Post-Mothú 2025 Thoughts 2: Writing Characters

The second of a series of posts after Mothú, 16 Iúil 2025, by Siskey

I submitted my blurb for Mothú on the 4th of May, and it would run on the 12th of July. So naturally I did my writing for the LARP at a steady pace so I wasn't over-burdened and stressed, right? Obviously not. Does that actually work for anyone?

I did some initial writing on the 10th of May at a writers' meet-up at Blas Café in Dublin, where I got my first 3 of 12 characters written. Great! Amazing! 25% done! The character sheets were my usual format, about a page of narrative which sets out who the character is, what they've done in their life so far, and what brings them into the LARP. Down the bottom I had some objectives, and a smattering of skills. At this point these were just random keywords, like the fathach ranger character, a stone person created for a particular purpose, had "Keen Senses" and "Great Strength". These skills did not make it through to the end.

The first three characters I wrote were as follows:

• Sceallach, the Fathach Ranger
• Velkern, the Rival Saoi
• Nieswurz, the Sage

I knew the game would be set in Draíod, the most magical of the Five Realms of Tirneach, where the majority of people live underground in a strange caste-ridden society. It made sense to start with two Draíodach characters, who would be embedded in that society. The fathach and the vartach are inter-linked species in the Five Oaths setting and they are archetypically from Draíod as well. Right away I had a character who would by default be loyal to Saoi Kervall, who was still amorphous in my head, and a character who had cause to hate him for a lifetime of perceived slights. The third character then, I wanted to have someone who would have an outside perspective, and would perhaps bring a bit of light to the proceedings. Nieswurz, meaning hellebore in German, would be a different species adopted by Krieger who had embraced the Krieger way of life, and was also an expert on the Gwyllt. So those were my first three characters, along with a fourth who was just an epithet so far, "the Devotee".

Then life got in the way as it so often does, and the next time I got back to writing was the 1st of July. I had been doing a lot of thinking about the LARP, and I had ambitious ideas. What I had decided I wanted to do was to have a library of books which would contain clues which would be accessible by the characters based on skills that they had. I was inspired by the old Fabled Lands adventure books, where characters visiting a particular entry might be able to go to a different one if they had ticked off a keyword in a list at the start of the book. The first book of the series had keywords starting with A, the second with B, and so on. I wanted the substance of these clues to be tailored to the characters and their experiences, so before I could get started on all of that I needed to get the characters done. Also I wanted to send the characters out a week in advance, so I was running out of time!

So it's the start of July, and I need to get nine characters done by the end of the week. I have been working on a spreadsheet with the titles of all the books I want to have, which I'll get to in Part 3 of this series of posts, and what skills and keywords I want the characters to have. I've ended up with six different skills: Five Realms Lore, Draíod Lore, Magic Lore, Religion Lore, Ritual Lore, and Magic Lore. I've distributed these evenly across 12 characters using a website that does random set generation. Now based on what skills they have, I start to imagine what characters might fit. As it happens, my wife has tested positive for Covid, so all plans are cancelled. Probably for the best, as I've got a lot of writing to do!

An hour a night all week gets me most of the way there. I start with a character with the Magic Lore, Ritual Lore, and Five Realms Lore skills. I decide this first character will be a wizard-at-arms, which is an officer position in a gallóglaigh band. I decide they are a Drakeblooded, giving them the name Ionraic. Ionraic is not a typical Drakeblooded, preferring not to focus overly much on their family and their legacy...although they still use their house name of House Roaring Thunder! As an ex-gallóglach, Ionraic needs a band name, so I pluck "First Flight" out of nowhere, deciding it relates to a myth about how the dragons, who are all dead in the setting, helped the Shaper, the main god of the setting, to create the world. I set up how Ionraic had met Saoi Kervall, how they had a debate about the dragons and the Gwyllt, and Ionraic was pretty much done.

Next was a pair of Torchbearers. I wanted one to be a vartach so the pair would have a link to Draíod, and I thought a good counter-point to them would be a human. Humans in the setting are happy-go-lucky experimenters and regarded by the other species as slightly crazy. When the species were being written for Five Oaths that "humans as space orcs" Tumblr meme was doing the rounds! I nearly made the vartach Torchbearer have the Hook mark, which is basically the working class mark of the vartach, but then I remembered that we already have a Hook Torchbearer among the player characters at Five Oaths so I changed them to a Sunspear. For the human, I had them come from Uasa and be part of a tribe of swamp dwellers, mostly Drakeblooded, that had cast the character out for being too human, playing pranks and questioning tradition. I figured the two characters would complement each other, with one being a bit more serious and focused on the main job of the Torchbearers which is fighting the Gwyllt, while the other had a more holistic view on their role as a cinnire, the priests of the setting. I made sure both characters had Gwyllt Lore and Religion Lore, which required a bit of tweaking with the skills mix I had allocated.

I decide I want to have one character from all the Realms, so I start to think about someone who could be from Baol. The highlanders are obviously the most interesting part of that Realm, with apologies to the lowlanders, but I want someone who Saoi Kervall might have been drawn to. Kervall is taking shape in my head as a self-professed iconoclast, someone who leveraged the position granted by the weird birthmark on his face up to the hilt but also claims to rail against tradition. Morag Oc Aonghusa, then, would be a forward-thinking highlander, in self-exile because they want to get things done for their Clann and raise their family's fortunes and they can't do it in the highlands of Baol because there are no opportunities there. Since the game would be set a while before the current Five Oaths game, I put in a cheeky reference to a grandchild called Tiernan, as the current Réig of Tirneach is called Tiernan Mac Aonghusa.

Now I'm over halfway done and starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel. Of the remaining characters, four have the Draíod Lore skill, so I start to think about how they fit in to the society because it makes sense that they are from Draíod and know things that outsiders wouldn't. I also start to allocate roles out in my head, looking at the survey results that Mothú organised to see what people want to play or not to play. I think about the vartach marks as well and what I don't already have covered. There are five marks, three of them have a positive connotation while two really don't. While in the regular field LARP, many of the characters dismiss the vartach marks as a purely social construct, including my own character, with three Sunspears marks already present in this game I thought they would be mattering a whole heap of a lot more. I decided not to include a Linebreaker mark, as they are generally exiled immediately when the mark develops. I thought about where I could fit a Hook, but this gathering felt like it would be too rarified for a Hook. A Broken Chain, however, who often form the underclass of vartach society, could be helpful. I wrote Kruiv the Broken Chain as someone who did dirty jobs for Saoi Kervall.

A note on vartach names. The Five Oaths setting uses Irish names for places and peoples very heavily, and of course Irish does not have a k or a v, as a c is always a hard c in Irish and the séimhiú mutation on b and m creates a v or w sound depending on the word. When I was writing things for Five Oaths, I decided that the vartach would use v or k much more regularly in their names. So in this LARP I had Velkern, Kruiv, Kívar, Kervall and Uavan.

I wanted to include a Clashing Blades as well, and decided they could be the former watch officer of Misneach, now concerned with managing a (covert) army tasked with the defence of the capitol city of Draíod. The next character was another from Draíod, and by now I was thinking about how to include an idea about stolen memories and how it would affect people. I came up with the name first, deciding to carry on my personal in-joke that Broc is the most common name in the Five Realms, I named them Broc Liath, meaning Grey Badger. This lended itself to the character being a wildling, and the skills to being a cinnire, so they became the former cinnire-at-arms of Misneach, who had subsequently become the leader of a town destroyed by the Deathspine Gwyllt, with holes in their memories that were attributed to that monster. A fun nod for me was that this character was a member of the Order of Counsellors, a wildling, and a cinnire-at-arms, much like a friend's character in Five Oaths, but from Draíod instead of Siabhal so there was a much different spin on their outlook in life. Now I went back through the different characters that were attached to Misneach, seeding events that tied them together. A bandit chieftain called Little Sullivan who got what she deserved, an incident somewhere called Tuorunda involving an elemental spirit and Firetouched who had been turned to stone. Things they could reminisce about.

Or maybe not! The next character was another who had been wracked by lost memories, whose entire career as a gallóglach, or at least all the exciting bits, had been stolen. For the character brief, this was an upsetting and isolating thing, but they had success in their life and had become a Rider in their home Realm of Siabhal, so had decided to move on with all their intrinsic Siabhlach confidence.

So where does that leave me?

• Ionraic of House Roaring Thunder, the Battlefield Scholar
• Morag Oc Aonghusa, the Highland Rambler
• Uavan the Fleet, a Torchbearer
• Corrán Rainwise, a Torchbearer
• Kruiv, the Broken Chain
• Builean, the Last Line of Defence
• Broc Liath, the Lost Leader
• Neasa Ní Shiún, the Destined Scion

Finally I write the final character who was among the first batch of four character concepts I had, Kívar, who would be Kervall's apprentice. This character was hopelessly naive, almost every opinion they have about other characters starts with "Saoi Kervall says". Oh yes and around this point I decide to go back and give each character a full page of their opinions about the other characters in the LARP. Finally I was done, and got the character sheets sent to the organiser of Mothú for onward distribution. Feeling of accomplishment!

As usual, I have written way too much. In total the character sheet document is 29 pages long and 14,474 words. Some character sheets have stretched into three pages, but only barely. I intend to check in with the players of that game to see if this was too much, as I imagine it probably was, and what I could do differently in future to make it easier to digest or to give them more agency as characters. Also as usual, although at the outset I was despairing at how I could ever write twelve characters for this LARP, by the end they were all living characters in my mind and characters that I would like to play myself. The way I get to that feeling is apparently by writing 1200 words per character! And now that I've written another 2000 words on how I wrote too many words for these characters, in the next post I will write about the process of putting together the game itself and the activity I wanted these characters to engage with, which was reading loads of books and assembling clues, and how I think that went.

Post-Mothú 2025 Thoughts 1: The Blurb

The first of a series of posts after Mothú, 15 Iúil 2025, by Siskey

It was Mothú LARP Festival on the weekend just gone. I attended and I wrote a LARP for it. I'm going to write a few posts about how I think it went and what I could do differently or the same in future. I'm going to start with players' first impression of the game, which is of course the blurb that I wrote for the convention website. The blurb was as follows:

The Courage of Conviction/An Misneach Diongbháilteachta by Siskey

Through the dark passages of Draíod Underland you have come, summoned by the great Saoi Kervall. Some of you are friends, some rivals, some even foes, but you must answer his call, for he says he has found a way to bring an end to the threat of the Deathspine Gwyllt, the terrible threat that has been plaguing the tunnels of Draíod for years. Now you wait to meet your host, to hear his amazing discovery.

A horror-themed LARP for 8-12 fated individuals, set in the world of Five Oaths.

Familiarity with the Five Oaths setting is not required.

Style and tone: Mystery, horror.

Content warnings: horror, feeling of peril, low-light and darkness.

Pre-written characters. Ideally players would costume, but I will reserve some characters for short notice.

Characters will be pre cast.

Age rating: 16+

Now as usual I wrote this blurb at a point when I had a very vague idea of how the LARP would look by the time I actually came to writing it. So what changed? The first thing to change immediately was the age rating, because I wanted to include a player who is 16. My default setting is 18+ because of a bad experience I had at one time, but I think on balance that problem players come in all age ranges and there's probably no need to assume that a younger player is going to cause huge problems.

What else? Let's go down through the blurb. "The Courage of Conviction/An Misneach Diongbháilteachta". Very high-falooting altogether, with a four-syllable word in Diongbháilteachta that a lot of people might trip over. I suppose my imagination was captured by the Irish name of the LARP festival and I wanted to riff a little bit on that continuum of Irish literary festivals. I even put my nickname in its Irish form of Súisce Beatha to be a bit more pretentious but the organiser saw sense and didn't put it on the website. My conception of the world of Five Oaths has always been one where the English and Irish languages co-exist and inter-mingle, and particularly where the Irish language, the Seanteanga in the fantasy world, will hold little pearls of wisdom and often humour that the monoglot might miss. I remember thinking that the phrase "courage of conviction" would be one often-used by Saoi Kervall in his writings, in that he thought this was something he truly possessed and had to exemplify. At first Saoi Kervall was going to be showing up with a solution to defeat all of the Gwyllt, not just one particular Gwyllt, but I thought this might be a bit much for what was going to be a closet drama, and one where I was writing fan fiction rather than canon material. As I was writing the characters, I decided that some of them should be ex-gallóglaigh, the elite warriors who are the focus of the Five Oaths field LARP, and needed a name for their band. At first the name was "First Flight", a reference to a myth about the long-departed dragons which I had made up on the spot, but once I had two or three of them, not all Drakeblooded species, I decided to use An Misneach Diongbháilteachta as the band name. The former band-mates all shortened it to Misneach in their backgrounds, while everyone else had the full mouthful of a name to contend with.

From the body of the blurb, I see that I set an expectation that they would get to meet Saoi Kervall, and some players were expecting a debate on the relative merits of the two schools of thought on how to deal with the Gwyllt, one of the main antagonist creatures of the Five Oaths setting. Instead, one of the characters, Kervall's apprentice, read out a letter from him stating that he wouldn't be making it, and that they should peruse his library. This ended up being a big chunk of the gameplay and was not foreshadowed in the blurb at all. While I don't think I need a content warning for "books", this could be a different experience than someone is expecting.

I hadn't realised when writing the blurb that all tickets for games would be allocated in advance, thinking maybe there would be some people showing up on spec or some tickets kept for latecomers. In the end all 12 characters were allocated in advance, and apart from one late dropout due to sickness they were all sent out the Sunday before the game ran. I've never done that before, I'm a chronic last minute merchant, and it felt really good. Players were enthused and there were some insightful questions which helped me to think a bit about the rest of the LARP which I was still writing right up until the last minute.

"Familiarity with the Five Oaths setting is not required". Hmmm, in retrospect I don't think that's true! Until the dropout the night before, I did have one player who wasn't a regular Five Oaths player, and I was concerned about how long I would need to spend getting them up to speed with the setting. I had meant to send them some background documents along with their character sheet, or at least point them to the Five Oaths website where there is some new player information. I think it would have ended up being a lot of "Oh, and another thing!" for about half an hour while the shellshocked new player tried to absorb everything. In the end we had 12 players who were very familiar with the setting and could bring in a lot of stuff that wasn't on their character sheet which was great, but that part of the blurb is not accurate I would say.

Was it a horror-themed LARP really? There was some mild peril for the players, as they were locked in a chamber with no discernable way out, and towards the end a Gwyllt turned up outside and was trying to bang down the door. The main horror of the game probably came from the realisation that key memories had been stolen from them by Saoi Kervall, someone who was quite respected in society, and hoarded for the purpose of his own glorification. The low-light and darkness...I had an idea of blacking out the windows and using lanterns but between one thing and another this didn't happen. It probably would have been a massive pain as well for players to be reading the books in bad light.

Eight to twelve characters! There were times in the ramp-up to getting all the characters written when I was cursing myself for having said there would be 12 characters. How can I possibly write that many engaging characters?! Of course by the end of it they were all inter-linked and the mystery depended on them all being involved and sharing what they had found out, and when there was a dropout the night before I was a bit panicked trying to find someone to fill the spot. Again, I hadn't realised all tickets would be allocated so I needn't have had the range there at all. It is useful for other types of events though, when you are competing with tabletop RPGs and other trivialities and need to set a minimum viable number. Still, if you set a maximum you've got to write them all!

What could I have done differently? I think I could have advanced the blurb slightly, made it clear that their host has not turned up on time and so they have decided to have a debate on the relative merits of the two schools of thought they were divided into. Starting with some kind of action isn't something I do very often but it could help to manage the group into the LARP a bit more. I think by using the title as the name of the gallóglaigh band I probably muddied the waters and confused the players a bit. While that may have been a good thing, it wasn't my intention when writing the blurb. Also I think I would be more realistic about the level of familiarity that players would require to get the most out of the game, and be sure to support players who need a primer.

What would I do the same? If I have an age rating at all on my LARPs in future I think 16+ is fine. Many of my favourite players were once 16 year olds playing LARPs and they aren't terrible monsters, and I can hopefully manage problem behaviour better than I once could. Distributing characters in advance was cool, and not something that I can do for every convention, but if I'm running something myself I would definitely do that again. The costumes that people wore were great, and some people had really thought a lot about their character's mindset which was great to see.

Overall I think the blurb is reasonably solid. I should have a better idea in future of what the LARP will look like, maybe write out two pages sketching out who the characters are and what will be likely to happen, so that the blurb can be a better reflection of how the game will actually go. We had a good presentation and discussion at Mothú (about which more anon) about setting expectations for your players and making sure you're clear about what your game is, and I think I could improve on that!

Those are my thoughts on the blurb anyway, next I'm going to talk about how writing the game went. Slán for now!

Céad míle fáilte! Welcome!

Opening post, 15 Iúil 2025, by Siskey

I have beeen inspired by the chatter after the very successful Mothú LARP Festival on the weekend just gone in Dublin to start a blog, which as the Internet continues to fall apart I think will rapidly become the main way of crying out to be seen and heard, the 2025 equivalent of the one or two episode podcast. A friend has brought my attention to Neocities, which has opened up a big auld can of nostalgia, a very powerful motivating force for me, and so here I am.

If you're reading this we probably know each other already, but just in case, hello! I'm Siskey, and I live in Ireland and I play and write and enjoy LARPs. I started out by playing the Vampire the Requiem Camarilla game here in Dublin, which I rapidly became the Storyteller for. Since then I've run a lot of LARPs, played in even more, and have enjoyed the majority of them. Recently I have begun to attend a field LARP in the UK called Empire which takes up a lot of my head-space, so you can expect to see thoughts on that and all the other LARPs I've played over the years collected here.

Will I keep to a regular update schedule? I will certainly try. I have always found the best way to sharpen my writing is to write regularly, and once I get over the hill of actually getting started it tends to pour out of me like a leaky tap. The best way to get me to do anything is of course praise, so if you like what I'm writing and would like to hear more let me know!

I'll try and get this website set up properly over the next week or so, it's been around 20 years since I last did anything HTML-related so there's a lot of catching up and borrowing to be done. Until then, there's this post, a little squashed doodle which I only realised afterwards would not show up well on a phone screen, and my thoughts about my LARP after Mothú above. Please enjoy!