Games: Tabletop RPGs, LARPs, and more
Sometimes you want to write a larp with other humans who are nowhere near your physical location. I’ve previously posted about Larp Writing Software, but that was more of a roundup than an analysis of each tool. This post is a summary of tools I have used for working with others, had suggested to me [ ]
This was written in November of 2020 by Eva with help from Quinn. Some of these details may have changed since then. This post was updated in late November of 2020 with more details based on feedback I got about the original post. This post was updated again in February of 2022. Most notably the [ ]
In my experience*, the beginning 10 to 30 minutes of a larp is awkward and uncomfortable, whether you’re spending it in workshops or unstructured in-character play. Players need time to feel comfortable in their “new skin” and in the new social environment of the game. They need to develop first impressions and gauge how much [ ]
Horror is hard. It can be amazing when it works, and laughably terrible when it doesn t. We ve all read or watched (or in some cases played) horror that didn t scare us. There are two main reasons why horror might not work 1) the horror is poorly executed or 2) the premise of what is terrifying about [ ]
I was disappointed with the design of the 5th edition Dungeons Dragons spellbook cards from Gale Force Nine, so I took a stab at redesigning them. My write up discusses the choices I made as I went.
A few days ago James Stuart started a very interesting conversation on Google Plus about the phrase “Theater LARP” (also sometimes called “Theater Style LARP”). He was confused about when and why it is applied. A number of people showed up to talk about the history of the term and it’s use today. Here are [ ]
A quick survey of LARP writing tools I know about (including some I have never used). I put these in alphabetical order and added some that other gamers told me about. If you tell me about another one I ll add it to the list. 🙂 Stuff designed by LARPers Akkar: this is from some folks in Norway and [ ]
This post was previously available on a private G+ circle. I figured it might interest people to know the method I use to cast small LARPs with prewritten characters. The community I play in generally calls these Theater LARPs and / or Parlor LARPs*. This is something I ve developed over several years with the [ ]
“If you can’t die then how can winning a combat mean anything?” Failure and death. Missing blows, losing, running away . all things that we’re told you must have in tabletop games so that combat is “meaningful.” I used to assume that when people said “meaningful” they meant “engaging and fun” or “like you were a [ ]
I’ve been learning more about Nordic LARP over the last year and over all it’s been very informative. One thing that’s irritated me is the insistence that a big swath of Nordic games are not LARP and that people on this side of the pond shouldn’t call them LARP. I should preface this by saying [ ]