Yesterday I witness one of the craziest of past times in the Mont Royale park: LARP’ing. For the uninitiated LARP stands for Live Action Role Playing. Basically it involves players (standard nerds) getting dressed up and acting out fantasy fights.
While most LARP’ing events are fairly structured and planned with skill trees, classes, teams and abilities all determined by dice rolls this LARP’ing event which happens every Sunday is more of a free for all. Forming two loose teams the groups advance on each other, proceed to beat each other with foam swords until at some point it is decided the round is over and the process repeats ad nauseam. There doesn’t seem to be any real referreree and anyone seems to be able to join. All it takes is a foam wrapped stick and a bit of imagination. In some cases you’ll see the level of dedication to role goes from casual stick bashing to broom head adorned helmets.
For the many onlookers that surrounded the players the whole thing seems ridiculous. Especially when you see the grown men taking things even more seriously than the 6 year olds. But you know what? In each and every photo you’ll see in my gallery you’ll find smiling faces. These kids are just having fun, making friends, getting out doors and a little exercise and I wont be one to decry them for that.
I had a hard time choosing which photo to use for the header image, it was a toss up between this, this and this but in the end I went with the hardcore players. All gold, all pretty cool, but you can find even more LARP’ing gold in the gallery below. It’s times like this I wish I had a decent SLR and a telephoto lens, but I just have to make do with my waterlogged Canon point and shoot which has done me well so far.
Oh and on the topic of LARP’ing check out the great animation from the For Tax Reason guys after the gallery. Great stuff.
For Tax Reasons Video:
By: simv
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I love the guy kneeling down looking sideways in the header image. Totally serious. He’s in the zone… enemies everywhere… WTF did i do with that magic +5 mace of death… must stay in control… crowd of kids watching me… looking up to me… time to fight
Awesome post
August 18th, 2009 at 8:00 pmHi there– I’m a marketing director for a similar type of game. I just wanted to thank you for making this post. It’s kind of difficult to explain exactly what it is we do…especially to new players or concerned parents.
August 19th, 2009 at 12:30 am[...] happy to say that Simon isn’t that guy. While Simon’s observations on LARPing don’t necessarily apply to every LARP or interactive game (Seventh Kingdom IGE offers an [...]
August 19th, 2009 at 1:32 amGreat post and a good, simple explanation of the hobby. Well written.
- Amber E.
August 19th, 2009 at 4:28 amDirector of Mortalis Games
Designer of Mortalis LARP
http://www.mortalisrpg.com
this just makes me think of Role Models.
‘rub a dub dub!’
looks like a good time, but.
August 19th, 2009 at 6:31 pmI seek people to participate in larp / medieval combat in Perth WA. If interested please checkout the following link,
http://larpwa.webs.com/
January 5th, 2010 at 8:40 pm