I helped crew a larp dungeon crawl yesterday.
Embers: Paths of the Maker was a day-game in the Embers campaign, about the entry (and ransacking… er… “study”) of one of the citadels of the lost gods. The sort of thing that in a tabletop game would be a classic dungeon crawl, with monsters, traps, puzzles, and secrets. And from the crew side, that’s exactly what it looked like. The GM’s had a dungeon map, and pre-planned rooms full of dungeon-crawl goodness. A setup trick - a copy of the map, NPCs who did some initial exploring and filled bits of it in, and other NPCs who could be helpful dungeon guides - allowed them to pace the game and limit the options available to the PCs, while giving them agency (the PCs were making choices about where to explore from their HQ). They had five or six of these “paths”, opened in groups of two, with (I think) information recovered in early rooms unlocking the later ones.
From a crew POV, the GMs could say “right, they’re going this way, we’ll set up this sequence of rooms”. Conveniently, we also had a venue which allowed a sequence of rooms, rather than having to use the “elevator” method (in which one room is set-dressed for an encounter while the PCs wait in the “elevator” / navigate the maze of twisty-turny passages). And we were well-briefing, with handouts, so we could just be sent on our way and left to it.
Naturally, the players split up, which meant having to handle a few things at once with a small crew, but it worked overall, and people seemed to have fun.
This (and some online discussion a few weeks ago) has got me thinking about ways to handle this sort of game. Any suggestions?