Whether LARPing sounds like a fantastical experience or the nerdiest thing ever, some real magic might take it to the next level. Take a look at how Doren does DM'ing and you might get some clues to how that might look.

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Seth looked around the gaming hall as he walked through it, seeing all the small groups sitting down at tables deep in their games. He could hear pieces and snippets of the adventures their characters were having. There were space explorers landing on some distant planet, monster hunters preparing to storm a castle of horrors, and bands of warriors from a guild embarking on a quest to save a nearby village. As he walked past them, he wondered what kind of adventure was in store for him.

When he reached the back of the gaming hall, he saw the stairwell to the basement that he was told about on the forum.
Head to the back of the building, then take the stairs down. That’s where they’ll be, he thought, mentally reciting the directions. He was browsing a tabletop gaming forum looking for a local game to join when he came across a post saying that a game master was looking for players for a live-action roleplaying game. He’d never LARP’ed before, but it sounded interesting enough, so he thought he would give it a shot. Besides, some people already agreed to it apparently, so he wasn’t alone in this.

Seth descended the stairs in the well-lit hallway until he reached the double doors at the end of it. Walking through them he saw, three other people sitting down around a folding table, presumably the other players in this game. They were all currently in a small room with another set of double doors on the far wall.

“This game’s smaller than I thought and I’m not talking about the group,” Seth said, wanting to break the ice as he came in.

“Hey, you must be the fourth player,” one of them said as he walked to the table and took one of the empty chairs.

“Yeah, I’m Seth.”

“Bill, nice to meet you,” he said, shaking Seth’s hand. “This is Harlan, he’s a friend of mine.”

Harlan silently nodded and gave a small wave. The fourth person there looked up from his phone to the rest of the group.

“I’m Gage. How’s it going?” he said.

“Well, looks like everyone’s here,” a voice said, seemingly filling up the whole space and grabbing the attention of the four guys. “Guess it’s time for me to make my entrance.”

Someone walked through the double doors leading into the rest of the basement, though looking at him, describing him as “something” instead, may not have been too far off. The figure that just entered the room looked like a two-legged humanoid panther. The beastman had thin black fur covering his body, thin claws were visible on his fingers and his uncovered toes, a small smile graced his feline muzzle, a wispy smoke seemed to come from the tip of his tail, and, perhaps more eye-catching than the panther himself, there were four tentacles-like limbs extending from his back, each one ending in a hand-like appendage.

“Welcome to what just may be the adventure of your lives. I am Doren, your game master for the evening,” he said as the four seated at the table got up to approach him.

“This costume looks sick,” Gage said, looking the creature up and down. The panther looked even more detailed and realistic up-close. If he didn’t know better, he would almost say it looked real. “You supposed to be a displacer beast or something?”

“Something like that,” he replied.

“Yeah, there’s a lot of detail in this,” Harlan added.

“Well, I am very serious when it comes to making costumes,” Doren said. “I even made some for you of the characters you’ll be playing.”

“Seriously?” Seth asked.

“Yes, just past here,” Doren said. He held the door open behind him as the four players grabbed their belonging and walked into the next room.

There, the players found themselves in a slim hallway. Differing from the green and white-painted plaster walls of the rest of the building, this room looked like it was made of aged wood and the fluorescent lights were replaced with lanterns that seemed to be lit with candles. It looked like some of them might imagine an inn in a medieval fantasy world would look. The wall to the left of them had four single-doors with paper signs on them, while the wall to the left, that Doren was standing by, had one set of double-doors.

“What’s this place?”

“This is the dressing room. I made it look like the inn you all start your adventure in,” Doren explained. “You each have your own rooms. That is where you will find your outfit and… get into character. You can just come out when you’re done and we’ll go through these double doors to start the adventure.”

Seth walked down the small hall until he saw a door with his name on it. He looked down the rest of the hall to see the other players finding their doors and going inside and Doren just standing with his back against the wall, watching everyone, his eyes giving off a blue glow. He thought the way the guy was looking at all of them was strange, but after a moment, he brushed it off and went to get into his costume.

Once the last of the players went into their rooms, Doren’s smile grew a little wider.

“Now, to make sure you really get into character,” Doren said.

The ‘hands’ on his tentacles began to glow with a deep blue light, as did his eyes. He inhaled, his mouth glowing with the same deep blue light, and as he let out a deep long breath, a misty fog the same color as the glow began to fill the room and seep under doors of each individual dressing room.

Seth looked around as he entered his dressing room. There wasn’t really much to the inside of it except for a bench, a couple of hooks for his to put his things on, a mirror on the wall across from the hooks, and a box with his name on it.

This must be my costume, Seth thought. He was told that the LARP they would be playing was inspired by Dungeons and Dragons, so after some thought, he said in the forum post that he wanted to play as a wolf shifter barbarian. He read about the race in the Eberron book that came out recently and thought of it as the safe way to play a lycanthrope in the game.
Seth took the top off the box and pulled out the different articles of his costume to take a lot at them. It looked just like how he described his character when Doren asked for it.

“He really went through all this? This is crazy. I love how this looks!” he said to himself. As he began to take off some of his clothes to put on his costume, he didn’t notice a deep blue mist slowly start to seep into his room.

After slipping on the black pants of his costume, he tried putting on the pair of werewolf feet with his socks on, but they didn’t fit right as he tried. They kept folding in as he put them halfway on. So, he took his socks off and tried just putting them on barefoot. The left foot slipped in easily, so he did the same with the right, putting both socks off to the side with his shoes. As he worked on putting the rest of the costume on, he didn’t notice the material of the costume feet changing, closing around his feet and merging with them, the plastic brown fur and black claws becoming his own real fur and claws. As the subtle change left him standing barefoot on the floor, the fur from his new feet began spreading up his legs. His legs also grew more muscle mass as well, giving him more of an athletic look as the changes traveled upward.

The next costume pieces Seth put on were a brown furred chest piece and a dark grey vest with a light grey furred collar. After taking off his shirt, he put the chest piece on, followed by the vest. As he glanced in the mirror, he could see the character starting to take shape. Still going unnoticed as he went to grab the next piece of the costume, the chest piece merged with his chest in the same way the costume feet did, giving him a real muscled chest covered in brown canine fur.

The next pieces he put on were a couple of furred arm sleeves, followed by a couple of werewolf gloves with brown fur on the backs of the hands and black claws. He thought for a moment that maybe he should’ve waited until he put the rest of the costume on before the gloves. But looking at the rest of the costume, he figured the rest of it should be easy enough. He straightened out the gloves before going to put on the last of the costume pieces for his head. As he did, the arm sleeves merged with his arms, growing as well to give his furred arms a bit more muscle to fit his new role. The feeling, again unnoticed by Seth as he looked to the final pieces of his costume, went down to his hands altering them until the gloves were no more and the claws and fur on them were really his own.

The last pieces of the costume were all things meant for Seth’s head. They were a shaggy wig, pointed ears, some fur patches that were supposed to stick to his face, a set of fanged teeth for his mouth, and a necklace of animal teeth to wear around his neck. He set about putting each of these items in place and, though the teeth were a bit hard to get in his mouth with his new claws, he was able to get everything in place. As each of the head pieces was set in place, they changed and fused with Seth’s body until they were an actual part of him.

As Seth looked at himself in the mirror, he felt like he was actually his character. He looked like he was an actual wolfman.

“This is so cool! I almost feel like I should howl, I’m so excited!” he said. If he wasn’t in the mood to join in this adventure, he definitely was now.

He heard some of the others coming out of their rooms next to him. Seth stepped out of his room and looked to the sides. Two of the others were out of their rooms already. If he didn’t remember than Gage and Harlan went into the rooms to his left, he wouldn’t have recognized them now.

One of them was now a demonic-looking humanoid that he recognized as a tiefling. He now had dark purple skin, a pair of horns jutting from the top of his head, and a long, skinny tail ending with a spaded tip. He was wearing an outfit that was a mix of dark blue and black, most notably a dark blue cloak.

The other one was some sort of aquatic humanoid that he didn’t recognize. He had a human-like face, but greenish-blue skin, pointed ears, and a large fin on the top of his head. He could even see fish-style webbing between his fingers. He was wearing white and blue ornate-looking robes, which stopped just short of touching the ground.

“Looks like we have our rogue and cleric,” Seth said.

“Looks like we have our fighter,” the tiefling said. Seth could tell by the voice that this was Gage, which meant that the fishman on the end was Harlan. “What’s your character?”

“I’m Ranulfr, the wolf shifter barbarian,” he said, using a different tone in his voice to try to sound more like a hardened warrior.

“You look like you jumped out a werewolf movie, dude,” Gage said, walking over to Seth to take a closer look.

“How about you? Those horns look like they’re really in there,” Seth said. “How about your characters?”

“Oh, I’m the tiefling rogue, Durith,” he answered. He heard Harlan say something as he started walking over but didn’t really hear what was being said.

“I said my character’s name is Levan. He’s a triton cleric,” Harlan repeated, loud enough for the two to hear.

“All we need now is a mage and we have a full team,” Gage said.

“Guess that’s my cue. Guys, say hello to Giath,” Bill said from behind his door.

As the door opened the figure that emerged from it had to duck down so part of him wouldn’t bang on the door frame. ‘Bill’ now appeared to be a humanoid bird creature. He had a mix of white and grey feathers, a big yellow beak where his nose and mouth would have been, and yellow, clawed talons for his hands and feet. His outfit was made of a green robe going down to about his knees that was worn open, revealing a white tunic and dark green pants. The most noticeable thing however was that he had a pair of large bird wings sticking out from his back. They were what he had to duck down to get through the doorway.

“Order up: one mage, no onions,” he said, taking in the appearance of the rest of the group just as much as they were taking in his.

“Take a look at this one,” Seth said, staring up and down at Bill’s new appearance. His eyes got even wider when he saw the wings move a little. “These costumes are something else. And he made these for us? How much is all this gonna cost?”

“I wouldn’t worry about that. Consider them a gift,” a voice said to the group. They recognized it as Doren’s, but they couldn’t see him anywhere.

“Huh? Doren? Where are you?” Bill asked.

“I’ve just taken my spot out of sight as the game master,” he said. “I’ll be speaking you like this for the duration of the time we are together. Looks like you’re all set. Go ahead to the next room and we’ll get started.”

They all looked at each other then back to the double doors that the tentacled panther was standing by earlier. The four of them went through the doors and found themselves in an old Medieval European style building, specifically an inn. They could see tables and chairs set up, a bar with bottles lining the shelf behind it, and a window with light streaming in from it. There were even a few people scattered about. They realized they were standing on a balcony overlooking the common area and walked down to begin their new gaming experience.

From his unseen perch, Doren looked down at the players he was directing.

“I wonder how long it will take them to realize those costumes aren’t costumes anymore,” Doren said as he watched his players start to talk to some of the inn patrons. “Probably as long as it will take them to realize the world I’ve placed them in is real.”