The Luminary Roleplay Society

The Luminary Roleplay Society (LRS) is a community of roleplaying enthusiasts in the San Francisco Bay Area.  We seek to use Live Action Roleplaying games (LARPs) as a tool to allow players and writers to explore improvisational roleplaying, story writing, characters, emotions, and new experiences.

The LRS hosts LARPs and LARP writing workshops at local conventions and other venues.  We are interested in collaborating with other roleplaying groups across the Bay Area and beyond in achieving these goals.

If you are interested in joining the LRS, send a request email to the address below and we will get in contact with you. In the email, please let us know who you are, where you heard about our organization, and whether you have LARPed with us before (at an LRS event or otherwise).

If you’d like help with running an event, please fill out the LARP request form HERE. 

Upcoming Events (send us an email for more info including specific location): 

The LRS also has a Zoom account and has access to full google workspace accounts (IE unlimited length google hangouts) – if having access to either of these (or some other resource!) will help you run online LARPs, please let us know and we will see how we can help! 

Note that sending us an email and getting on our mailing list will provide the most up to date info. See also, the CALENDAR. Websites do not always get updated in the most timely manner.

03/19/2023, Titanic LARP: Following the depletion of resources on the Earth’s surface, the UN and allied corporations have taken up deep-sea mining. As tensions rise with between the UN and the surface powers, corporations have begun to develop undersea luxury domes. The first dome, designed with a view of the wreck of the Titanic, was opened to much fanfare but closed only a week later under mysterious circumstances. Now various organizations are rushing their agents to the scene to determine what happened and retrieve any of their representatives who were present at the opening. With a variety of interests converging at the site of one of the most memorable nautical disasters in modern human history, it seems as though the entire situation lies in the shadow of the Titanic…

Titanic LARP is an old Stanford-style game in a futuristic underwater setting. We have roles for new players as well as veterans alike, so please apply. Location: East Bay (Oakland) 

04/22/2023, Night Forest: We are Memories, wandering the Night Forest. Together, we will slowly explore the interplay of histories and present experiences, weaving a beautiful web before we finally fade back into the night from which we emerged. This is a meditative game of creation, sharing and listening. Night Forest is a ritual game where you and your friends play memories on a journey of self-discovery; moving through the forest by (electric) candlelight and forming new connections with each encounter. In Night Forest each person draws a card with a word that is the topic of their memory, which can be either real, imaginary or some combination of the two. People slowly circulate through the space and share their memories. There is no grand plot, character-driven roles or overarching goals. Rather, it is about quiet witnessing and self-discovery. Location: San Jose (outdoors)

05-06/2023, Guild Camp: Learn how to write a game with us! You will be partnered with other new GMs and guided through writing a game over 5 weeks, after which you will run it. Writing will occur virtually and the game will occur somewhere in the Bay Area in June. Send us an email if you are interested in participating!

06/2023, Guild Camp game: A brand new game from the brand new writers! Location TBD

07/2023, LARP Festival: Come and play (or run!) a variety of short games. This is the place for all the new and experimental game styles as well as any very fast or small games. Location: South Bay (Mountain View)

11/10-11/12/2023, The Buried Paths of Siru Kisal – Grand LARP 2023:

Thousands of years ago, so the legends say, there was once a place called the Convocation at Siru Kisal. It was built on a mountain at the world’s heart, and there mighty sorcerers created wonders the likes of which humanity has not seen since, and performed terrible magics that shook the very foundations of the earth. In some myths the sorcerers are depicted as benevolent guardians looking out for all the folk of the land below their mountain; in others they are wise but inscrutable sages; in still others they are fearsome tyrants. But their reign was not to last. Proud Siru Kisal, once the center of everything, was erased in one ill-starred night. The mountain beneath them erupted, burying both the sorcerers and all their works under hundreds of feet of ash, leaving no trace of their existence save the oral histories passed down by the people of the surrounding lands.

The tale of Siru Kisal and its tragic destruction has captured the hearts and minds of poets and scholars for centuries. There is some debate over whether or not the doomed Convocation actually existed, or if some ancient bard had made up the whole thing. Perhaps it is just a fanciful tale, a commentary on the transience of human endeavor, or a scathing parable about power and hubris. Even those who believe that there is a seed of truth behind the stories generally hypothesize that Siru Kisal was a place of unusually advanced scientific progress that the ignorant locals misconstrued as magic. It obviously wasn’t actually magic. Magic doesn’t exist.

******

One year ago, the war ended. It was the first war that weaponized the fruits of modern science, and no one was prepared for its horrors. Peace has returned for now, but the scars of conflict are not so easily healed. In an attempt to exorcize the memories of the brutal fighting, people have flung themselves wholeheartedly into peacetime endeavors – exploration, scientific research, great works of art, or even just wild hedonism. However, tensions are rising amongst the disparate nations who recently fought as allies, and the nations’ leadership are looking for ways to promote ongoing peaceful collaboration between them. When a small team of volcanologists announced that they thought they had found the actual ruins of Siru Kisal on a remote volcanic island, it offered the perfect opportunity for scholars from all over to work together. However, the volcanologists cautioned that the site was still an active volcano, on the verge of erupting again. If Siru Kisal was to be excavated, it would have to happen soon. Accordingly, a hasty expedition of the allies’ finest archeologists and researchers have converged at the mountain, eager to delve into the ancient site and see what can be learned before it is once again consigned to the ash.

But nothing could have prepared the expedition team for what they found when they unsealed the first chamber. The entrance to the site is a small door embedded in a narrow outcropping. But the room on the other side of the door is an enormous atrium, far bigger than the hill which it theoretically fits inside. There was some argument about whether or not it was an optical illusion, but further investigation determined that it was not. The atrium cannot exist according to conventional geometry. But nonetheless, there it is, for all to see. Magic is real. There’s no denying it. And nothing will ever be the same again.

Location: Event center ~1-1.5 hours from the SF Bay Area

(note: for specific locations, please send us an email. Precise locations are not listed here since we sometimes run at private residences people offer up for our use and we’d like to keep those generous people’s addresses private rather than share with the whole internet)