For me, LARP (Live Action Role Playing) is all about playing interesting characters, dressing up in funky costumes and running around hitting people with foam weapons. It's like re-enactment with less worries about historical accuracy- history is a source of inspiration, not a set of constraints. Sometimes that's a relief, sometimes I prefer to be more authentic. Hence I do both!

I do wish there were metal weapons in LARP though, foam weapons feel exceedingly silly.

Masquerades & Massacres - Maelstrom - Odyssey - Serenity - White City

Masquerades & Massacres is a LARP I run myself. It's a fun mix of Jane Austen, Sharpe, Flashman, Strange & Norrell, Temeraire and Aliens vs Predator. As the organiser I play lots of NPC roles- but the characters that I like the most are Admiral James Ford-Gillette (a somewhat disgraceful elderly war hero) and Starets Makariy (a Rasputin-esque Russian Orthodox monk).

The main website is here.

Masquerades & Massacres - Maelstrom - Odyssey - Serenity - White City

I've been playing Maelstrom since 2008, and really enjoy it. It's a massive fest, filled with fascinating characters, based on the colonisation of the New World.

My current primary character is Papa Ab-Gal, a Native Eidolon, but I also sometimes play a secondary character herald called Canting.

Baron Samedi is one of my favourite archetypes, I had bits of his costume already, and I haven't had a chance to be him for a while. So I decided that Maelstrom was time to bring back the Baron. Time for the tattered clothes, skull face-paint, battered top-hat and lots of rum. But what should he be? Undead? Or a necromancer? Or a priest? I considered all those ideas, but in the end the Eidolon concept called. Eidolons are immortal servants and messengers of the gods, something like angels or daemons. And as the New World gods included Jaguar, God of Pleasure, I soon decided that my Eidolon concept would be a messenger of Jaguar. And what to call him? Papa Legba is a good voodoo god-name for a messenger concerned with fertility. But I couldn't just be called Legba. Hmm... Legba backwards is Abgel, but that is too like Angel. Abgal, on the other hand, sounded right and was also the name of the servants of Enki (who is clearly the Sumarian equivalent of Jaguar). And thus Papa Ab-Gal, Loa of Jaguar, was born. I've loved playing with the Natives. The snakes are interesting, the bugs are so frickin' scary, Horn's Jaguarites Did It Right. Religion is wonderful at Maelstrom. There's this great triangle: Mortals pray to the NPC Gods, the NPC Gods tell the Eidolons what to do, the Eidolons encourage the Mortals to pray. Very elegant. Being an Eidolon is very hard work though, especially one as active as Papa! So Papa will soon be retiring, or possibly being suspended for a bit.

Masquerades & Massacres - Maelstrom - Odyssey - Serenity - White City

Odyssey is the new LARP/LRP by Profound Decisions. Everyone's getting very excited about it! It's set in a mythical version of the Hellenistic World- in this world Alexander overstepped the mark, and the Gods exacted terrible vengance on him and his followers. The Gods have now decreed there will be no more wars, and all conflict between the 5 great cultures (ancient Persia, mysterious Egypt, blood-soaked Carthage, heroic Greece and bold young Rome) will be sorted out at The Annual.

I've got SO MANY GROUP IDEAS: Persian nomads, Greek symposion of philosophers, a Cult of Mithras, Greek maenads... Who knows what I'll end up doing!

Masquerades & Massacres - Maelstrom - Odyssey - Serenity - White City

I love Firefly, I love Serenity, I love immersive LARP with high costume and roleplaying standards. Hence I was delighted to find the Serenity LRP website. As luck would have it, one of my friends was planning to turn up as a group of carnival folk, a crew-without-a-ship; I decided the perfect complement would be to be a captain-without-a-crew. Later two of my other friends decided to come and joined my ship's crew, leaving me with a ship with three permanent crew and a whole load of transported carnies.

Our only event so far has been Event 3, in 2007. This was an excellent event, and I definitely want to return!