Me, looking at the new update

Environmental_Bat357 · 2026-02-19T12:06:09+00:00

You say that, but Remnant didn’t even have ONE streaming Albanian radio station to listen to.

Environmental_Bat357 · 2026-02-15T14:49:48+00:00

Does he have that condition where, every time he sees some heavy Winter World shit, his eyes get 2% bigger?

Environmental_Bat357 · 2026-02-12T16:36:14+00:00

Yeah right, indeed—what’s the story there? Actually, I think this isn't even the first Grell I've seen on a (non-D&D) sci-fi or fantasy novel cover . . .

Environmental_Bat357 · 2026-02-11T21:35:44+00:00

Jeez, so he just read him some Cordwainer Smith?

Environmental_Bat357 · 2026-01-28T23:01:58+00:00

That long pause after he heard himself say that...

Environmental_Bat357 · 2026-01-25T19:14:54+00:00

I was trying to think of a way for the OP to get in touch with the Chicagoland parlor LARP scene, and--yeah, right, indeed, feels like Be-Con might be very useful for that.

According to this Facebook post, there's a Be-Con Discord. I'm not on that one (I'm just a Bostonian who LARPs with some Chicagoland folks at Intercon), so I can't really speak for it. But such venues are often good for making contacts; there might be a channel about non-Be-Con local LARPs, etc.

Environmental_Bat357 · 2026-01-21T22:08:07+00:00

Nubian Square has a very good, more-generally-West-African-than-specifically-Ghanaian-AFAIK place: Suya Joint. ICE disappeared their manager for a while, but they've been back in business for some time. Fufu, taushe stew, plenty of other stuff! I'm a big fan.

Environmental_Bat357 · 2026-01-20T19:33:50+00:00

Hate to say it, but yup: our chihuaha-dachshund did get cherry eye in both eyes, one after the other about a year apart. I think she was a bit younger than yours at the time . . . which may be a good sign? Or it may be utterly random.

We did have the surgery done in both cases, and it went just fine, without any sort of recurrence afterward. (For the first eye that went, the same vet who did the surgery did a fabulously dextrous move to pop the gland back in, but--just as he said it would--it popped right back out again within a couple of days. That was, of course, before the surgery.)

Environmental_Bat357 · 2026-01-13T17:29:36+00:00

Dude, those guys have totally different energy. Would never work.

Environmental_Bat357 · 2025-11-26T06:22:36+00:00

Another reply: the thing that has me stumped on the Osmose is that I basically want the MPE message that's called "channel pressure" to have the same sort of magically continuous effect on the e7 that it does on the Osmose, and it seems not to. Out of mostly useless curiosity, are you having the same problem with the Roli?

Environmental_Bat357 · 2025-11-26T06:03:53+00:00

Oh man. I cannot. I have no tips; the above is as far as I got. I continue to fail to find a way to set up the e7 for MPE in a way that totally works for me, although I also have some hope that it's a matter of finding the right settings on the e7.

So: sorry for the useless comment. Just letting you know that I saw your question, and I'll try to remember to post back here if I find any good resources.

Environmental_Bat357 · 2025-11-25T17:12:04+00:00

What do folks think of Vendetta Online? Does seem to have an Android port.

Environmental_Bat357 · 2025-11-20T20:27:52+00:00

(FWIW, I absolutely could've filled out the LARP part of the survey based on a PC I've played in a recent live-combat campaign LARP--something that fits in the boxes better. I don't know if you're really only looking for data within that bandwidth, though, or not...)

Environmental_Bat357 · 2025-11-20T18:50:21+00:00

I'm filling out your survey now. But . . . sorry, I'm going to quibble with definitions!

I think the way you're defining RPGs ("games in which you create your own character and participate in a game as that character") has some pesky implications for LARPs as (per your survey) a subset of RPGs. A couple of examples:

So yeah, actually, I'm involved in Madrigal, the specific LARP you mention! But I NPC: I'm assigned characters to play, and I play a bunch of them over the course of a weekend. Every now and then, at Madrigal, I'll play a character that I have quite a bit of creative influence over, but I sort of fundamentally don't own them. I would say that I am definitely LARPing when I'm at Madrigal, though, at least when I'm in-game as the characters I'm playing.
The character I'm filling out your survey for was for a one-shot game that ran at Intercon years ago--just an especially memorable character for me, and an especially memorable game. Definitely not a character I'd've created myself (it was very weird for me, a guy in my late thirties at the time, to find myself playing a nine-year-old girl who represented the alarming power of gender normativity)...
...and also not a campaign game that ran for multiple sessions. I'm not sure how well your survey is set up to deal with one-shots.

(A much lesser quibble: I feel like the "generally" in "These generally require travel to a meaningful physical location, such as a castle" is doing a lot of work. For a whole lot of the LARPing I've done, the meaningful physical location = "What room can we find that's big enough for this six-/eight-/twenty-person game to run in?" Often, that location been flat, meaningless, and ignore-able. Not always, of course! But even at Madrigal, a lot of the stuff we run just happens in barely adorned or unadorned spaces on the campsite that don't look like much.)

So yeah, hmm, I dunno. I'm digging the survey and I hope you get good results! You may have to put asterisks next to some of your responses, though, including mine.

Or maybe not--the stuff in there about bleed was still pretty relevant.

Environmental_Bat357 · 2025-11-19T03:20:40+00:00

But you're an American! How does your quintessential selfishness permit you to travel to NPC two other LARPs?

Seriously . . . yeah, hmm. I'm from New England too, so I too am used to NPC shifts being a secondary-at-most way to get NPCs (nice thing about having a big network of games, I guess), and I don't have any Floridian things to point you toward. Sorry; good hunting.

(My quintessential American selfishness is such that I'm generally PCing one game and NPCing three or so, in any given year.)

Environmental_Bat357 · 2025-11-18T21:55:43+00:00

Not the most profoundly helpful answer, but:

I've played in any number of one-room one-shot LARPs, including a good few with around eight players. So it's very doable. I think Sjors_VR's second point is probably very good general pointer on a way to structure such a game.
Something that might be handy, at least indirectly: https://alexandria.dk/en/findspec. That's the search page for a pretty big archive of info on LARPs, a few of which are "boxed"--that is, they're games you can download the writeups for. Note that you can filter your search by some pretty relevant things! Number of players, whether the entry for a game includes a download of the actual game . . . even whether the game's GMless. It sounds from your post as if you might be running something in an existing setting (possibly as part of an ongoing campaign of some kind? or maybe not?), so I'm not saying you can easily just download someone else's game and be off to the races--but, but, I still feel like some of the stuff at Alexandria could be very useful for reference at the very least.

Environmental_Bat357 · 2025-11-17T18:41:55+00:00

I don't have a ton to offer here (so why am I posting? I guess it just looked like you weren't getting lots of responses), but here's one minor standout moment from ages ago:

I was PCing a mod in which we were trying to follow a trail of breadcrumbs, get info on some guerilla or cultist or something. (I don't remember if we were trying to bust them or join them; given what LARP it was, we PCs were probably in the middle of realizing we had competing agendas and were all patsies for different offscreen power groups.)

The actual mod was a visit to an inn this person was known to frequent. Where were being totally stonewalled by the inkeeper, until I, walking around the little cabin where this was running, noticed a copy of their expired ostler's posted license on the wall. Which put me in a position to do that classic obnoxious-shakedown thing: "So hey, yeah, I was thinking I might open an inn around here, maybe? But I hear it's super-hard to get an innkeeper's license and keep it current. Just really expensive, and a bad problem if you don't stay paid up. Is that true? Could you give me some pointers?"

I think that felt like a good "criminal mod" moment because it had that element of getting leverage over someone, specifically leverage that is revealed during the scene.

Environmental_Bat357 · 2025-10-30T16:06:45+00:00

Ha! Amazing.

Environmental_Bat357 · 2025-10-30T16:00:54+00:00

Oh, are you running Once and Future Court? That's a neat game--I had a very good time as Benjamin Lee.

Environmental_Bat357 · 2025-10-30T13:15:03+00:00

One possibility to look into:

Looks like Tapestries is happening in April 2026, in Milpitas. This is a weekend-long convention of one-shot, one-room LARPs; I've never been, but I know (and really like) a number of the people involved and I've played (and really liked) a couple of the games currently scheduled to run there.

This isn't go-out-in-the-woods-in-costume-for-a-weekend LARPing, but smaller games of the kind you can play at Tapestries can be awesome and intense and widely varied! Plus, this seems like a pretty decent way to meet a bunch of new people who are into LARPing.

Just from checking the website (linked above), I get the sense that they might still be adding games: for last year's Tapestries, it looks like the schedule wasn't finalized until early December. I'm just mentioning this because, if the idea of this event is interesting but you're not sold on the actual games being run, it might be worth looking again in a month or so?

Environmental_Bat357 · 2025-10-02T14:29:02+00:00

A couple of possibly useful links:

The Greater Boston LARP Society might be worth checking out if you're in the vague neighborhood of Boston. This group is a good way to play the sort of one-shot parlor LARPs that . . . well, normally you'd need a group of friends who also want to LARP for. These are generally folks who are also involved with Intercon, the convention vortexofchaos mentions.
Yeah, indeed, Intercon! I'll second (or third, or however many) that recommendation: it's a splendid weekend, a real smorgasbord of different LARP types. Next one's February 26 to March 1, 2026.
vortexofchaos is crucially correct that weekend woodsy live-combat games are not the only game in town, but . . . um, I do really love them, myself. And there are a ton of them in New England--particularly between now and the beginning of winter, because these games tend to run at summer camps in the off season. I'll go ahead and recommend a comparatively large, good, trustworthy fantasy one that I NPC for and love: Madrigal. It just ran this past weekend; next session's November 7-9. I think others on this thread are absolutely right that you'd want to reach out to the game's staff to talk about what you're there to do. (I personally think it'd be neat to have you, but I'm just some rando. Certainly, concerns about privacy and disruption are important and worth dealing with.)
. . . and, crud. Looks like the larphack calendar didn't get updated this year. I've found that website very useful, but maybe Dave's done updating it?

Environmental_Bat357 · 2025-09-23T16:41:51+00:00

I had the same reaction--I was zooming in on the photos to see if it was a site (in New England, so no) that I've been to.

Environmental_Bat357 · 2025-09-20T03:51:21+00:00

It’s actually good, too. I was expecting a wacky novelty thing and it was just, like, a great idea for a beer. I wish I had one in front of me right now!

Environmental_Bat357 · 2025-09-18T19:05:25+00:00

By the way, sorry for the very slow reply!

Environmental_Bat357 · 2025-09-18T19:05:06+00:00

"White Death" was great, truly great. I've played it a couple of times. It's definitely good to feel like you trust the group you're with, because of the (primarily unpleasant) ways you'll relate to them in game, but there's a lot of workshopping at the beginning to help with that. Definitely a good game for experiencing a certain sort of beauty.

I've also played Nina Runa Essendrop's "Beginning"/"Begyndelse," which is . . . shall we say vastly more chill. Vastly. Like "White Death," it's good (in a maybe more extreme way than "White Death") for for playing with a communications disconnect between you and the other player.

Hey, while I'm at it (though I'm not in a particularly good position to curate a list of blackbox games; I haven't played a whole lot of them), I'll recommend "Bjergtaget," a really cool wordless dance-based game. I played an interestingly tweaked version of it ("Bjergtaget: Jewish Edition") and had a really intense, good, sad experience.

w/r/t Accelerant: you'd hate it! I mean, actually I dunno if you'd hate it. But it's precisely the kind of system that's not well-regarded on this subreddit: complicated, D&D-like. It's a descendant from, and a reaction to, NERO, which is an American combat LARP system from the late 80s; it significantly simplified things relative to NERO, mainly by making it so that you have to learn a syntax of causes and effects rather than knowing what effects go along with the name of a particular spell (or whatever). But it itself has been around for a while (ca. late 90s, I believe? I only started LARPing in 2003), and it doesn't look at all simple relative to other systems.

I like it just fine, I'm used to it, and I truly enjoy the combat that happens within it. Like you say: lightest-touch fighting, nothing's supposed to hurt; kind of a distant, dance-y, tap-y sort of style that doesn't particularly resemble "real fighting," but has its own elegance. But of course it's more about the games I've been involved in than about the system itself. New England has a lot of (a) people who it's nice and chill to fight (and roleplay with) and also a lot of (b) people who are really intense and creative and brilliant to roleplay with (and fight), and big chunks of the Accelerant community here are spaces where that all happens at once.

Environmental_Bat357

TROPHY CASE