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!