Hey Survivors,
There are a lot of LARPs designed to explore stuff at the edge of human experience. Prison experiments and concentration camps, militia and guerrilla warfare, and yeah - even topics like sexual assault. We aren’t really that type of LARP, even when we get close to it we have a HEAVY culture of Opt-In/Opt-Out.
We have a few tools to tell you the things we will go into - and it’s called our ingredients list. This is an attempt of giving you a comprehensive list of the ingredients that we will put in our story. Now - this isn’t to say they will all be present all the time, or all present at a really high level. Some of them are pretty spicy - so we use them sparingly.
Sometimes we’ll have plots that either go outside this list, or go heavier on the spice. You will ALWAYS have a chance to review these extra or emphasized ingredients and be asked to Opt-In. Knowledge is power and we want you to have it before you opt-into a plot.
Okay, so now some of you are going “duh Krista, we know this cause you put it on the website and we read every page of that thing”. ….Okay maybe not that exactly, but anyway - we also created a list of Banned and Discouraged Concepts.
Take a peek at those and then come back. I’ll wait, promise.
Okay…done?
Alright, so here’s why that list is important. Not all of us have the same experiences and traumas. What seems like either ‘not a big deal’ or ‘a neat element to add to game’ to one person might be the thing that sends someone to cry in a corner. So what’s that mean for you?
Keep those discouraged concepts in mind and understand that something that you don’t fully understand, and want to explore via LARP - might be very traumatic for someone else to see in a game space.
Example (w/ permission from Krystal): Krystal, player of Bambi, was struck by lightning just outside the boathouse. She jokes about it and makes light of it a lot (sometimes I call her sparky when she’s getting sassy) - because like many of us that’s how she dealt/deals with the trauma. However, if Krista fakes getting struck by lightning and falls to the ground in front of Krystal during a storm - that’s gonna be super upsetting for her for a lot of good reasons.
So anyway, there’s no one incident that caused this post (no really, if you’re feeling unspecific guilt that you may have been the reason I’m writing…stahp) - it’s just not a topic we go over regularly and reminding everyone and explaining the whys is always a good thing to take time to do. <3