What, you haven't heard the tale of Mercurius? Let me tell you.
When the chimera attacked his legion, he rushed into the fray. With a backhanded slash, he slit the goat head’s throat. The lion head chomped his shield, splintering it. Mercurius brained it with the pommel of his sword. The dragon head breathed fire at him, but he ducked and rolled clear. Grabbing a spear lying on the field, he thrust it into the dragon’s neck with such force that it burst through the back of its head. The beast fell dead at his feet.
We know that you yearn to be like Mercurius. The heart of the valiant beats within you. You long to pick up a sword, bow, or staff and confront the ravening hordes of the enemy.
We know, for we are like you. Let us show you the way to glory.
Valiant is a simple, free-to-play system designed for quick and easy LARP action in a fantasy medieval setting.
What is LARP?
A LARP is a live-action role-playing game. The players in the game take on roles as heroes in an imaginary setting. As the game progresses, the players act out the actions of their characters as they try to complete missions and overcome the challenges presented to them.
What Makes Valiant LARP Unique?
Generally, LARPs fall into one of two categories:
Boffer LARPs - these generally emphasize combat but roleplaying and immersion are very low. It's just fight, reset, fight again...
Full Immersion LARPs - these offer greater opportunities for roleplaying but require far more resources. As a result, there aren't many of them so you may have difficulty finding one close by.
Valiant LARP offers the best of both these categories.
Like boffer LARPs, we generally run games for a few hours in a local park. Avoiding expensive facility rentals means we don't have to charge you an arm and a leg for the privilege of playing a game with us.
Like full immersion LARPs, we have an ongoing story. The results of our battle games tie into the continuing narrative. This gives your characters something to fight for.
Valiant LARP places an emphasis on the roleplaying aspect of our game.
Garb Standards
To enhance immersion, we require players to wear medieval-style garb during our lore battles. We may make exceptions for newer players, but encourage them to get garb as soon as possible. To encourage participation, players wearing appropriate garb will receive an extra hit point during battles.
Garb does not need to be complex or expensive. With appropriate accessories, you can even transform modern clothing into medieval garb!
Here is an example. The base layer consists of an Under Armor shirt, sweatpants, and brown sneakers. Adding a tabard and a costume helmet transforms the look from modern to medieval.
Here are a couple tutorials to help you get started:
You can also find decent garb at Dark Knight Armory. We recommend starting with a tunic.
Class System
To enhance our players' experiences, we also introduced a simple character class system. To keep the game simple, we don't have a myriad of classes like modern Dungeons & Dragons. Instead, we pared it down to three basic classes.
The classes are:
Militants - specialists in melee or missile combat. This class includes warriors, archers, scouts, assassins, and others specializing in physical combat.
Mystics - spellcasters like wizards and clerics.
Maesters - non-combatants who can provide healing, repairs or spell recharges.
Each class has a small list of optional abilities, allowing players to tailor their characters. For example,
choose healing and protection spells to be a healer,
stock up on blast spells to be a pyromancer, or
play a militant with the weaken and sneak abilities to represent an assassin.
These are just a few of your possible options.
Leveling Up
With experience, a player's character can gain levels and additional abilities.
Leveling up requires (a) participating in lore battles, (b) acquiring and wearing appropriate garb, (c) demonstrating prowess in your character's class and proper game etiquette, and (d) completing quests assigned by your game master.
We follow general boffer combat rules with a twist.
Some of the primary features of most combat rules.
Striking an opponent in the torso will "kill" that person.
Striking an opponent's arm or leg wounds that limb. The opponent cannot use the limb.
Two wounded limbs equals "death."
Two-handed great weapons can damage shields. The amount of damage sustainable depends on the size of the shield.
Valiant LARP Variants
We have made some tweaks to standard boffer combat rules.
We reduced allowable physical contact. There is no grappling, striking with shields, or body-to-body contact.
We lowered the amount of force necessary for a legal strike. Like Amtgard, an audible pop is all that you need.
We banned back-shields. We consider them broken because they are better in game than plate armor.
Our Hit Point System
A major innovation of our rules is our hit point system. We added this system to facilitate dungeon crawls and make it easier to design and play monsters.
The system works by assigning players a pool of hit points. Players get hit points from (a) wearing armor, (b) character class perks, (c) wearing garb, and (d) bonuses decided by the Legion.
Weapon strikes reduce a player's hit point pool first. Once hit points reach zero (0), subsequent strikes will wound or kill the player as per standard boffer rules.
