Basic Rules
What is LARP
This is just a little background information on LARPing for those who may be interested but don’t understand what this weird thing that I’m going on about is. LARPing stands for Live-Action Role Playing and that pretty much covers what it is. Instead of sitting around a table saying what your character is doing, you actually act it out. If you’re giving someone a hug, you walk over and hug them and if they try to hit you for it then they take a swing at you with a (foam rubber) sword. All of the skills for LARP’s mainly cover what you can do, rather than how good you are at it. If you’re nimble and quick on your feet then so is your character and if you’re a ham fisted klutz who couldn’t hit a barn without a couple of practice swings first then so is your character (and you might want to think about being a magic user).
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Hits
Each persons body is split into 6 hit locations: Head, body, left and right arm and left and right leg. Each location has a basic single hit point (the toughness skill and armour can increase this). This means that if you get hit there once you loose the use of the location (as it now has zero hits points). If it’s an arm or a leg then that limb has effectively been broken or chopped up a bit. Stick it behind your back if its an arm or start hopping if it’s a leg, but as you’re a tough hero it doesn’t slow you down too much. If it’s your head or torso then you’ve been quite badly hurt and knocked unconscious. You should fall over and your character will not wake up until the next morning.
If a location which has been taken to 0 hits gets hit again, that’s when the fun starts. That location has now taken really serious damage and could kill you if not seen to soon. Start timing under your breath as soon at it reaches –1 hits. If it was your chest or head that was on –1 then if you manage to count to 5 minutes without anyone healing you then I’m sorry, your character is dead. Dead Dave, everybody is dead. If it is a leg or arm which is on –1 hit then firstly you are in extreme pain, more even than your hardy character can really cope with, and secondly if your count reaches 5 minutes then your chest instantly goes to –1 hit, no matter how healthy it was before as trauma and lack of blood take their toll. At that point start a new count to five minutes for there. Finally if all six hit locations get taken to –1 hit points at the same time then you are dead instantly without any count or get out clause. You are a fantasy hero, it’s a dangerous line of work.
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Character Backgrounds
The world is a bog standard fantasy setting in the vein of Lord of the Rings or any other major ’sword and sorcery’ series. The inhabitants have got about as far as inventing steel and catapults but no further. Definitely no gunpowder. Magic exists and is a fairly accepted part of every day life, as are non-human races. As well as the usual elves, dwarves, halflings, goblins etc. There is a plethora of other, less well known races. Pretty much if you can conceive it, it doesn’t break the fantasy setting and it doesn’t require any special rules to play (the main examples there are vampires and werewolves. Both are pretty much impossible to play without a special ability or two being added to the character), you can play it.
The same sort of thing goes for your character’s background. I haven’t devised a map of the world or anything like that yet, I’m going to try to work it around people’s backgrounds. So if you decide that your character comes from a land where the culture is a mix of samurai, steppe nomad and ancient Aztec, where all right handed children are killed at birth and not owning at least two goats is counted as treason and punishable by death then that place will be added to my map (probably somewhere a long way away where no one will ever have to interact with it). The same thing goes for background knowledge and skills. If your character is an elf who’s been alive for hundreds of years and spent that time perfecting his culinary abilities so that he is now the best soufflé chef to ever walk a battlefield, fine. As long as you can talk the talk and take the apropriate skills for it then that’s what your character does. You don’t need to stick to stereotypes either. If you decide that your dwarf is actually a sensitive soul who has dedicated his life to peace, protecting the environment and practising the noble arts of origami and flower arranging that’s also fine by me.
What does not work (and will get you asked to leave the LARP) is anything along the lines of ‘I know I don’t have the herb lore skill, but my characters background says that he spent 20 years apprenticed to the master herbalist in his old town, so he must know what this herb is anyway!’. Provided you stay away from that side of things however, you have free reign over your characters background, and remember, the more interesting and in depth it is, the more likely it is to generate plot for your character. And we all know plot is a good thing don’t we!