“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!
The following scenarios debuted at Make a Scene 2025!
Actors
by Tom Fendt
You need to tell them how much they mean to you. You need to pass on intel to protect The Cause. You need to ask advice for your next career move. But with the filming schedule so tight and everything else going on, the only chance you’ll get to say any of this is on set, with the cameras rolling.
Actors is a game for 2-4 players and takes about 4 hours to play. In it, you will play an actor on the set of a blockbuster action film who desperately needs to communicate with your fellow actors about your relationships, your work, and a noble but persecuted Cause. Taking turns in scenes of two, you will attempt to communicate your important feelings and needs with one another while still sticking close enough to what viewers will expect from an action film script.
When not playing the role of your actor you will take the role of The Director, giving the other players direction, offering observations, providing advice, and generally working to either complement the feeling of the scene or encourage dissonance.
As tensions rise over the course of the game, will players figure out how to say what they need to say to each other to keep their relationships together, figure out their next career move, advance The Cause, and still create a movie worth watching?
CW: breakup (for some characters), background state violence and repression, simulated movie violence
About the author: Tom Fendt is here to have fun and make friends. A Montessori teacher by day and avid role-player by night, you can find them running and playing games at the Twin Cities’ Larp House, trying to find reasons to be outside, and working to bring about utopia by supporting children’s (and grown-ups’) intellectual and emotional growth. They consider themself a “realist of a larger reality.”
The City the Rats Kept
by Peter Hagmann
Deep under the city, under the subway tunnels and sewer systems, New York City’s rats gather. Every ten years rats of every kind hear a Call, a squeaking chorus that beckons them below. There, miles beneath the concrete, they determine the fate of the humans above. They weigh the transgressions of humanity against the good they bring, and decide the fate of the city.
You are one such rat, called to this holy site in the lowest bowels of the city. Far from your normal life, you are here to offer your testimony: do humans deserve the privileges they have? Are humans a force for good, capable of love and tenderness? Or a blight on the world they destroy around themselves? Here amongst your fellow rats you deliberate on the city’s future, and if it should have one at all.
Content Warnings: Mentions of violence/abuse towards animals, global warming, some mildly disgusting descriptions of eating dead animals/sewage, possible mass death, possible forced relocation/colonization, and allegories for real world racism, medical trauma, ableism, and classism.
About the author: Peter Hagmann lives in Brooklyn, where he helps run LARPs through the New York City LARP Collective (NYCLC). He has never befriended a NYC rat. They keep running away when he tries. He’s learning to not take it personally. (He’s more of a cat person anyway.)
Echo Caprese in The Silver Moon Directive
by Jae Krehbiel
In the latest adventure in the Echo Caprese series, our intrepid detective is once again on the case against a shadowy corporate entity, tangled deep in the web when they are accidently delivered the wrong datachip. It’s Act IV of V when Echo needs to use their hacked credentials to get the prototype out of the cybervault, making a stop at a district office to get the correct form. You work at or are otherwise present at this district office, and you have to make sure Echo Caprese gets that form. Otherwise how will the Player ever finish the game.
In Echo Caprese in The Silver Moon Directive, you play a non-player character in a video game, an adventure game set in the cyberpunk future of 2007. Your responsibility is to follow the script with the Player when you encounter them, but beyond that you are free to do whatever you want. What will you get up to while the Player isn’t around?
This scenario has some content common to cyberpunk stories, including poverty, cybernetics and disability, and general lack of concern for human life.
About the author: Jae Krehbiel (they/them) is a creator based in the Twin Cities. In LARP writing, they specialize in rich evocative world-building and tongue-in-cheek gameplay. They keep all their game work at taquelli.itch.io. They also have a YouTube channel about television, it’s at youtube.com/jaetalkstv
Face It
by Melissa Song Loong
“The Pyfaon retreat centre takes a holistic approach to helping women experience that wearing make-up in public is not just the law; it is a lifestyle, a statement, an identity.
“We’re proud to help you explore all the ways in which you can benefit from putting your face on at all times.”
So says the Director as he welcomes you to the Put Your Face On (Pyfaon) retreat centre, which is tasked with helping you get back to your true self.
The Put Your Face On law was passed to help the government identify women at all times. But also because enhancing your facial features comes with societal benefits. At least, that’s what the influencers have taught us.
In 2050, nobody wants to go back to those bleak times where women were ‘faceless’ and scorned for looking tired without make-up on, or as an adult asked where their parents were because they looked so young.
Whatever the circumstances, you’re at Pyfaon because you were given the choice to get a black check mark or avoid that by going to the retreat. Here, you can familiarize yourself again with the Golden Rules of make-up and be proud of yourself for having one of three make-up identities: the Cuties, the Put-Togethers or the Bombshells.
As for the circumstances that led you here, that’s up to you to decide.
Were you sleeping over at a friend’s place and forgot to bring your make-up? Did you have a moment of confusion? Or were you attacked by people against Put Your Face On and must you now prove that you were innocent?
During this larp you will be able to shape your character as you prefer. You will use that to explore what it means to live in a world where the consumption of make-up is embraced, rather than succumbed to.
Trigger warnings: isolation, alienation, bullying, harassment
About the author: Melissa has been writing creatively as a hobby for the past 10 years, from stand up comedy to shortlarps. An ex-journalist for global media, she’s interested in themes that lay bare societal issues.
The Language of Bones
by July Pilowsky
Iluvenen was once a dark and nameless wilderness ruled by monsters. Then the noble heroes of the West came in their chariots, slew the monsters, and raised from the wilderness a great nation.
This is the story told in Iluvenen. The monster-kin, descended from the children of humans and monsters, are an inconvenient reminder of what that story fails to explain.
The scholars of Iluvenen sought to learn the secrets of the monsters buried beneath their bright and shining towers. The monster-kin tried to tell them, until finally they learned: the language of bones is dance.
The Language of Bones is a game played in pairs. One person plays a monster-kin raising a monster from their grave with the power of dance, and the other plays their long-dead ancestor. It is a game about genocide, legacy, erasure, reclamation, and the complex fractures between ancestors and descendants.
About the author: July is a genderqueer Latine larp designer who has been active in the larp scene since 2014. Sie designs emotional, experimental, embodied larps about diaspora, queerness, and environmental justice.
Mozog Station is Falling Down
by Espionage Party (Sarah Barringer, Rey Miranti, Kyle Kissell)
In the remote reaches of known space, Mozog Station was founded by the centralized Core government to study a mysterious wormhole that opens every 12 years. But with the recent collapse of Core, funding has dried up, and the remaining scientists and residents of the station find themselves in peril as the station’s orbit around the nearby planet rapidly deteriorates. During the wormhole’s opening period, a supply carrier delivers what may be the final shipment. After a meteorite hits the station, driving it further out of orbit, the isolationist station denizens are forced to decide whether their home can be saved or must be abandoned. What lies in the nebula beyond the wormhole, and what will happen as Mozog Station careens out of control?
About the author: In Espionage Party, players gather in one place to take on unique roles in a scenario brimming with intrigue and mystery. Talk to other players, and figure out who your friends and enemies are. Keep your secrets to yourself, or confide in an ally to gain their trust. Make and execute plans to complete your secret objectives, but be prepared for the other players to complicate things. Even if you die, you just might keep on playing as a new character. Only the starting conditions are set in stone. What happens next and how it all turns out are entirely up to you. Espionage Party scenarios are written by Rey Miranti, Kyle Kissell, and Sarah Barringer.
Roots Underground
by Shawn Roske
Beneath your feet, unseen networks pulse with life and whispered conversations. Trees speak through ancient roots, fungi weave threads of nutrients and deception, and the forest breathes as one. But harmony is fragile. Seasons shift, crises emerge, and hidden alliances form and fracture beneath the surface.
Welcome to Roots Underground. Here, you become trees and fungi entwined in the subterranean dramas of life, decay, and rebirth. Your actions and interactions will shape the future of your forest. Will you nurture connection or sow discord? Will you stand tall through drought and fire, or will you crumble to ash?
In this LARP, players embody tree or fungal factions that together form the forest’s communication and survival network. Each tree clan and fungal faction expresses unique drives, strategies, and ecological roles.
- Tree players will remain relatively stationary, like sentinels of the canopy, unable to communicate directly. They rely on the fungal web to carry messages. The trees are like an aristocracy: powerful, dignified, but bound by dependence on intermediaries.
- Fungi players move through the space, expanding their networks, relaying messages, brokering deals, and pursuing their own secret aims. They work the forest’s hidden economy—some as loyal allies, others as opportunists or parasites.
This is a high-material game: physical markers (such as yarn, tokens, or paper trails) will represent fungal networks as they grow and shift. The LARP relies heavily on the interpretation of loose prompts and indirect communication. Actions initiated by one faction are left to the receiver’s discretion to interpret and resolve. This mirrors the uncertainty of forest signaling.
An active facilitator will guide play, announcing the timeline and marking environmental changes as the seasons turn and crises unfold.
Content Warnings: Themes of environmental destruction, forest fires, climate change, and slow-paced communication. Some physical movement required for fungal players.
About the author: Shawn Roske has been a contributor for Make a Scene several times. And he uses RPGs and LARP in his transformational play programs. See playstories.ca. You may find his games at https://vasistha.itch.io/ He lives in Wakefield, Quebec.
Thunder Only Happens When It’s Raining
by Soft Chaos
TOHWIR is a journey through the personal histories and relationships of a Fleetwood Mac-like rock band from the 70s, as represented by their ghosts, who are dressed in paisley-patterned bedsheets. The game will be a nostalgic look back at their complicated lives, and a dramatic reckoning with and addressing of the conflicts that they lived through together along with the secrets they’ve kept from one another. The setting will move from the tour bus, to flashbacks of their past concerts, to a mysterious black void in which the bus makes pitstops.
Play will be centered around a core play loop:
Flashbacks: Ghosts will relive a conflict from when they were alive.
Purgatory Tour: As they continue trapped on the purgatory tour bus to nowhere, the ghosts will reflect on the flashback that they just participated in/witnessed and play out what “could have been”
Pitstops: A time spent in a mysterious black void when the bus needs to stop for gas. Ghosts are given the chance to “cross over” if they feel like they have resolved their unfinished business.
Content warnings:
Death, infidelity, emotional abuse, cults (possibly)
About the author: Soft Chaos is a three person worker-owned cooperative game studio. Our team works on weird queer art whenever we get the chance. The team consists of three award-winning game designers: Allison Kyran Cole, Jess Rowan Marcotte, and D. Squinkifer. We each bring our own area of expertise and varied lived experiences to every project we work on. Some examples of our past Larp work include This is Fine (Golden Cobra 2019 winner for Best Apocalyptic Game, later adapted to run at the 2022 Montreal Fringe Festival), Dr. Mike Love’s In Search of the Fancy, and a Murder She Wrote-themed game that Jess designed for Allison’s bachelorette party. For this scenario in particular, Squinky also brings their personal experience as a musician who has played in several bands with varying degrees of drama.