Italian larp book 2016

The Italians have produced another of their annual collections of larp photos. You can see it here:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2BS4jdTtqGTbkJhWjNyTXU5QjA/view

Also, while browsing around about this: Laiv.it will be kickstarting a collection of Italian chamberlarp scenarios this year. An international edition in English will be available. Details here: http://laiv.it/en/ichor/

The kickstarter for Crescendo Giocoso is here:

It initially has 12 scenarios, with stretch goals which will take it to 18. Its expensive, though - 19 Euro for PDF, or 47 (with shipping) for hardcopy.

The English-language PDF of this arrived today, and hardcopies are apparently being shipped out. Skimming through it, not many of the games are things I’d want to run (this is normal, and I back these things to get a look at how other larp cultures do things, and to encourage people to publish). Many of those with hard-gendered characters have appallingly unequal gender ratios, there’s a lot of use of scenes and intrusive staging techniques. But there’s one in there - Under the Mountain - which I’m tempted to try sometime.

Hmmm… When would you really call a character hard-gendered, though? I’d think that was actually quite rare.

Also, what kinds of genres do the games fall into? (Yes, I could just go and read the Kickstarter documentation. But I haven’t got the time at the moment…)

It depends on the character and setting, but here I’m just using it for “the GMs have assigned this character an explicit gender”. IME, this is often done out of laziness, and characters can be easily re-gendered if you need to (e.g. with a name change). But its still a bad sign when a larp says it has 7 characters, 6 male and 1 female. At the least, it means I have to do extra work to run it, and that’s the sort of thing that gets me to dump it at the first cut and look for something better to run unless it looks really interesting. (See also: anything published for Cthulhu Live).

There’s a complete list of the games (including their character sheets, but not their setting and orchestration information) here.

Fair enough. I might be a bit more used to this sort of thing. It might also (partly) be because English as a language has more options for phrasing things in a gender-neutral way than Italian does. So something might have got lost in translation.

But I do agree with you that most of it is just people being lazy - most of the time.

It is also often a result of writing for the community you have, rather than the community you want. But that risks creating a self-fulfilling cycle: you don’t write parts for women because women don’t larp because there are no parts for them…

Of course, in Wellington, we have the opposite problem.

If you want to call that a problem. :wink:

The best way to break that cycle might be to simply run one of these in a gender-blind fashion, and tell the author about it if it’s successful. Might make them think…

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The PDF of Crescendo Giocoso II: The International Larp Orchestra arrived last month. Afain, its mostly workshoppy games, and ones I’m not very interested in running or playing, but there was one interesting looking one: Old friends by Jason Morningstar & Ole Peder Giæver. It’s basicly Supernatural, the sequel: a team of ghost-hunters (possibly even Ghost-hunting Badarses) get together for One Last Job in the old school where their team split up after one of them died. Which sounds like it’d be a perfect fit for KapCon one year…

And now, finally, I have the B-sides. One of which looks pretty cool: Public Offering:

Welcome to Gatekeeper Cloud Services! We are so excited to have you join our team of innovators and technology voyagers! We are definitely not an apocalyptic cult disguised as a disruptive internet startup, and our leadership team are most assuredly not invested in inducting our new hires into our secret rites of worship. We’re almost ready to announce our quarterly roadmap and nobody is plotting to invoke the Great Outer God Yog-Sothoth in order to secure our next round of funding!

In Public Offering, players will take the roles of employees of an internet startup circa 2008. The founders are cultist who must bring enough people on board to perform a ritual summoning of Yog-Sothoth (he is the Gate, the Key and Guardian of the Gate, IA!) to grant them the arcane knowledge and power to dominate the industry. Will they succeed, risking their lives and sanity to get their next round of funding? Will this affect their 410k?

I’ve given it a quick skim, and it looks hilarious. Also, it has actual characters, with no workshoppy bullshit. There will be time-pressure though: true to startup style, there’s an endless series of meetings, a few people have actual work to do (represented by various forms of Sudoku), and no-one really knows what management is up to (ia! ia!) Obviously, sacrifices will have to be made if the company is to achieve success…

I’m quite tempted to give this one a go. Unfortunately, it really needs an office, with two conference rooms.

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Might be one for KapCon if it’s not too similar to the flagship from a couple of years(?) ago.

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Well, it would fit, but I’m not sure whether there’s a room with two adjoining “conference” spaces. Plus of course I run tabletops at kapCon, not larps.

13 Characters? Upstairs at Petone House.

Oh absolutely, though extra rooms = extra expense, which would mean pairing it with something to cover costs.

It would work at Hydra though - the standalone space with the deck down by the entrance would fit.