Kitty Rode pulls on a brown wrap-around top and tan pelt skirt. She fastens a swath of grey fur around her shoulders, dons pointed prosthetic ears and pulls a strand of chunky wooden beads around her neck.

Carefully, she draws two black streaks of eyeliner from the corners of her lips to her chin. She creates wild black eyebrows, and, beside her left eye, a delicate vine pattern snakes down her cheek.

She is no longer Kitty Rode, the 20-year-old literature student at the University of Toronto. She is Vivica, the wild elf from Jericho who adores nature, spurns metal and coins and survives through bartering and theft.

This is the realm of Underworld LARP, a live-action role-playing game that has been going strong for about 15 years and attracted a stream of dedicated players along the way -- more than 300 at last count.

"It's about escapism. You, as a player, design someone separate from yourself and you go somewhere else for the weekend and become someone else," explains co-owner Edward Watt, an online sales representative who spends his free time crafting storylines, tweaking rules, designing props and otherwise maintaining the world of Jericho.

"It's about immersion and it's about story-telling," Mr. Watt says. "You can forget about your nine-to-five job, you can forget about school,

you can forget about your husband and wife and your kids. I think that's what people find most appealing about it.... It taps into something."

Live-action role-playing, a more widespread phenomenon in Europe, has steadily been gaining prominence in Canada, and the co-owners of Underworld LARP believe their organization may now be the largest in the country. Each weekend-long session -- there are about eight per year, with a hiatus during the winter months -- draws more than 100 participants.

It is a complex and immersive game, mingling elements of fantasy and horror, with a 123-page rulebook outlining the Underworld races, their skills and abilities, guidelines for combat, magic spells and more. In fact, players can cast a wide variety of spells, ranging from protective shields to healing potions to dark curses.

Mr. Watt and co-owner David Ashby are among a group of writers who craft loose storylines for each Underworld LARP excursion, while a team of volunteers act out key plot points. The players, who join at a cost of about $50 per game, improvise the rest.

"We basically write the game world, and as the players play that game world, they choose which direction it goes in," explains Mr. Ashby, a network administrator by day. "We'll paint the beginning of the picture and they will choose based on their reactions, whether they're good or bad, or evil or moral, what actually happens to the end."

In one hypothetical example, volunteers dressed as goblins would run into Jericho -- the game's central town, set up most recently as a campsite in rural Ontario -- and snatch the mayor's daughter. Players could then decide what to do: attack the goblins, negotiate the girl's safe release, or perhaps join forces with the goblins to take over the town.

During game weekends, the story runs 24 hours a day, and players are required to remain in character the entire time, sleeping whenever they dare. Combat, which occurs using padded "boffer" weapons, can deplete a player's "body points," which are subsequently replenished as that player gains more experience. But if the tally hits zero, the player dies -- a development that can be highly emotional for some, forcing them to create a new character.

"When you play a character for five years, it's like a second you, and then it's gone," Mr. Ashby says.

Adds Ms. Rode: "People have come and said it was too real."

University of Toronto biology student Ryan Szyiko and George Brown College fashion design student Kate Haines -- a.k.a. Agni Ragnarson and Nadja, two members of a Viking-esque tribe of "Einhers" in Jericho -- chose characters that were diametrically opposed to their own personalities, ensuring the utmost separation of game and real life.

Agni Ragnarson is "aggressive, loud, obnoxious.... He hates everybody unless you prove yourself to him," Mr. Szyiko explains. Najda, similarly, is frequently seen in a "blind, frothy rage," Ms. Haines says.

"I find it easier to play someone very separate from my personality," she says. "I think it's easier, because I can become more extreme about it."

Through the magic of character design, Mr. Watt notes, a shy player can morph into an extrovert; an atheist can become a religious figure; a "computer geek" can transform into an armoured warrior.

"There is no job like what we do," he says, a smile playing at the edges of his lips. He compares his work to that of a playwright, minus the creative control. "We are essentially story writers, but we have no control over the characters in our story--and we don't know how the story's going to end."

(Original article by Megan O'Toole in the National Post - LINK)