I am not going to sit here and say I am the best LARPer out there because it isn’t true, I am not the greatest of fighters and my role-playing skills are not better than anyone else, but what I do have is heart and having it is how got to where I am today. If you have not been to a Green Cloaks event then you will have no idea who I am and this will only be some guy telling you what he thinks about being a monster so please feel to stop reading if you don’t want to go on.

Well now everyone’s gone we can get more intimate! So this started about 3 years ago now and it all began by me trying to get out of buying a friend a birthday gift.
So why did I pick being a monster over being a player? Well if I am being 100% true it because I was lazy. Being a player always seemed like hard work to me and when you want to kick back a have a drink around a fire you want to have a nice easy time, but trust me in the years to come I found this not to be how it works.

Some of the GC Moster Team at the 3rd event 2014

So the 1st year of being a monster was fun! I got to kick ass, drink and make new friends. To me, at the time, this was what LARP was all about, but being new to this world I didn’t know much about what would be needed of me, but new players were coming in at each event, so from them I picked up new tips on how to be better at what I do and how to go about my work.

So if year one was just me playing around then year two was the hard lesson after lunch time break! In this year I would meet some great people that still to this day I have a lot of respect for, so people like Alex French who is still rocking the battlefield with me, or the legends like Lee Molyneux who made the monster team see that there was more to it than what we were doing.
It was this year I would say was the hardest to date as the green cloaks had got a lot bigger but the team as a whole wasn’t ready for it. Now as a monster you will kill players all the time but at this point when things got bad we didn’t know what to do on a real level. I’m not going to say any names as that would not be cool to the players, but when you kill a player and they cry for real (OOC) as the sadness of the loss of their character hits them, it can affect the Monsters too! We may play the big bad guys in the game but we’re not really monsters at heart. We can see when a player is hurt.
This was a big lesson for me and in itself changed how I monster these days. We are not there to hurt or upset players we are there to put on a show, entertain and immerse the players in an unreality they can enjoy.

From left to right: Sammy Kilsby, Kevin Hazelden, Lee Molyneux

Year 3 was just fun out right, having a fight with Kevin Hazelden for two hours when all of the Green Cloaks fought the tech dead or if it was the drinking in the bar as NPC calling players slags for no really good reason it was just a fun year. I’ve not really had the time to think over the whole year as the last event was only weeks ago. But I know I can walk away from this year of GC knowing that I did all I could do and I put on one hell of a show for them all.

I was asked to write about the standards of being a monster but I don’t really think you can some it up.
I have told you about my 3 years of being a monster but still don’t think you can find a level or standard in there. I will always be monster and will never change as I love what I do and love having my friends around me to do it. As I said at the top, I am not the be all and end all of what it is to be a monster. I just have a lot of heart and this has largely got me where I am. Without people like Lee Molyneux and Kevin Hazelden my skills would not be what they are at this time.
I have taken on legends and lost. I have seen friends come and go. I’ve been left black a blue and pushed beyond my limits.

I am a monster and I will always get back up!

- By Sammy kilsby