatures who seek to protect humanity and the world as a whole, Madsen said.

As their respective Garou characters, club members act out stories based mostly on the mythology White Wolf Publishing created for the game.  However, the personal interactions of the Garou during an approximately five-hour club meeting are entirely up to the people playing the characters.

The story has the Garou continually fighting against a destructive force called the Wyrm and other werewolves that have been corrupted by it. 

The Garou have been given the task of stopping the Wyrm from bringing about the apocalypse.

Western senior Guinevere Plume and her husband Eric Plume, who started the club at Western three years ago, are the storytellers for the club. 

As storytellers, Eric Plume and Guinevere Plume decided the club’s main story – or meta-plot – should be based around a group ­­­ – or sept – of Garou living in a series of caves on Sehome Arboretum.  

“The storytellers are the gods of the game,” Madsen said.  “They have the ultimate rule.”

The club also includes narrators, who are chosen by the storytellers.  Madsen and the six other narrators are tasked with creating minor plots which the club members – or players – act out as their Garou characters.  

The storytellers pick the narrators based on how many meetings they attend and their willingness to help out, Eric  Plume said.  He said he and Guinevere Plume have to be careful about members who want to be narrators solely for the power the position includes.

Madsen said she gets ideas for plots from the White Wolf literature, suggestions from other club members and her everyday life.  She said she has come up with a plot idea while driving home from school.  The storytellers also have a hand in creating minor plots, she said.

“Sometimes a player will come to me wanting their character to advance in a certain way, and I’ll develop a plot around that,” Madsen said.

While the meta-plot revolves around the Garou’s fight with the forces of the Wyrm, some of the more interesting pieces of role-playing have come about through character interactions, Madsen said.  The players put a great amount of time and emotion into developing their characters, so some of them are incredibly deep, she said.    

Players have to make sure they don’t put too much of their own personalities into their characters, Madsen said.  If a player creates a character too much like him or herself, he or she runs the risk of taking an action against his or her character during the game personally, she said.

“Tears have been shed over some character actions in the game,” Madsen said.  “Some players take it incredibly seriously.”

It is important for players to separate themselves from their characters in role playing, Eric Plume said.  A player’s life out of the game is more important than his or her character’s life inside the game, he said.

“As my character, I have screamed my head off at a fellow player’s character and still remained friends with him at the end of the night,” Eric Plume said.  “You have to be able to do that.”

But why do the players put so much emotion into something make-believe?  Eric Plume said players acting out extreme emotions as their characters are no different than people reacting to a movie or book.

“Think about when you cry or laugh at something you’ve seen in a theater, then imagine living in that movie,” Eric Plume said.  “[Role-playing] is the same thing.”

Eric Plume said he loves when players come to the meeting in costume or with prop weapons.  Anything that helps with the players’ suspension of belief is a great asset, he said.  Weapons used in role-playing must be completely safe, he said.  

Matthew Miller, a student at Whatcom Community College and member of Rage Action Theater, said he enjoys making weapons for his fellow players because of the thanks he receives.

Take, for instance, the ax with a 28-inch blade Miller made for Madsen.  The materials, which cost $5 to purchase, included a roll of duct tape and a few cylindrical, spongy-plastic pool toys called noodles, Miller said.

Role playing is especially attractive to people who love using their imaginations to portray characters but may not like memorizing scripts, Eric Plume said.  When playing a character, he said he gets the same thrill an actor might get performing on a stage.

In order to keep the storytellers and narrators interested in the role-playing, Eric Plume said he made it a rule that all club members must play a character.  He said he has seen previous role-playing groups fall apart because the storytellers were just coordinating and not getting involved in the role-playing.

“By playing a character, [the storytellers] can keep our interest up and show people a good time,” Eric Plume said.

Eric Plume said being a storyteller brings him great enjoyment because he gets to see players enjoy themselves.  He said seeing people acting out the plots he creates as a storyteller brings a sense of accomplishment similar to that of writers or musicians seeing people enjoy their work.

“I live for the moments where players come up to me and say, ‘Wow, I really had fun tonight,’ or ‘Wow, that plot really made me think,’” Eric Plume said.  “You’re doing it because people enjoy it.”

Guinevere Plume said she tries to develop plots that play off certain characters’ personalities.  She said she enjoys getting to know people both in and out of the game and seeing what directions she wants to take those characters.

One of the best things about being a storyteller is actually being able to tell stories, Guinevere Plume said.  Role playing lets one live in a whole different world; something that movies or TV will never be able to do, she said.  A good storyteller can really take a player somewhere else, she said.

Despite the popularization of online role playing games such as “World of Warcraft,” neither Guinevere Plume nor Eric Plume are worried about the survival of live-action role-playing games.

No matter how advanced video games get, they will never be able to compete with the power of the human imagination, Guinevere Plume said.  In some cases, advancements in internet technology, such as online message boards, have made organizing live-action role-playing clubs easier, she said.

“The art of sitting around a fire and storytelling has been around for thousands of years, much longer than computers,” Eric Plume said.  “There’s always going to be a certain type of person who enjoys telling those stories and there’s always going to be a certain type of person who enjoys listening to those stories.”

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