Hello friends!
Nick Bauman (Of Quixotic Tendancies - Meridian and ApocaLarp) came along with me and toured the Spooky Town Amusement Park in Chatsworth last night. As I said to him "Look for the haunted house, you can't miss it." And you can't. It's 1300 sq ft warehouse with a full haunted mansion facade.
The building has 4 bathrooms, a comfortable changing area, a workshop, a fridge, a microwave, sprinkler system, a master control room for all the lighting and effects, and emergency exits. The warehouse itself is 1300 sq feet of corridors, rooms, and permanent set pieces. There are 3 lanes of clearance that run through the entire area so getting from point A to point B backstage is easy as pie.
I met with Bob and John, the owner and head tech respectively. They are great guys who are just looking for a way to keep their hobby and passion alive in the off season by supplimenting their rent in creative ways. LARP is high on their list of Things we want to do here. They were extremely open to any suggestions and possibilities of games. "Airsoft? SURE! Overnight stays? Why not! Want us to redesign and redecorate? Yeah, let's do it."
The current layout is linear but it is easily converted to a more open feel by moving around a few exits, moving curtains, and lighting access areas. As it stands, you walk into a parlor before going into a tall room with a fireplace, couches, faux windows, and old books. From them you enter the attraction proper and go into a narrow corridor leading upward to an "attic". That leads down into a child's bedroom which has been the scene of a tragedy. The child's room opens onto a corridor with bizarre blacklight paintints and multicolored footprints (Note: Of all the set dressing, this is the most difficult to work around. There are ways to bypass this corridor entirely or cover the walls with fabric.) This leads into an Upside Down room where the ceiling is floor tile and the couch and lamp/table are bolted to the roof. That opens onto a large dining room with a chandelier, cobwebby formally set table, and a cobwebbed grandfather clock.
The dining room leads to a kitchen, which then opens to a trophy room with mounted heads (We all admired the heads, very neat.) Then the path leads to an aboritum complete with running fountains and dirty floors. Mind you, this is still indoors. You walk over a swinging bridge across a small stream and then past a roaring waterfall. After winding through hanging laundry, you find yourself at an old shack. Inside the shack are remnants of mutilation and torture and the floor itself is sloped at an unsettling angle.
You exit the shack to a small clearing where you can see the facade of an asylum, a locked gate, and a path leading through a small cemetary. There are menacing trees nearby and a wall mural showing more of the graveyard (Semi cartoony. I would request a covering for it) The only way into the asylum (and out of the maze) is through the mausoleum, which leads past wall plaques into a morgue with metal autopsy tables. From there you wander into the asylum, past some industrial pipes and rigging.
This is the newer part of the maze, which they didn't have as much time to put detail work into. Memorable highlights were the room with cage bars and blacklight scribblings of madmen on the walls, a corridor with inflatable bags you have to push through, a room with bloody hangings, sheets, and a head slammed into the wall over a sink. This area has a bit more industrial feel to it, with a shock therapy bathtub (complete with corpse), fake electrical boxes on the walls, and their air compressor used as a prop. You pass by a giant boiler at one point as well. After going through a room that is utterly pitch black (even with ALL the houselights on) you come to the final corridor which leads to an open area with roll-up doors leading out.
The grand tour, taken at a moderate pace, took 30-45 minutes. This was without stopping for encounters, examining clues, or resting. The facility is HUGE and you can easily lose yourself in the scale of it once inside.
Bob and John are very open to changing the layout and making the rooms more accesable from one another. They cannot, of course, change the waterfall, shack, or facade of the asylum but they are open to redressing them and shifting things around. I personally adored the waterfall/garden area. It's very surreal to walk into after being in all these other chambers. Whether it would be set redressing or even moving around walls and corridors, it can be done. They're cool with it and even with having the gamers assist in shifting things and making suggestions.
Cost is the tricky point and yet the largest one. If gamers could commit to a few events every few months (the more the better) he can go down in price. Right now, for a One Time Only never again never regular deal, it would be 700-1000 dollars. This is for the full facility, for an entire day maybe even overnight to a weekend. He could EASILY drop that price if games were run on a regular basis. He even asked if we could try to get one in for December!
So here's the low-down
Good: Flexible Owners who WANT LARP in the facility. Module layout which can be easily modified. Ample parking, easy to access from 101, 405, and 118 freeways. Overnight usage. Control over environment.
Bad: Commitment required to get the price down. Fixed set pieces which cannot be modified (shack, bridge, falls, asylum. foyer)
Overall I think this place is a BLESSING to the LARP Community in Souther California. We have two guys who WANT us there, using their facility for gaming. They're open to any possibility of genre and modifying their existing layouts to assist us. It gives us a place we KNOW we can get into regardless of rain, weather, or fire conditions. (September-October games are probably not gonna happen but who knows!)
I encourage everyone to email Bob at spookyhouse2007 @ aol.com (no spaces) or call him at (818) 633-9594 and set up a tour for yourself. The more LARPers we can get to book, the cheaper it will be for ALL of us.
Let's make this a reality. It's our best chance ever to get an indoor playground.
