Creating a LARP Space

Welcome to Querki's (first) LARP App!

Just a quick note about the platform to start. Querki itself isn't about LARPs -- it's a general platform to make it relatively easy to build online, collaborative, secure, data-centric websites known as "Spaces". You can find scads more information about it in the Documentation.

That said, Querki was created by Justin, who has been writing and running LARPs for a number of years, and the original prototype was created specifically for writing LARPs. Querki is super-flexible, and since LARPs tend to be rather complicated, it's a good platform for designing and writing games, allowing you to customize things to suit the needs of the game. It's pretty easy to build pages that cross-reference your game in all sorts of ways: this makes it much easier to keep track of relatively complex games that have involved stories.

Think of the Querki LARP App as a sort of template: you create a Space for your game, based on this App, and it's ready to start writing. But (unlike most sorts of "Apps") you can also customize it to your heart's content -- not just filling in characters, but adding new concepts that suit your needs. For example, the game Tabula Rasa III (a science fiction game) adds a concept of which Planet each Character is from, and the game A Respectful Calm (a modern political story) keeps track of each Character's Political Leanings. Many games would want to add concepts of "hit points" or other combat rankings for characters. (Note: building fancy customizations can involve a tiny amount of programming, although not much. We're happy to help you get things done.)

Expect this App to continue to grow and evolve over time. Currently, it's focused on designing and writing games. We also have the ability to help you run games -- the App is based on the game A Respectful Calm, which handled Casting Questionnaires and Character Sheet distribution automatically -- but at the moment that machinery is too clunky for non-programmers to use yet. We'll get there, but for now it's already a fine tool for game creation.

Finally: this App isn't the last word in how to design LARPs, it's just one approach, focused on the style of games that are sometimes called "Interactive Literature" -- heavy on pre-designed characters, plot and item cards. We encourage folks to come up with different Apps that better suit their style of LARPing, and we'd be more than happy to help you build those. Querki is all about making it easy to manage data, and most LARPs have a lot of data.

Great! You've now created the Space for your LARP. Continue on to Inviting Team Members for details about how to add collaborators to your game.