Before we get into the LARP stuff I’m going to just mention what it is for those who may not know. There a lot of different styles of LARPing, but the style of LARP I do is a version of “Nordic Larp” . Essentially I’ll write a world and a set of characters and their conflicts and relationships, have an inciting incident and then just let them interact in a room for a few hours until some conclusion is reached. It’s a style that focuses more on social interactions between characters to create drama and tension as opposed to using concrete mechanics.
My style tends to be very “character first” in the sense that I like the drama to come from character conflict caused by different wants and fears as opposed to conflict between the characters and the world at large.
As an example, trope that has been in every single larp I’ve written is the Group of Three Siblings. Two of them despise one another for a variety of reasons. (It’s ranged from Hey You Left Me To Die That One Time to You Abandoned Our Family). The third is still close with the two who are fighting. All of them are tossed into a room and have to deal with their baggage. Maybe they reconcile. Maybe they splinter further, pulled apart by their perpetual conflict. And mixed in with this is a more complicated web of relationships and ways in which to interact with the world as a whole.
It’s a very interesting form of storytelling because every single character has to be The Main Character. You need twenty separate characters rich and complex enough to allow for the player to have things to talk about and conflicts to have and try and resolve (or not). If you have the chance to try this style of LARPing I highly recommend it.
The rest of this section will mostly be retrospectives on the LARPS I’ve written. I’m not going to post any of the actual materials (Character Sheets and World Documents) from the LARPs because they all have personal information in them, and enough that it would take me a while to redact it all. Maybe I will someday. Who knows.
