O sages standing in God’s holy fire As in the gold mosaic of a wall, Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre, And be the singing-masters of my soul. –W.B. Yeats, “Sailing to Byzantium” Okay, I’ll fess up – this isn’t a post about how to use […]
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 […]
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 […]
It’s hard to explore the full background of my motivation for this post, but it is most recently triggered by an assertion in the comments thread of another blog that I read. (Note: I’ve now been working on this post for about two weeks, since well before the recent DtD […]
The host is riding from Knocknarea And over the grave of Clooth-na-Bare; Caoilte tossing his burning hair, And Niamh calling Away, come away: Empty your heart of its mortal dream. The winds awaken, the leaves whirl round, Our cheeks are pale, our hair is unbound, Our breasts are heaving our […]
About a week ago, I wrote a few words about the function of divination in tabletop gaming. As is common in this blog, I’m coming back to discuss how the same idea works in live-action gaming. Just like every other time I’ve posted about LARPing, I’m really talking about the […]