It's A Trap!
A collective of friends who kept making things: live roleplay, audio drama, short films.
It's A Trap!
It's A Trap! is not a project. It is a group of friends who met at the University of East Anglia Games Society and have been making things together, on and off, ever since. Most of what follows was made by several of us; this archive holds my share of it, and points at the rest.
Where it started
We met at the University of East Anglia Games Society, where we were all LARPers. We cut our teeth writing and running Errin, the local system, then moved on to Lorien Trust sanctioned events and helping out on other people's. The group got its name at the Winter Feast in November 2002.
From there we helped run the Gryphon faction for a few years, plot and in-character both, and put on events of our own — Trade Fair Estragalles, Veil of the Vampire, Et In Obsidia Ego, Terribilis Est Locus Iste, Horror in the Heartwood, An Evening With Vultan, Die Orc! Die! Photographs and write-ups survive at legacy.itsatrap.co.uk.
The full year-by-year record, including the parts that were mine rather than ours, is in the LARPchive.
Audio drama, 2008–2013
The usual story about a group like ours is that we grew out of one thing and into another. That isn't what happened. The dates above show it plainly: I was 2IC of the Gryphons through 2005, Deputy Head of Plot in 2008, Head of Plot in 2009. Jack Steel's first episode went out on the 31st of August 2008. Spiffing Review started in July 2009.
So for two years we were writing plot for some of the largest LARP events in the country and producing an audio drama and recording a film podcast, all at once. I don't especially recommend it.
It began with four minutes of nonsense: It's A Sketch!, a January 2008 test recording made to find out whether we could work the equipment. It was never listed in any podcast directory. It still exists.
Seven months later came Squadron Leader Jack Steel and the Starblade — twelve episodes of pulp 1920s and '30s action science fiction across two series, with a behind-the-scenes companion show, Starblade Unsheathed. Alongside it ran Spiffing Review, a film review podcast made with Simon Jones that outlasted everything else and carried on to 2013.
All of it is on the audio index: forty-seven episodes, in the order they happened.
Film, 2010–2014
We moved into film with Arms Race, a steampunk short, and then the more ambitious Arms Race: Escalation web series. We entered the Sci-Fi-London 48 Hour Film Challenge more than once. In 2014 we incorporated It's A Trap! Productions.
A retrospective
Now
Then the jobs got more responsible and the children arrived, and the output fell away. These days it is mostly pub visits and Warhammer. It's A Trap! Productions is still on the register — dormant, filing quietly once a year.
There are twelve finished scripts for Ravenskil Chronicles, and most of the audio is already recorded, sitting on a drive waiting to be edited. We didn't run out of ideas. We ran out of time.