With the help of our surveys I have come up with what I believe is a very good description of what we are trying to create.
I would like to get your feedback. Keep in mind this is a community project, so if you don’t like something in how we are designing or setting things up, please let us know.
First off, the main purpose of this project is to create the IDEAL LARP site.
I would define the ideal LARP site as an incredibly immersive place to Role Play in, where it is easy to suspend disbelief and where anyone can walk in and have a great time Role Playing, dueling or participating in a battle whether they are new or a seasoned veteran. There will be plenty to do whether you want to role play in town, do quests or fight on the battle fields.
The best way to describe it is, this will be the “five star hotel” of LARP sites. By that I mean it will be built with extremely high quality, no more “making do with what we have”.
It will have at least 50 acres with as much interesting terrain as we can possibly find (forest, hills, river, etc.).
There will be a working Inn with actual rooms for rent and ample camping grounds.
We will have shops and a feast hall, ideally a castle and/or a fort.
The Inn and town itself will likely be a draw for people who just want to experience it, and then we can introduce them to LARP and get them involved.
The site provides for those who are Role Playing oriented, AND those who are combat oriented.
It will feel like a real place, and will have an actual town or city “populated” by people who “live” there. They will be employees who play NPCs in the town or questing areas.
There will also be facilities for a “Merchant’s Row” where merchants can set up booths to display and sell their wares.
The majority of public we are catering to prefer traditional fantasy based universes, and that’s where we will start. The town will be designed with an attractive traditional fantasy design, though not so specific that it couldn’t fit into most gaming universes.
We intend to branch out into other genres at some point (i.e. Star Wars, Sci-Fi, etc.) but we won’t be looking heavily at that until after we get this initial site open and operating.
The site will be a rental venue for groups of any size. You can rent sections of the property or the entire place, depending on your needs.
When the site is not being rented we will have our own hosted quests and campaigns with their own ongoing storyline that individuals or groups can participate in.
The actions of the players will have a direct effect on where the storyline goes.
We are developing our own custom rules system for these campaigns which will be designed to be simple and easy to learn, while at the same time giving flexibility and ensuring balance among all players. We hope to pass out the rules for initial “Beta testing” very soon.
We may not be perfect at the start, but we will continuously work towards perfection. The way we will do that is by continuously engaging and surveying the community and people who use our site to find out what is needed and wanted, so we can improve. We will never stop learning or improving, because the death of every great organization or group started when they thought they had it all figured out and had nothing more to learn.