This is the fourth of a series of articles about the economics of LARP (live action role-playing) and the failure of market forces within the hobby. This series is derived from a keynote lecture which I gave at Camelot UK LARP conference held in November 2019.

• The first blog of this series, about LARP and the Failure of Market Forces, can be found here.
• The second in the series, about What LARP Should Cost, can be found here.
• The third in this blog series, discussing What do Other Similar Pastimes Charge? can be found here.

I have written in previous blog posts about how we at Crooked House organise LARP events, but I wanted to find out what other event runners were doing. In order to investigate this, I created an online survey about event running. …

Other interactive experiences and how they compare to LARP

This is the third of a series of articles about the economics of LARP and the failure of market forces when applied to the hobby. This series is derived from one of the keynote lectures which I gave at Camelot UK LARP conference held in November 2019.

• The first blog of this series, about LARP and the Failure of Market Forces, can be found here.
• The second in the series, about What LARP Should Cost, can be found here.
• The fourth post discussing What are we Charging? can be found here.

“Interactive immersive narrative events” are current buzz-words in the entertainment industry. Just look how excited everyone is getting about Disney’s Galaxy’s Edge Star Wars ride. …

This is the second of a series of articles about the economics of larp and the failure of market forces when applied to the hobby. You can find the first of these articles here.

I’m afraid this post in particular is numbers heavy, due to the subject matter. I apologise if it is hard going, but I can’t think how to reason my way through this topic without including the numbers. Sorry.

This series arose after I was asked to give one of the keynote lectures at Camelot UK LARP conference held in November 2019. I wanted to explore the finances of a larp event and investigate what it would have cost if we were running an event as a commercial, money making venture.

To do so, I have looked at the budget of All for One (a Larp X and Crooked House event run in May 2019) and tried to ascertain the actual market costs of each budgetary item. All for One was a massive collaborative experience and I am hugely grateful to everyone who gave up their time to help us run such an amazing event. However, I am aware that in doing so, we pulled in a vast number of favours. We couldn’t run an event like this frequently or regularly and still expect volunteers to give their time and enthusiasm with no reward. …

This is a series of blog posts based on my Keynote presentation at Camelot UK LARP Conference held in Birmingham on 23rd September 2019.

• The second in the series, about What LARP Should Cost, can be found here.
• The third in this blog series, discussing What do Other Similar Pastimes Charge? can be found here.
• The fourth post discussing What are we Charging? can be found here.

I’ve recently ‘come out’ as a larper to my work mates after many years of “going camping with friends.” …

A mature approach to roleplaying.

I’ve been pondering this topic for a little while, and have discussed it with a few people, but it’s taken a while to get to something that I can attempt to articulate in a coherent fashion.

I played a LRP game a few weeks ago which had a some rather fun game mechanics. In order to control players heading off to explore a new area, they set up a few conceits to manage how many people could go out, and how often. The game was set in a moon base, and to go outside the main base you had to use breathing apparatus, of which there were only a few sets (enough for about a quarter of the player party). In order to go very far, you had to use the moon bus, which needed a pilot and could only carry five people. …

LARP by the power of spreadsheets!

All for One was a major logistical challenge in ways which differed significantly from any live-roleplay event which Crooked House or LarpX had run in the past. We ambitiously decided to use the Cinedrama System to ‘film’ five concurrent films over the course of the weekend. Effectively we were trying to run five LARP events simultaneously, each for seven people, with overlapping plots, NPCs, props and locations.

If you didn’t attend All for One, I suggest you read Ian’s blog about game design before you go any further as it explains the structure of the game in much more detail than I go into here and will make this blog significantly easier to understand. …

I have recently been a player at The Quota, which was a dystopian dark future roleplaying event, set in a chronologically very close future and in an utterly believable world.

The background setting was that following Brexit, the UK became more fascist and right wing and eventually Scotland and Wales voted for devolution. They had most of the UK’s water, which they were restricting and selling back to England at a profit. They also developed more permissive political climate and in conjunction with the economic situation were seen as more attractive and therefore suffered mass immigration. …

This is the sixth of a series of blogs on the subject of alien and monster biology. The first, which covers respiration, can be found here.

Reproduction can take various forms, but allows a race to produce a new generation of offspring.

Sexual reproduction in mammals occurs where two adults have sex, one carries the young and gives birth. There is usually a standard gestation period as the young mature and then the carrying parent gives birth, exposing them to the outside world.

In some animals pregnancy can go into suspended animation for months or years. This allows the creature to conceive, and then pause the pregnancy until a time of year or a resource state when the young are most likely to survive. This happens in creatures as diverse as the sea otter, wallaby, skunk, polar bear, roe deer, red panda, armadillo and various rodents and marsupials. …