The pirate live-action roleplaying scenario I’ve been working is finally complete and published. I’m actually quite surprised at how long it took me to get it all put together, worked, reworked, playtested, torn down, written back up, polished, and finished — part of that was simply me being unmotivated and easily distracted, but a lot of man-hours still went into the production.
The final product is 62 pages long (A4 format) and weighs in at almost 30,000 words, which is basically half a novel. I’d say it took me just as long from start to finish as it does for me to write and publish an actual book.
The whole thing was basically a new experience for me. I don’t normally write roleplaying material for public release, though I’ve been running various different games for sixteen years and have written a lot of stuff for personal use in that time. On top of that I’ve only really played in a handful of LARPs. I’m more of a tabletop roleplayer, though I really enjoyed all of the LARP scenarios I’ve played in.
The first LARP I ever played in was the playtest of an excellent Warhammer Fantasy scenario called Sunset Claws (available here), written by my friend the inestimable Steve D. Steve is a great local game designer and player that was really welcoming to me when I first started making forays outside of my own little roleplaying group and into the wider Australian RPG community.
I knew literally no-one else at the playtest and have always suffered from a great amount of social anxiety, so the whole experience was a bit nerve-wracking… At one point I had gotten so far from achieving my character’s goals and was so lost at what to do next in this sea of people I didn’t know, that when the next person pulled me into a private conversation I just laid all of my cards on the table and begged them for help, actually on the verge of tears. This other player wrapped me into their plans and we ended up together on basically what was a “winning” side of the evening, having accomplished all our goals and gotten away with it.
Despite my near-breakdown and social anxiety, I ended up having an enormous amount of fun. Once Sunset Claws was released properly I ran it again myself, as a birthday event, and when Steve D wrote a sequel of sorts I participated in the playtest of that as well.
Afterwards, I tinkered with the basic format of Sunset Claws to create a similar “Very Special LARP Episode” for my own gaming group, a live-action session of the tabletop game I was running at the time. It was loads of fun. One of my players wrote another LARP, a steampunk one, again based on the same basic framework.
I’ve played in and ran a couple of other scenarios over the years as well, but I kept coming back to the simple rules I’d first encountered in Sunset Claws as pretty much my ideal.
Sunset Claws is where I started when I began writing Blackened Hearts, and I feel like I did a good job of replacing and updating the mechanics, customising them for the type of game I wanted to write, and just generally making the rules better than they were when I found them. I’m especially happy with the Crease/Tear mechanic I devised for pacing use of characters’ abilities throughout the scenario.
When I was writing, I gave a lot of thought to how complex it should be, plot-wise. You want enough complexity that everyone has plenty to do, but not so much that it becomes overwhelming and players don’t have time to do what they need to do.
The basis of the scenario is two major plots, each of which everyone can get involved with as they affect everyone on the crew: one is a bit of political intrigue around the captaincy and the other is the potential existence of a supernatural threat. If the cast is just the “core” eight characters, there is also a single side plot that characters get involved in. With that few players, the intrigue and action focuses very heavily on the two major plots.
If the full fifteen characters are used, however, I felt that there simply wasn’t enough material to keep everyone busy. To address this, each character beyond the core eight either adds a significant additional complication to an existing plot, or introduces an entirely new small side plot. This makes things increasing more chaotic as more people are added and I’d say that if you want the scenario to really shine you should definitely pull together a full cast of fifteen than going with just the core.
I think I ended up striking a good balance and the feedback from the live playtest seems to bear that out. I received a lot of great feedback from the playtest and made significant changes not only to the characters but the underlying mechanics of the game based on it. You can’t see exactly how well a game will work while you’re writing it — you need to chuck it at actual people, see how it survives contact with real players, before you can get a proper understanding of how well it’s put together.
A note on gender: “Are you a girl or a boy?” “I’m a pirate!” “Well yes, but what’s in your pants?” “Spanish doubloons!” All characters have been written as gender-neutral, so players are free to pick whichever gender they feel most comfortable roleplaying as when choosing a character (or to leave it ambiguous).
Blackened Hearts is available as a Pay-What-You-Want download from DriveThruRPG — please head over and grab a copy!
The story so far…
It is a fine day for larceny upon the high seas indeed! The Devil hisself must have blest the crew of the Black Kraken with his own luck—how else could it be that you would happen upon the fat Spanish treasure galleon the Urca de Lima, separated from her escort and crippled by one of the worst storms that ever scoured the ocean? Then again, even in these most favourable circumstances, the Spaniards fought long and hard before you finally took her. The Urca de Lima now trails behind you, a small prize crew doing what they can to keep her limping along just long enough to get to the port of Tortuga.
It’s been clear sailing all week all the way back to Tortuga—almost suspiciously easy-going and peaceful, in fact—and without much to do the crew’s been going stir-crazy thinking about how they’ll spend their ill-gotten rewards. In fact, the Captain’s arranged for an early share of the loot to be divided amongst the crew. Those who aren’t needed to sail the ship are able to enjoy the rest of the evening with a little bit of early gambling and drinking, so everyone is in high spirits. All that’s left now is to enjoy the rest of the evening as you coast into port, and maybe swindle some of your fellows out of their share.
Wait, what’s all this about a curse?
Blackened Hearts is a live action roleplaying (LARP) scenario for 8 to 15 players plus a Game Master (GM) that runs for approximately two and a half hours, not including set up and tidying afterward.
In a LARP, you take on the role of a character and physically act out that character’s actions, pursuing their goals and interacting with other players while remaining ‘in character’. More specifically, this scenario is a parlour-style LARP, meaning that the area of play is confined to a relatively small area and the focus is on roleplay and intrigue rather than combat.
Blackened Hearts uses a very simple set of mechanics to govern what a character is able to do in the context of the scenario. It is designed to be played with the assistance of a GM who will facilitate the game.
The download package includes a main document that outlines everything you need to know to play and printable PDF versions of all material that need to be printed prior to the LARP.
