Right, so now you know what LARP is (or you should at least have). But there are perhaps a few more words in the vocabulary of the York LARPers that you may not be familiar with. So just in case, here's a handy dandy glossary-type thing to help you out. Some of them are, perhaps, stupidly obvious, but hey, I thought I might as well try to be thorough.
There are also the calls associated with LARP game mechanics, many of which are largely universal and common to many LARPs, but those which are specifically relevant to the campus LARP are covered in the Shattered Legacies Rules Guide.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
AP - Action points. In ShatLeg, you'll earn these for turning up to sessions (but get a small amount just for exisitng even if you miss a week's sessions). You can spend them in your downtimes to have your character go and do things, including learning skills. Many other LARPs have similar points systems.
Clank - The glory that is plate armour, referred to as such for obvious reasons.
CP - Curious Pastimes, an event LARP system. See our LARP page and the official website for more info.
Downtime - you may only play your character for a few hours a week, but in character they don't just exist for a few hours each week. As such, in most LARP systems you will get the chance to send a downtime to the refs between sessions. Specifics vary - you may be given action points or experience points to allocate, or you may have to write a little about where your character goes and what they do, or maybe both - but basically a downtime is "what your character is getting up to between LARP sessions". The opposite of uptime.
Eos - Eos, an event LARP system. See our LARP page and the official website for more info.
Event - When a LARP runs for an entire weekend, that is an event. There are systems made of these, and sometimes systems that aren't will have them, too. They tend to be somewhat more ambitious than the sort of LARP sessions that happen weekly, have a higher budget, a dedicated monster crew, and happen out in the countryside where there are miles of fields on which to have sprawling epic battles (or indeed, more peaceful gatherings) and woods through which to adventure. You can do a lot with all this extra time and resources, hence events generally do everything larger, better and more epic, and as such are usually far and away more anticipated than your average weekly session.
FOIP - Stands for Find Out In Play, is pronounced "foyp", and indicates that the LARP-related thing the speaker is referring to is a secret, something you'll have to Find Out In Play (if at all) if you want to know. Like a spoiler, only for LARP. May be used as a general answer to a question ("So what's your character Bob been up to lately?" "FOIP"), as a noun ("there's a lot of FOIP in Bob's journal"), a verb ("don't FOIP about that in front of people who weren't there"), and occasionally an adjective ("well, it's a little bit FOIPy, but I can tell you this..."). You'll hear this one quite a lot.
Froth - After an eventful LARP session, there will inevitably be froth. People will chatter about how awesome it was, about how Sunday's going to be interesting, and often about LARP in general. This is froth. Which, as you can probably guess, also works as a verb ("Oh, they're frothing about Eos.").
IC - In Character. When you are LARPing, you are IC, you are roleplaying. Out-of-character, the situation may be a bunch of LARPers having an awesome time running around a field and hitting each other with latex swords. In character, the situation may be a deadly battle at the heart of a ravaged city where all hope seems lost, the outnumbered heroes making their last stand against the unrelenting legions of the enemy with grim determination. That's at the heart of what makes LARP so great - you can immerse yourself in the thrill of an exciting situation for a little while, then go and order pizza and then froth and have a laugh with your fellow LARPers about how awesome it was.
Kit - Articles of clothing and costume which you don to play a character or monster. Shirts, armour, belts, jewellery, tabards, leather pouches, hats, and so on. Because it helps maintain the atmosphere, can help with getting into character, can be required to distinguish two different characters played by the same person, is good fun, and - if done well - it can look damned awesome.
LARP - Hey, didn't you read the page?
LT - Lorien Trust, an event LARP system. See our LARP page and the official website for more info.
Maelstrom - An event LARP system. See our LARP page and the official website for more info.
Ming - As a noun: powers or abilities or attributes, such as those accumulated by LARP characters, usually with the implication of power ("I got to play with a lot of fun ming before that character died"). As an adjective: powerful ("I've been playing Bob for years, and he's a bit ming by now"). Like a high-level character in an video game RPG.
Mission - University term-time Sundays are ShatLeg mission Sundays. This means that the LARP takes place outside, as people kit up and roleplay through an adventure scenario organised by the refs. There will usually be two or three separate missions happening on a Sunday, as different groups of characters go out to different places in character. These happen consecutively, with those LARPers not currently roleplaying their own character being assigned monster and NPC roles by the refs. People are hit with latex swords, plot unfolds, XP is bestowed, and fun is had by all. The idea of missions is not exclusive to ShatLeg, of course.
Monster - Because somebody's got to play the other people and things the player characters meet on their adventures. In ShatLeg, if you turn up to a mission Sunday, you can "monster" for a mission instead if your character is not on it. You may be playing Expendable Goblin #3 and trying to kill the player characters (you may even succeed, although your real aim is for everyone to have fun, not to kill as many player characters as you can), or you may be a townsperson with something to tell them, or whatever else the mission in question calls for. You might play more than one thing throughout the course of a long mission. Take the opportunity to have fun playing something you perhaps normally wouldn't. See also: NPC.
Monster tree - For most ShatLeg mission Sundays, this is our base of sorts - a large tree under which we gather between missions, so called because it's usually where we kit up to play the monsters for the missions.
NPC - Non-player character. The player characters of a setting almost certainly aren't the only inhabitants of the setting world, hence NPCs, which are usually played by refs. Guards, townsfolk, bandits, spies, nobles, beggars, bartenders, mystics - an NPC could be anyone. And chances are, they're there for a reason - go talk to 'em... See also: monster.
One-off - Sometimes a LARP isn't run weekly, or even monthly. Sometimes it's a scenario designed to last for one session only, to begin and conclude in the space of a few hours of one day. The premise can be anything from a tense, paranoia-filled witch-hunt to a futuristic gathering of planetary leaders in crisis and everything in between. That's a one-off. There tends to be one at each convention. A great way to get a taste of live roleplay, and great for trying something different that you wouldn't normally get the chance to play as.
Physrep - Short for physical representation, and pronounced as you'd imagine: "fizz-rep". Obviously we can't hack at each other with real metal swords, nor are we capable of growing bona fide scales or claws for those non-human characters, and keeping actual undead for those adventures of a more grisly nature would get terribly smelly after a while. So anything that would be dangerous, infeasible, and/or just impossible to actually have in play - which covers most things in LARP, really - is "physrepped" by something meant to represent it with the aid of a little imagination. Latex weaponry, appropriately-applied skin paints, and a horde of LARPers lurching through the darkness in red-paint-spattered rags, for example. Even if something isn't dangerous, infeasible, and/or impossible, you can still say that, for example, the cake is physrepping, well, a cake. Used as a noun ("where's the physrep for the Wibbly Mystical Greatsword of Ultimate Plot Significance?") or a verb ("how are you going to physrep that?").
Plot - LARP plot is not like the plot you're used to, oh, no... unlike the tame kind, content to lie docile in the pages of a book, LARP plot is malevolent, insidious. It smells your fear. You think you've evaded it, but don't you dare let that breath go. Because it's there, watching, waiting, biding its time, subtly tightening its grip... by the time you realise, it's too late, and one day it will find you and it will kill your character. Jokes aside, having plot is one of the things that makes LARP fun. Get involved, take a risk, make your mark on the story. And if it's going to end in your character's inevitable doom, hey, you may as well enjoy the ride all the way down, right? Then you can start a new character and try something different...
Refs - The people who run a given LARP, they call the shots and manage everything behind the scenes and otherwise. They're the ones reponsible for the plot, they're the ones you go to if you want to ask a question about the system, because they know all. Fear them.
Roleplay - Taking on a different persona, acting and speaking as you would if you were not yourself, but the fictional character you're roleplaying as (within reason, of course). Like acting, only there's no set script. Improvised. It can be a lot of fun to play at being somebody else for a while. Don't worry about not being very good at it - there's really no "wrong" way to roleplay (as long as you're not referring to blatantly out-of-character things). Your character's personality is up to you, after all.
RPG - Role Playing Game. Exactly what it says on the tin - a game in which you roleplay one way or another. Consequently covers quite a lot of things, although in my experience most commonly used to refer to tabletop games and video game RPGs (the latter of which, in practice, end up being more about numbers and don't actually tend to involve all that much in the way of roleplaying at all).
Rule 7 - "Don't take the piss." Also the name of a LARP forum.
ShatLeg - Short for Shattered Legacies, the excellent bi-weekly campus LARP system.
Snazz - Snazaroo, a brand of skin paint that has become pretty synonymous with skin paint in general, applied using brushes, sponges and water.
System - Generally used in either a LARP sense to refer to a game as a whole ("Maelstrom is a big event system"), or sometimes in a tabletop sense to refer to a collection of gameplay mechanics ("I'm using a D20-based system for my next campaign").
Time faff - It may well take eight hours to get from A to B in character, but there's no sense uptiming the long hours of travelling in which nothing happens. Or you could spend a few minutes roleplaying armour repair, but you're in a safe spot where it's painfully obvious nothing's going to kill you while you fiddle around with buckles, so it's kind of a given that those minutes will pass uneventfully. In such situations, a ref might call a time faff. They'll probably explain specifically what they're time faffing, but generally it means "we're going to assume that those minutes/hours passed uneventfully and you're ready to get to the next bit of action". Like a TV show - the unimportant bits aren't shown because they're, well, unimportant.
Uptime - The time you spend actually roleplaying your character in a LARP session. The conversations you have in character are uptimed, and you may at some point want to ask a ref if a mission is going to be uptimed or not. The opposite of downtime.
World flip - Whatever else imagination can do to a simple field, it can't make it physically wider. Occasionally a mission will be organised such that when the players reach the edge, a world flip is called. The game is put on hold for a few seconds while everybody turns around and stands where they would be if the entire world had been facing in the opposite direction all along, then play resumes, and suddenly the players have the length of the field to continue battling across.
XP - Experience points. In ShatLeg, you will earn experience points to spend on skills for your character by playing your character on missions. Many other LARPs have similar points systems.
