Ed Fortune

They are a great many of projects that I’d love to do, but I am completely aware that I don’t have the time or resources to handle them with the level of care I feel they deserve. Many of these are LARP¹ projects. Despite my huge love of games and a desire to tell wild stories, LARP is very hard to do well.

One of these dream projects is a thing that I call Ordos. Set in the Warhammer 40K universe, players would play members of the Inquisition. Each player would select an exquisitely detailed character from a set list, and it would be quite rules light. Inspired by NWO Games Ars Magica campaign², this would bring together incredibly powerful characters and make them interact with each other.

There would be 3 games in total; Xenos, Malleus, Hereticus.³, and each would have very high costume standards and set pieces designed to evoke the universe.

Each event would be a High Conclave, and in the game world, the events would be spaced centuries apart. (In reality, you’d get an event every 18 months or so). The site would ideally be a repurposed industrial building, with plenty of places for conspirators to sneak off and talk in hushed tones. The Victoria Baths in Manchester would be ideal.

The idea would be to bring to live the complex and gothic world of Warhammer 40,000 without falling into the clichés that haunt LARP systems. Because the medium began as a way of simulating fantasy adventures, many LARP suffers from a focus on action, typically using rubber or foam weaponry.⁴ Though this has its place, the real appeal to larp is the same as any other media; it’s ability to bring you out of yourself and explore a fictional world, and this can be done without the need for waves and waves of monsters.

Such games are possible. As we speak, someone is organising a Battle Star Galactica game on an old battleship. It looks marvellous, but it’s unlikely I can afford it. I do hope it is the way that LARP will go in the future and time will tell. To echo the battle cry of many a games organiser, I want to play these sort of games, not run them.

1: LARP, aka Live Action Roleplay, often described as cross-country pantomime, it’s a deeply silly and extravagant hobby that combines the many of the logistical problems of theatre with the heartache and insanity common to novelists. Once you’ve ran the game, that’s it; it will be never repeated, you were either there or not. It’s a great experience that feels brilliant and looks very silly. It’s utterly ephemeral and there really is no other media quite like it.

2: New World Order Games were a merry band of larp organisers who created a series of remarkable and highly detailed game based on the Ars Magica roleplaying game. To give you a hint as to how much work went into briefing the players, you can take a look at 700-page book composed of the all the players briefs for the first game. Later games have two volumes rather than just the one, and an equal amount of love went into the props and costume. Unsurprisingly, several members of that creative team now produce other highly popular games.

3: These are three major factions of the Inquisition. For the uninitiated, Warhammer 40K’s version of the Inquisition is a fear inducing organisation who are utterly above the law. They root out demonic infestation, treachery and alien influence, and can use any means to do so, including blowing up worlds.

4: The game I’m currently writing, Greater Goods and Lesser Gods experiments with these ideas, but goodness will there be a lot of action. It’s a 1950’s Dan Dare style game, and it should be huge fun.