Hi All,
Thought it would be a good time to update everyone on where we are with the development of Calamity, our Weird West LARP.
The staff has been meeting weekly since April of 2015, I cannot believe it has already been nearly a year. I am so lucky to be working with such a fun and creative group. The story has become a tapestry that everyone has contributed to. As a team we have taken the core concepts I pitched to Ro3 and have created a rich world that we hope you will all enjoy. We cannot wait for the game to come to life and become yours.
The website is up and running, huge thanks to Geoffrey Fortier for all of his help with the creation and maintenance of http://calamitylarp.com/. As many of you may have noticed, we included a timeline and highlighted areas of deviation from real world history. We are expanding on these through a series of news articles that will provide multiple views on the events leading to the Civil War, the forming of the Republic of Texas, and ultimately the Calamity. This will continue to be our vehicle for delivering news once the game begins. There has been some interest among players of creating in-game newspaper(s) and we are certainly open to including that in our news blog rotation.
Rules. We have been diligently working on the rules system. I want to stress that we are not using any existing rules system, but have been working on a brand new system that we feel will work best with our setting. To be honest, this was a larger undertaking than I had anticipated and is taking longer than I had hoped. That being said, I am really thrilled with the way the rules are developing and our goal is to have them published by end of March. We will then schedule some playtests and make adjustments as necessary. I have abused the hell out of John M, Patrick G, Jay S, Sean M and Christie H, and have myself been waking up from dreams of rules spreadsheets. As a player, I know there will be a limit to your ability to create character concepts and determine if you can buy in to our game without the rules, so please know I want this available to you as soon as possible!
Culture Packets. We have the high level overviews of the cultures available on the website http://calamitylarp.com/setting/. We are committed to having the core packets completed by the end of March to coincide with the release of the rules. Our plan is to provide a framework for each culture with some aspects set in stone, but allow players that are committed to a culture to have some creative input with aspects of the packet.
Along those lines, we LOVE seeing character concepts. They help motivate the staff and in some cases inspire us to include story or mechanics to facilitate them.
If there are aspects of the game you have questions about, please do not hesitate to post them to our G+ or Facebook community pages, or feel free to respond to any of our blog posts.
Thanks!
Mike H
