Calling all scenario authors, past, present, and future!
We are seeking brand new live-action roleplaying scenarios exploring the festival theme of MAKE // BREAK to premiere at Make a Scene in August 2024! 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 2024!
- 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: MAKE // BREAK!
…a careworn family quilt, stitched together across multiple generations… nomads spin tales of the world’s beginnings and destiny in the bright stars above… a tumultuous relationship’s moments of repair or retreat… the library of Alexandria… to fire into permanence or render back into clay… a spider spins a beautiful trap… sixty seconds to make our pitch… a game that destroys itself… “We’ll show them! We’ll show them all!”
Make a Scene! 2024 focuses on MAKE // BREAK moments of creation and destruction. What courage or mistakes are needed to bring something new into the world? What fears or wisdom are needed to eradicate it forever? Let’s explore the process of collaboration, courage, costs, mistakes, and consequences of making and remaking the world anew.
What do you want to see in the world? What would it be better off without?
Make something. Break something.
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 very interested in 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 highlights a variety of topics and play experiences. We want an event that showcases the huge potential of the scenario style as a medium, as well as 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, and scenarios that are just good fun. Getting this variety is more important to us than accepting all of the scenarios we personally like the best.
Flexibility. Make A Scene is committed to running both our in-person festival AND our online day of play. We welcome submissions that are meant to be played in-person, online, or both! We expect that in some cases games will play better in one format than another, and that’s ok.
Focus. Since we are asking for synopses first, rather that fully-written scenarios, we are looking for clarity and focus in submissions. We need to understand your idea and believe that you can effectively pull it off before we can consider accepting it. We will be more likely to accept submissions that focus on one 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 MAKE // BREAK, the theme for the Make a Scene festival this year. Scenarios may engage this theme in a variety of ways. This doesn’t mean that every scenario at Make a Scene will only be about creation and destruction, but each accepted scenario will structurally or conceptually include it in some way.
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 the chosen scenarios at Make a Scene. 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 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.
- Be submitted by or before March 6th, 2024.
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, and tables. You will need to provide anything 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.
- This year, we have a brand new venue, including a black box and dance studios!
How to Submit
By clicking this button and filling out our submission form by or before March 6th, 2024!
Here are a couple of hot tips for making a compelling submission.
- DO keep it brief. Clear and concise synopses look better to us.
- DO seek and apply feedback from your peers before you submit. You can even submit as a team, if you want!
- DON’T submit a draft, even if you have one. We won’t read it.
- 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’re not going to accept more than one scenario from anyone (even if they are a part of a team).
How We’ll Pick
As mentioned above, representation, variety, flexibility, focus and the theme of MAKE // BREAK matter to us. Those will be our guide.
But we also have a program to consider. That includes player counts, play duration, other 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 3/22/2024 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! But 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.
If we don’t accept your scenario, we will ask if you still want us to give you feedback. If so, we will give you a timeframe on when you can expect feedback, but it may not be for a month or more.
We also may choose a small number of scenarios to highlight as honorable mentions. These would be scenarios that we cannot include in the program for any number of reasons, but that really impressed one or more of us and are particularly deserving of recognition. Whether or not we choose to award honorable mentions, and how many scenarios we choose to highlight, will depend on the submissions we receive.
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.