Enlightenment in Blood Design Diary 3: Player and Organizer Created Characters

In the design of Enlightenment in Blood, the most novel part is probably character creation. After you sign up for Enlightenment in Blood, you're invited to use a character creation software tool. The tool will help you find your place in the larp, whether you want to play a Toreador Anarch or a Ventrue courtier. It will also help you find your character's personality and point your way towards a concept.

In some ways, the method used in Enlightenment in Blood is a hybrid between the pre-written characters typical of Nordic Larp and players creating their own characters as in many Mind's Eye Theatre games. Our hope is that this approach combines some of the best things about both.

The advantage of a written character, such as the ones provided in a Nordic-style larp like Convention of Thorns are many. The designers of the game can influence its social makeup very closely. With casting, the designers can make sure that there's a good distribution of players in all parts of the game. One example of a casting choice would be to make sure that first time larpers are not all in one group. Another obvious benefit of organiser-written characters is that they offer a chance to experience something you did not even know might be interesting and would not have chosen yourself.

Written characters have pre-designed connections to each other, creating a ready-made selection of interesting content for players to play on in the larp. Our street level techno-party Vampire game End of the Line, which you can also play in Berlin, is very much built on these types of connections between groups and individual characters.

When you create your own character, you can make sure that your character fits you, that it’s the character you want to play. You can exercise your creativity and make the character all about questions that interest you. Perhaps you have a long-running character that you like to make versions of in other games. Creating your own character brings out the co-creative nature of larp where everyone is partly responsible for the experience of everyone else.

Our goal is that the tool allows you to customize your experience like you'd do when you create a character from scratch, while at the same time preserving the thematic unity and vision of the game and placing you within larger social groups. In my next blog post, I will go into more detail about how exactly our character creation tool will work.

Juhana Pettersson

#EnlightenmentinBlood