Citadel LARP is approaching the end of its second year, so I’m revisiting series on field battle (that is, “climactic action on a Saturday night”) design to discuss some of the things we’ve done. For Citadel players and my fellow staffers, this isn’t intended as a postmortem on the implementation of those scenes, though I won’t know exactly what I’m going to say until I write it.

Part One | Part Two | Part Three | Part Four: Citadel

Point-to-Point: the Kinship Chapterhouse

This was back in September of last year. The PCs had invested a lot of effort into choosing a partially ruined building to be a new usually-off-camera chapterhouse for their knightly order, the Kinship of Pallas Adine. We had described it as heavily overgrown with plants, some of them animate, so the PCs knew to expect plant monsters. They had some amount of prior information on the kinds of plant monsters that exist in our game, though the field battle boss had a bunch of powers on top of that briefing.

The combat took place in the three buildings that are all adjoining a parking lot, plus one pop-up pavilion that was behind one of the buildings. There was a shrine at each location that the boss (played by me) could use as a teleport destination and, if PCs weren’t there when I arrived, a place to heal up, catch my breath, and drink water.

The PCs’ victory condition was purifying each of the shrines, gradually eliminating teleport destinations so that they could stop the boss from healing. This got the PCs to spread out into smaller groups (always a strength of the point-to-point model) so that each engagement with the boss and minions was tense and interesting rather than a dogpile.

The addition of a highly mobile boss to the point-to-point model is the notable part of this. The main downside was the heat of September: we had one player drop out of the scene for heat-related issues. Also, some feedback indicated that players were disappointed with the significant gaps in their reconnaissance reports, but that came out of us delivering the reconnaissance reports before we wrote the fight itself, and not even considering that we should update the information the players had.

Three-Sided Battle: the Marble Halls and the Distortion

In May of 2026, one of our main villains led her entourage into an extraplanar space, and the PCs pursued them. This was staged in the same space as the Kinship Chapterhouse scene. We wanted to lean on the strangeness of the place; in the lore, it’s used as a prison for the most powerful of vampires. Which left us with an incredibly powerful villain and one or more master vampires that the PCs couldn’t do much more than inconvenience at best, so we spent a lot of time trying to come up with some version of this idea that could be fun.

What we landed on was very well received. The PCs started in the middle, in the parking lot. There were two tarp cubes (tarp cube: a cube made of PVC segments, 7-8 feet on a side, and black tarp is clamped to it to form walls; it’s useful for cover in the fight, and as an enclosed space) breaking up the space and blocking sight lines. There were powerful but not unkillable vampires and some of the villain’s other minions attacking the PCs across this field. Then the Distortion showed up, turning it into a three-sided fight. This is me, dressed in a large black shade robe, with claws—an extremely simple costume—but with erratic, as-random-as-safely-possible movements a lot of the time. It wasn’t hunting anyone, but if it got close it would lock in and become aggressive, and every swing is a Wound if it hits. Also the Distortion was immune to almost every effect in the game. If you’ve seen Astral Spikes in Control, that’s my visual inspiration.

The broken sight lines, erratic movement, and long stretches of not pursuing a target (I did also go after NPCs) meant that PCs would lose focus on me and suddenly be surprised as I rounded a corner. It also meant I had a lot of time to slow down and catch my breath. At certain intervals, I despawned and went into one of the tarp cubes that had an open side and a glow necklace. We’d explained to the players that these glow necklaces were teleporters, and if a marshal wasn’t present to tell them where to go, they went to a particular default teleporter. (The teleporters were described by clock numbers, because they were arranged in an approximate circle, with the tarp cube teleporter in the middle; no one ever needed to go to that one, it was only needed as a departure point.)

So when I despawned I became the teleporter marshal. PCs went into my teleporter and I sent them to T9, which was in a pavilion; from there they had an encounter with a space- and gravity-warping environment (another marshal) until they could make it to the outbound teleporter. The marshal sent them to T3 or T8, where they solved a puzzle and got a widget and teleported back to T1, the starting point. Their goal was to get enough widgets to go to T5, where they could fix the Distortion and finally get sent to T12. (This is confusing to describe but worked very smoothly in the moment.)

Every time each player went through the teleporter in the center, they got one level of Distortion, and I told them that getting to Distortion 3 would be bad and 5 would be really bad. By the end I think almost everyone was on 3, which meant I had done my math about right. The point of this was to make sure everyone got a chance, rather than the same few players handling all of the puzzles.

This worked because there was a steady but manageable danger (NPCs they were fighting) plus an unpredictable danger (me) with shifts into puzzle-solving mode (everyone is bad at puzzles under pressure, but they were working in teams of five so they had more mental energy to throw at the problems). We got some of the most positive feedbacks for this that we’ve gotten from any climactic encounter.

The downside of this was that I was trying to guess when each puzzle-solving group got back so that I could go send the next group, and I didn’t do great at that because playing the Distortion meant not being able to pay a lot of attention to it. It was around three hours of low/moderate-intensity combat, because I also had no good way to track time generally. If we had it to do over again, that would be the main thing I’d try to solve.

Environmental Danger: Kalor Temple

This encounter was adapted from a brilliant design used in Alliance Atlanta’s May 2025 event, the climactic final encounter for their first three-year arc.

We ran this encounter in September of 2026. The PCs were attempting to reclaim the golden Kalor Temple from the enemies that had seized it—but the enemies were still not in full control of it, for its ancient defenses were still active. Which is sort of a three-sided battle, but we made those ancient defenses more of an environmental condition.

The core idea is the heavy use of Voice Effects, but allowing PCs to mitigate it in ways you can’t usually do with Voice Effects. If you’re unfamiliar with Voice Effects, they don’t rely on weapon contact or packets for targeting. You’re affected if you hear the tagline. Our combat area was small enough that PCs couldn’t be far enough away to not hear the tagline, and we really don’t want anyone covering their ears to avoid an effect.

Instead, we gave players the briefing that for this battle, total cover also blocked Voice Effects, and we set out several tarp cubes to be that hard cover. (PCs aren’t allowed to move those; they represent vast pillars supporting the temple.) Additionally, two of the PCs received a benefit from a magical artifact that made their shields act as cover for themselves and anyone standing behind them. For old-school WoW players, this might sound like Sapphiron in Naxxramas. Not a coincidence.

The source of these Voice Effects was an NPC Kainenchen played in the center of the combat area. The NPC delivered a Voice Effect Light Corruption Poison to [cardinal direction] (this is an instant takedown if it’s not Warded or Resisted), about every 15 seconds or so, then turned 90 degrees. During this, the PCs also had to fight monsters with snaring effects that would stop them from getting behind cover.

Additionally, I led groups of 7 PCs out of the battle to a tarped pavilion, where they faced a reasonably difficult encounter with two NPCs. They had to gather things from that room and get back to the main battle as fast as possible, and completing this four times was the timer for the battle that stopped the Voice Effects.

Kainenchen realized during the battle that the Voice Effects alone weren’t enough, so she added packet-delivered Light Lances (a Wound to the location struck) targeting whoever she was facing. This added a lot more healing demand to keep the two characters with empowered shields standing. Our system doesn’t do a lot with backpack healing, as an intentional design choice, but the timing of Kainenchen’s NPC turning created a gap in the pressure so that it could work here.

What made this work was the combination of static and mobile cover, the manageable pressure from hostile NPCs, and the intermittent very intense pressure. Also, we ran an encounter immediately before the battle in which the PCs got to learn and practice the mobile-cover mechanic. The encounter did a lot to encourage movement and thoughtful positioning without forcing a lot of running or going to ground on the asphalt surface.

The scene ended with an emotional conversation between Kainenchen’s NPC and some of the PCs… and a big stompy NPC that I played trying to harvest her soul. The PCs were drained of a lot of resources but hadn’t let their guard down yet. It was one last spike of tension and danger as punctuation on a challenging fight.

Conclusion

I liked how all three of these encounters worked out, and I hope I’ve said enough about them to make them useful to current and future gamerunners of boffer LARPs who need to come up with challenging encounters for most or all of the playerbase. The core values are a combination of steady lower-intensity threat and intermittent higher-intensity threat, along with keeping the action moving so that many PCs are engaged, not just the highest-statted fighters. Making sure that the PCs can’t muscle their way through the encounter on stats alone (often because part of the threat is immune to damage), but need to think and react, is key.

There have of course been a lot of other encounters that include the whole playerbase, but many of them use encounter models I’ve already described in detail in this series.