What's a LARP?

LARP, or Live Action Roleplaying, is the weird theater thing I do every month or so. This site has a good synopsis of the medium in general, but doesn't exactly capture the kind of game I typically play. I've done 85+ LARPs!

My particular LARP style

My LARP group traces its lineage to Wayfinder. Our style of play is fairly ideosyncratic to the college I went to, but its distinguishing features can be summarized as follows.

On the broadest level, we do theater-style LARPs, as opposed to boffer-style LARPs. Boffer is what most people unfamiliar with the hobby think of as LARPs - fighting each other with foam swords, heavy mechanics, "win conditions". Most games I play rarely have any mechanics, and are far more focused on roleplay and collaboratively building a story together. Usually a game will be about 3 hours long, and may or may not be a fully contained story or an installment in a longer series. Games usually have somewhere between 10 and 30 players and we play them either in rented spaces, people's apartments, at cons or online.

To start a new game, typically one or more LARPwriters will come up with a pitch for a game, put out some basic world info, and send out character surveys. Interested players will fill these surveys out to recieve bespoke characters based on requests of what kinds of plots, motivations, and relationships they are interested in. In other words, the game is designed around specific player preferences. This is different than what many theater LARP groups do, wherein a LARPwriter fully writes a game and then sends out a "casting survey" to match players up with pre-written characters.

Most games in our community can be characterized by minimal "pre-planned" plot. Typically, all our characters with varied motivations and complex relationships are dumped out into a world, and whatever happens, happens. The LARPwriters tend to have a very passive role during game, playing HPCs ("helper player characters") to give tips and advice to players that are stuck or have questions, but generally do not have plot significance.

Selected Game Synopses

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Sunstruck

In the core of the world, those altered by the warmth of the sun meet. My character, Marrow Motley, is bored, so he tries to erode the humanity of people to make them Sunstruck. Usually, he fails, and he just ends up pushing people into the sun to their deaths.

In Carter Hall

The fae are throwing a frat party. My character, Kyle Hickenbottom, was the only character dumb enough to not realize the fae were real the entire time, yet somehow managed to get his name back the earliest, by making peace with the guy he was hooking up with.

[miracle machine]

In the world of Edenfire, when individuals experience intense emotions, they seep out into surrounding objects, sometimes creating "artifacts", magical items with various effects. In [miracle machine], a university is conducting an experiment to artificially re-create an artifact known as the "Death Flower" by messing with people's memories, and creating artificial and emotionally intense scenarios. There's a saw-style murder game, a seance, and a funeral. This was a three-part LARP, and each session began the same way, with most characters' memories being erased as part of the experiment. However, the experiment quickly goes off the rails as a rogue agent restores people's memories... both memories altered for the experiment, and memories altered years and years ago.

coriolis

I'm not quite sure how to describe coriolis in a way that could do it justice. I sometimes try to (hell, I once tried on a first date, oops). Maybe one day I'll learn. It was, almost certainly, the most impactful work of art I've ever experienced.

coriolis was a story about a dragon, with six heads and seven hearts. It was about an Angel and the wishes it granted. It was about drinking oatmilk and all the bits of humanity that you can never, ever, take for granted. For now, take this.

What came to pass:

• Time travellers wrote a Guide to ascertain the identity of an entity in the future known as "The Angel" that was granting wishes which were destroying the world. This gave the Angel the idea to start granting wishes.
• I taught the queen of lobsters how to use a toilet.
• "The sea is red, the sun is black, the moon is falling" - all parts of this prophecy became true eventually.
• A character called "Tow Truck" founded a new country, trucklind. The coronation ceremony took place in Club Penguin.
• The Holy Grail came to us with a quest meant only to decieve us.
• I lied to my friends about my identity for two years.
• The Storyteller Knight tried to cook every recipe in Julia Child's "Mastering the Art of French Cooking"
• Years later, the same Knight vowed dedicate their life to stopping me, while still being grateful for our friendship.
• Dogs started reading the news.
• The ghost echo of a bird lived inside a box in the dreams of the scion of a billionaire.
• Earth was created 22 years ago as a sacrificial lamb to feed to a dragon. That's why we have passionfruit!

Miscellaneous

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