Do you LARP? Do you want to LARP? Post LARP stories, questions, proposals! We could maybe get together and do something?
I think getting together might be hard since spread out over the whole world and all :P I'm goign on a con in early July! still don't got much of an idea of how to survive the summer heat to be honest, my Character Nono wears a shitton of layers normally :I
I think it'd be fun, but lack of people and lack of social skills means NOPE but like, it looks cool (and I might find uses for some makeup that I never use XD)
I've only ever done the Call of Cthulhu LARPs at Owlcon, and I had mixed experiences with those depending on the degree to which the organizers had their shit together. The Cthulhu LARPs are always scheduled to start in the late evening and they typically go until 3-5am. The goal is to discover as much of the story as you can before you lose all your sanity or die in horrible ways. By that measure, the WWII themed one was the best of the lot. I thought the story for the 80s club one was less available for discovery, but I still had a good time, and the haunted theater one was the least accessible. End results, respectively: avatar of Shub-Niggurath summoned into the world, all surviving characters transported to a blasted post-apocalyptic earth, and characters rediscovering their true Yithian natures after an experiment gone wrong.
I did a basic D&D one once. I wore my SCA armor and brought a wooden sword and an SCA buckler. I had good intimidation factor, even got some people running away just by charging at them. Okay, I was also doing shoulder rolls down a brambly hill at them without getting hurt. (Armor is good.) The problem I had was when we were doing step combat (turns and dice) and the DM said "Okay, now you two fight full speed. GO!" I couldn't fight well because with my wooden sword I would have taken the poor guys head off if I used any speed. I touched him a few times with it, confused that the fight wasn't stopping, and then he stepped in close, took a few moments to jam his rainbow telescoping plastic thing into my armpit while I go "wait, what are you doing?" and he says "Does this count as a sneak attack? It's on his back and through the armor!" Bleh. I need the rules clearly defined before we begin!!!
See that is why we always use safe (""""SAFE"""", nothing is ever 100% safe, but still) latex weapons. I mean you still don't hit each other at full force because that's rude and asking for trouble, but it does take away a lot of the potential for hurt. also... dice? Um. I've never heard of dice rolls in LARP. At least around here the rule is "YCDWYCP" = You can do what you can play!
Hi yes, LARP is a thing I do! Well, sort of? It's a thing I have done a lot of. Not, like, as part of formal systems, or ongoing campaigns. Just a bunch of short games with 20-50 people, a lot of foam swords, and a dedication to improv. Someone writes out a setting and some characters and maybe a handful of plot points, everyone gets enough background to have a vague idea of what they're doing, we play out a couple hours of story in roughly realtime. Started going in senior year of high school, so, eight years ago. My group has kind of fallen apart since, and I just moved across the country, but, I've had a lot of good times, and hope to have at least a few more. On safety and weapons, yeah. That's a thing. Wooden sword sounds entirely unreasonable for LARP to me. We use fairly stiff foam for sword blades, with pvc pipe just for hilts, so even swinging full-force shouldn't really cause harm. Still not recommended, but it's okay when it accidentally happens. Biggest risks from the weapons are foam burn and the very rare problem where the pommel falls off and the end of the hilt is exposed pvc pipe. Falling or running into each other or things like that are actually bigger dangers. Some cool things I've done: -wrote and played a game based on Churchrock Prison from The God Eaters. -played a character who wasn't written as a quest-giver, but pretended to be a quest-giver by asking other players what their quests were, and then merging and adjusting them and giving them to different players. Like, say, one dude is looking for a vampire who killed his dad. I talk to him in-character, get his story and his description of how he'll know the vampire. Then, I find another character and tell them that to achieve their goal, they'll need to take on the defining trait of the vampire. This was absolutely in the spirit of the game, and something I okayed with the gamewriter ahead of time. Was also some of the most fun I've had. -Asked a yeti lawyer if he had a screwdriver so I could steal the ornamentation at a faerie feast. This was when Boyfriend and I decided to try being in a relationship. Now it's eight years later and we're still together, so I'd say, "Do you have a screwdriver?" was a pretty solid pick up line.
... are LARP cons (as in "conquest" not as in "convention") like... an uncommon thing in the... I'm gonna wildly assume US here? Because Here in Germany there is two types of LARP event. The "evening" things that tend to be ongoing campaigns, and for fantasy LARP things are generally tavern settings or the full immersion battlefield and camp-life conquests that are between a weekend and a week long (I'm going to a small weekend affair from the 1-3. of July. Gonna be fun! I hate tent arrangements but it's just two nights so. At least I won't have that much trouble with food this time, bc it's so short) I think the best LARP stories so far was the middle-of-the-night illegal fight club our Red Cap crew arranged with the local Orc clan (who were technically the enemy NPCs. BUT RED CAPS AND ORCS ARE BROS WITH SIMILAR SENSES OF HUMOR YO) which was HELLA fun. Another ridiculous instance was the time I and my teacher attempted to explode a plot important object in the middle of an undead raid. "Resch listen to me. Don't do as I do, do as I say. And what I say is: Never mix chaos magic and explosions!" "OKAY!" "Now turn around and pretend you don't see me do this." we almost succeeded destroying the thing too, but only almost and then we had to get the fuck out of there :P
I did LARP through my school for a year and I was really sad when I wasn't able to do it anymore. I know there are groups in my area but I haven't had the chance to try any of them
LARP cons are slowly becoming a thing in the US. LARP summer camps for teenagers have been a thing, but not that much of one -- my group was an offshoot of one of those. New World Magischola just happened, apparently that was pretty cool, and a friend of mine is actually working on making a LARP con happen in the SF bay area in some amount of months/years.
ooooo good luck with that! If they are on here/are interested in it (or on tumblr) and they want like tips/things people look for in an orga team, I am absolutely willing to relay my experience! The weekend will only be my fifth con, but I've been to both smaller scale events and one proper Conquest of Mythodea (one of the three large events here in Germany, 9000 people if you count all players, orga, merchants, npcs, the first aid team and so on) so I have at least some idea of things (though I have never been Orga/GM and I have only once attended as an NPC)
I really want to get into LARPing, but the only groups in my area seem to be mostly brodudes and super-fit sporty types, so I am intimided.
while I cannot speak for group climate around you I can definitly say one thing: You do not have to be super duper sporty to do LARP imo. I'm chronically ill and while I do have to take some more precautions than other players and occassionally ask GMs to mark me as a non-combatant, it isn't impossible!
http://www.eventhorizonlarp.com/ So, my friend's thing has an official website now. People interested in LARPing who can reasonably spend a weekend in California to do it should check it out.
lacking good pictures of the last con, and especially considering I completely fucking forgot posting here in over a year, have this summary video that IS actually a year old I'm so sad that the vampire in the video, Dragonetti, was killed this con :( I never even got to meet him IC, bc due to health problems I didn't get to do much of the night stuff and had to go to bed early. But yeah if anythign the last con I went to had higher quality standards, I have no idea if anyone got pictures or video of the chaos witches bc those were a-fucking-mazing NPCs Edith (my character) got her first war injury at this con so she's a veteran codex merc now :') little scribe is all grown up lmao
ALSO i'm plannign to go to a con in april with my redcap Nono once more AND i'm plannign on actually putting together my useless conman raven shitson Hrafnass at some point considering everyone is loving the concept to death haha.
*Groans painfully* both my declarants for champion were disqualified on technicalities, so we're either going to have to appoint one, or have another reign with only one officer.
