There’s a lot of very exciting material here, and a lot of staff who worked very hard to bring it to you. In addition to the usual excellent job of HTML design and layout by Laura Quimby, we had a wide circle of editors who worked to get this issue together. Lynn Anslow, Dave Coleman, and joining us for this issue with complimentary editing job, Yashmyn C. Jackson. If you’re interested in contacting Yashmyn about professional editing services with Chicago Editing LLC you can make contact at yjackson@chicagoediting.com, or telephone 312-372-0560.

In this issue, we bring you LARP from opposite ends of the earth. From Taipei Brian David Phillips tells us about Sex and the Interactive Drama, and from Stockholm Ulf Staflund talks about an upcoming gathering for LARP writers and the prospective launch of Interacting Arts, a hard hitting literary magazine with the slogan "Fuck passive art."

In the Eastern U.S., Cheyl Ann Costa, Anita Szostak, and Rebecca Proch discuss the creation of a truly large prop – an armored car...complete with car. Meanwhile, Scott Mohnkern reviews the RTLB rules system which can be applied to many genres of LARP, GM and writer Steve McCann gives some of the backstory to the full length theatre style game Drink Deep, and Dave Coleman discusses plot in terms of The Carrot, the Stick, and the Box.

Moving West and East at the same time, British GM Steve Hatherley talks about Guns and Death in Tombstone!

Our very own Laura Quimby talks about methods of communicating in the Forums section in "Playing Nicely".

And of course our usual collection of columns including Jim MacDougal’s "Oooops!," and a new and thoughtlessly provocative news segment assembled by the same editor who brings you this exciting column.

My lead editorial for the last issue managed to whip up a tempest in a teapot. Partially, it was misunderstanding – I’ve gotta watch those long sentences with extra clauses hiding out in the middle. Partially it was geography. Quick review of what I’ve learned – as far as the British are concerned, Europe is a continent that they live next to, not where they live. Britain is Britain, and Europe is Europe. I smell a bit of rivalry there, as I’ve recently seen an article from Scandinavia "with pictures so the British will read it too." The LARP magazine Panclou uses the term "Nordic" for Scandinavian LARP, so we’ll likely subdivide further. Europe is a big place. On our side of the pond, LARP is somewhat of a different creature in Boston, Washington, Chicago, Denver, Atlanta and Los Angeles, but Vampire seems to be the same everywhere. At least something can be counted on.

Having managed to roundly offend everyone (elsewhere in this issue, I believe Laura blows a whistle – should your local game derived from kicking around the heads of dead enemies not embody that signal, over here it means "Time Out and knock it off.")

Everybody is proud of LARP where they come from. And we’ve had some offers which we’ll surely see in upcoming issues to prove why this or that region’s local LARP is the absolute best. We’re actually real happy about that. We’d a lot rather folks were proud of what they were doing than that they considered it "second best."

But, we’re about learning, and from what we’ve seen and read the fact is nobody has a headlock on the best LARP around. LARP is different things to different people, but there’s always something to learn from what the other guy is doing.

I started writing LARP back in 1984, setting up an "Assassin" dart gun LARP. That was a system where everyone had little toy dart guns, and went around trying to shoot each other in the back. If that doesn’t sound like LARP, well remember that LARP was awfully young in 1985. These games were played on college campuses, and occasionally the campus police got antsy about folks with pistols sneaking through the shrubbery outside the girl’s dorm at 3am, and intervened with a 357 magnum. Eventually there was a move to add some rules, more roleplaying, and less waving about of things that looked like pistols. The system for live action TAG still exists by the way, and is being re-issued by Steve Jackson Games, the folks who beat the FBI, and thus qualify as local heroes for the gaming industry whether you like em or hate em.

By 1986 we’d progressed to games with character sheets and motivations, and heavy roleplaying aspects. But I remember one thing about this period and it’s that learning was painfully slow. In 1987, some friends and I set out to play three theatre style LARP events in the same year. To do this we drove 1000 miles south from Washington D.C. to Sarasota Florida, then 400 miles north to Boston Massachusetts, and spent a very tiny mint in the process. Sure there were other events here and there. But how would you learn about them. Colleges had events. But if you didn’t go to school there, you didn’t know about them.

So here we are fourteen years later, and damned if I don’t know about events being run in Taipei, Los Angeles and Stockholm. That’s a phenomena of the Internet, and to no little extent the work of a devoted group called LARPA (formerly the ILF) which incidentally publishes this little rag. They aren’t the only folks pushing a LARP calendar, but it’s still one of the more comprehensive for North America, and their links will get you to most of the European (and British!) calendars.

It’s not enough to know when games are scheduled though, because frankly the odds of my having the moola to board a 747 bound for Taiwan just to play a LARP is pretty low in the foreseeable future (I keep buying those lottery tickets, ya never know!). But here’s the really fanatastic thing. Back in 1987, it took us years to learn about other groups and other styles. For example during this period, in some of the same areas that writers who attended Intercon (then Silicon) were spreading, evangelizing and improving theatre style LARP, the huge New England Roleplaying Organization was pioneering a lot of innovative concepts in Live Combat LARP. And of course there were groups doing both things in other places, because LARP isn’t an invention, it’s a meme – an idea whose time has come and which spreads faster than any specific information about it. But we didn’t know about each other, and we couldn’t share ideas.

Now it’s 2001, and I’m not only able to learn about what LARPers in Taiwan are doing, through the miracle of the Internet, I’m actually able to see samples of their work. Games are being shared around the globe, and every time information is shared good ideas get swapped back and forth.

That’s wonderful and it’s what The LARPer is all about. Check out our publisher, LARPA as well!

So send us your glorious ideas. Tell us why your hometown or regional LARP is the best. Be proud. Heck even have a chip on your shoulder and something to prove (though we don’t recommend taking it too seriously). But stay to take something home as well.

Good luck and good reading!

J. Gordon Olmstead-Dean