How To Run February's LARP

Is apparently a lot of information. I tried to write up what was going on behind the scenes, which wound up being nearly as much information as was given to the players in the first place. Hopefully, by reading this document someone else could create a similarly entertaining evening for their friends.

Even those not interested in running the game might be interested in the "behind the scenes" thinking going on in the game. I tried to explain my decision making process as GM, and why and how some things were done. I didn't delve to much into why some characters are written the way they are, but you get a little sense of that in the casting section. It still didn't cover, say, why so many character had few actual demonstrable superpowers (so that they might be suspected of being Brainjack) and similar issues. Perhaps that might be fodder for a future blog post.

LARP photos

Those not present might want to see what the event looked like. Or those present might wish to see how embarrassing they look dressed as a superhero. Either way, readers might wish to see the photos from the February LARP. The only people likely to be disappointed would be those looking for photos of either GM. Amber was busy taking said photos, so does not appear in them. I meanwhile, am apparently some sort of vampire or other soulless abomination that does not show up on film.

Few of the photos are action shots, because during action-y times a GM is busy doing other things. So I don't know if it gives an accurate depiction of the LARP. But it'll give you an idea what the bottom rungs of the superhero society look like.

February LARP report

Despite my total failure at logistics, the game went really well. I though some of the time I had scheduled for 7:30, when I in fact scheduled for 7:00, so we wound up even later than I though we were. Then when we got there, I realized I had everything except the character sheets. Which are, you know, the most important part. So Amber had to drive back to our house to get them, then return.

But that meant that I had half and hour or so to explain to everyone the situation, spell out what each room meant in game, point out the props, etc. And each player had the chance to see what everyone else’s name badges (which we had) and get a little idea of the other character (and a bit about themselves, too).

The Davis family costume trunk served very well for this game. The Bank Robbery game in January had little costuming involved, but everyone had at least a bit to make them look superheroic. Seaman wore a cape, which I thought got the right useless superhero vibe: how do you swim underwater while wearing a cape? Warning Sean ahead of time that he was playing a Viking meant he had some Nero gear, including a vest of chainmail, so his costume was awesome. Hopefully Amber will post some pictures of the game soon so other people can see how it all looked.

Once we got character sheets, everything got going smoothly. The really basic conflict system seemed to work very well, and it seemed to encourage the behavior I wanted to encourage. Actually, it’s surprising how many of my plans actually went as planned, like Copycat not having any powers but always avoiding having to show off his powers (which then put some suspicion on him as the game went on).

Lots of spontaneously entertaining things happened in game. Bjorn Yesterday wound up worshipping Detachable Head as a god, because he saw the Head detach and was confused and terrified. Powerbroker initially tried to explain this as a demon, then magic, but both those encouraged Bjorn to attack, so eventually the only excuse he’d accept was the Head was a god and that was a miracle. Bjorn then followed the Head around and gave him presents and things.

Copycat at one point was cornered by Powerbroker, who wanted to see Copycat’s (nonexistent) ability to duplicate superpowers in action. This was to prove Copycat wasn’t the villainous Brainjack. Using her ability to speak any language, she said something in Swedish about Ikea, so Copycat seized on the only word he recognized and said (in English) “I love Ikea!”. Powerbroker, revising the experiment, tried to have Nestor talk to Copycat in Swedish, but Copycat distracted Nestor by asking or an autograph and asking about stories from back in Nestor’s heyday. By the time the story was done, Nestor’s senile brain had forgotten about the Swedish conversation.

At one point, Nestor determined that maybe Seaman’s true power would only show up under great duress, so he encouraged Seaman to endanger himself or stop drinking water constantly. Seaman didn’t like this plan (what if Nestor was wrong and it just killed him?). So we never got to test it, but I would have gone along with it, because I though it was funny.

There was a lot of good stuff going on in the LARP. I had a lot of fun watching it, and I think everyone else did, too. I think it was more successful than the Bank Robbery larp, overall. Let’s hope next month will be even better than this one. Most of the LARP documents are online, though I'm trying to write up a document about "How to run this game" that might make more stuff clear.

Procrastination sets in earlier than I had hoped

I’m at a point where I’m procrastinating against writing stuff or the February LARP. I expected this to happen, but hopefully this month will be the hardest one: I had all the time in the world to write the first LARP (and actually took a month and a half to do so). But the second LARP has to fall in the real month-long schedule, if I want to keep things on track. And since it’s the first one actually written in a month, I haven’t developed a set of habits for doing so.

But my procrastinating doesn’t help. Nor does losing my USB drive and my written notes for the game. Hopefully, I can reconstruct things. And hopefully, having to rebuild the game from scratch in two weeks will leave me better prepared for future months. One thing that has helped is the announcing the LARP well in advance, which means people are unconsciously reminding me about it whenever they RSVP. Which puts social pressure on top of the personally established system of deadlines. Social pressure might be more effective as a motivator to get me writing than anything I could do myself. And getting myself to write things and run things and try out new things and do some non-D&D based gaming is basically why I’m doing this LARP-A-Month project anyway.

But the longer I write this post, the less time I spend writing up time travelling Swedish superheroes. So off to adventure.

Things I'd change in the January LARP the second time around

This post is partly more deconstruction, and partly for the benefit of anytone following this Blog who ever is interested in running the game for their own friends.


1: Not give the robbers rope. They tied up several hostages quickly, which reduced what those players could do. While it may be realistic, none of the variousbank robbery movies or TV shows I've watched involved tying up the hostages. Probably for the same reasons: so that the hero of the show/movie can move around and manipulate things rather than be tied up and helpless.

2: Change Thursday's background, so that he/she wants evidence of the embezzling plot. Thursday would in this case want to get out, alive if possible, and clear his name of the embezzling charges. Of course, this raises again the question I had for a long time: how would Thursday plan to get out alive and free? Well, maybe Thursday's priorities have gotten all screwed up, and he's willing to be arrested for robbing a bank if proven innocent of embezzling from the same bank. Or maybe he has some other plan, though I couldn't think of a good one. (That's why Thursday didn't care about surviving: so I didn't have to come up with an escape plan.)

3: Possibly change it so the manager is not the person embezzling. The manager had enough to do just being the manager, therefore the ones the robbers talked to. The manager might suspect his other employee of something, even, which could move that plot other ways.

Maybe some other things, like: give a hostage or bank employee a weapon. This was planned for the undercover cop, but she didn't get played. Should have given the gun then to the ex-con. We did give the duffel full of cash (written to go to the convenience store worker) to the off-duty cop, which worked really well. It gave the PCs something to fight for and sneak bits of cash away. (The cop had collected a bunch of money at his son's Bar Mitzvah, apparently, and was at the bank to deposit it all.)



But I should get to writing for February. So far it looks like a smaller crowd than January, but these things have a tendency to look deserted until two days before the LARP. Then at the last minute they double in attendance and I have to write extra characters. Two of whom never get played. We'll see how that cycle continues, though it's been the pattern every previous LARP I've ran.

Things I learned from the January

* Giving someone a lethal weapon and a revenge goal that doesn't include their character living means the LARP will be very short.

* Playing a hostage is not as much fun as playing a dynamic character.

* The plot was too focused on one primary group of PCs: the Kirkwood / Thursday pairing. They tied in to way too much of the game. Other characters were more on the periphery. Future games need to be more balanced out: if one character's info sheet is two pages long and another's is half a page, there needs to be some balancing going on. Maybe the game would have worked better if the embezzler weren't the bank manager? If the revenge were for something else? If the teller and her ex-con ex-husband really were robbing the place too?


All these points seem obvious in hindsight, but it's hard to keep this stuff in mind when writing scenarios. Maybe future months can benefit from earlier mistakes. Especially if I formalize them some.


In other news, the February LARP will be a comedic superhero game, like unto The Tick or The Mystery Men. The other strong contender for February (a science fiction mystery) will be moved to march or beyond.

LARP style

LARPing is not really my normal playstyle. Most of my gaming is of face-to-face tabletop roleplaying games (like, you know, Dungeons and Dragons or Polaris or Traveller or something). Why I chose to write a dozen LARPs is therefore an interesting question which I might explore later on at some point. But I mention this for a reason:

It often happens that I am sitting around talking to some guy that I know in a tabletop game that I mention LARPing. And they say something about how they don't like LARPing. Which seems weird to me, since they're already sitting around a table talking in a funny voice pretending to be an elven necromancer or whatever. How is it any different to do it while standing up?

So I pry into this (or sometimes my wife pries into this in my stead). And it almost always turns out that the person's live action roleplaying experience comes down to one of A) NERO, B) The Society for Creative Anachronism or C) White Wolf LARPing.


I'm not going to talk shit about any of these groups, though none of them are hobbies I personally enjoy. But it seems to me that these and similar entities represent the primary Gateway Games into LARPing. You know, the games that introduce people to the general idea of LARPing, from which they can then find other LARPs they might like better. And they are notably bad at it, since every one of the aforementioned tabletop only players who has attended one of our games enjoyed it and is willing to attend more of the LARPs I have done in the past.



But the fact of the matter is that "LARPing" as a hobby contains a huge variety of possible pursuits. The three big things linked above are all very distinct from one another. Beyond these there's a variety of other possible forms LARP could take, ranging from crazy Scandinavian "Jeepform" games to historical reenactment to who knows what else.



So what, specifically, am I interested in? While LARPing is a big field, and i am interested in exploring it more thoroughly over the course of the year, I have a history of running self-contained oneshot LARPs for 7-15 people, with varying amount of rules involved. Generally, all the conflict has been between player characters, and NPCs have been all-but-nonexistent (the hostage negotiator showed up for perhaps five minutes in the bank robbery, for example). In fact, my ideal so far has been to have the GM be largely superfluous once the game starts: the situation is wound tight enough that the character just interacting with each other will create a memorable evening. No NPCs or other outside help required.

Rules structures used vary considerably, ranging from the complete Unknown Armies rules to published LARP rules to stuff I made up to nothing more than "If someone shoots you, decide if your character died. Otherwise, LARP it out."

Costuming and props have been encouraged, but decidedly optional. This is largely a practicality matter: among other things, I am reluctant to hand out characters until the day of the LARP, in case someone's availability changes and I have to recast key parts. Boffer weapons and physical fighting haven't been featured at all.

The best examples would be to either A) read the information from the Bank Robbery LARP, or B) see some similar games: in the past we ran multiple events published by Interactivities Ink, or used the Unknown Armies scenario Jailbreak!. Those are the games most directly comparable to what I am trying to make: several player characters, in conflict with one another, with secrets and varying motivations. The situation is simply wound tight enough that letting the player characters interact will inevitably make fun things happen.


No idea how much of that will be true across all the LARPs I write this year. I might try selectively violating these rules for each game as we get to them. But so far those guidelines have been true most of the time in most of the events I have run or written.

So maybe you have some idea what I mean when I talk about LARPing.