I’m in the place of loving LARP writing and gamerunning, but not knowing if I’ll ever write or run another game, for reasons of time, energy, and the life commitments of having kids. That’s why I write so many blog posts of LARP design these days – I hope to pass on my perspective and what I’ve learned, so that another LARP-runner can make more interesting and rarefied mistakes. Also, I hope to spark enjoyable conversations.

To that end, this is a post about world-building specifically for LARPs – things that work well and things that don’t. Keep in mind, though, that ideas usually aren’t good or bad in isolation; it’s how they connect to everything else that creates a good or bad situation. I’m saying, if your experience contrasts with what I say here, that doesn’t make one of us wrong.

Also, if you’re running a salon-style or freeform LARP, a lot of what I have to say won’t apply in the same way. I’m a campaign-length boffer LARPer who has only state parks to run events on.

Do This

1. Plan in advance how you’re going to tell stories about each character ancestry, nationality, style of magic, martial school, and so on. These are all aspects of character identities and things they can share in common with NPCs to establish context. They’re also hooks to get players interested in storylines, especially as a cross-section of existing player teams. As a result, each aspect of character identity can drive player-to-player or player-to-NPC interaction.
2. Give each culture or nationality at least one major holiday that they care about. Holidays shake up the social interaction context and encourage people to put extra effort into hospitality, cabin decorations, maybe gift exchange, maybe setting lore as they recount the story of why that holiday exists.
3. Because asking players to read a document of, for example, 44 pages is a lot and many of them simply won’t do it to any particular depth, painting in broad strokes is helpful. At the same time, it is also vitally important to approach any cognates of real-world cultures with sensitivity and nuance. Accept ahead of time that players and game staff are going to get some things wrong and have a policy in place around cultural sensitivity – but let that policy start from a baseline of assumed good intention and grace.
4. Write your core villain or villain groups early and make them part of your setting history, openly or secretly. I see a lot of settings place villains in a kind of shadow-society that doesn’t intersect with the society PCs live in, and this doesn’t get explained. (I want to be clear, I’m also describing what I see as logical flaws in my own settings.) How do they acquire essentials and carry out their plans if they can’t show their faces on a city street without a brawl?
   1. This includes establishing their goals, methods, and assets early on, and sticking with them or telling stories about how and why they change. The point of this whole Do item is to get PCs started on learning the most important elements of the game (who to feel things about) from their first contact with the setting.
5. Much like villains, build cool treasures and their stories into the foundation of your setting, things with the cultural cachet of the Shroud of Turin, the Holy Grail, or Excalibur. You can introduce stories like that later, but you’ll be running to backfill story and might have to explain why the PCs have never heard of this thing before. You’re showing PCs a goal to invest in, as part of your setting material. (The goal might be as simple as seeing the cool thing, if it’s never meant to be owned by one PC.)
   1. Uh, make sure it’s something you can adequately represent. This is falls under the general principle of “don’t over-promise and under-deliver.” But if you find you have over-promised, put out some feelers in your LARP group to see if someone can pull off a miracle for you. Garrick Andrus, for example, has been approved for living sainthood by the LARP-Vatican, on account of such miracles. He conjured a hydra once!

Don’t Do This

1. As a result of #1, above, don’t try to write too many ancestries, nationalities, secret societies, cults, magic styles, whatever. I am keenly aware of this temptation: Dust to Dust had 7 modern nationalities, 6 ancient nationalities (resembling but not identical to modern ones), 4 player ancestries, 7 types of magic (one of which was itself 7 cults), and 9 warrior orders. Once things were in motion, there’s no way we could have cut any of them because all of this content interrelated, but we should have narrowed our focus more during initial design.
2. In-game holidays are good, as I discussed in #2 above. But you’re running games strictly on weekends, so don’t go too much deeper on when your holidays happen than maybe the month they occur in – or maybe just the season. For example, it’s almost impossible to schedule an event in Georgia for December or February, and playing in June through August is only going to become less possible as climate change continues.
3. As much as possible, don’t firmly connect one magic school to one nationality. Move carefully if attaching a magic school to a character ancestry. You will absolutely without exception have players want to blur those lines into meaninglessness. “All mages from [nation] are of this type” and “all mages of [type] are from this nation” are different but equally thorny propositions. My advice is to instead delve into how the society and concerns of a given nation might spindle, fold, and mutilate a school of magic that is also practiced differently in [nation2].
4. If you’re thinking about making one of your PC-playable countries the Oppressive Imperial and Colonialist Regime… what if instead you just didn’t? This setting element generates an incredible amount of bickering that can’t be resolved on a game site without erupting into PvP. You probably don’t have a strong enough post-game aftercare practice to handle this. An oppressive regime that PCs can’t belong to or sympathize with is comparatively fine – just keep in mind that it will take a ton of extra effort to field enough NPCs to deliver the degree of threat they should represent.
   1. Voldinar in Shattered Isles is a best-case implementation, because while the Voldinaran PCs had plenty of loyalty to one idea of Voldinar, they didn’t hesitate to take sides against it when it slipped into a magical Roman fascism. That would be a hard needle to thread a second time, and – to be blunt – the attempts I’ve seen since then have been less successful.
5. You don’t need to place your mythic past quite so far back as you’re probably planning. Five centuries is long enough for a rise, collapse, and rebirth, you don’t need to go with 5,000 years… in which language and technology are still largely recognizable. Save yourself some serious work and don’t create quite so many years you need to fill and explain away!
   1. I’m obviously talking about my own settings here, yes. All laud and honor to Professor Tolkien for being completely willing and able to fill his setting’s millennia of backstory – but you have maybe two years of pre-production, not fifty.

Conclusion

I hope you find this useful, even if you disagree – all of my don’ts could be rescued with the right set of other supporting choices, as I said at the beginning of the post. For instance:

• Maybe your mythic past is so far back because some of the people were removed from the flow of time, and you want to explain why nature has wiped out their work when they return to the flow of time.
• If connection to magic actually comes from connection to the Orb of the Dragaeran Empire, which is synonymous with citizenship, then sure, you’ve justified only people from the Empire having sorcery.
• Maybe you have an in-game holiday that explains why you never have a game event during a particular month – it’s a month of contemplative fasting at home, not market gathers and adventuring?

But you can see how these are narrow use cases that still acknowledge the general principle.

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