“Fortune & Felicity” is a Nordic blockbuster larp inspired by the works of Jane Austen. There’s a nice little article about it here. The larp used a full-scale regency-era village to stand in for Regency England, which is obviously difficult to do - but the design document is full of nifty tricks which can be stolen for other larps. Here’s a few:
- Putting people’s annual incomes on their name badges, so everyone knows that Mr Darcy is worth 10,000 pounds a year. Useful for any information everybody should know.
- A monologue mechanic: reading a poem aloud lets the character segue into a monologue about their inner thoughts and feelings, enabling signalling to the other players. This is coupled with a requirement that a male character must read poetry to a lady before proposing to her (thus enabling the realisation that they’re really only after her money).
- A really good guide to money in regency England and what it means in practice, since that’s such a driving force in the marriage economy.
- Some nice simplified rules of etiquette to provide the feel of stifling social convention, without too much detail.
- A nifty eloping mechanic. The larp was in three acts, with each act ending at church in the morning. Characters who had eloped would disappear in the night and not show up at church, allowing their absence to be noted. There was a workshop between acts, so the players could work out how the families reacted and what sort of a mess it had made.
- Structured activities during the larp to provide a framework for roleplaying and something to fill the time.
Hopefully there’ll be an article on Nordiclarp about it in the next few weeks.