Fan Club “Blog” #23: Getting into LARP oh dang oh no

The Furby's awake! Welcome back to business, Quinns Quest patrons! Happy New Year!

I've got a couple of announcements.

You folks will be happy to know that following my dramatic burnout post at the end of 2025 (one has to imagine me delivering that speech unshaven and with one half of my shirt collar sticking vertically upwards) I am much recovered. While my tea was brewing last week I caught myself practicing high kicks in the kitchen, and said aloud "Yeah, I'm probably getting back to normal." My machinery? It's humming. ⚙️⚙️⚙️✨

I start filming season 2 episode 5 tomorrow, and the moment I hand the SD cards to my editor I'm equipped to start writing episode 6. Last weekend I also started playing a campaign of a new TTRPG you'll see in season 3, and this coming Friday I'm starting to play another new game that you might also see in season 3.

So yeah. I just want to give a huge, 2026-sized thank you to all of you patrons who allowed me to take some extra time off. It's exactly what I needed.

But I've got one other, more secret announcement for you.

If you follow me on Bluesky you may have seen this post where I said I was going to have 11 of my RPG players over at the same time, and I wanted recommendations for a LARP we could play together?

Folks, don't be scared... but we had such a good time that in 2026 - while 95% of this channel will still be covering pen and paper RPGs - I'm going to find the room (and the time) to squeak some content on the main channel to get people to try LARPs.

The above image is doubly misleading, since not only is that not a photo me, I'm not talking about traditional fantasy LARPing. But I love his energy, so the picture stays.

Let me get in front of any preconceptions, as if I was laying out humane pest traps for your prejudices. 📥🐀

Oh no, Quinns, I don't want to go outside and hit strangers with foam scimitars

Yeah! I don't either (for now). What I've been dipping into is the world of "Chamber LARPs".

These are LARPs designer to be played in a single evening, often in just one or two rooms. Imagine a one-shot TTRPG that you'd play at your table, but the only differences are that there are no dice and you're not glued to the table. You can become a free-range roleplayer, grabbing your friends for a private chat in the other room or climbing into a wardrobe for a quiet moment.

Oh no, Quinns, don't LARPs need loads of people? I have like 2 friends I roleplay with

I've got good news! That's no excuse either. Chamber LARPs have quite specific player counts, but remember how my review of Tacklebox last year talked about it being a 2 player LARP? Turns out there are plenty of great chamber LARPs for 3, 4, 5 and 6 players, and I'll be namechecking them first and foremost.

Hell, I'll do it right now! If you pledge to the Bully Pulpit Patreon you're able to download years of great LARP designs, for free, plenty of them built for super small groups.

Oh no, Quinns, aren't LARPs like... acting? I'm not a theatre kid

Get it twisted! Everyone says the same thing before they get used to "Speaking in character" in TTRPGs. As you reading this well know from TTRPGs, it's not about acting, it's about re-connecting with the part of you that used to play pretend as a kid. You just... blow the dust off that part of your hardware. More than half of the players in my home games don't have a "theatre kid" bone in their body and they're loving our home LARPs.

Chamber LARPs - by definition - drop you into dramatic situations where there's no room to be worried about your performance, because you'll already be worried about the exploding spaceship or cannibal dinner party or existential question you're stuck inside of.

Oh no, Quinns, I'm just still kind of unexcited

NO! You're WRONG!!!

Look, I wasn't even supposed to be playing RPGs over the holiday season. I was meant to be recovering from burnout by - let me quote my last post - "Doing nothing."

And yet! Please picture me on the 23rd of December, metaphorically running my fingers over more than twenty different LARP .pdfs I'd had recommended, flicking from tab to tab, my imagination absolutely glutted on this new seam of game design I'd just found.

How did I get so hooked?

Okay. Let me tell you about my experience playing my first LARP ever: The Tribunal, by Finnish designer J. Tuomas Harviainen. Like a lot of LARPs, the above link is a totally free download if you want to have a read.

The Tribunal was recommended to me by legendary designer Jason Morningstar, who you might know as the creator of Fiasco, Night Witches and most recently Desperation, though actually Jason's TTRPG output is dwarfed by the number of LARPs he's created. He told me The Tribunal was the LARP he's run more than any other, and after playing it, I could see why. The experience is as smooth as a glass orb.

(For context, my players and I had also just done the Hot Ones experience literally right before we played The Tribunal, which made us extremely tender and giddy. And while I appreciate that the above linked hot sauce set is fscking expensive, doing Hot Ones straight into your first LARP is maybe a perfect evening?)

You can think of The Tribunal as Twelve Angry Men meets Animal Farm. If you prefer, you could think of it as "Twelve Angry Animals".

Here's how it works: Everyone in the game plays soldiers in the (one imagines) compulsory military service of a corrupt, totalitarian state. Before the LARP starts, two members of your unit, Magpie and Badger, have been arrested for stealing bread. The most likely outcome is that they're going to be shot. In 90 minutes, you each need to go and give private testimony to the tribunal.

There's just one problem. You all know Magpie and Badger didn't do it, and that the most likely culprit was your superior officer, Major Pig. But testifying against him is probably a good way to get yourselves killed.

So what do you say? Because one thing's for sure- it's going to look extremely bad if your unit can't agree on the same story.

As you can see from the above pile of testimonies, my unit did not all tell the same story. We were probably all killed. I blame everybody else. 😒

But that's the whole game. When you're ready to begin you all choose your characters, turn the lights down to something moody, put on a tense soundtrack, and enjoy the ride.

And I'm telling you guys- the 90 minutes that The Tribunal takes (plus the following two hours where we all talked about the experience) were so good, I was sold on LARPs for life. And not for nothing, it also filled my heart with a kind of golden light to discover that in 2026, I'd be able to create at least one video where the TTRPG community wouldn't be rolling their eyes that I'm covering this game instead of that game or that I liked this mechanic but complained about that one, because NOBODY is playing chamber LARPs, which is a wild injustice, so I get to run onstage like a wrestler and deliver a review like I'm beating the TTRPG community with a steel chair.

(Which is my favourite kind of review to write.)

So, why was The Tribunal good?

It'd be cheeky if I didn't mention that it was partially because I was playing with 11 of my closest friends. But then it's also strong because the LARP gives you a desperate and emotional puzzle to try and unpick from minute one like you're on an episode of The Genius (see me talking about that show here). But mostly, it's about the characters.

On a surface level, each of you is named after an animal, so you've got Cat and Rat and Elk and Peacock, which is slick design that gives you an immediate physicality that you carry into your role, while also making it effortless to (a) learn everyone's name and vibe in five minutes and (b) be gossiping and crashing out about one another within ten minutes.

But there's so much more-- one thing that immediately set my design brain on fire when it comes to LARPs is that with TTRPGs, it's usually the job of the GM to create adversity for the players. With a LARP, that adversity is created by having a cast of characters that are designed to create the emotional equivalent of a poison bubblebath when you put them together. Some of you have families you want to get back to, for some of you the military is your family. Others of you care about justice, others see this as an opportunity for advancement, others something funnier- Peacock doesn't particularly care about the tribunal, but always wants to be the centre of attention.

All the same, a lesser work of game design might see the game descending into dry debate, but The Tribunal never does, and a big part of that is your hierarchy. And this is another fascinating difference from TTRPGs! With pen and paper roleplaying we all put a lot of effort into making sure that we all get an equal amount of limelight. In The Tribunal, some of you are at home in the spotlight, some of you interrogate other characters, some of you hang on another character's every word, and some of you find one another in the shadows.

Half of you are good soldiers, some of you are loud, and I was playing Wolf, who's both. But my sheet also told me that I'd more or less do whatever my friend Hawk said, whereas Hawk's sheet says that he's a sociopath. Half the cast is explicitly instructed to bully Mouse, which sounds horrible until you remember that Mouse's players signed up to this, and in a fucked up way gets to be the centre of a lot of scenes. All of which means that it actually becomes part of the game who and when speaks in public or private, and who notices that.

I could tell you so much about the magic of what happened when we actually got to playing-- about the blazing arguments and panicked, private conversations about someone's ego or motivations or who's pulling their strings. I could tell you about Bison having a quiet one-on-one with Crane in a private room that led to her crying. But if I had to sell you on LARP with a single anecdote, it's a bit of a sideways one:

90 minutes is not a long game, right? With a TTRPG, often you've only found your rhythm by the third evening, or maybe the sixth. Now, imagine you're 30 minutes into a TTRPG. You're barely half-way through learning the rules at that point.

There was a point just 30 minutes into The Tribunal where, as Wolf, I opened the door to a darkened room in my flat and saw Cat, Rat and Raven talking to each other. On glimpsing this I had an instantaneous, physical response in my gut because not only did I know these three characters like I'd known them for days, I carried a different mixture of love and fear and hatred for each of them. And while I had no idea what they were talking about, I had at least four ideas, none of them good.

That's bonkers. That is a level of immersion, a Sailor Moon-like level of strength and glimmer to this game's magic circle that I haven't experienced since before I started Quinns Quest. And this feeling only got stronger as the LARP went on. 12 characters is a lot of people, and in no time at all I had such a strong feeling about every single player that if one of them walked up and joined the conversation I was having, I'd experience - in fact, let me lay it all out for you...

Rat? Mistrust. Raven? Wariness. Elk? Impatience. Peacock? Anger. Dog? Confidence. Mouse? Hated. Hawk? Relief. Stork? Care. Cat? Violent impulses. And Bison? Nervousness.

So yeah. As you can imagine, I came out of The Tribunal with a memory that fills me with nothing less than awe. Since then I've played seven more LARPs, Perfection (about a cult in crisis), The Gooseberry Marriage (a comedy) and The Pigeon Wager (a tense LARP for just three players), and four LARPs I played at a well-timed chamber LARP festival in London.

But right now, I'm all too aware that what I'm playing is just the tip of the iceberg of this scene. So as Quinns Quest continues this year, know that I'll be taking a bit of time to map out this iceberg, and see what other gems are inside.

"Quinns," you say, "that's madness. Icebergs don't have gems in."

OH REALLY? Watch and learn.

Let's get into another year of Quinns Quest, everybody. 😄

-- Quinns xx