Growing up my family played D&D for family game night. My first character was a Dwarf, and my dislike for knife eared glitter slugs (elves) was locked into the core design of who I would grow to be.
That pretty much sums me up, but if you need more, here it is.
In 1995 I started as a larp storyteller. Back then it was Vampire the Masquerade, but after my first events I was completely hooked on creating experiences for people. I joined an international organization and started running events for Changeling: The Dreaming, Vampire the Masquerade, and Werewolf: The Apocalypse. In 1997 I published my first set of “network rules” for Changeling: The Dreaming to fill in areas of design that I thought were lacking mechanical explanation.
In 1999 I was a club/bar promoter, a bar tender, and was running multiple events a month. I started doing event writing for an indi event that a couple of friends were running. This sadly came to an end when I was offered more money than I had ever made in my life to move to Texas to work for a major corporation. I finished my degrees in Physics and Computer Science because, as everyone told me, there would never be a future in that “gaming, events, and writing thing”. In 2000 I found that living in Dallas didn’t match me and I moved back up to CT.
In 2001 I went back to bar tending at a place called XandOs (later Cosi) as well as at the Tune Inn. I pulled $2 beers for townies who dropped just as much in tip. I ran a club
night called Distortion out of the Alley Cat Club and after 6 months not running immersive events I got back into it again.
In 2006 I started seriously writing my own IPs, was working as a bar tender and club promoter, and did theater events completely as my passion hobby. In 2007 I invited people to try a hybrid event I had been working on known as “Dystopia Rising”. It was raw, it wasn’t anything like the world you know now, but it had some solid foundations to it.
Between 2007 and 2009 DR was written, re-written, redesigned, and reworked in my spare time while working 80+ hours a week to keep the lights on and food on the table. In 2009 my business partner and I ran DR for the public for the first time with a ton of help from our friends. It was a success in our mind because a whopping 30 people showed up to the game. The next time we ran the event there was over 80 attendees and one of my best friends at the time joked “I don’t know what we would do if we ended up with like... 200 people. I think I would just vomit all event.”
At the middle of year two we were regularly getting over 250 people a month. From there one game grew into a franchise network of 20+ businesses with over 20,000 participants having attended a DR event (player number 22,000 or something is out there), it supported the founding of a publication company, a live events company, and allowed me to expand outward and make some real change in the industry. Over the following 10 years I had over 20 publications, designed ARGs for 3rd party promotions, worked publication and promotion organization, was hired to write content and design for other companies, and became the “ten year over night success” that is regularly joked about. While running aspects of the LARP network wasn’t my only income (since I was also working as a screen writer and a project developer at the same time) it was enough of an income that it deserved full time investment of my time into the project instead of just following my responsibilities as a stock holder and licencor. This would have me running larps nearly nonstop from 1995-2016.
In 2016-2017 I stopped working with the active management of the Dystopia Rising Larp Network and moved my involvement over to being a contracted developer. In 2016 This was a major step because instead of spending 40+ hours a week supporting the local branches and the game, I could spend my time supporting my IPs. It was in 2017 where I got married, moved, and decided it was time for me to start taking everything I had learned over the years and move into new fields. Now I work on more of a macro level organizing teams of people to blend art, theater, community groups, and marketing together to make immersive experiences as well as work in the field of event management and marketing full time. While there are things that I do miss about larp as a whole, when I do find myself missing those portions of the hobby and the industry I contract myself out to work on a new RPG book, test new systems, or host events for friends or for charity.
