I’ve recently been playing a game called Cultist Simulator, which combined the awesome narrative of Fallen London with the cow-clicky do-the-same-thing-over-and-over-again tedium of Fallen London. Larp inspiry bits:
- A fabulous occult mythos, for people who want quack but don’t want the tedium of wading through the “real world” stuff. “Less cosmic nihilism than Lovecraft, and more perilous longing”.
- A sense of What Lovecraftian Cults Do. Start off recruiting and dabbling in weird occult secrets out of curiosity, and then all of a sudden they’re down some rabbit hole and into murdering people to cover up their crimes, and kidnapping and sacrificing people to use as occult fuel.
- The magic system looks stealable. Basicly combine 3 elements / lores / whatever, and certain combinations do things. The elements can come in different forms too (so you can get your Winter power from an assistant, from knowledge, from a tool or ingredient, or from a temporary weird influence). Easy to work visually in a larp - you do it with colours, or with letters. The tricky bit with larp magic is of course finding effects the players can resolve themselves, without having to involve a GM, but this lets them get around the asking “does this work”, at least with known recipes.
I’m not sure that I’m going to write a larp about cults yet. But they feature in a lot of games, and I can see that when I finally get round to writing His Majesty’s Wizards (C16th Laundry Files), then bits of it will probably be informed by Cultist Simulator.