The Basics of Implementing Transformative Role-playing Games

This chapter covers basic information you will need to consider when implementing role-playing games for transformative purposes. When implementing these games, you are not only a designer and guide, but also an event organizer, which requires additional skillsets and planning beyond just the run-time itself.

This chapter is meant to briefly introduce key categories in implementation and provide an overview of concepts that we will expand upon in future chapters. Depending on your project, you will need to focus on some of these categories more than others. For example, a small tabletop game held in a home has far less considerations than a multi-day larp in a realistic setting with costumes and props. When you identify those categories, we recommend focusing on sections that provide more concrete information relevant to your current project. That being said, awareness of all the contents of the book will help you make judicious decisions about how to scale in future projects, not to mention developing a deeper appreciation for the work that goes into running larger productions.

This book is meant to complement the first book in the series, Transformative Role-playing Game Design (Bowman, Diakolambrianou, and Brind eds. 2025), which we will also reference as TRGD moving forward as shorthand. Therefore, we recommend reading that book first and familiarizing yourself with the contents, as we will only briefly touch upon the theory and practice around role-playing game design here. We will try to indicate such areas with the term “review” when possible.

Furthermore, even if you are designing for tabletop, we highly recommend familiarizing yourself with the Larp Design: Creating Role-play Experiences (Koljonen et al. 2019) book, which while larp-centric, has chapters that are relevant for many types of design.