Time Travel Review Board this Friday at Brandeis!

Alleged Entertainment is proud to present Brandeis’s first LARP of the 2009-2010 school year: Time Travel Review Board. We’ll be running the game THIS FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 25, from 7:00-9:00 PM in Shiffman 125.

“Time Travel Review Board” is a multi-award-winning comedy horde LARP set in 22nd century. It’s a great game for newbies and experienced LARPers alike, so if you’ve never LARPed before and want to try it out, we encourage you to sign up!

To sign up for Time Travel Review Board, go to the casting questionnaire and fill it out. Since this game will be running THIS COMING FRIDAY, we’re hoping to get people to sign up as quickly as possible.

For more information about Time Travel Review Board, see our game page about it.

2009: The Year that LARPing Came to Pi-Con

As previously kind-of-announced, Alleged Entertainment went to 4Pi-Con to run several LARPs. In addition, Susan and I appeared on two panels about LARP, and together, Alleged Entertainment,Intercon J, and Foam Brain Games held a room party on Saturday night.

I should mention first and foremost that everyone’s favorite SMOF, Kate Farb-Johnson, served as Pi-Con’s first LARP coordinator ever. She wrote a con report of her own, which is long, informative, and a great read. Many thanks to her for making this possible, and for all the hard work she put in on the convention.

First of hopefully several announcements

As alluded to in a previous post, we bid 10 Bad LARPs: C-Section and an extended, six-hour version ofThe Last Seder for Intercon J. According to their web site, Intercon has accepted those bids, so we will be running them on the weekend of March 12-14 in Chelmsford, Massachusetts!

World of Blurbcraft

What’s the single most important thing you’re going to write for your LARP?

It’s not the world description. It’s not the game system. It’s not the character sheet for the villain, or the main hero. It’s not even the GM manual.

The single most important thing you will be writing is a 2-3 paragraph description of the game for prospective players. The irony of the situation is that in almost all LARPs, the blurb either gets written first thing, before the writers really know what the game will be like, or last thing, when they’re rushing to get it out the door.

In this article, I’m going to try to convince you that that’s a big mistake, and discuss some ideas about Building a Better Blurb™.

I'm not announcing any LARP runs just yet...

…but I do want to mention that we’ve made bids.

There’s what one might call a “strong possibility” that at 4Pi-Con, we might be running some games. We might also be appearing on some panels; in fact, yours truly might be moderating one on the topic of an introduction to LARP for beginners. There might also be a panel about LARP writing. One of our members might be running a LARP on her own there too. There might also be two (count them, two!) World of Darkness games there. There might even be a party co-sponsored by us, a well-known group in the LARP community, and an upcoming LARP convention.

All in all, I’d say that 2009 just might be the year that LARP comes to Pi-Con. (And if it is, there’s probably a particular person you should thank for that.)

In addition, this March, at an aforementioned LARP convention, we might be running a new game in a popular series. We might also be running an expanded, 6-hour version of one of our favorites. But it’s too early to tell, the bids haven’t been accepted or rejected yet. I’ll keep you posted here as soon as we hear something.

In a similar vein, do you know what V stands for in April 2009? Vestival, of course. There’s a game we haven’t run in far too long that may be in the offing there. Again, pending bid acceptance (although given the Festival bid policy, I feel fairly confident about this one).

So, keep your eyes peeled, and your RSS reader laser-focused on this blog. I’ll give updates as soon as I’ve got ’em.

EDITED TO ADD: Susan points out that while we have handshake acceptance of the debut run of 10 Bad LARPs: C-Section at another prominent LARP convention this Fall, the bid has not actually been officially accepted on the site, and thus it’s entirely possible that interested parties may not have heard about it. Well, you heard it here first.

Comments imported from DISQUS


Chad, on 10/05/2009 at 10:38 AM
Let me know what I can do to help out at 4picon. And if you want another butt on a panel.


Nat Budin, on 10/05/2009 at 10:39 AM
Thanks! We could probably use party help. The panel thing is not up to me, unfortunately, and I've been told (when I mentioned the possibility of adding more panelists) that it was too late to do so. I'll talk to you more once I've figured out the logistics of everything.


Michael Leuchtenberg, on 10/05/2009 at 10:39 AM
If you really think a particular LARP panel could use another body, I can look into it. That stuff is mostly solid now, though, with a few exceptions for panels which really need more people (webcomics panels, in particular), and this neuroscientist from Harvard who wrote a book about zombies for the neuroscience of zombies panel.

Writing: No, really, the writing part

Written by Susan Weiner

So, Nat just wrote a lovely entry on the group part of the writing process. However, I’ve been lucky: that part has worked smoothly for every game I’ve written. In the groups I’ve written with, people love hanging out, brainstorming, and showing off their work. That’s easy. The hard part is actually doing the writing in between.

So, you’ve come up with a perfect game idea, you have some concept of the structure and a group of GMs. How do you get from that to the finished game?

Like everything else in any creative process, there are as many ways to go about this as there are LARPwriters. I can’t really describe what they do, so I’m going to start with how I work.

A Group Writing Process

As LARP writers, we tend to talk a lot about game design: characters, mechanics, plot construction, information economy, et cetera. We also tend to talk a lot about runtime issues: logistics, space, props, GMing, and production. This tends to leave out the fact that there’s a whole expanse of stuff in the middle, in which you need to actually sit down and write the LARP.

Writing, as anyone who’s tried it knows, is very, very hard. It’s a craft that many professionals work at their whole lives and never master. I’m certainly not about to pretend to give advice on good writing in general. What I do want to talk about, though, is writing in a group.

Group writing complicates matters significantly. It brings in the problem of coordinating between different writers to ensure consistency and continuity. It also presents a devil’s bargain: do you risk bruising egos and damaging friendships, or do you risk putting out a subpar game because you didn’t want to hurt people’s feelings?