Abstract
Somewhere in Texas, in a long-forgotten year of grace. The Ballad of the Colt Brothers is a western larp, inspired by Tarantino, that presents a bold and bloody feud among five brothers, filled with swirling grudges and the surreal everyday life of the wildest West.
Just like a Tarantino film, this larp aimed to be explosive, bloody, and audacious, without any claims to historical realism but with a focus on dramatic tension, aesthetics, and violence. Striving to remain faithful to its inspirations, the game offered players a delirious madness of bullets and a triumphant ode to the Wild West. Nothing too realistic; on the contrary, it was exaggerated and manneristic, colorful, crude, and hyperbolic.
Cinema served as both a starting point and a destination. Like any respectable pulp film, the larp raced through history at a frantic pace, jumping along the timeline in a non-chronological episodic structure, relying on punk and hip-hop soundtracks that were as frenetic and aggressive as the story being told.
The narrative of the event did not follow a linear path. It was decided to start from the end, in medias res, with the showdown, only to interrupt and restart with a characteristic “six hours earlier,” as is common in many films. Rewind. The tape is rewound. We return to that afternoon when we were all still unaware, not knowing how it would all end. But how did we arrive at this? What happened in those hours? The players were left to discover this, ultimately returning to the situation they had begun with.
Thus, the story of the infamous Colt brothers was reconstructed—dishonorable and fearless outlaws, stained with blood and sins, like indelible marks.
The Ballad of the Colt Brothers came to life as part of the initiative “W2 - 2 Weekend Western,” two western larps in a single weekend, showcasing the two great faces of the cinematic West: on Sunday, the Tarantino-inspired stories of Django and Hateful Eight with the Colt brothers, and on Saturday, the great classics from John Ford to Sergio Leone with the fourth run of “Last Stand at Oak Valley.”
