Larp Design Series (1 of Series): Writing the World You Actually Want to Run
Every LARP begins with a choice: are you running a game inside someone else's world, or are you writing your own? If you're writing your own, you need to be honest with yourself about what that really means. Building a game world isn't about throwing together a few interesting ideas. It's about constructing a foundation that other people will build on—through their characters, their stories, and their interpretations of your work. You're not just writing a story. You're writing the mythology and the definition of the setting's reality. There are good reasons to create your own world. Maybe the stories you want to tell don’t quite fit into someone else’s framework. Maybe you’re building around a core theme that hasn’t been explored in the genre the way you want it to be. Or maybe you just want full creative control. But creating a new world means taking on more than just writing lore. You're designing a mythology that has to make sense to other people and hold up under the pressure of hundreds of individual narratives running at the same time.
When you build your own mythology, you’re setting the stage for others to create stories inside it—many of which will be far removed from your original ideas. This is part of the process. At some point, your world will no longer belong entirely to you. Players will interpret, shift, bend, and even contradict your work, intentionally or not. Some parts will be misunderstood. Others will be ignored. This is the natural outcome of writing a shared universe. Death of the author isn’t a risk; it’s a feature. You need to want to see this world in action. You need to want to see what players do with it, how they stress-test it, where they fill in the blanks. If your passion is tied to tight control or single-story outcomes, you're going to have a hard time. But if you enjoy the idea of giving people a playground and watching what they build, you're in the right place.
Start by deciding what kind of experience you're actually trying to run. Not what you think people want, or what looks good on a flier. What kind of game do you want to spend your time building, writing for, and answering questions about for years? Is it heavy narrative drama? Pulp action? Bleak survival? Hopeful reconstruction? You need to know what the emotional center of your game world is before you start writing anything. That emotional focus will shape your setting, your conflicts, your cultures, and your mechanics.
Once you know what kind of game you want to run, decide if you actually need to write a new world. There is no shame in running a game using someone else's IP or setting, as long as you have that writer’s permission. If what you're trying to run already exists in a system or world built by someone else, don't reinvent the wheel just to say you did. Building a world from scratch is a lot of work, and most of that work isn't fun. It's taxonomy. It's internal logic. It's knowing why one culture acts differently from another, and making sure your documents don't contradict themselves three chapters later.
If you're committed to building something new, then start by creating a clear framework. What do players need to know to understand your world? What do they need to know to play in it effectively? What are the core conflicts? What themes are consistent across the setting? Avoid writing thousands of words of timeline and backstory before you've answered those questions. Focus on what players need to read before their first event.
You also need to separate worldbuilding from storytelling. A lot of new world designers write backstory that is actually just a character arc or a single plot line. That material has value, but it's not the same as worldbuilding. Worldbuilding is about what's typical, not what was exceptional. When you write your documents, be clear about whether you're describing the world as it is, or telling a specific story that happened in it. If you blur that line too much, your setting will feel vague and inconsistent.
Build what you need. Don’t create twelve religions if only one shows up in play. Don’t write a six-thousand-year history if players only need to know the last thirty. Focus your energy on the parts of the world that create meaningful choices and scenes. Expand from there. Make the core documents readable and usable. Save the deep dives and longform lore for optional material.
Most importantly, you need to want to see this world in action. You need to be excited to run games in it, write for it, fix problems in it, and hand it over to players who will do things with it that you never expected. If that doesn't sound like something you want to manage long-term, you're not ready to write your own world. But if it does? Start small. Build smart. Write the world you actually want to run, not the one you think you're supposed to.
