Icebergs

When we talk about larping — the actual activity of live action role-play — we often talk about how to do things better. This ranges from theoretical (“How do we play to lift?”) to specific (“What are good ways to role-play a romantic relation?”) to technical (“Should we try to do an accent?”).  But all of these questions have a fundamental assumption: that role-play is something we can do better or worse. And this question has a lot of implications.

Rarely can I find the origin of a larp phrase so easily and clearly as “boutique larp” — Mo Holkar coined it in the Larpers BFF Facebook group on January 21, 2017. It’s been nearly a decade since that post, and while the term is not common, it’s been used a decent amount. Personally, I’m quite fond of it, because boutique larps are having a moment. 

For ten years, I made larps that made people bawl. I felt like I really created something special. Then everyone started running “crying” larps. More accurately, I met more people who were already doing the same thing. And I realized I wasn’t special, or brilliant, or a larp god. Because the thing about tears is that it’s really not that hard to make a larper cry.

If you’re a larp organizer, Facebook is an unfortunate fact of life... which has a lot of us asking, "can we drop Facebook?"

The two most risky activities in a larp have very different issues.

There's a reason why we enjoy them... we've done them before. Let’s start with this: there are lots of very good larp designers creating...

As designers, we spend a lot of time asking, “What makes a good larp?” The best answer we’ve heard is “a larp is good when it meets or...

Last week, we kind of trashed an entire style of role-play. Actually, what we did was challenge designers.

About a decade ago, the unofficial slogan of the Sinking Ship larp at the time was “we make our players cry.” It was an extremely popular sl