The Time Is Now, And The Person Is You.

Ok everyone. This one has the potential to get a little dark, so consider that the warning label on the package. Then again, if you are someone I talk to regularly, you probably already know what aisle you wandered into. We talk about the good stuff, the bad stuff, the things that worked, the things that blew up spectacularly, and occasionally the uncomfortable reality that none of us gets to keep doing this forever.

There really are not that many people who make LARP when you look at the hobby at scale. There are plenty of people who play, contribute, volunteer, and make individual experiences better, but the number of people who sit down and decide to build an entire world is surprisingly small. The people who write hundreds of pages, convince someone that despite the reputation of the hobby that its a good idea to rent them a campground, recruit a staff, build props until two in the morning, answer twenty emails about sleeping accommodations, and then somehow still have enough functioning brain cells left to tell a story on Friday night are a pretty strange little tribe.

Most of us did not start doing it because we thought it was going to become a career. We thought maybe, just maybe, we could have our hobby cover its own expenses and afford to pay for us to do road trips. God knows most of us were not doing it for the money. We started because we loved this weird medium where a story could crawl off the page, put on boots, and punch you in the chest. But I think that its important to point out that a lot of the people who have been doing this for decades are not the young people in the room anymore. That sentence feels incredibly stupid to write because part of my brain remains firmly convinced that 1996 happened about fifteen minutes ago. Unfortunately, my knees, the calendar, and increasingly aggressive opinions about sleeping accommodations have entered contradictory evidence.

A lot of us are now building the worlds we wish somebody had built for us when we were eighteen or twenty-two. We are trying to create communities that make room for the people who once would have been standing awkwardly at the edge of the room. We are fixing things we watched break, carrying forward the things that worked, and spending an unreasonable amount of time arguing about whether twenty imaginary bullets is too many imaginary bullets. That is what generations of artists do. We inherit somebody else's tools, complain about half of them, improve a few, throw several directly into the trash, and then make something new.

The uncomfortable part is that every year there are fewer people from the waves that came before. Some burn out. Some decide they have given enough weekends to sleeping badly in cabins and answering questions at four in the morning. Some have a spectacular falling out with their community and become either a cautionary tale or a saint depending on which Discord server you happen to be reading. Some have actually been abused out of the hobby.

And some die.

Over roughly the last decade, I have lost somewhere between one and three people every year who I knew through writing, running, designing, or hosting LARP events. Some were close friends and people I lived with. Some were people I only saw a few weekends every year, but those weekends stretched across decades, which creates its own strange category of friendship. You realize eventually that somebody does not have to be part of your everyday life to have shaped it.

In the 1990s, a lot of the people running LARPs were in their twenties. We were figuring out what this strange art form even was while we were doing it. There were fewer examples, fewer resources, and certainly no endless library of videos explaining how to build your first event. So we stole ideas from theater, tabletop games, haunted houses, historical reenactment, punk shows, Renaissance fairs, and whatever else happened to be lying around unattended.

Then we made some deeply questionable decisions. We also made some incredible things. That generation got older. The people who came before us got older too. Somewhere along the way, without anybody holding a meeting about it, people who once felt like the new kids became the institutional memory of an entire medium.

That is why I am writing this.

Not because I want anybody to feel bad for the people who have been doing this for thirty years. Most of us have received far more from this community than we ever expected when we first started dragging plywood through the woods. We have stories, friendships, families, careers, scars, and memories that would never have existed without this ridiculous hobby.

I am writing because there needs to be a next wave.

Not eventually.

Now.

There need to be twenty-year-olds looking at the things we built and saying, "That's cool, but I think I can do it better."

Good. Please do.

There need to be people starting tiny games in somebody's basement. There need to be people renting a pavilion for twelve friends and trying an idea that might completely fail. There need to be new designers experimenting with structures that make old designers squint at the screen and mutter, "I don't understand what the hell they are doing." That is how you know the art form is alive. You do not honor the people who built the road by refusing to drive past where they stopped.

You honor them by blasting your music, hanging your middle fingers out the window, and by going so much farther. One of the biggest lies creative people tell themselves is that there will eventually be a better time to start. After work calms down. After you have more money. After somebody teaches you the right way to do it. There is no right time. There is Thursday night, three people in a group chat, a terrible Google Doc, and somebody saying, "Okay, hear me out."

That is how half this hobby started.

The world is chaotic right now. Money is tight for a lot of people. Communities are fragmented, attention spans are being fed into industrial machinery, and nearly every creative project begins with someone explaining why it cannot possibly work. Do it anyway. If there is a game you wish existed, start working on it. If there is a style of LARP you have never seen, experiment with it. If you think the people who have been running games for twenty years are completely wrong about something, prove it by building something better.

And if you need help, ask us.

Seriously. Ask the old designers. Ask the burned-out organizers who still light up when somebody talks about encounter structure. Ask the person whose game made you fall in love with this hobby how they handled their first event. Most of us learned this stuff by screwing it up. We know where some of the holes are because we personally fell into them. You do not have to repeat every mistake just to earn your credentials. Take the knowledge. Steal the useful parts. Ignore the parts that no longer make sense.

Then go make something that belongs to your generation. Because someday, probably much sooner than any of us would prefer, some of the people whose names are attached to the games you love will not be around to answer questions anymore. Their notebooks will sit on shelves. Their hard drives will get cleaned out by somebody who has absolutely no idea why there are seven folders labeled FINAL_FINAL_REALFINAL.

That is not tragedy. That is time. The tragedy would be reaching that point and discovering nobody came after us.

I do not want LARP preserved in amber as something my generation figured out. I want to see what happens when another generation gets its hands on it and breaks every assumption we thought was permanent. I want someone thirty years from now telling a story about some bizarre game they played in 2028 that changed everything for them. Maybe that game is already being written. Maybe the person who is supposed to write it keeps telling themselves they are not experienced enough yet.

Start. Make the terrible first version. Invite twelve people. Learn what worked. Fix what did not. Then do it again.

Someday somebody else will stand on your shoulders too. Give them somewhere worth jumping from.