New to Numina

Community & Etiquette

The rulebook covers safety — see Etiquette & Safety for Caution, Clarification, Emergency, the Lookdown, and the OK Check-In, all of which are worth reading before your first event even if you read nothing else. This page covers the parts of the culture that never made it into any rulebook, because they grew out of years of people playing together instead.

The tone, generally

This community’s own reputation, by its own account, is being welcoming to new players above almost everything else. Post-event recap threads almost always include a warm word for whoever showed up for the first time that weekend, and staff and veterans alike would rather a good question get asked and answered publicly than have one new player quietly struggle with something everyone else already knows. If you show up not knowing something, you are not behind — you are exactly where every single person in this community started.

Fighting together

There is no official “commander” role in this game and no single person in charge of a battle, and staff intends to keep it that way rather than formalize a chain of command. Leading a fight is informal and player-driven: anyone interested can try it. The community’s own shared philosophy for anyone leading a fight is to say what needs to happen — “we need healers over here,” “focus that target” — and trust people to know how to play their own character rather than directing them move by move. It is completely fine to not want to be led at all; a good commander will keep you in the loop without expecting you to fall in line.

If you would rather help without leading, being a scout or a runner — someone who reports what is happening on the field or relays messages between groups — is genuinely valued and does not require any combat confidence at all. And if you do want to try commanding, nobody expects you to be good at it right away; it is a skill built by doing it badly a few times first, and the community’s general attitude is to give new commanders real grace while they learn.

Hits, and the good faith they run on

Combat here runs on the lightest possible touch — swings should have a real arc, but contact is meant to be a tap, never hard enough to move a shield — and the game depends on everyone extending real good faith about whether a hit landed. If you did not notice being tapped, the person who tapped you can simply tell you it happened rather than restaging the whole exchange; nobody is expected to fake or oversell getting hit either way. You are also never required to deliver a finishing blow on a defeated enemy — walking away is just as valid as narrating the last hit, and it is flavor either way, not a rule.

Stepping out, and back in

The phrase for breaking character to handle something real is “you’re speaking madness” (or “may I speak madness?” to ask first) — see Day in the Life for when and how people use it. Character conflict itself is a normal, encouraged part of the story; it only becomes a problem if it turns physically aggressive or if someone stops prioritizing the fun of the people around them. The expectation is that players de-escalate that themselves where they can, and staff will step in the moment anyone asks them to.

The community’s own sense of humor

Years of shared jokes have built up their own vocabulary. A “floon” or a “squee” is the specific kind of post-event excitement you cannot quite explain to anyone who wasn’t there; “larp drop” is the very real crash that follows a good weekend, and people check on each other for it. Post-event recap threads sometimes collect a running list of “Numina Quotes Without Context” — overheard lines that make no sense outside the moment they happened — and reading a few old ones is a genuinely good way to get a feel for the community’s tone before you ever show up. The game also does not shy away from heavy material — its story deals in genocide, religious war, and loss — and this community treats real emotional support after a heavy scene as just as normal as the jokes.

The line that gets repeated the most

If you take one thing from this page, take this: nobody here expects you to know everything, and saying so out loud is normal even for people who have played for years. Ask the question. Step out if you need to. Come back in when you’re ready. That is the whole culture.