Setting
Dark Moon is an Urban Fantasy game involving vampires, shifters (were-animals) and changelings (people who were stolen by the Fae and have come back changed) as PCs, who have been drawn together to combat forces which wish to destroy them and devour the world.
They also meet together as the Cambridge Lunatic Society and support each other through the difficulties of being a supernatural creature in a mostly mundane world.
Other than the PCs and the consequences of the world-destroying forces of darkness, the world is essentially the modern world, minus coronavirus or any other particularly interesting world events. If you're an experienced LARPer you'll also be playing 'Touchstones' - non-supernatural humans who are somehow important to the player characters.
This is a semi-open world - you should feel free to assume that any kind of stereotype or cliche about your relevant kind of supernatural creature is true for you, but might or might not be true for any of your fellow supernaturals.
There are a set of banned and restricted topics you should pay attention to before getting too excited about your backstory: see Banned and Restricted Topics.
More details on all of these things are available on the other pages in this section, but here are the five points you need to know:
Your character is a member of CLS, but you don't have to attend its Friday meetings (the Friday 'interactives' on the Discord server, which in character are at the Unitarian Hall) - you can just go hunt monsters if you like (on the Saturday 'linears').
Your character doesn't have to go hunt monsters on Saturdays - in fact not everyone will get the chance to do so every week - but if they don't, your character has spent the night in the tiny kitchen at the Unitarian Hall site, stuffed into a warded area with all of the other CLS members to keep you safe.
If you're an experienced LARPer, you'll also be expected to play Touchstones - people who are important to other player characters, who have problems in their lives that they think CLS can help resolve.
You can use the #touchstone-recruitment channel to request a Touchstone for your player character - and you can then use the downtime system to meddle in their lives (and generally interact with the wider world, but the wider world isn't a big part of the game so that is unlikely to have much effect).
CLS has a couple of important traditions - no fighting in / damaging the hall, use a coin flip to resolve disputes to avoid violence (vampires win on heads, shifters win on tails, changelings call before the flip). If your character breaks the in-character rules at a meeting, the wards may zap them into void-space for a while to cool off.
We also have some setting support for our Covid-Secure Policy:
The hardest part of passing for human as a supernatural creature is making your mouth and nose appear human. Fangs, coloured spit, bad breath smell, slitted nostrils, or slightly odd movements when speaking can all come off as extremely uncanny valley. As a result of this, some of the supernatural creatures living in Cambridge habitually wear surgical or cloth masks or other coverings over their mouth and nose.
While the above topic is fine to roleplay around, IC attempts to get another player to remove their mask during an in-person linear should be treated as an OC violation of the covid-secure policy, which can be found at Covid-Secure Policy for Larp. IC, it is extremely taboo to suggest such a thing, because you never know what kind of horrors could be lurking beneath someone’s mask. They might not even have a mouth or nose!
You all are very sensitive to smells, and most of you smell quite bad. Cambridge Lunatic Society etiquette is to keep a little bit more space between each other than humans usually do, and to not stay indoors in large groups for very long.
Some of you smell extra extra bad, and even when outdoors, others in the Society tend to keep well away from you. This is referred to by the polite euphemism of “Social distancing”.