Calling all scenario authors, past, present, and future!
We are seeking brand new live-action roleplaying scenarios exploring the festival theme of Under The Surface to premiere at Make a Scene in August 2025! We invite you to submit a synopsis for consideration!
Perks of Being Accepted: The Make a Scene Package
If your scenario is accepted:
- You will be paired up with a mentor for one-to-one feedback, advice, and support.
- Along the way, we will keep you on track with monthly check-ins.
- We will facilitate your game if you are unable to attend the festival in person.
- Your scenario will be played at Make a Scene 2025.
- We will help promote you and your game, including commissioning cover art for it.
- Finally, every completed Make a Scene scenario receives a small financial stipend.
- You retain all rights to your work.
Below you’ll find a button to submit your synopsis, but please read what we have to say on this page before submitting.
This Year’s Theme: Under The Surface
“Are we going to talk about it?” … lights flicker, fathoms deep… your makeup’s cracking… wolves grinning in their wool suits… ”there’s gold in them thar hills!”… buried ledes and lead burials… skin bulging under the strain… whitewash slopped over teeming mold… “we’re still alive down here”… masks beneath masks, shadows in the mirror… lacquered dreams… dive in… tunnel deeper… read between the lines… don’t blow your cover… “This changes everything”
Make a Scene! 2025 scenarios look Under The Surface, beyond first impressions and shallow artifice to the truths beneath, whatever the cost.
Let’s delve deeper together. Who knows what we’ll find?
One way or another, we’re sure to Make A Scene!
What We’re Looking For
Here’s a quick rundown of what we’re looking for in a Make a Scene scenario.
Representation. We are especially seeking submissions from new scenario authors, people of color, women, non-binary individuals, LGBTQIA+ individuals, disabled individuals, and people belonging to any other often marginalized community. If you feel this applies to you, please submit! If you do not think this applies to you, still submit! We will read and consider all submissions that fit the guidelines outlined here.
Variety. We are looking to create a program of scenarios at Make a Scene that highlight a variety of topics and play experiences. We want to showcase the huge potential of the scenario style as a medium, and the wide range of people who play and write scenarios. To that end, we’re equally interested in scenarios that are socially inquisitive, educational, emotionally heavy, emotionally light, or just good fun. That variety is more important to us than accepting all of the scenarios we personally like best.
Flexibility. Make A Scene is an in-person festival, with both last-minute player drops and attendees who buy tickets at the door. Games with a flexible player count are dramatically more feasible than ones that require firm player commitments. Scenarios at Make a Scene do not require participants to do any advance preparation. We don’t pre-cast roles, or expect participants to pre-read, pre-play, bring costumes, or provide props.
Focus. While we are asking for synopses first, rather than fully-written scenarios, we are looking for clarity, focus, and submissions where all aspects have been fully considered. We need to understand your idea and believe you can effectively pull it off before we can consider accepting it. We will be more likely to accept submissions that focus on a small topic or idea that is clearly communicated than those that seem overly ambitious.
Engage the Theme. We are looking for scenarios that engage with our festival theme. That engagement can take a variety of forms, and not every scenario will be strictly focused on every element of it, but accepted scenarios will structurally or conceptually incorporate it in some way.
Transparency. Their characters may be wrapped up in secrets, but our players should be knowingly in on the fun. Accepted scenarios will set clear expectations so players can enthusiastically opt into and steer their experience, and demonstrate careful consideration for individual players’ experiences.
See the Our Vision page for more details.
Practical Details
Your scenario should:
- Be new. It doesn’t matter to us whether your scenario is already fully written, or if you are just starting to think about it now. But we want to be able to premiere chosen scenarios at Make a Scene 2025. So, if you have already played, facilitated, or shared it outside of the context of playtesting and requesting development feedback, it is not eligible. Try to think of a new idea for Make a Scene!
- Be designed for at least 2 players. Specifically, we want to support a range of scenarios from smaller scenarios of 2-6 players, medium scenarios of 4-12, as well as large scenarios of 10+ players. For any game, the minimum player count cannot require more than 10 players. We are not interested in single player scenarios for this event.
- Be playable in four hours or less, including time for introduction and debrief, or have a clear structure and plan for how to integrate into the festival schedule. We have two-hour and four-hour play slots at the event. We’ve had scenarios that mess with this format before, but we can only support a very small number that confound these norms of time and space.
- Be written in English.
- Not contain any generative AI content.
- Be submitted by or before March 10th, 2025.
Other important notes:
- If your scenario is accepted, we would love for you to attend Make a Scene and facilitate your game! However, an inability to attend will not affect our decision on your scenario. If you know you can’t attend, please still submit. If you cannot be there to facilitate yourself, we will find someone else to facilitate your scenario.
- We can provide a small number of common props and materials including paper, pens, name tags, tables and chairs. You will need to provide anything else your scenario needs beyond that. If your scenario requires props and you are unable to bring them yourself, we may not be able to support your scenario. Feel free to reach out if you have logistical ideas or concerns.
- Our venue includes a black box theater and multiple dance studios!
How to Submit
By clicking this button and filling out our submission form by or before March 10th, 2025!
Here are a couple of hot tips for making a compelling submission.
- DO keep it clear and concise.
- DO seek out feedback from your peers before submitting. Team submissions welcome!
- DON’T reference other scenarios (unless it’s absolutely necessary).
- Even if it’s not a perfect fit, we still want to hear about it!
- You are welcome to submit more than one synopsis, but we’ll only accept one scenario per designer (even if they are a part of a team).
How We’ll Pick
As mentioned above, representation, variety, flexibility, focus and the theme of Under The Surface will be our key criteria.
But we also have a program to consider. That includes player counts, play duration, logistics, play experience, and subject matter. We’re prepared to have our hearts broken by not being able to accept scenarios that we love but just don’t quite fit.
We will accept up to nine in-person scenarios, but we may accept fewer than that. Again, the aforementioned values are more important to us than filling a quota. If we choose fewer than nine new scenarios, we’ll fill out the program with other published scenarios that we feel fit the values of Make a Scene.
I Submitted! What Happens Next?
Awesome! We’re excited to read your submission.
We review and discuss the submissions. We expect this to take about two weeks. By 3/27/2025 we will reach out to those of you who submitted and let you know whether your scenario was accepted, conditionally accepted, or not accepted. In the meantime, you should continue developing your scenario!
If you get accepted, congratulations! Do something special for yourself to celebrate! You’ve got some work ahead of you. We want your scenario to be the best it can be, so we’ll work with you to connect you with resources to aid you in the development of your scenario. We’ll be in touch about the timeline going forward. Broadly, we will ask for your first draft in mid-May and the final draft in early July.
We may also conditionally accept your scenario. This means that we are very interested in your scenario, but may need to see more content from you, or may want to see it playtested before we officially include it in the program. This might be because your scenario is very ambitious or innovative, or is just one of those things that’s difficult to get a feel for on paper. In any case, we’ll let you know what we need from you and offer our support to make it happen.
In any case, be proud of yourself! You conceptualized a brand new larp and put it out there – that’s huge! Even if it doesn’t it make it onto the Make a Scene program, it may be a great fit for other groups or events.