I normally attend two larp conventions a year (three this year), and every convention I see the same things: GMs stressing because they haven’t finished their game. Players stressing because they haven’t got their character sheets. Games with fantastic concepts obviously undermined by being a little rushed. Want to write a larp without inflicting all that on yourself and your players? Here’s how.
TL; DR: Start early and finish early
That’s the key lesson. Start early. Because the larp will take longer to write than you think it will, and it needs to be ready long before you think it does. So start early, finish early, and spend the extra time polishing rather than stressing.
Ideally, you should finish writing your larp before even offering to run it. That way its in the can and stress is minimised; nothing can go wrong short of you being hit by a bus. But everyone breaks that rule, including me. So:
The long version:
I’ll assume for this that you have a great concept for the Best Game Ever!!11!, and that you have some idea of when/where you want to run it (e.g. Chimera 2016). Also that you know how to write a larp, and that combining characters and plots to produce a great play experience is not problematic for you. Or that you’re at least willing to give it a go. I’m also assuming that you want to do a good job of it, rather than have your larp suffer from being rushed. And above all, that you want to avoid stress. The central way of doing this is time-management, and in order to solve that problem, we need to know two things: how long your larp will take to write, and when it has to be ready by.
How long will it take to write?
Short answer: longer than you think. Long answer: depends how big it is.
“The Rose and the Dragon”, the 160-player Chimera flagship I worked on in 2013, tried to be stress-free. It allowed a month for initial design and fleshing out the initial concept, two months for detailed design and turning that concept into plots and (very rough) character outlines, four months for writing the actual character sheets (at a rate of 5 sheets per GM per month), and two months at the end (which overlapped with the signup and casting process somewhat) for polishing, consistency-checking and making it pretty.
That’s a pretty generous timeline, which (in the grind phase) boiled down in practice to one weekend’s work a month. A smaller game - say, your average 20-player Chimera game - can probably compress the initial design phases down to a single month (flagships should probably allow at least two because of complexity). Most people can write more than 5 character sheets a month, too, but we’re not going to rely on that. Because the goal here is for you to write your larp without stress - which means leaving time for you to do other things (like, say, your job, or those university assignments, or paying due care and attention to your cat) rather than pretending that they don’t exist and that you can devote your entire time to larpwriting. It also allows time for things to go wrong, for you to get sick or to juggle other projects, like running larps you’ve already written. Or to just piss about and spend a month playing the latest version of $PreferredComputerGame.
Allow yourself extra time, then do the work. If you finish early, then that’s extra time to relax and polish and make your game really shine. And if you merely finish on time, congratulations, you’ve avoided stress.
When does it need to be ready by?
Lots of larp writers seem to operate on the basis that the due date for a larp is the day it runs, or maybe a day or two beforehand to allow for printing and stuffing it. This is wrong. The due date for a larp is the day you open for signups.
Why? Think about what you need to have for signups and its inevitable successor, casting: a number of players and a cast-list. Which suddenly constrains your writing - and specifically how you can respond to characters which don’t work. If you have time, you can set them aside to fester for a while in the hope of improving them, replace them with a character that works better, or just drop them entirely and shrink the larp. But once you’ve opened for signups and provided a cast-list, your numbers and characters are pretty much fixed - and once you’ve actually cast, you’re set in stone, because players will be making costuming decisions. Which means that if you haven’t finished writing your characters, and you discover that one of them doesn’t work, and you can’t solve it, then the player is basicly stuck with it. And their impression of the entire larp will be based on that.
Also think about the production process. While Chimera recruits players and allocates them to games, you still have to contact them, cast them, handle their queries, then panic when someone cast in a vital role decides to pull out. All of this takes time - as does printing and stuffing. Juggling that with writing a larp means you’ll do a bad job of both. So don’t juggle. Finish writing the larp early, so you can focus on production as a separate stage.
Putting it together
What does this mean in practice? Let’s look at a concrete example: Chimera. Chimera runs in mid August, but it has an 8 month production cycle. It calls for games in late January, right after Kapcon, and aims to have a full slate of games by late March. The games - usually including a cast-list - go up on the website in early May, with signups starting a week later. Players are allocated to games in early June, with first contact 8 weeks before the con, casting done 4 weeks before the con, and character sheets due out by 2 weeks before the con.
Using the timetable above, and assuming you’re willing to overlap consistency checking and prettification with signup, a 20-player game takes 5 months to write. The deadline is hungry shark week in mid-late May. So rolling that back, you need to start in December, a month before the call for games goes out. Which is pretty sensible when you think about it: it gives you a month, including a holiday period, to chew over your concept and see if it works before committing to it. For Phoenix (late August / early September) just add a month to the Chimera timetable. For Medusa (November), add three.
Hydra runs in April, but its hungry shark week is in mid-late January (again, right after KapCon), so you need to start your writing process about now. Which is great, because you’ll all be feeling inspired after Chimera, right?