A long time friend and I (both in our 40’s and friends since we we teenagers) got to talking last night about old games at a local convention and suddenly my brain is on fire with how perfect Blades in the Dark would be for a LARP.
One gm with each crew, 4-6 players per crew. Each player and crew type has predefined relationships with the other playsheets and crews. Set initial position. Set up a central hub for collating data and plot. Set players loose.
I can’t stop thinking about it.
Blades in the LARP?
Sounds intriguing.
📌
It’s a cool idea but only the setup works for larp. Getting the heist feel would be really hard.
I think it would come off as something either similar to one of the Oceans films, the Italian Job, or Reservoir Dogs…either crews are pulling scores on one another trying to nab the Maltese Falcon, or they end up killing each other off.
I feel you might run into issues with score and free play vs downtime due to them working on different time scales. For a crew that goes threw scores quickly, they will somehow end up farther on the fictional timeline then those that go slower. Which could be solved by making downtime mode and none-downtime mode be aligned to be the same for everyone, but that could making pacing odd.
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Gorinich Serpant , that is a good point. We realize there will be some hurdles, but we are definitely going to give it a try. I am going to need to design a smaller character sheet that can fold up and some sort of folder for players to use. I am sure other issues will come up, too.
The way I see that working is to have the players as heads of factions. Heists are something that they order, choosing a leader from their stable of leaders. The heist outcome is generated in a 5 minute window and the results reported back as appropriate; maybe a discreet note to the one who triggered it, or an announcement of city-wide news, or maybe a blustering underling making demands too loudly of one boss. Whatever.
Design tier, hold, and turf, and then set an objective for the LARP (like controlling Bellwether, for example, or organizing the docks under your faction.)
To do both, have a session in the morning, one mid-day, and one at night, and in between have various crews tackle the heists assigned to them by their tier leaders. Then the outcomes affect the next session of tier-level larp.
We are going to run a smaller scale LARP, only lasting 6 hours total. The idea of the player’s being the heads of factions has merit.