In March of 2016 we found ourselves frustrated, bitter, and hungry. After a dispute over design priorities, the team had split from the LARP we were intended to launch a new chapter for. We were given the option of using most of the rule set with the exception of spellcasting, and forbidden from using story constructs such as major locations or some metaphysical constructs. We had the option of scrambling some names around and running in April, but I - and I think others on the team - felt slighted. It was not a clean break, and for months I found myself frozen in place, consumed by frustration. The statements that came out to the public laid the issue entirely at my feet. I felt betrayed, but I didn’t want to make myself into an aggressor over the issue. We knew that we could make something that we more truly owned, and we gave ourselves a full year to create that product. We faced a lot of social friction. People turned on us, bared their venom, and groups fell apart. I was told that people were talking about me. I could manage that. I watched others struggle.

Any story, setting, and group of characters has a sort of “momentum”. In a good story, everything is a certain way for a reason, and the way that things *are* will be essential to the story. The theme of the story is bound to the setting. The theme for our expansion chapter was about moving from scarcity and survival towards establishment. The arc of the story saw the characters as nomadic explorers, with the intent that the players would at some point choose where they wanted to settle, and would then profit or perish by virtue of the relationships they had forged in the course of their exploration. It was a theme suited to a post-apocalyptic game, where the predecessor game had showcased plots about famine and the playerbase held to an aesthetic that focused on scavenging and crafting. This theme also related to our biggest frustrations about our previous outings, where we felt that the game was very good at giving us a list of problems to solve, but not very good at making us feel that we were exploring or interacting with real people. So we set the stage in accordance with these frustrations - we wrote in justifications and constructs that let us challenge the limits of the setting. Once we were out of that setting, our story made no sense. We needed a new theme.

The joy that I found in LARP was the ability to test myself against a new standard, and force myself into challenging circumstances. I got to watch people around me really put themselves out there, and into roles, and watch them feel their way through the experiences that ensued. As I LARPed, I found that I grew with my character. I wanted to create an environment where people could grow their skills and share their accomplishments through the medium of LARP. We wanted to accommodate both fantasy and post-apoc aesthetics, so we started to create a LARP where you could be anything and we would get it to play nice and make sense. That became our theme - “a world where you can be anything”. There’s a natural flow to both gameplay and story that arises from this theme. Character building must be flexible, but demand choice and evaluation. Plots should concern themselves with morality, loyalty, inclusion, and identity. We continually reinforce that a player progresses these goals through effort (both in-game and through efforts like costuming and props). I immensely enjoy that players can apply their efforts to establishing and growing an identity, and that the stories we write can become part of that identity.

The frameworks that we first created in service of this theme, and several of the supporting systems, were not my idea. The Storm was not my idea. I’ll take credit for the specifics of Pathfinding, but that idea came about initially because we wanted to explain why going to a certain place at the campsite would take you to a certain place in the world, and I was not the one who made note of that problem (I mostly wanted to get rid of travel time without using teleportation). There’s a hidden promise in the theme “you can be what you want”. The promise is that “who you choose to be is important”. Good roleplay is collaborative. Just as the ideas that form the world came from the staffers and testers who helped us get started, the ideas that shape the story come from players who write backgrounds and who share writing prompts, and who costume extravagantly and who conduct rituals, and really who do everything in their power to express that they love this and want to keep this community alive.

Stormflux is not *my* game. It’s a game that I was instrumental in creating, but it “belongs” to a community. I’m delighted to share this with all of you, and I hope that you continue to enjoy the stories that we make together.

-Wordsmith