Do me a favor; think back to the days when you were looking for your first-ever LARP experience. Did you have someone to guide you along the way? Maybe a friend had already attended and told you to come along. Perhaps you were at another event, like a theater show, or a festival, maybe a Ren Faire, and stumbled across some information or cast member. That wasn’t my experience, and I’m noticing more and more that’s not the experience of people trying to break into the hobby today.

Here is how my experience went.

In college, I joined an alternative theater group whose members were putting on immersive experiences in the years before I started attending. Most of those people graduated or moved on from that community but the memories were still shared. Stories of old were recounted like pop-up Wrestling matches with makeshift mattress rings in the middle of the campus quad or Humans vs Zombies events throwing socks and shooting Nerf guns into classrooms. The only remaining interactive performance was the annual Rocky Horror Picture Show. Eventually, I started directing and eventually, I took over Rocky. But the longer I was there the more I wanted to get my hands on a more immersive experience. I joined the RKO Army and started doing more shadow casts, I started 24-hour play-writing competitions with crazy twists and silly premises, and I wrote a play where the audience is seated amongst the set. Eventually, I ran a game of Assassins for my entire university’s Greek-life members. And yet, it still wasn’t what I had wanted.

Fantasy was never my genre of choice. Urban fantasy maybe, but Lord of the Rings-style high fantasy? No. So I had never been to a Ren Faire. My understanding of what I could do was severely limited by the words I had been given and the experiences I had been shown. I started watching YouTube videos on immersive theater experiences, short films people made alone in their homes, and eventually board game content. I played my first Pathfinder game, then D&D with a bunch of people I met through making BookTube videos, and all of this eventually led me to MoMo O’Brien. Not even for one of her LARP videos. She hadn’t been to the Voyage North yet, so one of her Tumblr-era vlogs found her way across my feed. When she mentioned attending a LARP it was the first I had ever heard of it.

So I started looking for LARPs. I found pages of then-defunct games with websites that looked like they were made in the 90s. Most of them didn’t list where their games were run, what dates events were, or who was in charge of them. Their contact sheets were broken and emails were nonexistent. So I kept looking. I googled and was directed to Reddit where the response for games in my area was “We’ve answered this already” even though the last updated post was from 3 years prior and only one of those events was still active (with a bunch of warnings not to go as it’s not friendly to new people).

I was left in a tough spot. I wanted to try this out but was faced with either shelling out a lot of money to go across the country or to another one entirely to attend something that felt entirely too overwhelming for my first experience at LARP, or face going to the one game I could find that wasn’t in a genre I was thrilled about and came with every warning label you could think of. So I didn’t go.

Instead, I kept doing my theater thing. I played more tabletop games. And eventually, it just so happened, a few more LARPers overlapped with that community. When I finally connected with one of them, I took the plunge and went to my first campaign boffer game – around 6 years after I started looking. I’m four years in now, in one of the biggest hubs for LARP in the United States. So tell me why conventions, games, and events that have been running for decades here were nowhere to be found for me until recently?

Live-action role-play has done a lot in the last few years to be more welcoming and supportive of a more diverse audience, but it’s still a slow-moving process. A big part of that is how we as a community go about bringing new people into the hobby. If the best way to find a LARP is to have already attended a LARP before or to know someone who has, there is a massive barrier to entry stopping people from joining in on the hobby.

What this brings me around to is – we need to be better about marketing our events, reaching people in communities outside of our own, and making an active effort to find people who aren’t already just in our inner (or even peripheral) circles.