Publishing a LARP scenario

[travisjhall]

Hi all. I'm new around here, but I've been lurking as a guest for a while now. Something happened recently that I thought I might ask you people about, though, so now I'm registered.

Recently, I had a conversation with someone I met that was only tangentally related to this, but it caused a circuit in my brain to close, and I realised I might actually have a publishable work. Just to provide a question for people to respond to, most of the following is intended as a "What do you think about this? Have I missed something important?"

A few years back, I wrote a LARP - actually, it's what is commonly called a "freeform" in the Australian parlance, which is essentially a live-action game for at least a dozen people (and often several dozen) with a light to non-existant system, generally in a social setting (thus reducing the "action" part of "live-action" to a bunch of people talking to each other). It was a very successful LARP, getting a lot of very nice comments from some people who know a lot more about this sort of thing than I do, after running it at a convention.

This game is a complete scenario, run without a game system (doesn't need one, can't think of any use for one). It is designed to be run in about four hours, with 24 players and possibly multiple GMs (but the truth is, one GM can run it just fine). The bulk of the game is the write-ups of the 24 characters (yes, all pre-gens - this is not a scenario into which players' own characters can be added). Those write-ups, put together, come to over 50,000 words - as in well over.

Now, I've seen a lot of talk here about publishing indie systems or adventures, but this one seems to be a bit different from that. It is entirely stand-alone, but is a single scenario.

Part of the little revelation I had was that PDF publishing is really the perfect way to deliver something like this. If it was published as a physical book, the buyer would have to photocopy almost the entire thing to use it. It would be better, I think, for the buyer to have the work in electronic form, to make it easy to print out, and even better, easy to modify if it is thought better to tailor characters slightly to suit the players. (I wouldn't do that, but some GMs might.) PDF publishing is easy for me, and better for my target audience - everyone wins.

This product would be a buy once, play with your club thing. As such, I wouldn't expect to sell very many copies. It's useless to those who don't have a club or equivalent to play the game with. I'd be perfectly happy for a gaming club to buy it - I'd encourage it, in fact. It'd be a very cheap way for a club to hold a special event.

In light of that, I don't expect to get much money from the game. Maybe what I'm looking at is a form of vanity publishing. My thought is just that I've got this 50,000-word+ thing sitting on my hard drive, thoroughly play-tested, untouched for years at a time. Why not toss it out there and see if anyone wants to run it? Distributing through RPGnow, there wouldn't be any start-up costs, so I don't have to worry about financial loss. To tell the truth, I think selling the game rather than giving it away is important to me just to provide a disincentive to download the thing "just because". I'd rather not have someone get the scenario to run for their club, and then have one or more club members download the scenario and read about everyone else's character's secrets. People won't generally do that if it would cost them money.

I've written some other good (non-LARP) scenarios, but I'd hesitate to publish even the best of them. Either they are written for a published system, or have ties to someone else's published works, or both, and nothing else feels as complete and self-contained as this one. This LARP is completely without strings of any kind, not counting millennia-old religious texts and folklore.

Hurdles to overcome... Well, I don't have a proper GM briefing written up. What the GM has to know is all in my head. However, that's no big deal. I've been promising a friend that I'd give him a complete copy of the scenario, with a GM briefing, so that's coming anyway.

There's no artwork, and that might be a bigger concern. I'm not worried about a lack of interior art. As 95% of the scenario is character write-ups, designed to be printed and handed out to players, I think it is more important to keep most of it largely free of illustration. Perhaps a picture of each character would be nice, but that would require 24 (well, 23 - two characters are identical twins) pictures, and I'd probably put them in as full-page pics anyway. They'd be good for a visual representation of the characters, anyway. I've been thinking that a cover illustration would be good though. My wife might draw something for the cover, but her usual style wouldn't fit. (She almost went into animation, but this isn't really a cartoony game.) Maybe I can get one of my artist friends to draw something suitable (maybe even in exchange for a cut of the profits - meagre though that would be). A cover pic would at least give something on RPGnow to catch the eye of a prospective buyer. Given the nature of the work, I'm not sure that a buyer would even bother printing the cover.

So, what does everyone think? Might there be any interest in buying such a LARP scenario? Even one play-group, somewhere in the world, would probably make it worth it to me. And how much would be a reasonable price for this? I've been thinking maybe just US$5 or US$10 would be fine.

[Walt Freitag]

Hi Travis, and welcome to the Forge!

Even one play-group, somewhere in the world, would probably make it worth it to me.

That settles it right there, doesn't it? Given that, I can't fathom how you could possibly not publish it.

I have lots more advice and suggestions, but I'm going to leave it all for another post because I don't want it to distract from the one really important point here. Yes, you should take advantage of this whole Internet accessible-publishing revolution thing. (If not you, then who's that all for?) Publish it.

- Walt