Inspiration for 2018

Because larps go much easier if you write them a year in advance, here’s some historical inspiration from Wikipedia for next year:

1993

  • NZ votes for MMP
  • The Waco standoff
  • The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia is created
  • Magic: the Gathering
  • Books: A Fire Upon the Deep, Doomsday Book
  • Computer games: Doom
  • TV: Deep Space 9

1968

  • Apollo 8
  • TV: “The Prisoner” ends
  • Film: 2001: A Space Odyssey, Planet of the Apes, Night of the Living Dead
  • Books: Stand on Zanzibar, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, The Wombles, A Wizard of Earthsea

1943

  • Building of Colossus, the first electronic computer
  • Beginning of the Manhattan Project
  • Film: Casablanca
  • Books: The Little Prince
  • Births: R L Stein
  • Deaths: Beatrix Potter

1918

  • The Spanish flu pandemic
  • The end of WWI
  • The Russian Revolution rolls on
  • Women’s Suffrage in the UK
  • Deaths: William Hope Hodgson

1893

  • Women’s suffrage in NZ
  • Chicago World’s Fair
  • Births: Dorothy Sayers, Clark Ashton Smith

1868

  • Meiji Restoration
  • Titokowaru’s War
  • Books: Little Women

1843

  • William Miller predicts the end of the world. It doesn’t happen.
  • First wagon train on the Oregon Trail (Die of Dystentry: the larp)
  • Ada Lovelace writes the first computer program
  • Books: A Christmas Carol

1818

  • Books: Frankenstein, Northanger Abbey, Persuasion
  • Births: Emily Bronte

1718

  • Death of Blackbeard; end of the Golden Age of Piracy

1618

  • Defenestration of Prague

1518

  • Dancing Plague of Strasbourg

1268

  • The first Venice Carnival

When did Prague get thrown out of a window? :open_mouth:

/goes to Wikipedia

The (second) defenestration of Prague: two Catholic officials are thrown out of a third-floor window into a dung heap, sparking a war which depopulated Germany.

I’m not sure that there’s a proper larp in it or its aftermath, but it was too good not to miss.

The real opportunity for 2018 is a larp about the suffrage campaign. But its not one I can write.

Personally I think doing something about Ada Lovelace would be neat (but then, I have an Honours degree in Computer Science), though I have no idea how you would make a LARP out of it, beyond having Lovelace and Babbage as characters. And Lord Byron, he’s too colourful not to include, even if he was dead by 1843 (which I think he was off the top of my head). Oh, and George Boole too of course.

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I would totally play that LARP

[quote=“Jarak, post:4, topic:21507, full:true”]
Personally I think doing something about Ada Lovelace would be neat (but then, I have an Honours degree in Computer Science), though I have no idea how you would make a LARP out of it, beyond having Lovelace and Babbage as characters. And Lord Byron, he’s too colourful not to include, even if he was dead by 1843 (which I think he was off the top of my head). Oh, and George Boole too of course.[/quote]

And Bernel, the Wolverine of the early Victorians?

The expanded version of Lovelace & Babbage: the Secret Origin has some interesting stuff about Lady Wentworth (Lovelace’s mother)'s parties, which were a who’s who of the 1840’s. One of them would make a great larp.

Im keen to try my hand at larp writing. Is there a good larp writing software that people would recommend or would Microsoft Word suffice?

There are a couple of websites, of which http://www.larpwriter.com/en is one of the most frequently used. But Word or Open Office work fine. ATM I just use Google Drive.

Larpwriter has some nice features - you can define relationships between characters (and it will warn you if one character sheet includes the relationship and the other does not), set up a character sheet template, and define groups of characters and have special documents for group members only. Larpwriter can also handle the mailing out of character sheets and other documents to players. On the downside, the character sheet formatting isn’t particularly attractive and sometimes the server can be quite slow. It’s worth having a look at, but you may find you prefer to use a word processor. Some larps have been written using wiki software, which is another option.

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