Laura Sirola is the president of the Witchards’ Society, who look after the universe where College of Wizardry – next run in December! Tickets here! – Bothwell – which I loved playing – and a slew of community events happen. Notably, in the next four weeks – like Liminal Domain, where your witchard is dead, and The Pits, where they’re in prison. She’s rooted in the Nordic tradition.
She came to Empire to crew, and posted up on Facebook with some feelings on the design. The rest of these words are hers. They are good words.
First of all, it was an impressive example of managing players at scale. The game has over 3000 players per event, 4 events a year, which means a lot of things have to be streamlined. Character creation happens automatically online, and while you can send your character background to the plot team to be checked, I got the impression that a lot of people don’t. And since you play with hard skills (more on that later), your background doesn’t really matter anyway: if you want to be someone important or powerful, you have to back it up with actions.
There are no mandatory briefings or workshops. Everything is available on the Empire wiki, and if you want refreshers on site before the game starts, there’s 6 hours of optional meetups, briefings and classes on anything from combat rules to public speaking. Even the game start and end aren’t indicated in any way, people just start and end playing on their own at the specified times. The only times when large groups of players need to be briefed are the big battles on both mornings: if you fight in one, you have to play an enemy NPC in the other. As I had my breakfast I watched large groups of players gather in the offgame area to read their enemy briefs from large signs summarising the character options and what kind of kit (see, UK terminology is starting to stick) they’d need. Simple and effective.
While I was originally suspicious of Empire’s very extensive rules and lore (for example, their wiki lists 300 rituals and almost 300 magic items), I now actually think that even if they feel cumbersome at times, they also contribute to a shared vision of the game. I know how difficult it is to make even 100 people have the same understanding of what kind of a larp we’re playing, and this is in circles where collaboration and calibration are the norm. Empire is a PvP game, so you have to know who wins the fight or how many spells you can cast. Rules, and occasionally the much dreaded numbers, make things very clear cut, and depending on your character there’s only a specific fraction you actually need to know. In a similar vein, the idea of a larp having referees sounded so odd to me in advance, but turns out it’s no different from the larps I’ve played myself where occasionally there is a GM hovering nearby to tell you what happens after you’ve performed a ritual, or something similar. Empire just has a lot more rules to keep track of, so they need a specialised referee team instead of single GMs. So yeah, sure, having things like this probably takes away from your immersion a bit, but in a game of this style and size it’s quite a necessary tradeoff for everything to function.
I have now also seen what it’s like to run a team of 400. The plot NPC team alone was somewhere around 20-30 people (I’m pretty sure I didn’t even meet all of them, let alone actually talk to them), and on top of that there’s a separate skirmish team who are basically combat NPCs. Each team is an independent unit taking orders from their team lead, and the only time the lead organisers talk to the whole team (or however many are left) is the thank you speech at the crew party after takedown. To my surprise, this didn’t seem to deduct from the team spirit at all. Any kind of more extensive team building would be very hard to coordinate and get in the way of the actual work, and even though you don’t know or maybe even see most of the other crew members, there’s still a general feeling of working together to build something amazing. My fellow NPCs were great, and if you know people who know people, it will be easier to meet the other teams too. (Turns out the electricity team will like you if you help them coil cables in the pouring rain.)
Finally, about those hard skills. I come from larp communities where they’re not really a thing: you don’t have to be a charismatic leader or a fearsome fighter in order to play one, and you can trust the other players to play you up. Empire doesn’t do that. It might be partially because of the scale again, since there’s no way to know what each player on the massive field wants their character to be, but mainly it seems to be just a part of the playing culture. And while I think it’s really valuable to let people experience new things without having the out of character skills, I can also absolutely see the upsides of hard skills. If I was a player at Empire, I think I would happily put in years of work and commitment to learn how the world works, fight my way through the politics, and hope to eventually get elected as an Archmage or a Senator. How satisfying it must be to finally reach that point, knowing you did it with your own skills and dedication and allies. And isn’t this the immersion we wanted?
LARP experience 
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