Each year, we debut a selection of brand new scenarios around a theme. 2025’s theme is Under The Surface.
The following scenarios will debut 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 as they do every year to determine the fate of the humans above. They weigh the transgressions of humanity against the good they bring, and decide if the city should sink below the rising tide or live on for another year.
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 animal abuse and climate change.
About the author: Peter live in Brooklyn, where he helps run LARPs.
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 VI 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
“I forgot to apply eyeliner. So, I’m detained for 24 hours because I looked too mentally ill to provide myself the self-care required by law.”
In 2050, you must always have your face on. In an era where personal perfectionism matters most, good looks will get you far indeed. Not because sexiness gets you ahead – no, in this world it’s the law. All citizens must at all times have an appearance in public deemed worthy by the Bureau of the Golden Rules.
Make up, face waxing… that’s just the start.
Those addicted to the new level of personal ‘care’ even take out loans for that nose enhancement or jaw shaving. There are devices that will control your sleep so the stress doesn’t cause wrinkles.
Meanwhile, demand for some professions has skyrocketed – psychiatrists, stylists, even police officers tasked with interrogating the faceless. Also, the bureau responsible for waivers.
What happened for this massive ‘masking’ to become rule of law? Who stands to benefit and what does it mean for rights? And what problems does it bring with it? Emotionally, but also practically, when the faceless rise at 5am to ensure they look tiptop or risk getting institutionalized?
This dystopian shortlarp is set in the all-women Pyfaon Holding Facility. Shockingly, this is the first time you’re seeing others without their face on. Soon, you get to know why they’re here…
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 to study a mysterious wormhole that opens every 12 years. But with the recent collapse of the centralized Core government, 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 their ship is damaged by a crash landing, the crew must find a way to repair their vessel while the isolationist station denizens 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, Julie Comber
Beneath the forest floor, a vast web of communication hums with life. Trees send messages through their roots, fungi relay warnings and nutrients, and the entire forest reacts as one living organism. In Roots Underground, you will embody these hidden networks—some as trees standing tall, others as the fungi that weave unseen connections beneath the soil.
As the seasons pass, the forest faces challenges: droughts, pests, human interference, and fire. How will your network respond? Will cooperation strengthen your survival, or will miscommunication lead to decay?
This is a slow, sensory experience that invites players to embody the rhythms of nature. Players portraying trees will stay mostly still, sending messages through written notes held by their “roots,” while fungal players move between them, acting as intermediaries.
Content Warnings: Themes of environmental destruction, forest fires, climate change, and slow-paced communication. Some physical movement required for fungal players.
About the authors:
Shawn Roske is a game designer living in Wakefield, Quebec– a small village north of Ottawa, ON. He 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/
Julie Comber loves to play games that encourage humans to explore their relationship with nature, Earth, and other species. She is a Forest Therapy Guide, singer-songwriter, and sound bath facilitator. She has a background in Zoology, Genetics, Bioethics, and Environmental Education. She lives in Wakefield, Quebec. See juliecomber.com
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.