A couple years ago, Ryan Green wrote a document on how to create lore as a player in Novitas. He used the metaphor of “invisible sandcastles”; in a game with 20 years of history, it’s almost guaranteed that at some point you are going to run into something someone else has created and accidentally knock it over. In my three years writing SIP and in my own creative work, I’ve often struggled with the craft of writing with intention inside a world that I don’t fully control—and accepting that sometimes, something is going to upend the sandcastle I am building for myself.
However, the biggest challenge in the LARP creative writing space is working around player agency. How do you write something in a world with unpredictable variables, secrets you don’t know, and characters who belong to people who aren’t you? How do you build your sandcastle on a beach with a bunch of other people who are also building their own sandcastles, integrate part of their sandcastle’s structure into yours, and not kick someone else’s sandcastle over?
Character Blogs, letters, flyers, narrative prose, etc are a popular way for players to engage with the world. Collectively referred to here as creative writing, it’s an interesting way to create opportunities for engagement without forcing it. Using SIP as an example—other characters can have read the paper, can disagree with Poppy’s coverage, can come find her with a tip, and can reference an article in conversation.
Or they can never mention it, and that’s fine too.
Writing does its work just by existing, and adds to the world regardless of whether anyone explicitly engages with it. It’s hard not to get discouraged when something you worked hard on doesn’t get picked up, but you can’t take it personally. The choice to engage belongs to other players, not to you.
And that principle extends even further, because it isn’t just about whether someone chooses to engage with what you’ve written, but your responsibility as a writer to make sure what you have written respects their autonomy over their own characters in the first place.
This is where writing with intention becomes important. Player agency isn’t just about whether someone reads your story or responds to your letter but extends into the writing itself. How you handle another PC’s reaction in a blog post, how you navigate writing about world secrets without spoiling them, and how you build something that leaves room for other people’s stories to exist alongside yours are all things that you need to take into consideration when you are writing in a community’s world.
In my personal craft, I operate with two distinct frameworks. The first is a character framework: am I respecting this character’s autonomy and their player’s authority over them? The second is a community framework: am I being a responsible member of a shared space with real people in it?
Writing Around Other Characters
When I am writing something like a character blog, I ask myself:
- Would this character actually act like or say this?
- Am I deciding what the character is thinking or feeling?
- Am I involving the character in something they didn’t consent to?
In practice this sometimes looks like writing an incomplete story, but it is like this by design. In my blog post Terms and Conditions, Poppy’s Blight addiction is heavily featured as a central conflict. Titus and Lynn, both other players’ characters, are also present throughout. In a typical story, those characters would notice Poppy’s struggles and react to them. Readers would be writing reviews screaming “ARE YOU BLIND?!” at Titus for not doing so. Booktok would be cheering for Niko because “He sees the real Poppy!”.
But those characters aren’t mine, and I can’t say if they would notice or not. Maybe Nick wants to have Titus discover himself in character, or Heather wants to have noticed but have Lynn be struggling with approaching her sister about it.
So instead I wrote around them, using a close third person perspective of someone too deep inside her own performance to accurately perceive how others are responding to her. This solved two problems simultaneously. Narratively, it’s the most authentic choice because Poppy genuinely doesn’t know what Titus or Lynn noticed. It also preserves those players’ agency to decide for themselves what their characters saw, felt, or did in game, on their own terms, without me having already written the answer for them.
This often means that in narrative prose, Poppy winds up as an unreliable narrator. She is absolutely certain of her perceptions, the motivations of those around her, and how her actions will land. But more often than not, she is completely wrong. Rather than being a limitation, this is actually one of the most useful things in my craft toolkit because a narrator who doesn’t accurately perceive her own situation leaves space for other people’s truths to exist alongside hers.
That all works beautifully in a blog context, but Poppy also runs a newspaper. SIP is a document that exists publicly in the game world, that other players interact with as fact, and that has real community impact regardless of whether it’s ‘just Poppy’s perspective.’ It has the potential to actually hurt someone if not written with intention.
Poppy is the main character of her story, but she isn’t the main character of Novitas.
Know Your Audience, Know Yourself
When I am writing the paper for game or anything that a player would interact with, I ask myself:
- Would writing this interfere directly with a plot in a bad way?
- Would writing this cause real-world upset feelings?
- Am I writing this as Poppy, or are my real-world feelings causing bias?
“Will this interfere with a plot” has an easy solution—I reach out to the GM in question and ask. The other two are where things get sticky.
SIP covers a mix of serious journalism and gossip, and you’ll sometimes see the same players featured heavily. The Chainbreakers consist of a lot of my closest friends, so I can have a bit more fun with them knowing they won’t take it personal. My own party is just fun to throw under the bus at any given chance. There are players I know well enough that I can poke fun at them and they won’t be upset, like Poppy’s constant jabs at Arcturus.
On the other end of the spectrum, newer players don’t appear as often because I don’t have enough of a feel for them out of game to know what they’re okay with. This also gives them time to find their footing as a character; nobody likes remembering that embarrassing thing they did in middle school, just like new players don’t want their awkward first game immortalized on the front page. Some players don’t appear in SIP at all, whether through an out of game conversation or the time-honored tradition of bribing the reporter.
Poppy is a journalist with integrity. She is also not above accepting a retainer fee.
Knowing my audience is one thing; knowing my own emotional state is another. We’ve all been in the situation where the player, not the character, is having a lot of emotions about an event. If something emotionally charged happened at a game to Poppy, I often won’t write about it for a couple of weeks. In the moment, it can be hard to separate what happened to me as a player from what happened to Poppy as a character. After I’ve had enough distance to see the situation for what it was (good RP, a fun as hell battle, a story worth telling), I realize that I’ve cooled off and can make sure that Poppy is writing the article, not me.
These aren’t perfect tools, and I have absolutely messed up even when using them. But having the framework questions at all has made it easier to be more intentional about where my authority as a writer ends and someone else’s begins.
What You Know, But Can’t Say
My authority as an author doesn’t stop with just characters; it also extends into the world itself. The wonderful thing about Novitas is the ability to build your own corner of the world, discover its secrets, and grow as a character. As a writer, protecting that experience of discovery for other players is just as important as respecting their characters.
Think of how annoyed you get when you see someone post a spoiler about something you were looking forward to online. You don’t want to have someone discover a major spoiler because you wrote about your character discovering it in a blog.
At the same time, your character has experiences that they wouldn’t just ignore or never talk about. You want to write about the cool thing that happened, and you should. There are ways to do this without giving away the whole story.
The first big one is redirection. Similar to writing around a character, you talk around the secret. In my story A Ledger of Ink and Scars, a prominent scene is Lapis and Poppy being given a secret straight from the dragon god himself. The secret itself wasn’t shared in the text; instead, I shifted the focus to being about the bond that Lapis and Poppy were forging during the conversation. The characters that know, know; and the ones that don’t, won’t.
There are other times where you will need to omit things entirely, which is arguably much more difficult. Redirection gives you something to write towards; omission requires you to recognize what NOT to write and narrate the gap in a way that doesn’t feel weird. There are times I have seen or heard about things in character that I have not written about because making the information public would hurt someone else’s character arc. I’ve done it enough times that I can’t point to a specific example, which is exactly the point. If the reader doesn’t feel the absence, the technique worked.
Sometimes, the best choice is to not publish a scene to a public blog at all. Instead, share it only with certain people or even just write it for yourself. Writing for a limited audience lets you get your thoughts on the page and share with the people who know or are involved, while not having to edit yourself so that you don’t ruin the joy of discovery for someone else. Writing something purely for yourself, with no intention of sharing it at all, helps you understand your own character’s experience. Not every scene needs an audience to be worth writing.
When the Tide Comes In
“No character survives contact with game” is a saying in RP spaces for a reason. You can arrive with your character’s entire arc mapped out, backstory meticulously crafted, trajectory carefully planned, and skill points assigned perfectly.
Then a dragon slaps you upside the head with its tail and you have to pivot.
The fun part of roleplay is letting the world affect you and seeing how your character reacts. You create your backstory with the worldbook in hand, stars in your eyes, and a clear vision of the mark your character is going to leave based entirely on what you know at the time.
My Vleanoans in the room: raise your hand if your sandcastle got knocked over several months after introducing your character.
Part of writing in a communal space is discovering six months in that the world you built your character into isn’t what you thought it was, but having a strong enough foundation that your sandcastle can take the hit.
In the interest of not giving away world secrets, I’ll use a small example of how this happened to Poppy. Initially, Poppy didn’t like gods. This was intentional, because I wasn’t comfortable with religious themes and didn’t know how to interact with them. LARP itself was a new thing out of my comfort zone, and I didn’t want to add more discomfort on top of it.
Poppy felt like the gods all just watched mortals like they were in a dollhouse, poking them to see what they would do. She was almost on board with a cult who wanted to kill one. Then through some plot events she wound up talking to Draconus directly, and basically said ‘Hey, pick me, I like you better than the rest of the assholes.’ She got laughed at and set on fire.
Was that a yes? Was she already chosen and didn’t know it? Was the independence of wanting to be chosen itself the Draconic thing? Poppy doesn’t know. Neither do I. None of it was planned. It just happened, and somehow it fit perfectly. Being Chosen of Draconus didn’t change Poppy’s core. Draconus just turned out to be the patron deity of exactly who she already was.
The reason that worked as a writer is the same reason it worked as a player: I knew what Poppy’s core was clearly enough that the unexpected thing had somewhere solid to land. Leave room in your writing for the world to surprise you, because the unplanned thing is often better than what you had in mind. Poppy’s relationship with the other Draconus chosen is richer than anything I could have written deliberately. The game gave me that, and all I had to do was let the tide come in and reshape things a little bit.
Closing
That’s the paradox of collaborative storytelling: it’s hard. It’s messy. The tide comes in, people trip over your hard work, and the world doesn’t always cooperate with what you planned. But the mess is where the best stories live.
Somewhere along the way, the sandcastle stops being entirely yours. Other people contribute pieces. Their stories touch yours. You borrow bits of each other’s work and build something none of you could have made alone. There is a rich, creative world here that you could spend years in as a character and not scratch the surface of. That’s not a limitation, it’s the point.
All of these techniques that I’ve described—the frameworks, the deliberate absences, the redirections, knowing your core—are in service of one thing: making space for other people’s stories to exist alongside yours.
These are my techniques. They work for me. They might not work for you, and that’s okay. We all come to this beach with different buckets, shovels, and construction methods. Finding what works for you is part of the process.
The only wrong way to build your sandcastle is to do it without thinking about who else is on the beach.