It has been a great couple of years building LarpCraft and now we have hit a milestone of 1,025 member profiles as of today. With this news, we teamed up with Live Action Products to release the all new giveaway worth over $100.
How LarpCraft Started -
Oden and Artenen were watching Role Models the movie one day and decided to put together a whole bunch of foam weapons. We then went out to the local park and began swinging at eachother. We were not able to find another group here in Wisconsin that was close to our city (not that we could find anyway) so we built the first version of www.wilarp.com and gave ourselves a name. This was back in the end of 2010. After some practices and such we decided to start writing up some guidelines and began thinking about how to make something like a MMORPG but where you did it Larp style with tools via the website to track it all. We didn't see that this was easily available in any other system so we brought in Skylab to see if he had any suggestions.
At about this time a player by the name of Bucky contacted us and asked when our next event was. Oden and Artenen simply would bust out the swords at parties and whenever so we really didn't have anything formal yet as we were brainstorming the ruleset. We decided to just have practices as we could in a local park so Bucky and others began to come to these sessions.
During the 2011 year Artenen poured in some bucks to make the site and Skylab poured in huge amounts of time to make the wilarp.com site better and trackable. After failing many times and after countless hours of crashes, format issues, bandwidth issues and pretty much everything you could think of, we had a system that would work. At this time we began to host weekly games on Sundays for free every week (and I do mean every week). We modeled our games around questing and battle but we had few costumes and weapons though everyone was always asking for them.
Artenen then decided to set this up as a business called Progressive Live Action Role Players and registered the prolarp.com domain. He did this for 2 reasons. First, so we could get a checking and business account set. 2nd so we could tell people where to find our info on stuff since wilarp was only a local club. Then we got the sales license and such so we could sell our own stuff at games (since we really didn't want to make it all). After a while another site was made for the online store. This was called battlestuff. The online store served to make sure we had the right props and costumes to keep growing our games while at the same time giving reviews on stuff we sold to help players decide on how to shop for stuff. It was the swell of videos that eventually brought prolarp to life nationwide.
But...
The site could not handle the load of all the people and videos. Load times were slow and the tracking system was not real good. People wanted to join prolarp but our ruleset and system were not able to work for that many people. It quickly became overpopulated and eventually we had to take the system down. At this time Artenen really didn't like the prolarp name it was too wordy and didn't explain what we did. It wasn't a brand that he was happy with. One afternoon at a game the group was together and somehow the crafting of Larp came up and boom... the name LarpCraft was invented.
After 2 years we finally had a medieval ruleset, website, tracking system and enough people to call the site home. We know we are not done yet, but we spent lots of money and time building this thing the hard way to make sure that we had a solid foundation to grow off of. Now we will continue to smooth out the system to make it easier for new games to get going with as many resources as possible to grow said games.
We have lots in store for the future and look forward to your thoughts, interaction and involvement. All LarpCraft systems are built by the players and admins. We bring up ideas, vote on said ideas and then before the next season put stuff in and take stuff out at our annual LarpCon or should I say LarpCraftCon??
Anyway... here is the contest for stuff we are giving away due to this milestone. We would like to thank Live Action Products for the donations!
http://liveactionproducts.com/giveaways-contests/
