Resonance and Stars Over Atlantis on Saturday July 23!

Everybody knows that summertime is the dead season for larp. But it’s tough to go through all those months without a single packet to open. That, friends, is why Alleged Entertainment and Paranoid and Crotchety are teaming up to bring you Dia de los Sobres, or the Day of the Envelopes, a doubleheader production offering you two great packet-packed larps on the same day! Alleged’s RESONANCE and P&C’s STARS OVER ATLANTIS will run one after the other on Saturday, July 23rd in Fitchburg, MA.

If you’d like to sign up for one or both of these great larps, click on over to sign up at:
http://journeysurveys.com/answer/312

RESONANCE
By Nat Budin, Susan Weiner, Vito D’Agosta, and Phoebe Roberts
An amnesia and storytelling larp about tragedy, desperation, and the apocalypse.
11AM to 4PM

STARS OVER ATLANTIS
By Liliya Benderskaya and Tory Root
An amnesia LARP about tragedy, sacrifice, death, guilt, karma, love, sex, gender, and forgiveness.
5PM to 10PM

Stepping Stones: Scene-Based Games at Alleged Entertainment

Alleged Entertainment (or, at any rate, a certain subset of it) debuted our new game Resonance back in March.  We've also recently started work on our next big project, A Garden of Forking Paths.  In order to tell their respective stories, both of these games use very unconventional, scene-based structures¹.

For the purposes of this essay, I'll define a scene-based LARP as one in which gameplay is split up into a series of short scenes.  There are many different types of scene-based LARPs out there, and we have written in a few of those styles.

First off: why use an unusual structure in a LARP at all?  Why not stick with well-tested best practices that we know work?  Well, because it's fun to experiment!  Perhaps a better reason, however, is that unusual structures are helpful for telling types of stories that would be difficult to express in the LARP medium otherwise.  We've been on a track of experimentation involving scene-based games for a few years now.

At the beginning of my LARPing career, it would have been difficult for me to imagine playing in a game like Resonance, let alone writing one.  Thus, it's interesting to take a look back at how we got here, and where we're hoping to go now.  Along the way, I'll explain how the scene-based structures help serve the narrative ends of each game.