Focus On: Live Roleplay

It has been a long while since I last posted and a very long time since I said I was going to write a Focus On: post about Live Roleplay. Having spent the last 2 weekends away at LRP events I am taking the chance to write a bit about what LRP is.

Live Roleplay, or Live Action Roleplay (LRP or LARP for short) take the basic premises of tabletop roleplaying games of players taking the role of a character but rather than describing the characters actions and calculating an actions success using cards or dice, the players act out actions in real time.

Greek Shield Wall at Profound Decisions Odyssey LRP

Photo © Tom Garnett used under a CC-A license

 

LRP covers a wide range of different settings from traditional high fantasy using foam weapons to decide combat, entirely non combat modern day horror events, games based in historical periods to Sci-Fi games using NERF, Lasertag or Airsoft. In the UK the first LRP was Treasure Trap formed way back in 1982, which generated substantial press coverage including this feature on Blue Peter.


  



Troops marching to battle at Empire LRP

Photo by Charlotte Moss © Profound Decisions.

Used with kind permission from Profound Decisions

There are now many different LRP groups in the UK from small local systems often based around University clubs to large festival events attracting several thousand participants. The two largest games in the UK are The Gathering run by Lorien Trust and Empire run by Profound Decisions.

There are a variety of different ways a LRP game can be organised . Linear adventures in which a group of heroes work their way through a series of encounters planning by a Games Master with the antagonists played by a team of crew are common at small to medium sized events. Social events without any combat, or an abstract combat system without weapons, is common in modern day horror such as Minds Eye Theatre (MET).

Large scale systems often have very small crew teams and primarily revolve around interactions between the player characters. Most large scale LRPs have massive battles with hundreds of participants on each side, whether these be between differening player factions or teams of enemy monsters depends on the setting.


Many games are run with limited props and costume, though there is a current trend towards high levels of production value to enable players to more easily suspend disbelief and improve the immersion within the game environment. One event that is at the forefront of this is Mythlore: New Lands which utilises the talents of professional props makers and special effects companies to produce a truly cutting edge LRP game.



Mythlore New Lands 3

SFX by LarpFX

Photo © Tom Garnett used under a CC-A License

The UK LARP Facebook page is a good point to start if you are interested in playing LRP games as well as the LARPevents listing page.



Focus On: Roleplaying Games

Its only taken me four months, but here is the second of my Focus On series of blog posts, this time on roleplaying games.

Four Commedia dell’Arte Figures: Three Gentlemen and

Pierrot by Claude Gillot

The basic concept of roleplaying games, that of taking the role of a character and acting out or describing their activities is as old as human civilisation. From the games of Cowboys and Indians played by children all over the world to the improvisation theatre of Commedia dell'arte, roleplaying has ubiquitous to society for centuries (possibly even millenia).

The first publication of what we would now term a roleplaying game was Dungeons and Dragons by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson in the mid 70's. D&D had developed from earlier fantasy wargames Chainmail and Blackmoor with the focus moving from battles between armies to playing individual characters carrying out heroic quests. Soon after the publication of D&D a whole range of other games were published including Runqeuest and the Sci-Fi game Traveller, both of which are still have an avid following.

Since then the number of roleplaying games has expanded considerably, the website rpggeek.com lists a total of 4649 different RPGs written by 26,681 games designers. Conventions are held all across the UK including three run just a stones throw from Bournemouth, these being Conception, Consequences and Indiecon - all run at Naish Farm holiday park. RPGs cover pretty much every genre you can imagine from the high fantasy of Lord of the Rings to gritty low fantasy Saxon history, the space westerns of Firefly to the dystopian future of SLA Industries. There are also plenty of games firmly set in the real world ranging across all era's of history. There are horror games, investigative games, heroic games, political games, comedy games... you name it there probably is a roleplay game for it.

Players in roleplaying games typically take on the role of one character and act out or describe their actions in response to the situaton that is described or acted by the games master. The games master, or GM, plays all of the non player characters, writes the story that the players will be interacting with and often acts as an arbiter or referee in the game. GMs are called by a variety of names that often make reference to the specific part they will play in the game, from Dungeon Masters in D&D, Storytellers in Vampire to Marshalls in Deadlands. In most games whether a characters actions are successful or not are decided by comparing some form or random element (commonly dice or cards) against a set of characteristics or test difficulties. Some games dispense with these mechanisms entirely but these are in the minority.

Roleplaying is just one of a variety of narrative games and storytelling activities. I have already discussed some of the similarities and differences between roleplaying and other storytelling activities in this post. As described in that post, these narrative games tie in particularly well with the traditional focus of libraries.

In the next Focus On post I'll talk about live roleplay.

Focus On - Necromunda

The original Necromunda Boxset

Taken from http://lawhammer.blogspot.co.uk/

Many of you in the club are too young to remember Necromunda, which Games Workshop first published in 1995 and finally stopped supporting part way through last year. The game is set in the Warhammer 40,000 universe and is focused on small scale skirmishes between criminal gangs in the lowest levels of Necromunda's Hive Primus. Unlike regular 40K games you only need a handful of miniatures to play across a table strewn with scenery to represent the twisted walkways and hazardous chemical dumps in the long forgotten hab domes of the underhive.



A Necromunda board, full of scenery on multiple levels.

Taken from http://www.dakkadakka.com  

The main rules of the game are pretty much the same as those of the 2nd Edition of Warhammer 40,000 and were developed from a game called Confrontation that was published in White Dwarf in 1990-91. Both the original Warhammer 40,000 Rogue Trader and Confrontation were heavily indebted to Laserburn, a game created by Bryan Ansell prior to joining Games Workshop in the late 80's. The basic stat lines for models in Necromunda will mostly be familiar to current 40k players, with the addition of a movement stat (which also featured in the earlier editions of 40k), however some of the game mechanics are quite different (particularly close combat).


A Delaque Gang

Taken from http://thewargamingcynic.blogspot.co.uk/

There a a variety of gangs to choose from in the main game from muscle bound Goliath's, sneaky Delaque's, Latino inspired Orlocks and the all female Eschers. The supplements add a variety of other options from Redemptionist firebrands and Muties to noble born Spyrers and Ash Waste Nomads from the desolate plains between the hives. Each gang is recruited from a stash of credits with a choice of Gang Leader, Heavies, Gangers and Juves in the main gangs and a variety of other miscreants for the outlanders. Each ganger gets their own equipment and as a campaign progresses their own stats and personality.


Kal Jerico Graphic Novel

I'm not much of a wargamer these days, but Necromunda is a game I still really like. The rules for campaigns are great, the fact that mostly your gangers survive between games picking up experience, injuries and grudges against other gangs makes it a cut above the rest of GWs products in my eyes. Sadly GW no longer produce the models but they are available second hand through sites like EBay. Alternatively there are a range of other models you could use, the chaos cultists from the Dark Vengeance box set can easily be converted to form a Cawdor gang, Heresy Miniatures produce sci-fi ganger minis that are pretty much Delaques and there is a whole blog post covering other suitable miniatures here.



Though GW no longer officially support Necromunda you can still download the rules for free from their website (along with most of the rest of what became known as the specialist games).

An Escher Ganger

© Antti Autio, used with permission

Necromunda is in many ways a product of a bygone era for Games Workshop, it is far more cyberpunk than the grim gothic imagery of the current game. Gangs are able to get some pretty high-tech equipment, from lascannons to plasma guns, which feels somewhat incongruous given the very low-tech feel of the recent 40k roleplaying games. There isn't so much leopard print or pink hair dye in the 40K universe these days and perhaps that creates a more distinct background for the game, but I do miss it a little bit. I'm looking forward to bringing my Eschers or Redemptonists along to the club to create some more mayhem in the underhive.

PS. Sorry about the wierd formatting, Blogger refused to let me automatically add the captions on the images so I've had to edit the html, which is rather badly formatted meaning its quite difficult to work out what the tags are referring to.