Back at the end of October I was at Grenselandet, the international chamber larp festival held in Oslo. Unlike Stockholm Scenario Festival which I wrote about recently, Grenselandet is just for proven games, not new material – they all have to have run properly at least once – and each takes place only once and Read the full article…
In November I attended Stockholm Scenario Festival, a three-day gathering of about 130 people for short chamber larps and freeforms. Back in the spring the organizers had done a call for new games to run at the festival, and I submitted my Women on the Verge… They liked it, with certain tweaks which meant that Read the full article…
I know I’m months behind on here, but I wanted to do a quick post with some feedback I’ve been sent about recent larp runs. So Women on the Verge… and These Are the Days of Our Lives are two subtly different versions of my chamber larp about the lives of a group of women Read the full article…
“What’s a man now, what’s a man mean? Is he rough or is he rugged, Is he cultural and clean? Now it’s all change, it’s got to change more, Cause we think it’s getting better But nobody’s really sure…” ‘Real Men’, Joe Jackson The other day Kevin Burns and I got to run the first Read the full article…
I got to play the freshly-published version of the excellent social card game In a Bind recently. It’s designed by Behrooz Shahriari, who I know originally via the London playtest meetup. It’s a very straightforward game, quick to learn and to play, for 3–10 players, about physical constraints. At its simplest, players take turns to Read the full article…
I spent most of last week in the 1980s, in New York. I was Abner Finkel, a professor of modern literature at Columbia University, and a radical nihilist poet. The larp was Just a Little Lovin’, my first long-form Nordic larp. It was written by Hanne Grasmo and Tor Kjetil Edland and is one of Read the full article…
This last month or so has seen a whole bunch of playtesting activity. Playtesting is what you do when your game isn’t yet ready for publication/release/whatever your final intention for it is – so you run an unfinished version of it and ask the people involved to feed back to you on what they thought Read the full article…
One of the most fundamental decisions you need to make when designing a larp is: who will be responsible for creating the characters? In fact it’s so fundamental that people with experience only in one area of larp may not even realize that it’s a variable. If you only play trad larp, the idea that Read the full article…
What’s a scene? In the theatre, it’s a self-contained section of action, often signalled by the curtain going up and down or the actors going on and off stage. In a game, basically the same thing, except it’s often signalled by the GM saying “Right then… what do you want to do next?” In traditional Read the full article…
“Dystopias come from somewhere, and they go somewhere. They appear because someone is able to convince others that they are reasonable, and they disappear because someone is able to exploit their weaknesses. They rise, and they fall.” The other weekend I got the chance to playtest Rise and Fall, a new (GMless and prepless) storygame Read the full article…