Getting Started
WELCOME TO RENEWAL
Renewal is a live-action roleplaying game run by Curious Pastimes Ltd. It is a long-running fest campaign, staging four major events every summer since 1996 and supporting about a dozen smaller events a year through the autumn and spring.
What is Live-Action Roleplaying
Live-action roleplaying (or LARP) is a form of collaborative storytelling, in which players take on the roles of heroes in a fantasy world and act out their stories. These player characters quest, scheme and strive, interacting with each other as well as with a variety of non-player characters – friends, foils and foes – played by members of staff (or other players volunteering a little of their time). Think of it as a huge game of Dungeons & Dragons, where you get to dress up as your character.
Scores of LARP events take place every year across the United Kingdom, most of them one-off events (or short campaigns lasting a few events) for just a few dozen players; the handful of fest games, like Renewal, are larger-scale events with hundreds of players organised into distinct factions, competing and collaborating to achieve their goals.
The story runs continuously, with characters persisting from one event to the next (barring death or retirement) and stories unfolding over months or years. Characters in the game grow and develop over time, learning new skills and acquiring new powers, as well as forming friendships and alliances, accumulating experiences and earning titles and accolades.
LRP or LARP?
Some people call it LRP (for live roleplaying), some call it LARP or Larp (for live-action roleplaying); some people have extremely strong opinions on the matter, and will give you detailed arguments why one is more self-evidently right than the other.
We call it LARP, just because we had to choose one for consistency, but you can call it what you want – we’re more concerned with playing it than arguing about the name!
How Do I Get Started?
For starters, read about the world of the game and familiarise yourself with the setting, the factions in the game, and some of the creatures you’ll meet on the way.
Head over to Character Creation and start planning a character. You may have a group of friends you’re planning to attend with, or at least have a faction in mind to play in, which could inform the type of character you create. All of the factions have social media spaces, at least on Discord and Facebook; pay your prospective new home a visit and get to know them.
Read the Rules of Play and the Combat rules and brush up on Calls. It’ll be useful to familiarise yourself with all the rules, eventually, but those three sections, plus whatever sections are relevant to your character’s skills, will be enough to get you started.
Source yourself some costume and weapons. It can be daunting to get started putting your kit together, but some tips are listed in the sections below, and you may be able to borrow or scrounge stuff to start with.
And then come along. Don’t worry about learning everything or feeling completely prepared; just have fun and you’ll figure the rest out. Welcome to this strange, silly, wonderful hobby!
Characters
Your character is your persona in the game. You’ll play as your character from time in to time out every day, pausing only to volunteer as a monster or to take a break from play. Your character persists from one event to the next (barring death or retirement), forming friendships and enmities, earning titles and accolades, and learning new secrets and skills over time.
You can have only one active character in the system at a time; once a character is retired, it is out of play (i.e. you may not switch back and forth between characters from event to event).
Concept
You can play any kind of character you want, as long as it fits into the world of Renewal. Every character in the game can be a hero, and you will walk among a host of those who live, fight and die together.
In game terms, your character is chiefly defined by their skills, which determine what they’re trained to do, but it can help to start with a sense of who they are. We call this a character’s concept: they could be a haughty duellist, for example, or a studious wizard, or glamorous courtier. You don’t have to start with a concept – feel free to jump ahead to the next section – but it can help to inspire you and to shape your choices.
A concept is usually broad and simple, expressed in a few words. Players approach it in a variety of different ways.
- Skills: Most players, inevitably, base their concept on the skills they want to pick: a pike-wielding soldier, a potion-stained alchemist, a master of the ritual circle, a skilled tracker, a body-hacking surgeon.
- Role: Many players start from where they’ll fit in their group or faction (p. 00): a wealthy merchant, a courtly chatelaine, a devoted civil servant, a priest to a flock – or even a hardened criminal.
- Motivation: For a lot of players, of course, it’s all about what drives their character: a power-hungry noble, a knight trying to rediscover their holy zeal, a perfectionist blacksmith, a rogue dedicated to chaos.
There isn’t any one right way to come up with a character concept: you could take inspiration from a favourite book or historical figure, or start with your backstory and work forward – or even start with a costume. Whatever fires your imagination!
Archetype
Most characters in the Renewal campaign belong to one of four archetypes, broad character classes that unlock development paths for specialisation and more powerful skills:
- Creator: Whether weavers or alchemists, blacksmiths or surgeons, tattooists or jewellers, creators are artists who make, repair and alter lasting things.
- Magician: Spellcasters, enchanters, summoners and necromancers, ritualists and oracles – magicians are scholars who channel magic and work miracles.
- Scout: From burglars, assassins and pickpockets, to sappers and siege engineers, to trackers and hunters, scouts rely on wits, skills and guile to survive.
- Warrior: Thugs and berserkers, duellists and tacticians, monster hunters and warleaders alike, warriors master all the arts and modes of warfare.
The four archetypes are described in more detail in the Archetypes chapter, along with the more advanced archetype skills associated with them, some advice for character creation, some example characters, and some common study paths for progression via Research and Training.
You can choose your archetype at character creation, but you don’t have to – you can get a feel for your character before choosing a path. You must, however, choose one before learning any archetype skills.
Skills
Your character starts with twenty (20) character points to spend on general and archetype skills. You don’t have to spend all your points up front; unspent points may be held back for later use (see Experience).
Skills are described in more detail in the Skills chapter or are listed in alphabetical order in the Skills List.
Changing Your Mind
It's entirely possible to find, after an event or two with a new character, that the archetype and skills you've chosen don't seem to fit - or you want to go in a different direction, or you just don't find the skills fun - even though you want to keep playing the character.
Despair not! Any new character's archetype or skills can be tweaked, or completely discarded and re-chosen, until you spend character points gained through Experience after the character's second event. Once you've spent those points, the character is fixed.
Changing your character's skills after that point generally requires significant in character effort of some sort, including ritual transformation, although if you wish to change for out of character reasons (such as no longer being able to take the battlefield), please contact the Game Organisation Desk to discuss.
Background
By now you have a sketch of a character – at least a set of skills, and possibly a broad concept to hang them on. This is absolutely enough to jump into your first event! Many players prefer to develop their characters in play, filling out their motivations and backstory as they get a feel for who they are.
Some players, on the other hand, like to dream up their character’s background – who they are, where they’re from, what life they lived before they joined the warband – before they start. Having a story adds depth and detail to the concept, and can help the character feel more real to you.
| Examples:
An armoured sword-and-shield fighter might be a pious knight of Albion, orphaned by war and raised by monks in a remote abbey, who feels out of place in worldly company, while an elemental spellcaster might be a learned druid of Caledonia, the eldest daughter of a tribal chief who refused to follow in her mother’s footsteps and fled to study the mysteries in the groves of the wise. Of course, not every character’s background has to be very grand or dramatic – there’s space in every warband for a humble pig-farmer who turns up to fight out of patriotic duty before heading home every winter to tend to his pigs. |
Many characters belong to a group with a shared past, shaping their background, although always with the scope to have a unique story of their own.
Faction and Culture
The most pertinent part of a character’s background is where they’re from: their faction is both the land your character calls home – although not necessarily where they were born – and the camp you’ll be based in at events. A faction is something like a nation, with political institutions, a shared religions and a shared identity; most are loosely based on historical real-world cultures, albeit with a fantasy twist.
The current factions are available to all players and every faction has a website and/or social media presence where prospective players can learn more about them and develop group and character ideas before turning up. Which isn’t to say you have to do homework before playing, but making contact with your intended home can help hit the ground running.
Every faction is home to several cultures – kingdoms, regions, tribes or noble houses – with their own identity and institutions within the larger faction. Most of the factions foster a certain amount of friendly rivalry between cultures, to generate roleplay.
Some cultures have not just distinctive identities, but characteristic appearances:
| Example:
Horns and blue skin may be common in one community, while the neighbouring tribe are thickset and broad-shouldered, with full beards. |
Of course, a character’s features may betray a mixed heritage – and not all children look wholly like their parents.
Each culture in turn may consist of one or several player groups at events, each representing a family or clan, a military company, a trading house or gang or similar.
Religion
Your character might not believe in them but gods do exist and they can literally walk the earth. Your response to these giants of power and belief is your own. Some characters are loudly pious and devout, some more irreverent; some see the gods as merely very powerful spirits.
Each faction has some sort of official religion, although plenty of groups – and individuals – have their own private faiths.
Note: Players are not permitted to practice any living, real-world faith in character, except for reconstructed historical European religions. You may draw inspiration from real-world religions, as long as you don’t use real names and terms, and as long as you mix elements and practices from different sources so as to obscure their origins.
Personality
While many players find it easiest to play characters who are much like them – especially for sixteen hours a day, three or four days at a time – some enjoy the challenge of inhabiting a very different persona.
Your character’s personality might be shaped by their skills.
| Examples:
A warrior might be taciturn and grim, while a scholar is verbose and enthusiastic and a thief is evasive and given to euphemisms. Or it could convey their social role or background: a courtier might be gracious and charming, or a priest stern but kind; the last survivor of a slaughtered village may be anxious and skittish, or filled with simmering rage. |
Some players find a distinctive costume or make-up helps them find their character, or adopting a particular posture or gait – and many find an in-character style of speech helps. Accents are of course permitted, but players are asked to consider how they come across to others when choosing one; in particular, accents based on racist or otherwise offensive caricatures are unacceptable.
Goal
One way to develop a character and drive roleplay is to have an in-character goal. There is, of course, no official way to “win” Renewal, but players can absolutely create win conditions for themselves.
| Examples:
A character may set out to be appointed governor of a Siberian city-state, or to lead Teutonia’s warband in battle; they may be seeking immortality as a vampire, or driven to find and kill the werewolf that mauled their brother. |
Appearance
Inevitably, your character will look more or less like you! But there are ways to make a character distinctive and recognisable.
Costume
Your character’s costume can say a lot about them: a vain noble might wear rich fabrics and jewellery, while a pauper scrabbles by in dirty rags; a hardy ranger will prefer rugged, practical garb, while a scholar or magician dresses in magisterial robes.
Many factions have a definite flavour of dress.
| Examples:
The Norscans style themselves in furs and chain, while Estragaleans favour doublets and capes. A character’s group may even have a specific uniform, to clearly mark them as a member. |
You may have more than one costume for your character, of course, if you can afford the investment – after all, in real life, people have more than one set of clothes. Weather at events can vary between swelteringly hot and cold and wet, and being able to add or remove layers while staying in character can be a lifesaver.
Make-Up
As in the real world, the people of the world of Renewal come in all forms and features; but being a magical world, that includes green or blue or purple skin, fur or scales (or bark, or stone!), spots or stripes, pointed ears or horns. Some features are more common than others, but almost anything that fits a living person in a fantasy setting is appropriate – but you should avoid looking like a demon, or undead, or any clearly supernatural or unliving creature.
The following guidelines apply:
- Prosthetics: Pointed or shaped ears, nose-ridges, horns, fangs, fur, feathers or scales, a wig, stick-on beard or sideburns, or any other fantasy-appropriate prosthetic features are permitted.
- Patterns: Make-up may include a coloured stripe or flare over the eyes, painted forehead, dots, stripes or other patterns or any sort of partial cover.
- Colours: If covering the whole face, make-up must use at least two colours, either to pattern or highlight, and the predominant colour may not be brown, black, yellow or red. We do not permit Blackface of any kind at any time in the game.
Make-up can represent your character’s past as well as their heritage, of course: it’s a dangerous world, and some players incorporate scars, burns, plague spots, tattoos and other markers of a full life into their make-up.
Can I Play An Elf?
There are no “races” in the world of the Renewal campaign, only the immortal fae who once ruled the world, and the mortals who ultimately supplanted them. And now that the fae are all but gone, mortals are all that remain.
It pleased the fae, in times past, to label mortals according to their features – to call all mortals with pointed ears “elves” or all those with green skin “goblins” – but now that the world is remade, mortals have seen the truth: that all mortals are one great family, and all are uniquely themselves.
So the answer to the question “Can I play an elf?” is both yes and no: you can absolutely play someone with pointed ears, from a culture who share those features, live in the woods and love music and dancing, but those are markers of that community, not of a global “race” that can be neatly lumped under a single name. And not every member of that community necessarily looks, acts or feels like the stereotype, either.
How you look, and what you call yourself, is up to you – but it doesn’t put you into a neat box, and it has no mechanical effect in the game.
Starting Equipment
Your character starts with whatever equipment they need for the skills they’ve chosen – all you have to do is bring some sort of props to represent them, known as physical representations (or phys reps). Props are available to buy from vendors on site at all main Curious Pastimes events, or can be sourced online or from charity shops; it may be possible, at first, to borrow items from faction commands or other players.
Starting equipment should include:
- Weapons: You’ll need weapons to fight! LRP weapons must be constructed within strict guidelines, and are subject to rules regarding safe and appropriate use.
- Armour: Any armour your character is wearing must be represented in your costume. Armour doesn’t have to be “real,” but should look the part.
- Workspace: Creator skills all require some sort of workspace: a Crafter’s Workshop, a Surgeon’s Bed, an Alchemist’s Laboratory.
- Tools: Various skills require tools for some or all of their functions
Examples:
|
Check skill descriptions for what props you will need for your character. All starting equipment is standard quality and doesn’t need an item card.
Special Items
Your character may acquire special items in play with specific game effects, including higher-quality or enchanted equipment, potions or poisons or magical scrolls and trinkets. They may also collect consumables: crafting materials such as wood or metal, bandages and armour staples, alchemical ingredients such as herbs and venoms, or mystical ether. See Equipment and Resources for details.
All such items and materials will be issued with item cards to record their existence and confirm any relevant effects.
New characters do not start with any special items or consumables.
Income
By default, characters in the Renewal campaign do not receive any automatic income, whether in coin or otherwise. Players may receive an income at the beginning of every event by taking one or more levels of the Income and Resources skills.
During time in, the skills Foraging, Gathering and Scrounging allow the character to venture into the woods or the camps and find, collect or steal coin or resources each day. Results may vary from day to day – and there is always some risk associated with the effort.