“There were as few dissonant elements as they could possibly manage and that really contributed to me being able to play my character as if she was me.” Roz Horton As discussed in a previous post, instead of a long swathe of out-of-character briefing document, we wanted to give players space to create their own... Read more »
‘God Rest Ye Merry’ Our first order of business was to sell tickets for the event. The Name We needed an event name. “God Rest Ye Merry” sprang to mind fairly swiftly – obviously it was Christmassy, it had echoes of the restlessness of the dead, it’s in an interesting minor key rather than celebratory... Read more »
‘A 1950s Christmas Ghost Story’ “There are games that constitute the stories that we tell one another… Those moments when something so extraordinary happens that it lives on for years after and becomes something more…” John Shockley So with a venue worked out, what sort of event were we going to aim for? The house... Read more »
“It’s now a week on and I’m still dreaming that I’m my character. At the time I was dreaming I was my character. It was so immersive that I forgot that I was me.” Rachael Eyre Designing A Character For Someone Else To Play For one-off LARP events it’s often the case that the event organisers... Read more »
At the start of 2015 we ran a one-off live-action game called God Rest Ye Merry. It was a ghost story set at Christmas 1954 about an extended family returning to their ancestral home for the first time in years. We hired a sprawling, creaky old mansion on Exmoor and filled it with props, documents... Read more »
“I’ve been regularly attending these events for 25 or more years and I’ve never come across an event that used psychological techniques to enhance the atmosphere and the narrative. All of the design was unified behind a single goal, which was the embedding of the emotional impact of the narrative and the immersion of the... Read more »
We’d been thinking about running another event for years. People kept pushing us to run a sequel to Dick Britton and the Voice of the Seraph, our 1930s pulp action-adventure. We didn’t want to do that; when we run an event we tend to throw all the tropes for that genre into the pot for... Read more »