The Best Smoke Submission

RPG system: LARP
Participants: 8-16 players

By

Description

In 2021, the requirements for larps pitched to The Smoke changed drastically! This year, all larps submitted to The Smoke have to be 1 hour long, the scripts need to fit on 3 pages. Moreover, the festival will only accept larps which explore An Important Current Issue, and they all need to be playtested before they run at The Smoke.

Is 1 hour and 3 pages really enough to experience a larp, especially if it is meant to explore a societal issue without trivialising it? Will imposing this limit on new scenarios at a major festival stifle the art form? We will explore this Important Current Issue in this larp.

The first part of the larp will last 1 hour. You will be playing a group of larp designers with very different approaches to larp, long-time friends (or enemies, or secret lovers, or co-organisers — the most sacred of bonds!), who meet up every year to design together a scenario for The Smoke 2021. As usual, you’ve spent the entire retreat drinking rather than designing, and now it is 40 minutes until the submission deadline.

Fortunately, in 2020 we still allow larps to be longer than 1 hour! In this precious bonus time, your characters will get to explain their brilliant larp idea to another group of designers (who also happened to pitch their larp to The Smoke 2021…) and have them playtest it — while you playtest their horrible, half-baked larp which surely shouldn’t get accepted to the festival, especially not when your masterpiece is in the running!

Presented by
Karolina Soltys: Karolina Soltys has been writing, playing and organising Nordic-style larps for several years. She is one of the organisers of The Immersivists Club, a community playing larps in London, and has co-organised four editions of The Smoke. Her larps have been presented at several larp festivals; one of them, Arsenic & Lies, has been published commercially. She has recently organised the first weekend-long, international larp of her design: Our Last Year. In her practice, Karolina takes inspiration from other forms of art (literature, film, music), adapting them into co-creative, character-driven immersive experiences.

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