Designer's notes

Swordhaven Designer’s Notes

The origin of the Swordhaven game is a curious one. It was during the closing days of 2020, that dire and fated year, that I received a thick envelope in the mail. It was yellowed with age and addressed to me at my college address of many years ago in a firm but faded hand. By what mystery of the US postal service it arrived thirty years later at my present address I cannot say, nor is there anything to be learned from the return address, a post office box on Nantucket. Opening it with care, I discovered photocopies of handwritten pages, evidently of correspondence from the 19th century. With rising excitement I puzzled over the passages, which were in many cases damaged or incomplete. I soon determined that they were by two authors, both ancestors of mine. One was Captain Norman Starr out of Grotton Connecticut, the other Anna Leonowens, whom the reader may know was governess to the children of the King of Siam, and the inspiration for the movie “The King and I”.

The writings discussed a place called “Swordhaven”. No location was given for this place, nor any discussion of how these two came to know if it, and I suspect that I may in fact be the butt of some elaborate jest, possibly set in motion by some college acquaintance, and, like unexploded ordnance, only triggered years later. However, the more I read the more entranced I became by the fragmentary description of the place, and as I lay sleepless that night, inspiration for a Live Action Roleplaying Game came to me, and the next morning, being Saturday, I rose and began to write. I have made many alterations and assumptions not in any way born out by the Starr-Leonowens Papers. It would be best if we all considered this to be wholly a work of fiction.

In conceiving Swordhaven, I have made a number of unusual design choices that deserve come explanation. Here are the answers to a number of questions, some I have been asked, and some I have asked myself, for the business of designing a world is mostly a matter of answering questions.

Why such an unusual Setting? Swordhaven is a “Techno barbarian” or “Sword and Planet” game, neither of which is common in the LARP scene. Most of all I hungered for something new, a setting where players could be presented with many unexpected elements, where both players and staff would have maximum freedom to create while still evoking and rich and strange world. Plus, it is an homage to classic science fiction and fantasy before the LOTR and Star Wars/Star Trek showed us all how it was “supposed” to be.

Why both Magic and Technology?

Many early works of science fiction had magical elements, either as straight up sorcery, or as “psychic” powers, and fantasy often included advanced technology. First and foremost I wanted to harness the power of technology to improve the game. For example, the use of cell phones to interact with game information vastly simplifies many things, and allows a game to maintain a huge “Library” of lore without hauling backbreaking totes of books around, or trying to keep mountains of scrolls organized and undamaged. Technology also makes music and special effects more easily part of the game, and adds variety to the setting. On the other hand, many aspects of Larp are just much more easily realized by magic. It is much easier to put up some runes and fetishes to make a doorway impassable until a challenge is completed than to make a convincing forcefield and code encounter. Magic is easily propped and roleplayed in the woods of Maine, but many staples of technology (like vehicles) are just not available to a larp that strives for “Practical Effects”. As much as possible I feel Larp should try to work with what we really have to minimize the disconnect between what you see and what is supposed to be happening. This is why there are no large quadrupeds in Swordhaven - after all, we have no four legged NPCs.

Why no Space Travel?

Well, who says there isn’t? Swordhaven’s world is enormous. If there was a starport twenty thousand miles away, most of the world could easily be ignorant of it. However, I decided not to make it part of the game because we have no spaceship props, and I did not want to have intergalactic politics somehow become part of the tale of a bunch of people with swords in a wooden fort. I also wanted to avoid having people portray characters “from Earth”, (even though that is a staple of Sword and Planet fiction), because I wanted to A) leave this world behind and B) have players add to the world of Swordhaven by imagining their backstories.

However, I made the Sword Haven setting as much LIKE a space travel setting as possible. Players come from far away to a new place. There are wildly different societies, from stone age tribes to decadent high tech cities that might as well be different worlds. The Ring gates transport you to different realms in a way not much different from a hyperspace jump - just easier to simulate in a woods larp.

What is the deal with Guns?

Guns was a tough one. High quality melee combat is a priority for Swordhaven, as the name implies. I have not yet encountered a Larp that has managed to have both Nerf guns and Swords work well together, IMO. On the other hand, Nerf guns are much cheaper and easier to use than, for example, Larp bows or crossbows and were part of the reason for incorporating technology. I knew I did not want to deal with counting every bullet, partly because that is a pain, and partly because when ammunition is precious players almost always use it at close range to avoid wasting a resource. At close range they should be using SWORDS! I wanted players to be able to blast away with fun Nerf Guns that shoot lots while ALSO getting to have furious sword fights. Hence the “minimum range” rule. Blast away enthusiastically - but once things are close, use a sword! Projectile weapons are mostly a tool in a warrior’s kit, not a decisive weapon. I also tried to accommodate many different ways players might want to use projectiles, such as “salamander/black powder pistol” style. On the other hand, we can easily create scenarios where gunplay is dominant, or battles in which only swords are any use (which is why you get the sword skill for free). In this way maximum variety in combat can be achieved.

Is this a “Dark Dystopian” game or a “Light Hearted Adventure” game?

Good question. Aspects of it are unquestionably dark - players are for example literally at war with something very like Devils of something very like Hell. The world has some terrible, terrible episodes in its past. On the other hand there is a humorous thread woven through much of it (sometimes intentional, sometimes just a byproduct of using Retro themes or practical game design), and the theme is going to be on adventure, not suffering or morality. Personally I think larp can mix light humor with serious roleplay easily, and this is healthy. Other than fighting Devilkin which is pretty much mandatory, players can seek their fortune/fate as they wish. It is a big, complicated world, and players and staff will inevitably shape it in different ways. The fight against Devilkin means the players are all heroes (which I prefer), but other than that things are wide open - Dark, light, both or neither.

Why the unusual Death System?

I always want to push the envelope in larp design. This has led to many excellent innovations - it has also led to some dead ends, but it is just who I am as a designer, and I have been trying to figure out Death for years. Player death is a polite fiction in most larps, which is fair enough - who wants to invest enormous effort in a character and costume only to die in season 1.5? However, I think that the lack of any real danger to players (in many games even a player’s GAME ITEMS are considered sacrosanct - it highly unlikely for a player to suffer any significant set back) cheapens the experience eventually. I wanted to create a system where character death was legitimately POSSIBLE, though not likely to occur soon.

I also dislike the way death occurs in most larps. Players who suffer deaths usually do so not in the maelstrom of savage combat (where they are almost inevitably healed -in large battles the players either all win (99% of the time) or all die (1%).), but either A) when they are stabbed, usually randomly, in the dark, most classically on the way to the privy or B) when an NPC chooses to use a deadly ability on them. A is lame, and B has many issues, because it means choosing, mostly arbitrarily, who lives and who dies. Many players don’t mind the idea of a character dying, they just don’t want it to be pointless, or feel like they were targeted. As a game director or NPC, I want players to be be “in danger”, but I don’t want to deliberately cause characters to die.

Swordhaven address this in several ways. Firstly, though the first aid system, which assigns a small, random chance of dying every time you are reduced to zero hit points. Assuming the healing situation is well in hand, this chance is about 1 in 36. If you fight skillfully or cautiously, your risk should be small. If you are very brave, or very inept, it becomes larger. The NPCs just fight normally, without deliberately “killing” players, and players are still in danger, even if their side wins the battle. Secondly, although a player can survive as many as 10 deaths (statistically being knocked down 300-400 times), they have a chance of “breaking the thread” after five. This places them in danger of dying as part of a story, in some suitably heroic manner. For example, if you are in this state (which only a few staff members will know about, you won’t) and you challenge a powerful foe to a duel and lose after an epic combat… ...you’ll die the final death. But what a way to go! Much better than stabbed while looking for the privy. On the other hand, such deaths won’t be inevitable - there will always be some chance of avoiding them (though it could be small).

Got a question? Send it to truaxmc@yahoo.com and it will get answered here, eventually.