I've said before how much I enjoy the "Tavern Quest" games run by Omen Star. It's the most marvellous lightweight lockdown experience of mutually agreed storytelling, based on some sketchy tropes nailed together with so much plagiarism that it counts as research. Your characters meet up the night before some momentous event, and play what... Continue Reading →
20th Century Fae: memory magic and its modern consequences
I like to try and aim for "what you see is what you get" in the larps I'm involved with. I'd prefer to use something to represent itself, rather than be a comparatively poor quality representation of something else. This post looks at some of the video we used, and how I felt about it.... Continue Reading →
A Midwinter Night’s Dream
I really wasn't going to run a larp in 2020. I was going to play a lot of larp, learn a lot, then come back in 2021. Then came COVID, and lockdown, and no face-to-face larps at all after Avalon LARP Studios' "Midwinter". That was not quite sufficient for a year. I did a couple... Continue Reading →
A Midwinter Night’s Dream: an online larp
Once upon a time, there was an event called "Twilight Theatre", the pitch of which was "The fae are real, they're waking up, and their magic is based on performance." The dream of Helly and Rob, it ran for a couple of events in a pub theatre in Camden and I had the bucket-list role... Continue Reading →
Another bit of self-indulgence: Odyssey this time.
It was the last event of the Odyssey system. I'd played King Minos, the MC of the arena since the first event. 7 years, 13 events, 500 or so arena combats witnessed. I'd never taken the floor in anger.
All for froth: guest post by many hands.
We got a lot of useful feedback after the event, some of which I'm using to comment on my own Design post and a Learning post elsewhere.This is really just the froth. I say "just", it's lovely to hear people praise something you've spent best part of 5 years working on on and off, so...... Continue Reading →
All For Cinedrama: mostly a guest post by Claire Sheridan
Cinedrama is pulp film-style as larp practise. It comes straight out of the Crooked House playbook; notably Dick Britton and the Voice of the Seraph in 2005. As an attitude to play, it sits somewhere between a UK "LARP is just for fun" instinct I don't entirely subscribe to, the "Win by losing" playstyle I... Continue Reading →
All for encryption
I can't recall the first time I used cryptography in a larp, but it was a good 20 years ago. Some players like the puzzle solving, some don't, no-one likes struggling with something that for plot reasons is actually impossible. Tricksy.Experience suggests the simplest cipher - the Caesar - is easily breakable in a field... Continue Reading →
Odyssey for Larpgeist
Follows an article written for larpgeist magazine in 2011... I can't find it on the Internet anywhere, so here it goes. Publish. It's a bit dated, but then it was 8 years ago.
More from the tombs…
Some more thinking about Odyssey from the files of the Wayback Machine, this time from Ian Andrews and myself. Apparently, we thought it was a game back then.