Level Up!

Level Up!

Credits

Version 1.1+

Jennifer started making some small but systemic changes of the game based on the v1.1 observations. The opportunity to run at Summer LARPin' came before she could finish. She rolled back some of the changes, but not all of them. Thus, v1.1+ is not quite v1.2, but it is more than v1.1.

Version 1.1

We were psyched by the Intercon run. It was too late to bid the game to run at RPI's Dice Bubble. The Brandeis Festival of LARPs needed bids, and we decided that Julie and Jennifer could run through their list of fixes noted in their readthroughs before and after Intercon. Gaylord also had some ideas and changes he wanted to make.

The changes were finished just after Jennifer's printer stopped working, the Thursday before the game. There were two rushed printing jobs at Staples. Jennifer and her son Jordan stuffed the game, finishing all the packing after Julie brought a stack of really cool new item cards she'd sliced and diced into two large piles.

The noon run had ten players, and ran the entire two hours. The 2 PM run had a full complement of twelve players, and Julie and Jennifer had to run, hide, and dance as NPC/GMs, for two more hours. There was a lot of laughter, singing, rising threats, rapping, clever play, bad puns, and more.

Level Up! will run again. The LARP has clearly leveled up!

Version 1.0

In 2014, Jennifer Diewald, Tim Lasko, Theresa Sullivan and Gaylord Tang wrote This Time For Sure: Boris Badenov's Gulag For Unrepentant Children The LARP was written at NELCO 2014, in 24 hours. We had a lot of fun writing it, and more fun running it. It's run several times since then.

In 2016, the four of us wrote Adrift on the Starry Sky. The LARP was written at NELCO 2016, in 24 hours. We really clicked on the topic, the design, and the writing flowed. The resulting LARP has generated some amazing play, and has run many times since then, including in the UK.

In 2018, the format of NELCO changed dramatically, and there was no time or room for a 24 hour LARP writing workshop.

The four of us agreed that we had to write something together again. Since Jennifer was no longer on the NEIL Board, she was eligible to write in the Intercon S Iron GM competition It seemed a great chance to write together again. Julie Diewald wanted to write as well, and everyone was good with that. Julie and Gaylord found a two bedroom hotel suite in Connecticut, which was about in the middle of the five of us.

The Iron GM Coordinators wanted a team name, we didn't have one, so an off-handed "We're Working On It" comment by Jennifer became our team name.

Four of us gathered at the hotel on January 25th, 2019. Despite Tim being closest to the site, he Skyped into the discussion, for good real life reasons. It was not a problem.

The instructions arrived at 8 PM. Write a LARP for 5 to 12 players, with the ingredients of:

We wrestled with the ingredients, but it wasn't long before we narrowed in on a viable game idea. When we're all on the same page, as we'd been twice before, good things happen. Level Up! was born.

Writing a game is a challenge. Writing a game that runs well for five players or twelve players is really difficult. We came up with what we think is a novel solution.

Somewhere in the night, we realized our team name was still We're Working On It. We needed a better name. Not Set in Stone floated to the top, probably from Theresa. We changed our team name. It was very meta.

Later in the night, we all agreed on a simple combat system, stealing directly from Boris Badenov. None of us actually wrote this into the game materials. Combat shouldn't really happen in the game, but Oops!

We managed to get everything together for the Saturday 8 PM deadline. We sent all of the materials in. There was one last quick change that followed after a moment, and then we were done. That's when we learned some Iron GM lessons:

LESSON 1: As always, in any LARP writing effort, you'll find a handful of "oops" shortly after submission. You can't change them in this competition.

LESSON 2: There was just over a month between submission and runtime. That meant there was time to go over everything. We made lists of things we'd missed, things we'd forgotten, and noted a few paragraphs that were simply strange or incomprehensible in the light of day. There's a good game there, which needs the usual set of first revisions — which we couldn't do.

LESSON 3: When you write a new LARP, the first desire is to talk about it. You want to announce it to the world. You want to talk about the clever things you've done. You want to run it. We had to be quiet about everything, including our participation in the contest, until after the last Iron GM game ran. Any discussion might change the impartiality of the scoring. Waiting and staying silent is the hardest part.

The Iron GM judges read through all the game submissions, to score them. We were told that some bits of Level Up! made the judges laugh.

On Sunday morning, February 24th, at 9:30 AM, we gathered at the function space assigned to Level Up! We got eight very good players, which was great — that let us test out our novel approach to the variability of the size of the game. The players were clearly amused as they read the characters. Then the game began, and it was wonderfully silly. Goals were met. Characters leveled up. Everyone was laughing. They left the game happy, talking excitedly about what they had done. That's a win in our book.

We didn't win the competition, but Level Up! is another LARP we can run many, many times, that players will enjoy. We're already working through the lists of fixes, planning for a second run.