How to make 100 different NPC's

Let's say your larp consists of 20 players (on a good day). You have a budget of whatever you can scrape together. You have some basic skills, such as building weapons, simple sewing, basic construction... But with limited garb and resources how do you make varied NPC's? How do show the players what monster they face with verisimilitude and without expensive garb? How do you make that disposable hoard come to life? Here is one simple thing you can do to make 100's of NPC's, with the basic skills you already have.

GoPro for Larp?

I have acquired a GoPro Hero3 White Edition. As well as a fairly significant number of devices which strap it to myself and other things. The box has a handy plastic plate which looks durable enough to mount on a shield. :) Free mount, that was intended to be packaging. Thanks GoPro!

The camera is small! The picture that you see on this page is not much smaller than the camera itself. Well Ok, the picture is about half the size of the real camera. Perhaps my perspective is skewed due to my size. Everything about the camera is tiny.

My intention was to film practice last week, but it ended up not happening. Filming yourself is a great way to learn what you're doing wrong that you don't notice. You will notice some tiny, and some not so tiny things you don't even know you're doing.

While I'm learning how to use it I'll need to shoot movies of interesting things. Gosh, where ever shall I find something interesting to take pictures of?! Hopefully I can bring it with me to a larp or two.

Kite Shield Progress, and a great handle trick.

There may currently be three ongoing shield projects in my home, at the moment.  This was not in any way intentional. But suddenly there are all these opportunities to get crafty. Captain Tripps is entirely at fault for being so dang inspirational! Check out his shield, entirely foam, and plastidip. It's amazing. Now let's check out what I've been up to.

First Playtest Session.

The first play test session of Relational Character Creation is complete. It went well. Some unexpected things came up, and some interesting new sample houses were generated. Most of them are ones that I would enjoy playing. Additionally I learned some things about what to do and what not to do while play testing.

Dungeon Bar Crawl 2014

So apparently there was this thing called the "Dungeon Bar Crawl" held in 2013. A bunch of gamers got together and created a bar crawl "Because, at some point in your life, you've wanted to walk into a bar, and be approached by a mysterious figure saying, 'I am hiring adventurers for a quest. Would you like to go on a quest?' ". When asked to join the 2014 DBC, I was initially apprehensive. But was talked into joining because it's basically larp.

Firefly 2014

It's been a while since I went camping. When the opportunity came up to visit Firefly this year, I decided to go. It wasn't a sure bet, as the group of people who go are not usually the crowd that I hanging around with. Any trepidation on my part, in retrospect, was less about how they are as a community and more about my own social anxiety. It was a great event, attended by many wonderful people. By Friday I decided I want to go back.

Playtesting A Larp Fiasco

The next step to polishing Relational Character Design for Larp is some individual playtesting. This is somewhat analogous to paper prototyping for software game development. This system does not really need a wire frame, as there is no UI. The current rules set can simply be printed out on paper and then roll some dice. Here are some cleaned up versions of the prototypes in Google Docs format.