Check Larps
10 take & play larps from Czechia in one book

10

take & play games

43

hours of fun

200+

game runs

Inside the book

Buy the book €24.90

larps

L-World
Partnership, friendship and parenthood at stake

6 players, 4 hours

Sabine, very active in the LGBT movement, her wife Veronica, and her daughter Denise are looking for what is important to them in relationships, either in partnership or in family.

Moon
Freedom in times of western-style future

10 players, 5 hours

“Take my home, take my land, take me where I cannot stand. I don´t care, I´m still free, you can´t take the sky from me…”

Telenovela
Love. Hate. Happiness. Fear. Friendship. Envy. And Love.

14 players, 4 hours

A parody of all endless TV series full of earnest and genuine emotions. Families Lanz and Pereira have been torn apart by ancient wrongs and carefully hidden secrets. However, love will conquer all!

Carnival Life
1930s French avant-garde

5 players, 4-5 hours

The story of family secrets and repressed desires updates the timeless themes of love and death in the Paris of the 1930s. Out of the dust of the exhausted Dadaism, a new artistic movement has risen: surrealism.

Don Juan
The night before marriage

5 players, 4 hours

“Oh, you really do live in your little Neverland, don’t you? The world is cruel, baby doll! But you will get to learn that soon enough, no worries. And you will see what’s beyond the curtain!”

Operating System
Family life in times of AI

4 players, 3.5 hours

Discovering the ways the present and future technology, social networks, and artificial intelligence can influence interpersonal relationships.

Pika-don
Top secret atomic meeting

6 players, 3 hours

August 1945. A plane with 6 men lands at the American Johnston Island Air Force Base. The top secret meeting has one item on the agenda – a new weapon, never used before – the atomic bomb.

Samael
Fake smiles hide real tears

4 players, 4 hours

At the end of a high-school reunion, in the middle of the 80s, four former classmates are left in one bar at the frontier of bad dreams and even worse reality. In a whirlwind dance, they're falling deeper and deeper into their common dark past, icy fingers of their personal weaknesses hysterically tickling their nerves.

The Ascent of Ouranos
The soul's journey

5 players, 5 hours

The voyage of five souls through time, through key events of human lives, from completely intimate moments to great, historical ones. What impression the souls and their thoughts will make in completely different scenes?

Two Worlds
Teenage life torn apart

6 players, 3-5 hours

“Kathie, is that you?” Her mother, her therapist, her partner or friends - everyone is doing what they can and it's still not enough. Her life gets divided into two worlds and she is gradually losing the grip on either of them.

Show them all

Their thoughts

This collection includes ten battle-tested larps from Czechia, showcasing a vibrant play culture that may be intriguingly different from your own, but still entirely relatable. These games are brimming with new ideas, cover a vast swath of thematic territory, and are totally worth exploring.
Jason Morningstar, USA
Precisely crafted experiences, at the reach of your hands! From soul crushin dilemmas to heartful laughter: Czech larp is a book full of emotions. Just take & play them!
Dominik Dembiński, creator of College of Wizardry, Poland
Check larps is a beautiful book with a clear structure. Even though parts of the design choices feels alien to me, they feel intruigingly alien. The reading experience leaves me feeling inspired to expand on my own design choices. The book is as much about cultural exchange as it is a playing manual or a book about larp design.
Siri Sandquist, Sweden
Buy the book €24.90

More about the book

“In the Czech republic there are more than 300 chamber larps designed and played repetitively. We had chosen 10 great ones of them and put them into one book so you can taste them on your own.
Lujza Kotryová, editor

The book contains 10 full larpscripts including design concepts, tutorials, tips and tricks for facilitations and reflections. We had chosen larps that were played many times and they are proven by players. You don't find any raw ideas there that weren't tested repeatedly. Our aim is to offer you quality as well as diversity of scenarios typical for Czech larp scene.

You can find there detailed guidelines for running the larp by yourself. Additional materials, such as full texts for players, playlists, in-game texts and picture materials are available on the web for download after buying the book.

We, editors of this book, are larp enthusiasts, authors, larp theoreticians and members of Czech, and Europe, larp community. In 2015 we have decided to put together a collection of larps that represents our “Czech cousine”. From that time our firstly small project got fat and here we are translating 10 very well developed and complex full larps into english for international public.

Our hope is that this book helps not only preserve some of the good designs made so they won't disappear, but we also hope that that they can be interesting for you to study in terms of game design and that they will be played behind our borders.

We firmly believe that a style of larps representing the Czech way is unique in its forms and can be inspiring for other authors and organizers. So called chamber larps (in english sometimes called blackbox larps, theatre larps or parlor style larps) had gone through big development during 2007-2008 to repetitive take and play format with robust content. Around 2010 the style we call “czechoslovakian jeep-form” came across using some of the nordic jeep-form mechanics combining them with “classical” chamber larps.

Examples of both (classical Czech chamber larps and czechoslovakian jeep-form) awaits you in this book.

Meet the editors

Michal Havelka

Michal plays larps because of amazing community around the fenomen. He cofounded larp database portal, organized a lot of festivals and was tutor on larp design course Škool. He is (co)author of nine larps and around thirty articles on larp portals. He loves good beer and tries to explore non-traditional ways of life.

Lujza Kotryová

Lujza is author of several larps made in Slovakia and the Czech republic. She loves to cut edges of forms, topics and expectations in larp design. She works for Court of Moravia as a gamificator, game designer and consultant bringing playfulness (and larps) into bussinesses. She opened Škool - larp design school for non-larpers. You can read more about her work at her portfolio.

Petr Kuběnský

Petr is writer, author of several larps and larp theoretician. He is dedicated to czech larp history and collects all stories of larp fathers to his new book. Also, he is standing behind the larp database portal. In his professional life he fall in love with experimental poetry and wrote a book about it.

Big thanks to contributors

Translators
Gabriela Fialová
Iva Vávrová
Kristína Kureková
Kristýna Chvojková
Barbora Růžičková
Dagmar Wiesnerová
English proofreaders
Jason Morningstar
Marshall Miller
Gaylord Tang
Mo Holkar
Marta Błaszkiewicz
Czech proofreaders
Martina Drabinová
Josef Tisoň
Andrea Špoková
Kateřina Holendová
Marek Boček
Tereza Cirila Havelková
Jan Páral
Consultants and other helpers
Hana Kovářová
Jindřich Mašek
Zbyněk Štajer
Tereza Chocholatá
Lizzie Stark
Jakub Maruš
Graphic designer
Martin Rašek
Illustrator
Kristýna Sochnová
Typesetter
Markéta Tunková
Webdesigner
Ondřej Henek
info@checklarps.com | With love from Brno...