I’ve talked about villain design in this blog before, but now that the Dust to Dust campaign is over, I want to use them as case studies in that conversation. In my view, DtD’s major villains were one of the most-right things that we did. This is not “in comparison […]
Yeah, it felt about like this. The LARP that I play, Eclipse, recently staged an event that genuinely surprised me and did things I had never before seen in the whole medium of boffer LARPing. I had a phenomenal time, and I want to break down what they did and […]
By request from a reader, I’m talking today about Circle Tests in LARPs. These are far from universal in live-action games or any other kind of game, and I am far from an authority on all of the best practices around them. To my knowledge, the term comes from Shattered […]
This month’s Unearthed Arcana is another brief one, but to be fair, Mearls has less time around the holidays just like the rest of us. “Kits of Old” looks back to 2e’s kit system to find the gold among the dross. The short version of the result is that I […]
Tabletop games, like video games, have long had a concept of a “boss fight,” a climactic end to an adventure or series of adventures. Starting from that similar position, though, video games have done far more creative things with the concept, while tabletop games have scarcely advanced beyond what MMO […]
This post is directed toward players in LARPs that have NPCs who are not full-time members of Staff. That includes both folks who are volunteering for the whole event and never play a PC, and folks who are doing just a few hours’ shift backstage. There’s probably a lot of […]
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 […]
LARP-running has any number of challenges that tabletop gaming can’t reasonably face. The specific case I want to talk about today is module parties. I assume modules aren’t a significant part of salon LARPs, though of the three salon LARPs I’ve played, two included adventure sequences outside of the main area […]
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 […]
Your shadow at morning striding behind you Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you; I will show you fear in a handful of dust. –“The Waste Land,” T.S. Eliot Now that another DtD event has been put to bed, I can get back to writing here – and […]
