The latest game announced for Phoenix 2018 looks interesting:
Tears of Heaven by Ciarán Searle
You are part of an adventuring party, making their way to the Tears of Heaven, a waterfall that is said to fall all the way from the celestial plane. Your party recently fought and defeated a powerful lich, whose phylactery is now in the possession of the fighter. It is said that the Tears of Heaven are the only way to destroy the phylactery, the waters being pure enough to dissolve the foul magics surrounding it.
Your battle against the lich was fierce and Edren the paladin, leader of your party, was slain.
Though your greatest foe is defeated, for now, their undead horde has been amassing around the Tears of Heaven. Even if you reach your destination, victory is not assured.
Note: This is a game that is intended to have a significant amount of walking. This is the part of the fantasy story that isn’t usually told: the large amounts of relatively uneventful travel by foot. As such, this game is more focused on your relationship with your companions than on action and heroics.
@Ciaran’s larp is an example of a relatively new larp genre: the walking larp - games in which the primary “action” is walking from A to B (as opposed to the walking just being a short break between fighting monsters). The earliest example I can find of this is The White Road (which you can read about it Playground Worlds ), in which a small group of Danish homeless people walk to the sea to buy a dead friend. And then there’s the Czech Legion: Siberian Story, about a Czech military unit walking across Siberia during the Russian civil war. In that one, the players are expected to walk ~20 miles in subzero temperatures in the depths of winter, with occasional interludes of being shot at and killed. There’s an interesting article about its design here, and some notes from a Knutepunkt talk about lessons for spatial design in multi-location larps.
Both of those seem pretty gruelling - basicly a weekend-long tramp with attached larp elements. “Tears of Heaven” has a much shorter format, so will be far easier physically. Its also potentially easy to re-stage in other locations - there are plenty of 2 hour “waterfall tracks” around New Zealand. I’m looking forward to playing it at Phoenix.