Pax Europa and Immersio
Last year, I helped a friend run an independent larp, inspired by the Nordic-blockbuster style. Pax Europa is steampunk single day game where the characters are scientists, inventors, adventurers and diplomats at a scientific symposium where they are competing for Nobel prizes. You can read more about the game at steamlarp.com. I want to talk here mostly about some lessons I’m learning about running larps and organising larp from a business perspective. More on that later.
I describe Pax Europa as “inspired by” the Nordic-blockbuster style, because obviously it isn’t exactly the same as a game like College of Wizardry or Convention of Thorns. But it included some elements common to that style of game. The game used the consent mechanics I’ve discussed previously at Convention of Thorns and Threehold, and were taught in pre-game workshops.
The venue was an important part of the game. It created a believable and immersive setting, complete with appropriate catering for afternoon tea and an in-character formal dinner.
Like Convention of Thorns and Threehold, the game is written to provide an overall structure for players to make their own fun inside of. It can make for a very sandbox style game, but also lots of emphasis on personal character development and drama, rather than organiser run plots. That said, Pax Europa does have a few secret plot elements that are going on in the background for those interested in pursuing them. Those plot elements are effected through the NPCs that players request, but also through the telegram system.
The telegrams are an ingenious little idea and made a lot of fun for players, while also being pretty easy to implement. Players could use telegram forms to send in-character messages to NPCs back home. Because it’s a telegram, not a phone call or other immediate communication, we as organisers could write responses whenever we got time, sometimes several hours later. This was a much easier way for players to interact with powerful NPCs, like Queen Victoria, without us having to fully costume a character and make a potentially disruptive scene.
Another Nordic-blockbuster technique we used was having an IC cover for the organisers and staff to move around the game. We all dressed as butlers when we needed to be in the game space and weren’t playing an NPC. Some of the time we even did butler things like serve tea and stand unobtrusively in corners. Generally I’d say it was a good technique and let us interrupt scenes that otherwise we would have been reluctant to walk into. It also made us as organisers feel like more of a part of the game, and so was more fun for us too.
Occasionally we’d get asked to do something when we were actually just transiting through the room on our way to do something else. For that we used the Dziobak trick from Fairweather Manor of replying with “Of course, I will just get one of the other servants to do that”, which meant that we weren’t going to do anything about it at all and the player would have to try again or deal with it themselves. Generally I’d say that worked well and would encourage other larp organisers to have a go at providing some kind of IC cover for their own presence in the game.
Like Convention of Thorns and Threehold, we allowed players to request NPC appearances. We had a bit more of this (and a bit more notice) than for Threehold. In some ways that made things easier, because we knew what we needed to do and could plan something effective. But scheduling became a little challenging. We kept a white board for our team of four organisers (for a 28 person game) so that NPCs arrived when they needed to and left when we needed to start costuming them for something else. Generally that worked, but when some of the game events got delayed, or players decided to do events in a different order, we needed to rearrange who played what on the fly. When we run it again, I’d prefer to have another helper or two.
Characters were written to be a little bit bare-bones and flexible so players could add to them, especially adding their own relationships. This was also a design choice to enable game to scale up and down easily. The hope was to run it again in different cities or venues with larger numbers. There’s a great venue in Canberra I’d love to run it in, but really would need 60–80 players to make it work.
To that end, Jason, Justin and I have launched Immersio, our own little larp business. Our first project is a second run of Pax Europa in Melbourne in July this year. Although, at time of writing we are still a few people short of our minimum numbers for it to go ahead. Hopefully that changes in the next week or two.
Generally I’d say running a larp from a business perspective has been a bit eye-opening. We opted to set ourselves up as a for-profit company largely because we were all tired of the general meetings, and constitutional crises and other heartaches of organising not-for-profit enterprises. While we certainly hope that eventually Immersio can be a profitable company, none of us are expecting to make a living out of it, and we recognise that it will probably lose us money over the short term at least. But there are a lot more bills to pay as a business. There’s GST for a start, but also different kinds of insurance and a few overheads that we wouldn’t have as a not-for-profit. There are also some venues that might be cheaper if we were a not-for-profit or community organisation. But despite those drawbacks, the level of control we have is really satisfying. We don’t have to hold minuted and formally announced special general meetings to change how we run things. We don’t have to appoint ourselves, or others, to official roles and hold elections each year to change those roles (with the associated headaches of changing bank account and IT access). If we decide we want to have a strict policy on not inviting problematic players, we can just do that. If we decide we want to hold an extra game, we just do it. If I act as communications and social media person for one game, I don’t have to continue doing that for all our other games. While I definitely would not recommend the business structure for everyone out there running larps, it is giving us the agility and control that we most wanted right now.
We’re learning some lessons too about marketing and ticket pricing and when and for how long to open ticket sales. We’ve opted to go for a nicer venue and a higher-end menu than we otherwise might have, which has put the ticket price up significantly. We’re taking a gamble that there are enough players who want a more premium product and will pay for it. If that pays off it will bode well for some of the other higher-production value projects we have in mind.
There has been one particularly interesting setback. We’ve had comments from a few people that the game looks awesome, but they worry they don’t have the requisite costume. Paradoxically, the more awesome our game photos look, the more some people feel intimidated that their costume won’t be up to scratch. That’s particularly a barrier for people with body sizes and shapes outside of what the fashion industries views as stereotypically attractive.Obviously as game organisers we want to showcase the amazing costumes our players have brought to game, it makes us look eye-catching and cool. But we also don’t want people to get the impression that an amazing (and expensive) costume is a prerequisite to play. It’s something I’ve started to try to be more conscious of in the photos I post to promote the game. I’m trying to make sure that as well as showing women and people of colour playing our games, we also show people in more simple costumes.
One success we’ve had so far is the sponsored concession-priced tickets. Our base ticket price is $120, which is at the higher end for a one-day game in Australia. We know that will be a barrier to a lot of people. But we also don’t have much budget spare to offer lower priced tickets to those who need them. So instead we asked the community to sponsor some concession-priced tickets. Players can voluntarily pay an additional $20-$60 to help fund additional concession tickets. So far I’d say it’s been a success. Plenty of people have expressed appreciation for the idea, and no-one has complained (to us at least) about the ticket price. To date, more players have sponsored tickets than have taken them up. I’m trying to encourage people who need them to just grab those cheaper tickets, but it seems there is still a bit of stigma about it. As a game organiser, I’d rather people take the ticket than not come, no matter what their reason for not being able to afford the full-priced ticket. The game is made up of players, not just organisers and venue, and the more players, and more diverse those players, the better the game will be.
There is still a chance that Pax Europa 2 might not go ahead, and we’ll lose a bit of money on that gamble. But we will have learned a lot about how to connect with other communities and how to promote ourselves and our games. Hopefully those lessons will be useful for whatever we do next.
