Players

Not part of a convention.

by Warren Tusk, Kristen Hendricks, Tony Vila

The Department of Physics

and the Program in Ancient Cultures & Civilizations

are pleased to announce this year's

Miskatonic University Interdisciplinary Faculty Workshop in Unusual Phenomena

"The Stars Are Right"

featuring a variety of the University's established legends and rising stars

as well as several visiting scholars from eminent institutions

and special guest speaker Leland Price of the Silver Twilight Lodge

Dates for conference meetings have not yet been scheduled. Should you have availability constraints, please contact the conference committee through Eliot Grissolm at grissolm@misk.edu.

The conference committee will be accepting papers and lecture proposals throughout the semester.

Ex Ignorantia is a Cthulhu Mythos live-action roleplaying game set amidst the ivied halls of H.P. Lovecraft's Miskatonic University. Players will assume the roles of faculty, postdoctorate fellows, and graduate students associated with MU's "special" departments -- those whose curricula and research output have to do with the mind-shattering secrets of our planet, and the terrifying laws of the cosmos that lie beyond conventional human understanding. Characters will be concerned with maintaining their own academic prestige, with getting published, with securing scarce university jobs, with funding, with tenure, with the administrative choices of the university...and also, perhaps, with certain issues of a more esoteric nature. The stars, after all, are right.

You do not have to be familiar with the writings of H.P. Lovecraft to play in this game. But it probably won't hurt...

A few warnings and explanations are in order.

This game is, in many ways, intended to be hard-hitting on an emotional and philosophical level. The Mythos universe is a brutally unkind, unfair place; terrible things may well happen, to your character or to people you care about or to the world at large. Some PCs will be grappling with psychological horror, deep-seated mental issues, and/or sexual themes.

In addition, it's a big and complicated LARP in a logistical sense, and not just because it takes up two normal-sized game slots. The documents are extensive by Intercon standards, and the rules are complicated (although they're more intuitive than they look). Preparation is not a trivial matter.

One other thing worth saying -- this game stares hard into the heart of the Mythos. The madness isn't generic cartoony craziness, and the inhuman terrors aren't generic scary tentacled beasties. The PCs are scholars at Miskatonic, so it's their job to think hard about weird things, and Ex Ignorantia tries to capture some of that dynamic for the players.