Day in the Life
The rulebook tells you what your character can do. It does not tell you what Friday night actually feels like, or where you sleep, or when you eat. That is community knowledge, passed player to player for years, and this page is that knowledge written down.
The weekend, roughly
Events run four times a year — roughly March, May, August, and November — Friday evening through Sunday afternoon, at one of two sites in Virginia that alternate through the year. Camp Horizons, near Harrisonburg, hosts the season-opener and season-closer and has rustic cabins at the cold end of the year, so pack for cold regardless of what the forecast promises. Prince William Forest Park hosts the two events in between and has no air conditioning, so it tends to be the hot ones. Prince William books its LARP dates through a park-wide lottery shared with other groups, so even staff often do not know those exact dates until after New Year’s — check the official site rather than assuming a pattern.
Friday starts later than you might expect. The supply trailer usually does not arrive until the early-to-mid afternoon, and nobody is allowed on site until setup crew has gotten in ahead of everyone else, so check-in tends to be mid-afternoon. “Game on” — the moment the world starts moving around you — has crept later over the years and now often lands somewhere around 10 PM to 1 AM, sometimes later. Bring something to do quietly while you wait, and do not read a late start as a bad sign; it is close to normal.
Saturday is the heart of the weekend, and it typically opens with a short new-player orientation mod right after opening ceremonies — a walk-through of the mechanics in practice, aimed squarely at people in their first event or two. Go to it even if you read every rule ahead of time; doing a thing and reading about it are different skills.
Town life and mods
Most of what happens over a weekend is mods — small adventures, usually built for somewhere around ten to fifteen people, running in parallel all over the site all weekend long. Think of the game less like a movie with one plot everybody follows and more like an MMO: dozens of things are happening at once, you will only ever see a slice of them, and that is by design, not a sign you are missing out on something you were supposed to catch. A handful of larger field fights — the weekend’s set-piece battles, combat and non-combat pieces both — punctuate the smaller mods, usually two to four over a weekend.
Meals and cabin time are treated as real breaks, not something to apologize for. Mods are never scheduled over mealtimes or run into cabins, so stepping away to eat, sleep, or just sit down is expected of everyone, new player and ten-year veteran alike. If you need to step out of the story for a second — to ask a real-world question, deal with a real-world problem, or just breathe — the phrase for it is “you’re speaking madness” (or “may I speak madness?” to ask permission first). Say it, get your OOC moment, and step back in. Cabins and the meal table are treated as informal gray space where nobody expects you to stay fully in character.
For the actual out-of-game safety calls — Caution, Clarification, Emergency, the Lookdown, and the OK Check-In — see Etiquette & Safety; that page is the rulebook’s own account of them and worth reading before your first event.
Food and sleeping
Only Camp Horizons offers catering (breakfast and dinner, or a bundled meal plan), and even there it is optional. Prince William has no catering at all, so most people bring a cooler, split a grocery run with cabinmates, or make a short supply trip into town. The tavern building usually has a real kitchen — stove, sink, fridge, microwave — and if you cook in it, bring your own cleaning supplies and expect it may be informally claimed by whoever is running the weekend’s tavern food.
Nobody tents. You are in a cabin at both sites, and cabin assignments are handled through the event’s registration system and can shift close to the event — one longtime NPC describes it as “cheerfully chaotic,” and that is the right amount of concern to have about it. Camp Horizons cabins are genuine depression-era buildings with no air conditioning, heaters that are more of a suggestion than a guarantee, and thin mattresses, so a foam sleeping pad and a warm bag matter more than you would think. Prince William’s cabins are similarly rustic but share some more modern common buildings.
Monster Camp, for anyone curious
If you spend any part of the weekend as an NPC, you will end up in or near Monster Camp, the staging area where NPCs gear up between roles. It has its own culture: a shared stock of loaner weapons and armor (swords are plentiful; polearms and spears are limited and have historically been offered to new players first, specifically to help retention), a running supply of homemade treats other NPCs bring in, and a genuine habit of checking on each other after a hard fight or a rough scene. NPC meals are covered by the game as thanks for volunteering. See NPCing for what it is actually like to spend a weekend on that side of the story.
The one thing everyone says
Across years of this community’s own chat, one sentence shows up more than any other, from veterans and staff alike: nobody knows everything, even after years of playing. One player put it plainly — “I’ve been playing for two years and still don’t know what’s going on” — and meant it as reassurance, not complaint. You are not supposed to see the whole plot in one weekend. Go to your mods, eat your meals, sleep when you’re tired, and let the rest of the world keep happening without you. It will still be there next event.