Most LARPs rely on a reasonable number of rules – combat system, skill system and so on. Smaller LARPs tend to have more rules than large-scale fest LARPs. We intentionally kept our rules system very light, to deepen the immersion. We didn’t have a skills system – instead we simply told the players that if... Read more »
“It was more like being within a movie than being within a game.” Rachael Eyre As described in Set Pieces, the finale of the game was a scene of reconciliation between Nicholas the owner of the house and two of the ghosts. The moment that scene ended we did a hard cut to the credits.... Read more »
“…when we discovered that everything that was happening in the house within the game had a reason and that reason was driven by a terrible misunderstanding, [it] ended up being both terrifying and full of pathos for us…” John Shockley The History In 1809, Nicholas Northmoor fell madly in love with and became betrothed to Catherine... Read more »
“The pacing was interesting, because there was a structure, a mutually understood structure to the event – it was a family Christmas – and they’d clearly set that out in an in character way. The servants had left us a schedule so that we knew which particular events were going to happen on the Friday,... Read more »
“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 »
“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 »