LARP Design: Dungeon Setup

This topic comes to mind because, as LARPing reopens in the South (in the summer… we all do things we regret), I’ve gotten to see a surprisingly effective new(-to-me) development in dungeon presentation in boffer LARPing. To explain it, I want to work through the history of dungeon setups I’ve seen in LARPs. This post elaborates on a number of things I said in Module Construction: LARP and Tabletop back in 2014.

Take it as read, then, that people running any kind of boffer adventure LARP want to have exciting things that sometimes happen in a place that is indoors in the fiction, whether or not it’s outdoors in real life. The overwhelming majority of LARP participants I’ve known over the last [cough] years are also familiar with tabletop gaming and D&D-style dungeon crawling (or shadowrunning jobs or whatever).

Step 1: A Path in the Woods

The earliest games in a lot of LARPing communities don’t even have the benefit of a building that they can safely run combat in, so they use a path with trees and underbrush grown close on each side as a cave. I should say that games that do have buildings may do this too – having enough space of the right kind for all the content you want to run is a never-ending challenge. If sometimes you can’t get fancy the way you’d like, well, that’s life.

Anyway, a path in the woods as a cave has the benefit of not being enclosed in black tarp and making unbearable Georgia heat unbearably Georgian hotter, and not having to solve lighting for safe combat is mighty nice. Sure, making PCs carry some kind of light source is realistic, but also… they won’t be sorry the times they don’t have to do that.

Other than the general sense of limited representation of what the players are seeing, the core problem of this model is that the “sides” of the cave aren’t real or hard surfaces, so players in the scene (PC and NPC) will try to edge around each other for positioning advantage into what “should” be the wall. It’s not a serious problem, but it does pull everyone out of the scene a bit to need that reminder.

You’re also limited to very simple structures, because that’s how paths work. If you’re lucky enough to have a clearing, maybe you do a little more, but you’re completely beholden to state park forestry here.

Step 2a: A Tarp in the Woods

Here you get a branching solution, and a given game probably uses both. With a lot of work from a staff member, you can use black plastic sheeting and duct tape (not ideal) or clamps (ideal) to create walls and a roof. The downside here is it’s a lot of work, definitely not worth it if you’re running just one adventure there. Also, as I suggested above, if it’s hot out (so like half the year in the South), you might lose people, especially NPCs waiting for the encounter, to heat exhaustion if they’re in the structure. Taking care of your tarp so that you can reuse them, and buying more tarp when you need it, is also a lot of work.

The upside is that you solve a lot of the drawbacks of “a path in the woods” – there are walls and you can build multiple chambers, even branching chambers if your staffer is really bold. Because there are walls, you can start doing things like adding traps (still not great… sorry, a light breeze is your enemy here) and secret doors.

This is the step where you might start having a staffer whose primary job is “tarp wrangler.” It’s an endlessly valuable skill set within LARP-running. My advice – and it’s advice I need to take! – is that every staffer should set aside time to assist the tarp-wrangler and learn what they do, if physical ability allows. (Tarp-wranglers may prefer to work alone; respect this preference but try to find a right time to learn some of the skillset.)

Step 2b: Existing Buildings

If you’re playing on a state park group camp or a private site (you lucky bastards), there might be permanent structures you can use – anything from a roofed pavilion to a cabin or barracks-style building. Sturdier walls than hanging tarp are a huge benefit, especially when it comes to anchoring fishing line for trap setup, and resisting wind. Roofs are also better for deflecting heat than hanging tarp.

The challenge is that you’re beholden to the shape, number, and location of buildings that the park has, and if you’re trying to run multiple adventures at once, you’ll have to sort out logistics. These are standard challenges and not serious problems – buildings are a blessing. If your game runs close to the site’s capacity, giving players sleeping accommodations puts pressure on your use of cabins, and you’ll probably have to use only pavilions. This is considered to be a good problem to have!

Repeater Modules

In terms of content development, this is roughly where the concept of repeater modules shows up. A repeater module is a content-creation labor-saving technique: if you’ve written a module of 2+ encounters that is fun for, let’s say, 2-8 players, but you have a playerbase that is at least three times that many players… maybe you want to give multiple groups a chance to enjoy that content.

Now, it’s going to seem weird if the same adventure hook shows up with the same problem and two different groups come back to the main game area telling the same story of things that happen. It highlights the pure game nature over the collective-narrative nature of LARPing; also you need to explain why the group that already knows what to face doesn’t immediately go back in and face it again.

You solve that with three tools. Players owe it to the game to accept even fairly flimsy reasoning.

A narrative conceit that acknowledges needing more than one group of characters to address a larger problem or exploit more of the resource.
A narrative conceit that explains why you can’t go back, or can’t go on two consecutive runs of that adventure. Usually there’s a fig leaf of “a bad condition stacks up on you that isn’t a problem unless you do it twice.” This might also be part of putting a timer on the module.
Writing the encounters in a way that doesn’t use the same named NPCs repeatedly (without a good reason), and that includes variations on one or more of the encounters. Maybe there’s a random environmental condition that makes each run unique, or the middle encounter in each run is completely different.

For games that use repeater modules, they become a standard part of a 36-hour event structure, typically running for 2-8 hours on Saturday during the day. Just remember that if you’re working within a formula, you need to do extra work to keep things fresh.

Step 3: Buildings Plus Tarp

Sure, it’s an incredibly obvious step given Steps 2a and 2b! It’s getting its own step because frankly, you don’t have to move past this step. It was good enough for Shattered Isles, King’s Gate, Wildlands South, and a lot of other incredible games. It’s really as simple as “what if we hung tarp inside pavilions and cabins to reshape them?”

Some of the greatest dungeon-crawling experiences I’ve ever seen have been this. Shattered Isles ran William the Black’s Tomb in one of the Indian Springs cabins, with something like an 8-hour setup, as the culmination of a multi-year rogue-focused story. (I didn’t go on this module, I just heard about it afterward.) At FDR’s larger group camp, King’s Gate ran the spectacular mad scientist laboratory of Port Nord, as well as the Port Nord sewers that somehow got the lighting precisely right so that my imagination did the rest of the work.

Now the downside: in addition to the workload, the length of the adventure is essentially limited to the size of the building. You start worrying about ideas like spatial density of content. Let’s say you’re using an AH Stephens lodge: interior room + front porch + large back porch. How many things can you fit into that space that PCs need to engage with (combats, traps, puzzles, whatever)? I bring this up because, bluntly, it’s hard to get a memorable dungeon crawl (the main kind of module I want to talk about here) out of 2-3 encounters. The crawl portion really is about multiple steps that are distinct within one’s memory.

If you have all of an Indian Springs/Booker T barracks-style building to work with, plus a skilled tarp wrangler or two, you can safely stop here. Steps 4+ solve problems you frankly don’t have. When your building is intended to house something like 34 people, plus bathrooms and common areas, you can run an incredible dungeon crawl, maybe even entertaining most of a 40+ person playerbase without going to a repeater structure.

Pavilions are both the best and the worst for this. They’re great because they’re inherently open space with even footing for fights or jumpystone challenges or whatever. Heck, you can put down chalk lines or duct tape and it’s all good! That’s incredibly convenient. On the other hand, you have to build every interior wall yourself – see above about tarp-wrangling. Also, less protection from the wind, and less noise cancellation into and out of the module.

There are a lot more best practices worth discussing here – clever use of available furniture, turning any space into a maze, clever use of vertical space, physical safety considerations, and so on. I’m not covering those today, sorry.

Safety Wolf

This isn’t so much “advice” as “a completely amazing thing we got to do a few times.”

There’s a former motel and office building that became a paintball/ActionSoft site. Some of our community members – pretty sure it was Garrick Andrus being amazing, again – had contacts with the people running the site, and Eclipse rented the site. The motel is a two-story building where many of the rooms don’t have dividers anymore – so you can slip from room to room in some places without going out to the hallway. The office building, also two-story, is self-explanatory.

So Eclipse, and later DtD, have a space where enemies can ambush and outflank you in the dark, all day long, and you’ve got to clear room-by-room. Maybe you also have to hold the courtyard against attackers the whole time. It’s the “realest” dungeon-crawling experience we could ask for, though I think they’ve changed the business around so that it might not be available for LARP rental anymore. I’m not really sure.

You get a completely different experience of exploration when many of the rooms aren’t anything special, they’re just more of the same, until you do find the one that matters. Tedium-with-tension makes discovery more powerful by contrast, is what I’m saying. It’s also special because you’re in an exciting adventure area, not a safe in-town area, for the whole 6-12 hours of the event. Players have unparalleled freedom to go off on their own, in small groups, or en masse to explore without needing a staff member, while still expecting to potentially find something cool. You often have to do it 2-3 times, too, because first you find out what’s there, then you find out why it’s useful and have to work your way back to it.

Step 4: Tarp Structure

Eclipse introduced PVC pipe structures with tarp on three sides that could be moved and set up in various ways to restructure a module space, while Dust to Dust built on that idea to a massive tarp-covered PVC frame with posts for interior walls. (If you’re reading this and you weren’t part of those game communities, understand that people staffing one game were playing the other, and we traded a lot of innovations and materials back and forth.) The tarp hangs with shower curtain rings and maybe a small number of clamps, rather than relying on a ton of clamps, for a massive time-savings in setup and keeping the tarp reusable.

In terms of building a maze that you could run repeater modules in, solving some of the workload problems while also making it readily adjustable, this is a huge step forward. You’ve got a building just about anywhere there’s flat(ish) ground, something like 30-40 feet on a side, with all kinds of options for placing entrances and exits. You can set it adjoining to a building, to extend the active module area. We got great use out of it.

The downsides are that it’s functionally built out of sails, and a windy April day once picked up the whole structure and blew it across a field. That wasn’t great. It also takes some practice to set up quickly. It’s possible but not easy to include setups with more than just rooms and corridors – tables, chairs, and whatever else would have to come from elsewhere. This only occasionally matters, of course. Its parts break down for transport, but they’re still bulky to move and store. But, again, this felt like a huge step forward in freedom to manipulate a module space.

Calamity has iterated on the tarp structure by using the comparatively lightweight pavilion tents, set up adjoining each other, in the area they need. This has the advantage of being commercially available at scale, having a roof to keep off rain and sun, setup doesn’t require specialized experience, and having any number of possible configurations – including an open “atrium” center if they need a huge structure without expanding their stock of tents. I haven’t gotten as much of a look at this – my NPCing for Calamity keeps me doing other stuff – but I think they’re using tarp on shower curtain rings for interior and exterior walls.

Step 5: Rapid Set Changes

As far as I know, credit for this step goes to Garrick, an absolute creative powerhouse in the Rule of Three and Altera Awakens gaming communities for the last [cough] years. At Eclipse, he ran a module that had us in an office building, with the floors connected by an elevator. (If you think we didn’t make some Mass Effect jokes while in the elevator, you don’t know many gamers, do you?) The conceit of the elevator (a tarp cube with a wall that goes up and down) let Garrick rearrange the rest of the setup for a new floor, out of sight of us but without asking to wait out-of-character. It meant that we got a bunch of module areas with the large footprint of the pavilion.

He was still constrained in what he could implement quickly – he didn’t want 10 minute waits between “floors.” He achieved incredible variety, all the same, with a tarp cube or two, a folding table or two, and briefing the NPCs on various kinds of responses. He didn’t try to set any fishing-line traps, that I recall, because those always eat up time.

Pretty sure he had speakers set up to play “Girl from Ipanema” when we were in the elevator – if he didn’t, my memory just filled that in. In short, it captured the modern-action-thriller, Nakatomi Plaza feel like nothing I’ve seen before or since.

Oh, you know, we also did something like this at Dust to Dust, and I’m not sure now which game did it first. We had the Pickett’s Mill building set up with a wall down the center, doors in the tarp at each end, and more tarp walls or cubes to break up the space. One part of the room was the staircase down, so the PCs would descend, complete a circuit around the room, and get to the next set of stairs. Thanks to lighting, sound design by Jeremiah McCoy, and Stands-in-the-Fire’s incomparable portrayal of one of the campaign villains, it was some of the best horror we ever ran.

Step 6: Multi-Path Rapid Set Change

I think I saw the beginnings of this idea in some Eclipse Digital Sea content (my memory is hazy here), but Altera Awakens is where I know I saw the full implementation. This takes the principle of the elevator structure and applies it to a multi-room dungeon complex with branching (“multi-path”) corridors.

It works like this: the dungeon is set up in a pavilion, which might or might not be divided into two rooms with tarp. When the PCs finish the room (or the second room, if it’s divided), they can choose to go out the left door or out the right door. There might be more options narrated to them by a staff member. This puts them “in a corridor,” where they wait while the staff member and any NPCs reset the room. The overall complex has more rooms than the PCs can reasonably explore (see “Repeater Modules,” above), and the staff member knows what to set up because they have a D&D-style dungeon key.

The thing that makes this amazing is that the repeater modules are, self-consciously, groups collectively exploring the same space. The narrative conceit encourages them to spend time on interacting with one another and exchanging stories. So maybe the first group follows a left-hand rule (take every left, see what happens) and later groups decide where they break away from that line.

The most recent Altera Awakens event went one step further: the game laid out an old-school Chessex wet-erase mat and told us to get busy mapping. So each group that came back reported their turns and findings, so the next group knew where to go for new content. We wound up charting it with index cards and cut-up paper rather than drawing on the map, but whatever. The interaction, mutual benefit, and excitement to see each group come back was a huge esprit de corps boost within the playerbase, as well as scratching that old-school D&D exploration itch.

The next step for this model specifically is to get more volunteer support so that the game can improve its set dressing. The only downside was how much each chamber had to lean on spoken narration rather than set dressing to tell its story.

Next Steps

I’m fascinated to see where this whole model goes next. I’m going to toss out a few possibilities, but I’m not currently a game-runner having to implement anything.

Tying mechanics into multi-path rapid set change, such as scrying to find out what’s in the next chamber.
Your dungeon needs Chaos Gates.
Adding secret doors or openable alternate pathways to create alternate routes that avoid more difficult, annoying, or costly rooms and routes. Classic Metroidvania move right here.
More decisions from one run affecting later runs.
Garrick suggested improving the “corridor” portion of the experience by enclosing it and giving more ways to interact with the environment while waiting for the room change.
Rapid tarp change (stringing up cables with tarp on shower curtain rings, probably) altering the room shape – so this time it’s a long U-shaped room, and this time it’s got some kind of barrier we have to get past. Getting the rapid setup down is the key here.
More exposition dumps – journals, dungeon graffiti, phantoms signaling to you, whatever – to inform PC decisions along the way.
Layered dungeon history – so when you go down, you find things that are older, from a different culture, and telling a different story.

I hope this has inspired some wild new ideas for your boffer LARP!

Brandes Stoddard

Harbinger of Doom