It’s five years now that I’ve been writing this blog. Each year has had slightly fewer posts than the year before it, though if you add in all of the articles I’ve written for Tribality, I’m well above the writing output of my first year. It’s been a busy year; […]
This post is directed toward players in LARPs that have NPCs who are not full-time members of Staff. That includes both folks who are volunteering for the whole event and never play a PC, and folks who are doing just a few hours’ shift backstage. There’s probably a lot of […]
It’s four years now that I’ve been writing this blog. I’ve just passed 250 published posts. Considering that I average more than two thousand words per post, I conservatively estimate half a million words, and possibly closer to twice that. Every year of writing has slightly fewer posts than the […]
This past weekend marked the thirteenth weekend-long event of Dust to Dust, so I want to talk about what goes into filling out an event’s schedule. Now, there are a ton of valid ways to approach this; the one that works for you is necessarily correct. I’m just talking about […]
Today I want to talk about some very bad people. Well, narratively speaking, the bad people. Villains: a species of character that has a damn tough time getting a word in edgewise in roleplaying games. It’s a tough life for villains; players have learned over and over again that letting the […]
Now that another Dust to Dust event is in the recent past, I can spare some time for blogging. Today I’d like to talk a little bit about the social dynamics of LARPs, with particular attention to mega-teams. This post is inspired by a conversation I had with Samhaine; ironically […]
In response to a question from a reader, I’m tackling what is, in my limited knowledge, one of the great unaddressed issues of LARP-running: the long arm of the law and imprisonment, both by PCs and against PCs. Now, I bet you’re thinking of that one time there was a […]
LARP-running has any number of challenges that tabletop gaming can’t reasonably face. The specific case I want to talk about today is module parties. I assume modules aren’t a significant part of salon LARPs, though of the three salon LARPs I’ve played, two included adventure sequences outside of the main area […]
There are a lot of lessons of good game-running that carry over between tabletop and live-action gaming. This post, though, concerns itself with an area in which the two are quite different. As usual, I’m talking about a certain band of LARPing, not all LARPing. (There are almost no statements that […]
When it comes to structuring a robust lore game, many games include knowledge or lore skills. These skills serve, on one level, as background: a character-sheet indication of who the character is and what she does. On another, they represent a path for additional exposition. In some games and to […]