Categories
Larp

Sound Explorers

Sound Explorers was an online larp run by Nina Runa Essendrop as part of the weekend of activity that replaced the original dates of Knutepunkt 2021. It takes place entirely via audio — and was initially designed as an experience for blind people. This run happened via Zoom. And as well as not seeing anything, […]

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Larp

Alex the Great playtest

Today I ran a playtest of a new idea for an online larp, called Alex the Great.

Categories
Larp

Some thoughts about story, and about Story

Different people will have different expectations about what Story there will be in their larp experience, and how much, and where it will come from — and this is one of those things where a mismatch of expectation versus actuality can lead to misery.

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Larp

Rei’s Guide to Online LARP Design

[Note from Mo: this is a guest post, written by the very wonderful Rei England.] The risk of CoViD-19 and the resulting lockdown may have put a temporary halt to the style of LARP we are most familiar with, but that doesn’t mean LARPing must stop. Our wonderfully creative community is already experimenting and finding […]

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Larp

Some thoughts about historical larp

This is not a manifesto. But it contains some considerations that I think are important. Designers of a larp set in a historical period have double responsibilities: to the real people of the period, and to the present day. It’s impossible to experience a historical larp, or to design one, other than through our present-day […]

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Larp

The Sense of an Ending

So this is actually some notes from a few years ago, but I thought it might be good to capture them here, rather than in the Facebook post where they first appeared. I was thinking about ways of ending a larp: and this is an initial attempt to categorize possible endings. Here I’m talking about […]

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Larp

Just a Little Lovin’ 2019 UK

So a few weeks ago, I was part of a team that ran the classic larp Just a Little Lovin’, for the eighth time overall and the first time in the UK. It seems like the participants mostly had pretty good experiences, and everything pretty much worked as it was supposed to. Behind the scenes, […]

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Larp

Axial tension character design in On Location

On Location is a standalone weekend larp that has run twice, in the UK: in December 2017, and January 2019. The website is here: https://onlocationlarp.wordpress.com/ The initial designers were Karolina Soltys and Mo Holkar. Before reading much further, you might want to look at an example of what the character briefings are like: https://onlocationlarp.files.wordpress.com/2018/02/the-femme-fatale.pdf On […]

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Larp

Tell me about your NPCs

So one thing that I think I want to know, before signing up for a larp: does it use NPCs? – and if so, how? This is not just a question of taste, or even a question of ideology. Rather, I think the answer to it may reveal quite a bit about the ‘style’ of […]

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Larp

Mr & Mrs Unscripted

A weekend larp that ran in Sweden late last spring, designed and organized by Mia Häggström and Petra Lindve. About The setting was the making of a reality TV show, in which couples competed to win the big prize of having their wedding paid for. Players were either contestants, producers, or technical crew (camera, sound, […]