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 →
I say, "guest post", but really it just floated past sunning itself, and myself and Andy Raff and myself fought it out to see who'd get to re-publish...
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.
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.
Back in the day, I was involved in the design of a fest lrp game called Odyssey. This is what Ian Andrews and Matt Pennington had to say about designing PvP play into that game...
Last year, I was part of a team that ran "Wing And A Prayer". I've been tying to write some words about it for ages. Unedited, here they are.
I played the Janitor at CoW18, and I've frothed about it before Specifically, I said it was; "In charge of recording and collating points awarded in the House Trophy competition; of maintaining 100% accurate IC paperwork; and of maintaining order amongst a community of characters built to rail against authority." This is more how I thought about it going in, and some bits of advice that might be of interest if you ever end up being Janitor.
(Another me-me-me post. Just character scratchings. Nothing of substance here. Move along.)
I've 7 posts in draft I want get out over Christmas. This bit of copy-and-paste is perfect displacement activity... Happily, I had a post in draft called "Roles and responsibilities - the nature of "play" in player and crew characters", and you can read this instead. Peter chose his own byline...
tl;dr - unless you’re pathologically interested in stories of What I Did, and What My Character Was Thinking, I'd avoid. This is just a long stream of me-me-me. After a decade or so of thinking That Kind Of Thing Really Wasn’t For Me, I went to my first larp outside of the UK last year.... Continue Reading →