There’s a certain style of weekend fantasy game that’s evolved in Auckland. Mordavia had a big part in shaping it, because so many people attended that game who’ve gone on to run their own, but Mordavia in turn borrowed somewhat from Lateral Worlds before it.
Here’s my take on the style, or at least the way I see it ideally:
The overall goal is to create an interactive setting where player actions have significant believable consequences. This means throwing away any idea of scripting “plots” that affect the players but can’t be affected by them. Instead, the approach is to throw interesting stuff at the players, see what they do, and then throw more stuff at them that’s a believable response to their actions. Similarly, the players need to be empowered to decide where they’re going and what they’re doing, as much as practical. This doesn’t mean that the whole setting revolves around the players. You can have big, significant NPCs, they can be doing important stuff “off-stage”, and that stuff may affect the PCs. However, once the players get in contact with these NPCs anything can happen. The key to this is briefing NPCs on what they want, what they know, and what their plans are, but not briefing them on how things will turn out - they have to feel their way through it, just like the PCs. As in the real world, no-one knows how it will turn out. The GMs who can’t predict how the chaotic interactions of PCs and NPCs will go, if everyone is given free reign. I would add that “invulnerable” NPCs are also against the spirit of this approach to running a game, tempting as they may be to use in order to add predictability, as are puzzles that seem contrived rather than a natural part of the game world.
Player creativity is also a major factor. Players can create factions. They can also invent backstories that include 1) characters that the GMs can put in the game as NPCs 2) places that can be visited 3) historical interactions with other PCs and NPCs 4) items of significance, etc. This approach has a couple of advantages. Firstly, it gives the GMs a wealth of creative material to draw on without having to invent it all themselves. Secondly, it gives the GMs the ability to introduce so-called “player plot”, that is characters, items, etc that relate to the PCs backstories, into a live event. Finally it enables players creatively, so that they can feel the sense of having added more to the world than just their one character, and so that they get to choose roughly the sort of player plot that is likely to happen to them (write romance into your backstory, and it’s likely to turn up in play), giving players some individualised direction over the style of content they’ll encounter. Player plot can also be written to involve a whole faction of PCs, or more than one. The GMs may guide the players to help their backgrounds overlap.
In order to have a setting that PCs can interact with and affect believably, the GMs need to have a good idea of what is going on in the setting. The setting can be viewed as a simulated fictional world, and the more the GMs know about that world, its history, and its current events the easier it is for them to come up with interesting responses to player actions, and to invent stuff to throw at the players that isn’t from their character backgrounds.
In terms of how getting ready for an event:
- The GMs lay out the setting and current state of events
- The players input character backgrounds
- Based on the state of events and player input the GMs decide whether the event will take place in the setting, what player plot they want throw in, and what other plot they want to throw in. “Plot” in this sense typically means NPCs with info/goals/abilities, plus places that might be visitable, items, creatures of interest, etc. For ease of organisation this might be divided into a number of “plot threads”, and one or more GMs assigned to facilitate each thread. Player plot can count as one or more plot threads as well.
- It may be a good idea to brief some crew members who are playing complicated NPCs in advance. Having a crew forum where you can brief everyone on aspects of the setting that the players aren’t aware of may help too - just be careful to emphasise that this info isn’t for sharing with players.
In terms of running the event, you need plenty of GMs who are well informed about the setting and plot plans. If there are too few, they become a bottleneck. A lot of info and briefings have to pass through the GMs, otherwise NPCs may sit around not sure what to do. The GMs job is to brief NPCs, listen to what they say about what’s happening in the game, and rebrief them if necessary. It pays for the GMs to work as a team, having a meeting every couple of hours to go over what’s happening and how they want to respond. That gives a chance for brainstorming, where more dramatic and interesting twists can be thought up.
It may seem intuitive to start off the game slowly, with just a couple of things happening, and then add more and more material to the game as it goes on to provoke a climax - that may seem like a logical way to create dramatic pacing. However, my experience is that it’s actually better to throw masses of stuff at the players on the Friday night and early Saturday of a weekend. Giving the players plenty to do up front means that the cascade of action and reaction starts early: based on how the players respond, the GMs can kick off responses from the setting, which tends to escalate into more stuff for players to do, more responses, etc. It’s a virtuous cycle, so the earlier it starts the better. Also, from a dramaturgy perspective the beginning of the story is the time to introduce new elements, the middle of the story is when complications arise, and the end is when the complication of the elements is resolved. Thus the saying “the gun on the wall in the first act will be fired in the third”. This doesn’t mean you have to throw every NPC at the players on Friday night - this may especially be a bad idea if your players are trigger-happy. But you can foreshadow those NPCs, players can hear information about them that will build tension and make them seem more significant when they actually arrive.
There’s nothing wrong with having “set piece” encounters where you have a great location and something impressive that you want to happen there, whether it’s something dramatic or a big battle or whatever. However, if you know in advance how those cool moments are going to turn out, you’re taking away the interactivity of the game (which is one of the coolest things about larp) and turning it into a play. Better to plan how they will kick off, and leave the rest to the players and NPCs. So you might decide that a big force is arriving in town on Saturday night and/or Friday morning, that they will have XYZ cool costumes/abilities/stuff, that they’re their to do whatever… and that’s all good for ensuring a big dramatic climax. But if you already know the outcome, not so good - otherwise why have players at all?
That dramatic arc of introducing materials, complicating, and resolving can also apply to a whole campaign spanning numerous events. This allows you to plan to finish a campaign, rather than the common issue of it going on until it sputters out with no satisfying ending. Sputtering out is a common fate for fantasy campaigns overseas, they go on for years until the people origanising them run out of steam, then someone else may take over and do it differently which causes some players to leave, then the new people run out of steam, then the whole thing collapses on itself and the stories and characters never get resolution. As Steph mentioned, by the end of the Mordavia campaign we didn’t need to introduce a lot of new elements at each event, and we also discouraging players from doing it. Instead, we were focused on finding ways to tie plots off with good endings. By that stage, many plots had been going on for a long time, and they had become intertwined with each other. Stuff that had originally been player plot was indistinguishable from the rest of the setting. We focused on resolving it all, without knowing how it would turn out. This mostly involves bringing the subject from the plots into play, and being willing to have them resolved. If there are mysteries that the players haven’t uncovered, reveal them. Villains they haven’t confronted - put them in play. If the villain wins, that’s fine as a resolution. If the whole campaign revolves around a Big Bad (Wolfgang’s had Mephastopheles, and Mordavia had the Dark One), then towards the end of the campaign it’s time to introduce more and more opportunities for the players to progress against it. If they flub it, too bad. I know that the good guys losing may seem like an anti-climax, but if there isn’t a real possibility of it then where’s the challenge?
Going back to the original question - I don’t think it’s a good idea to think of an event in term of “quests”. That gives the idea of discrete challenges, managed by a GM, for a specific set of PCs. That’s a tabletop roleplaying way of thinking about it, and it doesn’t adapt so well to larp. This is actually an approach taken in the US, they have “modules” where they take PCs out of the game and put them on a linear quest. This isn’t the style that’s evolved here, and personally I find it contrived and less likely to lead to a believable, free-flowing world with a tangle of action and reaction. Instead of quests, I would think in terms of a naturalistic setting within an area in the fiction, with lots of PCs in it all interacting, and NPCs sometimes arriving at various places around the area and providing challenges to the players and progressing the various plots. What you get is a big melting pot of characters and plot, where everything can interact with everything else. That doesn’t mean that 50 PCs wander around as a big group doing everything together. Typically, they are too factionalised to do that, and that’s a good thing because it’s hard to provide encounters that entertain 50 people at once (“big battles” are the classic example, but some big roleplay encounters can work too). My experience is that if you have more than about 12 PCs, they are likely to split up into multiple groups, and that’s good. Then if you have multiple plots happening in different locations, different groups of players are likely to encounter them.
In a campaign like this, information is king. Most plots revolve around stuff the player doesn’t know yet. Even with player plot they may write in that someone killed their brother, but it’s often a mystery who exactly did it, or why, or where they are now. Often, it’s when players find out this information that you get complications in the plot - the killer may have done it for a good reason, or they may be a relative of another player, etc. Resolution comes when you get past that stuff, although if you kill someone’s relative in revenge it may kick off a new plot. Because different players have different encounters, there’s always info that some PCs know and some don’t. As GMs, it pays to keep good records of all the information. That helps keeps things consistent, and it’s good grist for more plot.
. You need to be flexible in terms of the envisioned story arc, and it helps if you enjoy thinking on your feet.