Hope Stands United LARP

19/02/2025

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1dEmVRV302qt90SasNaEiK_C4gZBaXmI1B9zOuAfQNmo/edit?usp=drivesdk

The wait is over, the first complete draft is complete, we are ready for people to start tearing the rules apart and showing me obvious exploits I've missed!

https://discord.gg/s2R3wsh5

Join the discord and get involved, start pitching Rounds!

Check out the Hope Stands United community on Discord - hang out with 12 other members and enjoy free voice and text chat.

27/08/2024

Someone asked me a very sensible question the other day.

What about archery?

We'd forgotten to add rules for archery and ranged weapons. So we've updated the live rules, here they are for ease though.

Bows like all two handed weapons take stamina to use. You cannot safely wield a bow with anything less than two hands. Whether you hit or not it takes a stamina to loose a bow.

You cannot block an arrow with anything but a shield.
Arrows deal a deadly wound with a direct hit, if they hit the ground or bounce off another person they only deal a single hit.

Metal armour downgrades the damage to a single hit.

Thrown weapons in contrast take a Stamina to throw and only ever do a single hit.

26/08/2024

Please find here the live rules document. This is open to change and adjustments especially in the first year.

Hope Stands United The following is historical “fact” In 4th century Dumnonia, what is now Devon, the majority of the population lived in Isca Dumnoniorum. The rest lived in small walled villages called rounds. About five extended families would live in each round, around fifty people total. Rom...

22/08/2024

Farming and Landkeeping Summarised

Each round has four plots of land, until we garner a large player base that is as far as the logic needs to stretch. Each plot can be used for one of four things; fields, forests, mines and rivers. This keeps the decisions meaningful.

Rivers are a thing that exist in your Round’s territory, or they don’t. You can’t create one or destroy one, they are a blessing or a curse depending on how much you can get out of them. Rivers provide fish, stone, clay and specific herbs and spices, some rivers are estuaries out to sea and offer saltwater fish and plants.

Mines are holes in the ground or surface deposits from which your Round can extract the stone, clay and salt they need for every day requirements, and metals for the more prosperous endeavours, what comes out of a mine depends on where it is.

Forests are a source of wood for lumber and firewood, herbs and mushrooms, game meat, and skins. You can graze some herds in forests. Forests can be worked sustainably, or cut back for big hauls of lumber that will take a long time to grow back. Enough cutting back and you can even turn a forest into a field.

Fields are the final and most important part of landkeeping, they can have one of five things in them. Wheat, Flax, Vegetables, Herbs and Spices, or nothing and left Fallow. Wheat is standing in for Barley, Rye and Oats as well, it can be turned into lots of foodstuffs and stored dry for almost a year. Flax can supplement a Wheat supply with protein rich grains, it also provides flax fibres, needed for linen and toe. Vegetables is a four crop rotation of Spring Radish, Summer Turnips, Autumn Carrots and Winter cabbage, offering a consistent variety that can’t be easily stored. Herbs and Spices are pure variety and also the main source of alchemy ingredients. Leaving a field Fallow will allow it to slowly regenerate richness over time, the richer the soil the better the growth.

Finally there are herds, four different species can be reared in fields, each providing different resources and having different needs. Cows supply milk, meat and skins. Sheep supply wool, milk and meat. Pigs provide meat and skins but can be kept in woodland or fields equally well. Chickens provide eggs, meat and feathers and can be kept in fields, woods and even the surface of mines. Herds will eat a portion of crops they share a field with unless provided sufficient additional food.

The more variety you can provide your people the more productive their labour, but a mouthful of spices can’t sustain you through winter, so hard choices must be made. There is no one right way to survive in Dumnonia, and arguing over that is at the heart of Hope Stands United.

21/08/2024

Why farming?

I believe in well designed games there are rules for the things that are important. Most LARPs have pages of rules on combat, healing and magic, but none on land management and taxes. I believe this is because those LARPs aren’t about land management or taxes. However we have all experienced LARPs that say they are about something, and then don’t provide mechanics; “Just roleplay it” being the mantra here, horror games that don’t have fear/stress mechanics are my biggest pet peeve on this front.

HSU was going to have argument mechanics, this meant there needed to be something worth having an argument about. How to kill the monster of the moment is a good one, but relies on there always being a monster to kill, and that discussion isn’t deepened by replacing potential combat skills with verbal skills. Arguing about alchemy ingredients is another, but that is just a loot discussion in a snazzy hat. Arguing about which missions to take in order to save which people, is almost meaningless if you aren’t invested in those people or places. So we needed reasons to care about; monsters attacking places, sourcing alchemy ingredients and what to do with them, places, and people.

I am a big believer in elegant minimalism, that by having less things, each thing can do more. Why make five different reasons for the players to care, make one thing hold all those reasions. Players are from a place, the people in that place are their relatives and neighbours, those people are how they make food and alchemy ingredients. It suddenly all clicked into place, what happens to the people of their Round and their lands, has tangible mechanical effects. Alchemy ingredients are in direct conflict for food, this leads to discussions about land use and ultimately farming. Gods, the Dead and the Romans also make claims on that limited resource.

Farming wasn’t part of the original design plan for Hope Stands United. The more I design the other systems within HSU though, the more I realise how integral farming is to the soul of the game. Generation of food is pivotal to your relationship with the Romans, the Dead, the Gods and alchemists, all of whom make for interesting topics of discussion.

So land use will be a series of decisions and those decisions will hopefully be meaningful, they will definitely be mechanically impactful.Each of those decisions is a discussion opportunity, meaning the discussion mechanics will become useful and important too. I will attempt to compress a summary of the rules of farming into my next post.

15/08/2024

The Dead and their honour

The dead; honoured Manes, or dishonoured Demanes, always demand respect. For the ancient dead this came at the point of burial, with annual festivities topping up their needs, until they faded from personal memory into communal memory. That transitionary period is the most dangerous, when they are still individuals empowered by recent sacrifices, but angered by being forgotten and dishonered by that.

Every Round remembers their dead. Some Rounds have barrows, special underground resting places for the ashes, or in some cases the whole bodies, of the dead. Some Rounds have simple cairns, added to over time. Some Rounds have a sacred location where urns are placed, half buried, until time and the weather erodes the stones to nothing.

These places, whatever form they take, would be where the sacrifices to the dead would be made. The dead form a communal spirit over time, a small deity of each gravesite. Hopefully a Manes. Like any small deity they needed keeping happy, but not over feeding, lest they develop an insatiable hunger. The greatest irony is, those that were once given the most honourable sacrifices, rise as the most terrible beasts when those honours are withdrawn unjustly. It is the responsibility of each family and each Round to ensure their dead are placated, for the justice of the dead is most wrathfull.

The insidious could under false flag of honour feed an enemy’s dead great honourable sacrifices, in the hopes they rise angered by their own kin’s thrift. Only the truly disturbed would consider such a course of action.

A modern thinker may say we pay similar honours to our dead, in memory and flowers at graves. The argument could be made that the dead only have the power we give them, but no one wishes to do anything less than their best for their lost loved ones.

14/08/2024

The Gods and their power

There are more gods in the world than leaves on a tree, but sometimes the only leaf you care about is the one keeping the sun out of your eyes.

Gods carry many faces and sizes, some as large as the world creating serpent, others as small as the spirit of a notably old tree.

Gods gain power through mortal sacrifices to them. This comes in the form of burnt offerings or similar destructive uses of food or living creatures, but also acts that resonate with a particular deity.

The stronger more powerful local faiths are Britonnic or Roman in origin, with gods fed by thousands of sacrifices by countless worshippers, one sacrifice from you is unlikely to win you their attention.

The smaller gods, the spirit of a river, the darkness that abides in a mine, can be swayed more easily than their monolithic kin, but are more fickle for it. Though Yahweh won't strike one person down for failing to burn the right offering once, a river may burst it's banks or a mine cave-in, if its ego isn't sated regularly. Unfortunately the Gods rarely speak directly, and their followers won't know they've got it right or wrong until there is a sign, a bountiful crop, a new precious vein revealed, or a cow's milk going sour. A person who doesn't worship a particular god may discount these signs as unrelated, or indicative of a greater gods displeasure. It falls to the faithful and Wyrdwise to divine the divine intentions.

Every deity will have an amount of power; and sacrifices to them, directly or indirectly, will feed that power. Deities will use fractions of their power to change things in the world; either to bring in more power, or align it more with their intention. This means gods have and obtain resonances, particular concepts will feed them and others will harm them, the more powerful a god the more wide reaching their ability to feed and the more sweeping their power. With enough devotion a deity’s resonances could be slowly shifted over centuries and with it the world may find new harmonies.

Great care must be taken in attempting to change the face of a god, schisms and wars have brought empires low and seen despicable acts committed by allegedly devowt peoples. Splitting a god is an awful and awesome thing, in every meaning of those words.