Today I ran a playtest of a new idea for an online larp, called Alex the Great.
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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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Alice is Missing
Spoiler warning – this talks about how Alice is Missing works and is played out, and as it is a mystery game, you might not want to read on if you’d prefer to be surprised by developments. Intro and apology Ok so first thing is to say that I don’t actually own a set of […]
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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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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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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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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, […]
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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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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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, […]