Blackpowder & Bloodlines is being run by Immersive Arts Melbourne - a group of experienced LARP writers and players who’ve participated in games all over Melbourne and around the world. We’re bringing our unique approach back to run the best game we can - and we need your help!
The campaign focuses on the interaction between Old World humans and New World orcs, their mutual struggle to survive, and the development of a new society. Humans from four nations as well as the orcs are available for player characters, all richly filled out with their own unique but recognisable cultures.
Our streamlined rules get out of the way and let players
engage in deep role-playing, with resources tracked by in-game tokens and some brutal but forgiving combat mechanics. Much of the game experience will result from emergent play driven by the search for resources, and their use. Success, story and survival will all depend on competition for these scarce resources.
The game itself is spread out over several different play spaces, both physically and conceptually, to allow players to pick and choose what parts they participate in. While each play space affects the others, it’s perfectly possible for a player to just do one thing they enjoy all event. Better still, players can work with friends to have an impact everywhere - and true power awaits whoever can best shepherd their assets.
Our goal is to create a campaign of at least five weekend events, for over a hundred players which engages and inspires everyone involved, creates an environment of real challenge, and leaves a lasting impression full of fond memories.
What We Need
We’re more than happy to do all the writing & testing on our own time: it’s fun, we love it and we’ll keep doing it as long as we can. But, we’re going big this time and some of this exciting stuff costs money. We’re asking for $6000 to help cover the major setup costs to help us get everything moving:
Insurance & Administration: $1000. This is our first hurdle. We can’t run without it, most sites need us to have it before they’ll even take a booking.
Site fees: $1250. If our game is going to be immersive, the choice of site is critical. We’re looking for a site that meets our atmospheric needs, as well as being able to support the hundred-plus people who’ll actually be at the event, so having some coin in the pocket will help us find the perfect place.
NPC costumes, weapons, gear: $2000. We have some big ideas, and for that we’ll need a big crew. NPCs are the key to developing really cool play experiences, and we want them to be awesome.
Props & set-pieces: $1000. We can make do with posterboard and string, but we’d prefer to do some really special stuff to bring the world to life. With your help, we can make it happen.
Website & photography: $400. The photography that comes out of LARP events is amazing, and it really helps to get people to events. We think this deserves proper recompense, and we’re tired of paying for it in booze and pizza.
GM Supplies, radios, first aid kits: $250. Making sure our Game Masters are properly-stocked, able to coordinate and look after everyone is a priority.
Storage & transport fees: $100. It’s not sexy, but we’ve got to put all our props somewhere.
If we don’t make our goal, we’ll still be running the game - even if we have to build stuff out of duct tape and cardboard!
What You Get
For the full run-down, have a look in the sideboard. Here's the highlights!
-
Crew and Leading Crew get our eternal gratitude. Thanks guys, every little bit helps!
-
If you want to pre-purchase a ticket to the first event, the ones you're probably looking for are the Stowaway, Passenger and First Class Passenger perks.
-
Officers get discounted entry to all our events, and Captains can buy their tickets up-front.
-
Privateers, Dockhands, Explorers and Navigators get some cool loot to take away.
-
Carpenters and Quartermasters can help us with some details to bring the game world to life.
-
The Master of Mint gets to help us write the ruler of one of the Old World nations, and if we make our stretch goals, their face will go on that nation's currency!
-
Should they exist, the Grand Patron of the Game is a beautiful human being who we will run an entire weekend event for, as well as mention how awesome they are every chance we get. Let it be known that we are buyable.
The Impact
Immersive Arts looking to build on the excellent LARP community that already exists in Melbourne and take it to the next level in every aspect: in immersion, in intensity, in maturity and in ambition. We fully expect that Blackpowder & Bloodlines will have an ongoing positive effect on the community at large, since we’ve seen it before - each time a club makes something amazing happen, the benefits filter out everywhere else. We hope that we can capture that magic too, and help the entire hobby take the next step up.
When we write & run LARP events, we don’t throw things together. We design them from the ground up with specific goals in mind. For Zeppelin Games, we wanted to ask “Can LARP be art?”; for Murder on the Ghan, we wanted to see what happens if players can’t trust the GMs; for Blackpowder & Bloodlines, we have several major goals:
We want to give our players a wide scope of play options.
We want to create mature, theme-exploring play.
We want our players to intensely immerse themselves.
We want to present serious moral choices with high personal stakes.
We want to help our players grow and improve in the hobby.
We’ve seen & done all of these before to varying degrees of scale and effectiveness and the results can be truly amazing. Most games focus on one or two of these aspects and do them really well, but we want to do it all - and we think that’s something worth doing
.
Risks & Challenges
There’s a lot in here about aims, goals, and what we want to do. We do know that this is a big project, and we’re well aware that we’re doing something out of the ordinary by asking for your help. Running any LARP is fraught with difficulty. For starters, we have all the regular potential problems facing LARP events, like funding, character “bleed”, participant injury, organiser stress and so on. These are things that any LARP needs to manage, but there are some extra challenges which face us:
- We want lots people to come to our events: One of the most challenging things that every new LARP faces is getting people to show up, and we’re aiming to get at least a hundred of them at our games. We know that the LARP calendar is expanding (which is excellent) but we think there’s space in there for one or two more weekend events each year. To be plain about it, our plan is to get people as excited as we are so that they tell their friends, family and random passersby that they should come as well. Then, we deliver - and good games are self-sustaining.
- We have lofty ambitions: Blackpowder & Bloodlines is a crazy-ambitious project and we really want to make it better than anything we’ve done before, by a big margin. We know we can do “pretty good” but we want to do even better. The way that we’re going to do that is by working to our goals, communicating them to our community, and getting everyone to tell us how they think we’re travelling. We thrive on feedback, since it’s the only way we can find out if we’ve done what we set out to do, or if we need to change it up.
-
We’re dealing with confronting themes and ideas: We’re not only out to challenge ourselves, but our players as well. That can sometimes be hit & miss, but we’ve seen that the community is ready for it with other great events like After the Fall. We’ve already touched on how we’ll manage this: by communicating; by telling everyone up-front what kind of game we’re going to run, and then by giving people the tools to deal with it. Development manifestos, workshops and an open ear are just some of the tools we think will prove useful. That way, participants will know what to expect and how to direct their play to match those expectations.
Even if you can’t make a financial donation we would still love your help!
Sign up to our development emails: you can be among the first to read the drafts of rules and world and give us your feedback
Join the playtest events and help us break everything so that we can figure out how to make it better!
Tell your friends about Blackpowder and Bloodlines, share our campaign on facebook or your favorite other social media.
Come to our costume and prop, and character workshops, help us build & make things (no experience necessary).
Volunteer to NPC or crew: events need lots more than just the organisers running around to make things happen.
If you have other skills you'd like to contribute - such as building, making, sewing, writing - let us know.
And of course, come play!
