So please tell what the hell is LARP?! LARP stands for Live Action Role Playing (sometimes it may be LRP for Live Role Playing). LARP is a form of RPG where ,in stead of sitting in a group around a table and having your characters on a piece of paper, you and your friends go into a forest and live your roles in flesh and blood. Then instead of saying what your character does you just do it yourself. There are many form of LARP ranging from the most normal fantasy game over Cyberpunk to things like Western and 2. World War games. Another big game is Vampire LARP. How you play LARP is very different from place to place. Some places you have contact battle and some places you have no physical contact at all. How do we fight? When you play a game where there is contact battle it's usually a "Buffer Game" where the weapons are soft and padded so nobody gets hurt. The fight is fought as a real fight and each player has a number of HPs in torso, arms and legs. When you get hit you usually lose one HP and when you drop to 0 in the torso you're dead. But as I said the rule can change from place to place. Some places they use real steel weapons! When a fight begins they have some rules about who will win and the fight is then role played until one of the fighters die.Magic in a LARP is made by using an ingredient and some words and/or handsigns. For example Maxis the Mage wants to get the big nasty Orc in front of him to sleep. He says his magic words and hurls a handful of flour at the Orc while he calls "sleep". The Orc then (as the good LARP'er that he is) falls to the ground sleeping. Casting Fireballs and the like is done in the same way but with other ingredients. But fighting is not the most important thing when you go to a LARP. The best thing in a LARP is when people role-play their part and people stay in character. Of coarse not everybody can just come to a LARP and just drop right in to character. It can take some time before you master the fine art of role-playing a live character in a good way. Usually there will be some people that can help you with any questions that one might have to the game and rules in general. Then how can there be any plot in a game?! Well most of the plot is just lose information given to some people in the game. Lets say that Maxis the mage wants to find the powerful staff of fire magic that is hidden in a old cave in the forest. First he has to find out where the cave is. To get that information he may have to talk to the Dwarfs. There you have a good opportunity for some role-playing right there as he talk to the dwarfs. Let's then say that for the favor of giving Maxis the location of the cave they want him to give them support in their battle against the orcs. After the battle the dwarfs tell Maxis where to find the cave. When he gets there he finds out that he'll need an ancient ritual to open the gate into the cave. And it goes on like that and that's how you have a plot in a LARP. The different parts of information are given to people in the beginning of the game. Maybe Maxis found the information about the staff on an old book (cleverly given to him by one of the GM's). The dwarfs knew about the cave from some old dwarven legend (again told to them by one of the GM's). That is how a plot is made in a LARP. Of coarse the plot does not always turn out as the GM's planned it before the game. Maybe Maxis just hired someone to steal the information from the dwarfs instead of getting it himself. This is one of the charms of LARP. What happens when I die? Well that again depends on the rules you play by. Some places your character is out of the game when you die and you'll have to make a new one. Other places you can die over and over again. Then when you die you go to The Keeper of Death. He'll maybe think up a "punishment" for the dead. This maybe something like your character being insane for 5 min or maybe he'll be terrified of orcs for 10 min. Sometimes the Keeper will just let you go but at other times he can the cruel as hell. This is done to avoid people just fighting all the time cause "Hey we'll just come right back to life again". But the way death in a LARP is handled may as I said wary from place to place. How do I make a character? Well this is hard to answer because the rule wary alot from place to place. Some places you get to create your own character and other places you get a pre made character when you start. I personally like the method where you create your own character best. This gives you absolute control (within the rules of the game) on how you want your character to be. I think this tend to make people a little more devoted to playing their roles 100%. All in all people tend be play better when the play something they like playing not not something that they are forced into playing.