About Thrune

Thrune is

Thrune is a monthly fantasy LARP. It runs as an ongoing campaign: you make a character and continue playing them, event after event, as they learn new skills, make connections, and get deeper into whatever trouble they have found. You arrive on a Friday at a campsite, and once the event begins, that campsite becomes the village of Wanderer’s Hope, out on the Frontier, in the realm of Thrune.

The Frontier is the far western edge of an ancient Empire that stood the test of time for well over five thousand years. For most of that time, the Frontier was a wilderness largely ignored by those within the grand cities; hunters, foresters, a few mining camps that flared up and went dark just as quickly, and those who wished not to be found.

A decade ago, Wanderer’s Hope was little more than a few old buildings and abandoned wagons. Now it has cabins, a tavern, and caravans that circle through with whatever goods are still being made, and it is still growing, because people keep arriving.

But those who arrive now are not coming for the scenery.

They are running from something.

What they are running from started with a war. The Charlatan War tore the Empire apart for nearly a decade, until Arthur the True and his forces broke through the walls of the Ebon Tower and the warlock king Vaerlys was killed. But with his last breath, Vaerlys spoke a curse, and that curse called forth a stain upon the world: the Corruption.

It arrives without warning, the sky goes dark, there is a sound like the world trying to scream and gasp for breath at the same time, a dark fog comes up from the ground, and things tear their way in from the other side of somewhere nobody can see. The people call them Darkborn, for lack of a better word. They are hungry and hateful, they cannot be reasoned with, and they are shaped wrong in a different way every time. Kill one and it comes apart into ash and blows away, so there is never anything left to examine. Afterward, the place it happened stays thin… Colors look slightly gray, the sounds of birds and wind go muted, and that patch of the world becomes a Wound, yet it does not recover on its own. In a Wound, animals give birth to monstrous things, the dead get up, and cultists arrive to do the sort of work that needs a thin place.

The Frontier is not free of any of this, it simply has less of it than the ruined middle of the Empire does. The skies of the Frontier are mostly clear and the soil is still capable of growing crops. In their attempts to escape the Corruption and the Wounds it opens, people began heading West, to the Frontier… And the small village of Wanderer’s Hope is where many of them have chosen to make their home.

What's Different?

This is the point where Thrune stops resembling the kind of fantasy you are probably picturing. Thrune is a fantasy LARP with a considerable amount of influence from the western and horror genres. The western half shows up within our weaponry and setting, as there are firearms here: foam-prop pistols and long guns that ride on the same belt as a sword, in a frontier town sitting at the last edge of anything one might call settled. The horror half is not the kind where a simple monster turns up on schedule and you kill it.

It is older and stranger than that. There are creatures that steal the faces of those asleep and then spend the small hours clumsily imitating their lives. There is a hag who catches you as you drift off and writes omens into your skin with her claws. There are creatures that seep out from the dark fog and nearby Wounds through all hours of the day and night. And that darkness does not only affect them.

Every character can be affected by the Corruption, and it is much easier to become corrupted than it is to be cured of it. As one becomes more corrupted, their dark veins begin to show through their skin. Further corruption makes healing more difficult and infects one with an incurable disease. At the final ledge standing between life and Corruption, when one goes down, they rise as a Darkborn and turn on those around them until they are permanently destroyed.