Launchpad

community, poverty, empathy
Designers: Kol Ford and Prudence Greenwood
Number of participants: 12
Duration: 4 hours
The presenter feels that this larp IS suitable for young people aged 16+

About the larp

“The Launchpad community program is committed to giving young people a second chance at life. Taking people from a wide variety of vulnerable backgrounds, we provide them with safety, security and an opportunity to develop a skill so that they can become productive members of society.”

Launchpad is a larp based on the wide variety of youth schemes of the early millennium in the UK that were intended to tackle the rising number of young people not in education or employment. This larp focuses on the lives of the attendees of one of these schemes and the difficulties and dilemmas they face while attempting to engage with the community project.

It is about the struggle between hopeful idealistic goals and cruel pragmatic reality while also humanising a group of young people who are often seen only in statistics.

Content Warnings: Launchpad contains materials referencing sex, violence, drug abuse, domestic abuse, homelessness, homophobia, poverty, disability, structural poverty and institutional racism. While none of these subjects are central themes of the larp, the nature of this larp means that they will all be present in some capacity, spoken or unspoken.

Kol Ford: Kol is a larp designer from London and part of the Omen Star Studio. He helps organise the School of Sorcery and Sacrament international larps as well as writing a wide variety of chamber larps. Outside of larp he works as a project coordinator for a variety of community organisations in North London providing advocacy and support for people from vulnerable backgrounds.

Parameters

Physical contact Moving in contact; e.g. rolling around on the floor together, contact improv, very close dancing
Romance and intimacy Symbolic kissing or sex; e.g. stage kisses, abstractly representing sex
Conflict and violence Pushing, grabbing, latex weapons or other safe physically forceful actions
Communication style Lots of speech
Movement style Walking
Characters Characters are fully predesigned
Narrative control Intensely plotted and designed, but players have freedom as to how to achieve their goals
Transparency There are predesigned secrets that players will have from each other
Representation What you see is what you get: the space and fixtures etc are exactly as they seem
Play culture Players are individually trying to achieve goals, such that not all can succeed
Tone Intense

Sunday afternoon, Boardroom