The Lead Will Walk The Earth: Conan VIII - The Golden God

My name is Adam and I'm a LARPer, or more precisely an LRPer.

I state the latter because when I was mostly involved in the hobby it wasn't even know as LARP, it was LRP, the action got missed out, why? Probably because 'Action' was a given. I don't know who coined the phrase LARP, but they we better marketeers than we were, it certainly rolls off the tongue better than LRP.

Point of clarity. What has widely come to be known as LARP in the public eye is not what I actually did. It was the same sort of thing, just different. I don't think there's anything wrong with the 'Sport' LARP that has become so popular, but I was always very much firmly on the European side of the fence, immerse interactive improvisation theatre, story lead rather than rules led, is what we did. In fact, the first event we ran didn't even have a rules system. The mantra was 'The is movie-make-believe, if it's fun, awesome and might happen in a film, run with it'.

As a life-long fan of Robert E. Howard, our games were for the most part set in Hyboria and visually John Milius's 1982 classic Conan The Barbarian, whilst not true to the text, certainly 'felt' right.

I was fortunate enough that many of the friends I fell in with were writers, model-makers, prop-makers and costumiers to the film, television and theatre industry (I did a short stint in the industry myself just before heading off to college). So, to put it bluntly, the games we played had pretty high production values, especially considering the relatively limited budgets.

I drifted away from the hobby for one reason or another. I still played quite a bit of horror themed and Zombie LARP but I hadn't picked up a sword in years.

In last 2012 we received an out of the blue invite. Some of the people involved back in the day were ready to run something once again... it was settled then, we were headed back to Hyboria.