HELLO

So this is not true for all larps but it is for mine. Mine is Avalon. We’ve got species and culture, and then talents and skills when making a character. My species is Brendylian, so I’m basically a human. Brendys are usually haughty royal types of high social standing. This of course does not ALWAYS have to be true! For instance, my character, Imbri, was raised by a fairly wealthy merchant in the city of Lysander (a high class brendylian city). However, her father (her mother died in childbirth) dabbled heavily in the black market and got caught up in a lot of shady deals nad a lot of people got killed. She ended up assassinating him because she has a strong sense of right and wrong (even if her idea of right and wrong is rather skewed) and she lived on the streets as practically an urchin for awhile. So she went from middle class to the lowest class and now she’s pretty much middle class again. There’s a lot of other species, some falling under human, like Gurnei (gypsies) or Kuranin (barbarians), and then a bunch of non humans, too! There are Unicorns, which are bipedal demihuman creatures with unicorn features, or wynlyn, which are basically troll like fairies. Kiruge are dragon people and Rorors are little yellow gnomes.

Then there’s your actual stats. Skills determine your fighting ability and talents are everything else. I am a Shai fighter, which means all my stats are in the martial art of shai ir. That’s all out of character skill, lots of running and jumping and sneaking. Basically, it’s assassination skills. Shady stuff. I however am not an assassin and refuse to kill anyone for money- it upsets my sense of morality. There’s Yng Toth for rangers, and then there’s Dorian for shield fighters and Tet Sharda for dual weilders. There’s a bunch more, too, and you aren’t restricted to staying in one martial art. You can pick up more than one- you’ll be lower level in both because you still have the same amount of points, but it gives you a much broader range of ability, and a lot of martial arts are made to work together like puzzle pieces.

Then there’s casting. That’s magic. There’s fire, water, earth and air casting to start, and then void and nexxus casting later on. Fire is mostly attack stuff- you can summon a fire sword or set people on fire. It’s almost all physical. Water is mental effects, like Dominate, where you can control someone’s actions and make them fight for you or just do whatever you tell them to, or knock outs or confusion, etc. Earth is healing magic. Air is mostly augments- augments are magic abilities you can apply ot yourself and others. Like levitate, to make you fly, or extra armor or making your attacks stronger, etc. Void is not necessarily evil and nexxus is not necessarily good. As a general rul however, yeah basically. You can only pick those up after level five though, and my city requires you register yourself as a void/nexxus caster if you are one- in murshank, casting void gets you executed.

Then there’s talents, which is basically everything else. As a librarian I have a lot of lores. Lores are basically what your character knows. You can pick lores up by dumping points into them, or actually writing about 50 pages of information on the subject in a book. My boyfriend Ollie is has a hooch lore (hooch is in character alcohol, out of character kool aid) and he just has a book that’s dozens of pages of nothing but drunken tales and instructions to properly mixing kool aid haha. THere’s streetwise talents like gambling or knot tying, and proper talents like reading and writing. There’s stuff for doctors, like autopsy and harvest blood or bone. There’s stuff for hunters, like harvesting hides and tracking and animal magnetism whatnots. There’s a whole set of talents for barding, and barding is really intense at avalon. unlike with a lot of games where bards are just derp, in avalon, you can do STUFF. like, ollie is a bard. He can increase the damage of everyone around him, by a lot- he has bardic mind control, and his songs can change yours character’s perspective on reality by making them light or dark aura. Something he just picked up is battle bard formation stuff, where he can be in a formation with people and he becomes blue headbanded. I’ll talk about that later but basically it means you can’t be hit by anything! so the people around him fight but as long as they’re still in formation he’s immune to getting injured. it’s pretty intense.

Blue headband is something that happens when you’re not combat active. IE, my roommate Krystal is a blue headband player. She was in a car accident a few years ago and now her leg doesn’t work well. She has a leg brace, so she can’t run or even really walk quickly- she can’t get up stairs. So her character is an earth caster who heals people and mostly just roleplays. There’s two new gurnei who are also headbands- their players are fifteen. Avalon says you can start playing at I believe 14 but you can only join in combat at age 16, just to make sure nobody gets injured. But you’ll be a pretty darn high level by then aha. So they can’t fight, but they did fantastic roleplay and were lots of fun to be around!

So my character is Headmistress Imbri of House Frostwynnd. She’s the head librarian in the Oasis. I collect information and apparently piss off other shai fighters, because there are a bunch of people right now who want to kill me! like not just, hey, I really don’t like that person, but hey, I’m going to stake out her cabin at night until she gos to slepe and slit her throat. My life is seriously in danger! In character shenenigans.

If you live in north carolina or virginia (where they two chapters are) or don’t mind driving into those states then yu should totally join Avalon. We are AWESOME and we have a GREAT time and even the people who want to kill me in character are friends with me out of character. I made so many amazing friends via larping, ad even the love of my life. So many people get married through avalon haha. But yeah if you want to come play with us I will totally hook you up with all the info and stats and help you make a character and stuff. First event is free and you will be well taken care of and hooked up with awesome people. :D