Thanks to a long list of complicating factors, I had to miss almost every LARP event of 2023 before September. Since the start of September, I’ve played an Eclipse event, an Altera Awakens event, and two Alliance events (one Atlanta chapter event, one National event run by Crossroads TN), I’ve NPCed one Calamity event, and I’ve been part of two staff-only playtest events for the upcoming Citadel LARP. I’ve had a lot of fodder for LARP-running thoughts.

I’m not calling out any game for its problems. There are complex reasons that any game demonstrates any particular shortcoming, and if you’re not part of the game’s staff and in close communication with a broad cross-section of players, you’re not getting the whole picture. Every game I’m talking about here is good but also has problems. Yes, even the one you love. Even the one I’m working on. Sorry, that’s how it is. It doesn’t make the thing you love bad! I specifically covered that when I said: “Every game I’m talking about here is good.”

The In-Town Game

The in-town game is the thing that isn’t modules or field battles. I’ve talked about modules a bit and field battles a lot – see the partial directory that follows this paragraph. (It’d be in a sidebar if I knew how to make sidebars for Patreon and WordPress. Moving on.) The in-town game includes action in the tavern or other main building, player housing if your site has that, other interesting game locations that players can visit without a marshal or Guide, and all of the space between those locations. If it’s a big game site that players can wander freely, all of that is still within the bounds of “in-town game” for my purposes here.

Module Parties, Dungeon Setup | Field Battles part 1, part 2, part 3 | Active Game Locations, Quest Shrines

Wandering monsters can be a component of a good in-town game, but especially with the aging playerbase of CI/Ro3 lineage games, it’s not as exciting or sufficient as it once was. If wandering monsters – which I not infrequently call “wandering damage” – is your main source of entertainment, you’re supporting action, but between fights, the odds are pretty good that players are slipping out of character.

The argument I want to put forth, then, is that social encounters of many different kinds, ranging from intensely personal backstory plot to the pageantry of a royal progress or… whatever really. When an NPC shows up and doesn’t engage with players who are having out-of-character conversations, I think people get it and stay in character more. Someone is addressing them in-character, which is a perfect creative prompt if your reason for slipping OOC was about not having anything compelling to say. Once your conversation is done, you might have something new to talk to other players about in-character.

Calamity is doing some of the best work on this front of any game I’ve ever seen. They have the huge advantage that they’re set in a fantastical version of the real world, so fictionalized versions of real people are viable NPCs, and you can count on many players to have an immediate interest in meeting them. For example, the game staff in their infinite wisdom(?) cast me as Jules Verne. It was much more the strength of the name than any acting capability on my part that garnered much interest and interaction from the players. It hasn’t stayed as electric as that in later appearances, but it’s still great.

Puzzles

Puzzles that take a good bit of time to solve, but you don’t spend a lot of time in total confusion of not knowing where to start, are also a great way to entertain players in town and give them a lot of things to interact in-character about. The Alliance Atlanta one-day event and, from what Kainenchen tells me, the first Raveling Paths event both made good use of that. A single set of puzzles won’t necessarily entertain more than 2-4 players, but that’s work you can do before the event, and they’ll feel engaged the whole time.

There are plenty of people who talk about not liking puzzles, though. Some of them really mean it, and some of them just don’t expect to get the kind of puzzle they like in the circumstances that let them enjoy it, because we so often use overly complicated puzzles in high-tension situations. Consider using more puzzles in low-tension situations, or using things that aren’t confusing, but are difficult and time-consuming, but still feel rewarding to complete. (Getting into that distinction is a bit outside the scope of this article, but I’ll try to cover it soon.)

Anyway. Consider giving players puzzles, especially a collection of medium-difficulty ones, as something to do and a project to collaborate on during play. Make them relevant to the narrative and include in-game rewards, but not so generous that players who don’t enjoy puzzles are left out.

Pageantry

Looking back to Shattered Isles and King’s Gate, I think that more recent games – including my beloved Dust to Dust – have lost some of the sense of pageantry and big, memorable staging of in-town scenes that those games often did so well. KG’s Court of Love event in 2009 is a particular standout, and SI’s goblin market scene when the Lord of Nothing killed the Unseelie King left an imprint on my imagination that 24 years has not diminished.

Some of this pageantry directly involves PCs, as when they’re part of some noble house and need to look and act the part when some two-bit king, earl, or the Parel of Salceny shows up to make some announcement or get (almost) assassinated. Maybe the NPCs press them into service in various capacities.

Sometimes it doesn’t – you can go full cut-scene with this, as the Alliance National event did so incredibly well at this past event. We got to see a sequence of major villains having conversations around a tactical table, explaining through their dialogue what they planned to do and what they feared the heroes would accomplish. I think there was something the PCs had to do Friday night before I got there to make all of this possible? I don’t really know, but it was excellent.

Pageantry scenes deliver a lot of characterization in a hurry, starting with the best costuming you can put the characters in, and continuing straight into what is probably a lightly scripted, unrehearsed scene. It doesn’t have to be Shakespeare – just commit as hard as you can and accept the imperfections. And please, for the love of God, project your voice as much as you can.

But I assume I don’t need to explain roleplaying to you. If you’re running a game and you don’t feel confident playing major courtly figures, maybe you can cast players in those roles during an NPC shift, or maybe you have a Campaign Committee of some two dozen people the way Wildlands South did.

The reason this pageantry works is that it grabs the attention and tells everyone something important is happening, which will probably have major story ramifications. There may be theorizing, rumor-mongering, or outright bullshitting to do afterward, to say nothing of just relating what happened to anyone who missed it or had a different perspective on it.

There are plenty of risks to look out for with pageantry scenes too. For starters, some gaming communities have players who haven’t grown beyond the urge to claim attention for themselves through simple disruption. The king is here? I sing a loud song about farts, and then complain even louder when everyone asks me to stop.

If you haven’t earned a basic level of player buy-in to your setting’s politics – mortal, fey, whatever – you’re facing an uphill climb. Everything about the reasons pageantry works requires, from first principles, that the players can see how the outcomes can affect them. It’s incredibly common for PCs to say that they hate politics, but at least some of those players can get interested if they have relationships with the characters involved – a rooting interest in an individual or side, if you will. Even if that’s just “this could be bad for business.”

Feast

This is a subset of my points on pageantry in games. If your game has an organized time for everyone to eat Saturday dinner together, that means you’ve got a captive audience for some dinner theater.

Together is key here. In some games, there’s a central dinner provided by the game (for an additional fee, but food costs money), but some number of players make their own dinner plans – grilling out, going offsite for fast food, whatever. As a gamerunner, the events of feast are a narrative payoff for joining in the group dinner. (If it’s a paid feast, don’t price it at a loss, for heaven’s sake.)

Even if you’re not doing a big, prepared scene for dinner, it’s great to have Plot members come to feast as named NPCs and make themselves available to PCs who might want to speak with them. This is what we did with most DtD feasts, because we were so often too wiped out by Saturday evening of each event to do a lot more. From this remove, though, I can wish that we’d apportioned time and energy to feast scenes.

Unless your game has no feast at all – not a potluck, not an collective pizza order, nothing – I also strong recommend that Plot members avoid joining in private group dinners, and instead make a point of attending the feast that everyone can attend.

Legal Matters

This is a thorny form of public entertainment, sometimes necessitated by emergent narrative and player actions, and sometimes driven by Plot. In campaign boffer LARPs set in the American South – and presumably elsewhere in the States – there’s a strong tendency for trials to resemble Mock Trial or a Hollywood-ized understanding of the modern American justice system. It’s possible for this to be fun, but only if everyone involved is committing to it in roughly the same way and to roughly the same degree. Otherwise, it winds up ridiculous most of the time – not least of which is because traditional approaches to evidence don’t work in a LARP.

If it’s NPCs on both sides, at least, you can script the trial heavily – maybe the PCs are the jury, maybe they’re just an audience gleaning lore and clues to other mysteries from hearing the evidence.

Or maybe your setting has its own take on civil and/or criminal justice, and you find a different exciting way to handle that. We love a Code Duello.

The Rolodex

Preparing and sending out in-town encounters is another part of Monstertown’s job in most games I’ve seen. It can be hard to come up with smart, engaging encounters on the fly, and all the harder as sleep deprivation adds up throughout Saturday. One of the absolute best favors you can do yourself is to build a Rolodex of in-town encounters you can drop in almost any time. Recurring characters, organizations, themes, problems large and small – all of these are great.

I probably don’t need to explain this, but keep up with these encounters and work on ways to build upon the results, event over event. As much as possible, bring back surviving characters (or the ghosts of dead characters, where narratively interesting). The index card of that encounter can be a good place for your after-action report, so that between events you can replace it with your next idea.

Even if your campaign doesn’t really do wandering monsters, these encounters can involve plenty of combat, because you’re doing the work to incorporate them into the story. They’re not a group of nameless goblins fruitlessly attacking the tavern the way hundreds of small groups of goblins have fruitlessly attacked the tavern in the past – these are goblins with a story! (Please, I am begging you.)

Anyway. Build a collection of encounters between events. After the event, go through them for things that don’t fit anymore and update or replace them with new ideas. Be prepared to roll with player responses and send out additional encounters. Sure, it’s Gamerunning 101, but there’s also never been a bad time to hone your fundamentals. In running Dust to Dust, we started with good intentions and a well-stocked collection of encounters, but we didn’t keep up with it because we got busy with other aspects of gamerunning.

Character Backstories

This is another part of why Calamity’s in-town game is just about the best I’ve ever seen: they put a huge emphasis on pulling encounters from PCs’ backstories. I don’t know their committee’s internal approach to character histories, but back in the Wildlands Campaign Committee we had (I think) two committee members whose main job was going back through character histories and looking for encounter ideas. I recommend this approach, or something like it, very highly – though if you can take turns doing that so that every committee member becomes familiar with every character history, that’s even better.

Character backstory encounters are great candidates for your encounter Rolodex, as long as Monstertown has access to notes on who’s on-site. I have just a few pieces of advice for character-backstory encounters.

1. No character backstory should feel resolved in a single encounter, unless you’re already in the game’s final season. In writing the first encounter, think of a few different outcomes and make sure they all lead to something interesting. Other kinds of storylines can feel fully resolved in a single encounter, but you don’t want a PC to feel that their personal story is neatly sewn up in the first season of a five-season arc, for instance.
2. You probably already know this, but – absolutely whenever possible, connect personal character stories to larger plots, and vice versa. What I mean by that is that one personal-scale encounter can lead to a need or goal that is part of the main plot just as much as the main plot can create a new need or goal for NPCs already established in a character backstory encounter. This is why we often use weaving as a metaphor for storytelling.
3. On one level, the narrative development of a character backstory encounter is a reward in itself – content and Plot attention are a reward. But that doesn’t mean you should skip the other kinds of things the game regards as rewards (cash, tagged items, and so on). You don’t want to create a stratified system where some players get personal plot and no Stuff, while others are part of main plot or just module-focused play and get all the cool treasure.
4. It goes without saying because it’s the whole thrust of this post, but – keep the action of a character backstory encounter in-town as much as possible. Modules are great, don’t get me wrong, but if the action of a character backstory is in-town, it’s a way for other characters to experience a part of the targeted PC’s story too. (Be judicious here.)
5. Target the wallflowers. The players who are already great at engaging with story and action are also probably the easiest to write character backstory encounters for. Everyone deserves that attention, but you can do so much to build up your shyer or less engaged players with personal story. (All advice is situational. If they tell you that they don’t want personal story, believe them. Advice on how to target the wallflowers is a whole separate article topic.)

Circuses, Markets, and Pit Fights

I can’t possibly list all of the amazing things you could do for big in-town encounters, but circuses (normal or sinister), markets (normal or goblin), and pit fights (against mortals or weirder things) are all great options that I’ve seen done well. I’m not going into too much depth here – just a closing note that markets need to have some content to offer PCs at all levels of in-game wealth, and favors, jobs, and shadowy spiritual debts are all valid.

If you have a staffer who can manage it, an Olde Curiosity Shoppe is a fantastic repeated draw for players. Weird props, quirky magic items, rare crafting materials, and an NPC who can be a lore source – I don’t think you even get into fantasy gaming if that kind of thing doesn’t speak to you at least a bit.

In conclusion – let me hear about the great in-town encounters you’ve seen games run!

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