Nemefrego Saga
How do you play Dungeons & Dragons with four hundred people and no game master?
What it feels like to play
You are Meriam. A merchant’s oldest daughter, almost too old for marriage. In desperation, your father has promised you to a depraved old nobleman, empty purse, a cruel reputation, and worse behind closed doors.
Your closest friend urges you to elope with the miller’s son. You do like him. He cannot support you.
The priests say obey your father. The old wise woman says seek counsel from the creatures of the night forest. The beggars taunt you. The soldiers by the gate suggest an entirely different life with their eyes and their whispered remarks.
Every character you meet, your father, the nobleman, the miller’s son, is a real person, trying to solve their own problem.
In the end you decide to talk to the miller’s son. So you walk to his village and find him. You open your mouth and say the words Meriam would say.
He woos you with a song he makes up on the spot. The lyrics are about you, improvised, imperfect, completely sincere. You decide it works on Meriam. But you push back: he has no money. No future. He’s the miller’s third son.
He tells you his plan. It’s daring. You’d have to help him.
It could work. It sounds like an adventure.
The design challenge
Four hundred players, no game master, no script. You have built the world, the villages, the backstories, the factions, the secrets. But when they walk through the gates, the story belongs to them. The designer’s job is to make sure they can tell a great one.
What it opened up
Players took the story somewhere we hadn’t imagined, and it was better than anything we had prepared. That was the first surprise.
The second came when we played other designers’ larps, games with predetermined narratives, careful structures, beautiful stories. We were thoroughly entertained. As audience members. That felt wrong.
The players should be the authors. That didn’t feel like a solution. It felt like the beginning of a much larger question.
Nemefrego was a series of games that explored answers that fit this new medium.