Idle Speculation

Under new guidelines brought over from Icelanding larps in the “skopstæling” style, we will have introduced our first “lammie” to the Idyll System: All players will be required to wear a tag near the waist of their costume detailing how much they paid for it, or how much it would cost on the open market.

Having been paying attention to cross-industry trends, as well as our nordic Immersion Enhancement lessons, IS are today announcing our bold new initiative for LARP Ticketing.

We are simulating, with the famous Idyll Empire, a modern pre-medieval setting, with enhanced social understanding. We looked at the concept, and decided that we the ref-team found it to be self-evident that no player is ab

The cult of ‘Sicero are traders, solvers of problems, and wearers of headcloths.

Around a fifth of ‘Sicero land is rich and abundant in a resource called “O’lv”, a key ingrediant in the best swords and hardiest sheilds thoughout the Empire. Nobody has been able to find O’lv anywhere else, and so the tribes – or Hou’ses – of ‘Sicero have grown rich and successful on the trading of O’lv. These tribes tend to be open and friendly, welcoming and civil. They will feed you beverages and sweet pastries, and haggle your prices down until they squeak. All deals can only be broached after one or more cups of the traditional sweet, carbonated hot beverage “Khoa’la”.

Other hou’ses are much less well off. The tribes without O’lv – Known as the Bra’s’sic (Bra-sa-seq) Hou’ses – have lived for generations in the shadow of the O’lv Bahr’ons, living on a heavily barter-based economy within their huge traveling markets – or Haa’star’s. Dealers in anything they can get their hands on, the standard currency for many decades has been in memory of a long-extinct dromedary, the Kah’mal. It is said that a Bra’s’sic trader would sell his on mother for five Kah’mals.

The different tribes of the cult of ‘Sicero are easy to differentiate. There is a complex and hierarchical set of tribal cloth patterns, in squares, stripes and patterns, that you can always distinguish a member of the ‘Sicero by, known as their Ka’Tarn. The richer O’lv Hou’ses wear their Ka’Tarn head-dress with a band around the forehead to hold it in place, in a style known as the Ciff’yah; whereas the Bra’s’sic prefer to fold their head-dress in a shape that fits around their head, known as the Ma’teath.

The economy is a heavy topic for debate – and in the game – and it’s a part of the game we take absolutely seriously.

One of the central discussion points we have observed of festival larp is over the ability to use OOC time and organisational skills to generate in character money. Currency and trade is a complicated topic, and entire essays could be written about in game economies, and the danger of unbalancing them by the importing of cake-based goods for in-character money is a worry.

The our first solution is that alongside Weapons Check there will be a new Cake Check desk, where we will check any baked goods you intend to sell and assign a sensible in-world cost price, which you will need to pay as your character’s outlay for ingredients and equipment. This will be based on observation and recipe, as well as a taste test. Be prepared to lose a sample! We believe that this method will allow cake-sellers to interact in a real way with the game economy without providing an external value item that unbalances and destroys it. Cakes are the sub-prime mortgages of the larp economy.

To broadcast a bit wider our answer to Al’s question about children on site:

All nations will have as a cultural option the ability to craft armour out of no more than thirteen occupied baby harnesses, one per loc, which will make the wearer immune to every third damage call at that location, and entirely to impale.

Any person found swearing on the field, whether in front of a child or not, will be hoisted to the rafters of the GOD tent by wrists and left there for not less than three hours or until time-out (whichever is sooner) as an example to others. We do not have a comprehensive definition of “swearing” as agreed by our entire ref team, so we will leave it up to the players to decide if they are offended.

Finally, we remind players that the Orc nation’s traditions of ritualistic infantcide and subsequent canabilism will be roleplayed on site with relish, and ketchup where applicable.

Here at Idle Speculation, we take pride in taking the very best of other campaigns, and, thus inspired, we are tackling one of the most important aspects of any modern LARP system: How to prove that your stuff is better than their crap.

Traditionally, there are several ways of doing this. First, there is the time honoured method of hitting people with your superior latex covered sticks until they are convinced of your worldview. This is a method encouraged and supported by the system, see “Combat Rules” in ISpeculation passim.

Secondarily, there is the plastic tag method, where each item is labelled with a laminated card indicating the use and status of the item. Due to the nature of the Idyll universe, we aren’t able to support this mechanism, as items would logically be confused in-universe for artifacts of the Fellowesland Lammie-Nation.

Thirdly, there is the ultra-modern system of embedding RFID tags into every in-universe item, issuing scanners to refs (and players with the relevant skills) to be able to recognise weapons. It turns out, however, that this method looks slightly crap, is very expensive and is fairly easy to break. Plus, in our limited trials, twelve characters were killed for necromancy due to holding an oyster card.

Eventually, we have hit upon a brand new system, innovative and ideal. We have developed a brand new form of identification for weapons that is subtle, a two inch squared piece of paper with a revolutionary adhesive reverse, which contains a series of sigils that will identify special items and their effects. Player-focused effects and enhancements will be handed to the players as descriptions on these tags without the adhesive reverse.

By this method, we will have completely removed lammies from our system.

Any player may submit a single date for their birthday, be it an anniversary of their birth, transition, new name, new life or any date they feel is important to them, but only one. Should an Idle Speculation event fall on an anniversary of this date, a character is allowed to call RESIST to one (1) effect or blow that would otherwise render them incapacitated or bleeding. Players whose important date falls outside the festival LARP season are fully invited to make major changes to their lifestyle to game this system. You will not be allowed to change this date once submitted except under special circumstances.

This will be the only source of RESIST in the system.

(Happy birthday H)

This morning, the Idle Speculation development team found a suggestion box nailed outside our door. Inside were two suggestions, the first saying “You should get a suggestions box”, and the second:

“Unintelligent players, or those lacking in charisma or wisdom, will be permitted to have a more mentally gifted person with them OOC to suggest clever and/or humorous things to say”

To which IS can only agree that this will monumentally add to the atmosphere and feel of legal proceedings. Alternatively we may invest in a soft-skill Wit system, whereby players with the Wit skill will be given a number of tokens each event, and they are able to use them after any line they believe should have gotten a better reaction to make their audience fall about laughing, or possibly just go “heh”. This system would only exist as a transitional phase.

“Temporary Wit Accessibility Tokens” players will be accepted and lauded on the field. Their ability to maintain an audience to be affected by the tokens will remain a hard skill for balance reasons.

In the second event of Empire, around halfway though day two, reports will start coming in of a new land, ripe for invasion. Players will assume it is setup for future plot. …and they will be correct, as halfway though Odyssey year six, reports will pour in that where once we believed Scotland to be is actually a portal to another realm, where an Empire is bickering and ripe for invasion. The remainder of both games will be two sides of a coin, founding colonies in each other’s lands, fighting against the invading natives and the affects of wrecking a hole in the universe, character generation synced across both with only one rule: You may not play the same character in both systems at the same time. Empirical Odyssey, PD’s Grand Unified game of combat, mystery and multi-universe PvP where you can even launch attacks against yourself, is coming in 2013!

After a lot of consideration, briefs for Idle Speculation are now available. Due to the limitations of the format, they are here: http://foip.me/J5YUNA