Article:
LARP Plot Tips: Rumors

A lot of plot teams like to prep the players with some information before the event, often in the form of rumors. This gives a little bit of direction to the players and helps to set the mood for the event ahead of time. When used correctly, rumors are a great way to provide imperfect, topical, and IG information, drastically helping immersion.

However, rumors are only useful if people actually read them.

I have seen games where essentially no player reads the rumors ahead of time. The problem was based on the implementation and the bad attitude of the plot teams giving the rumors.

Here are a few tips to remember when implementing pre-event rumors into your game.

Rumor Accuracy
When we started doing rumors for our events, we would throw in maybe one or two (out of 10-15) tongue-in-cheek type rumors. Many of these were completely off the wall and entirely unbelievable. The benefits from this technique was two fold.

1) Everyone knew that rumors were not 100% true.
2) It allowed for some serious side-swiping when one of the unbelieveable rumors was actually true.

Rumors cannot have perfect accuracy, because then the players will blindly follow all the rumors. Players need to develope important skills like the ability to discern valuable information from a lot of noise. However, if the rumors that are mostly false (or even 50% false), players will simply ignore the rumors completely.

I suggest making at least 80% of rumors at least 50% true. If you give a rumor like "Orcs are building up forces on the border of the town," you can make it partially true. Maybe orcs are building up forces, but don't have them on the border of the town. Maybe trolls are building up forces instead of orcs. Players will identify that the rumor eluded to an actual event, even if the information was imperfect.

Rumors are Serious Business
I used to always write my rumors in about 15 minutes the night before. This is not the appropriate thing to do! You really need to put some effort into the rumors your write. If you do them quickly, you're more likely to make rumors either true or false (rather than partially true), and the details are less likely to be of value to players.