for about 25 players, with only a small crew
Editorial note: This article was originally published in the Knutpunkt 2026 book Seasons of Larp. It has been reprinted from there with the editors’ and authors’ permission. It has not been edited by Nordiclarp.org.
In this article I will try to live up to the title above. There will be some tips and tricks on the practicalities of how to run a game like that, some things to keep in mind, what kind of game design works well for this format, and why to buy pre-chopped onions. None of what I write is news. Larp communities have been doing this for decades. Collecting it like this is just a way to pass community knowledge and experience on to new organisers.
Assumptions made
This article is written from a Nordic perspective so some of the information here about for example location hunting will be based on what is often available in the Nordic countries. Things might work differently where you are at. This article will also assume that the larp is run non-profit and by volunteers.
Getting the project started
First of all: have an idea for a larp. It does not have to be a great idea, just something you find exciting enough to get going. If your larp idea is “Flower arranging contest gets infiltrated by ninjas but it is actually about social media” just go for it. All ideas usually start out sounding a bit silly. It might turn into a great idea somewhere along the way. When you’ve gotten an idea and are willing to try to make it happen, your project has begun.
Get a small crew
Getting a larp to happen is always a lot of work, and while people are often happy to volunteer and help out, they often have responsibilities, work schedules, studies, family, kids, pets, and/or other obligations as well as that pesky need to get some rest every now and then. Sidenote: have you ever tried getting five adults together for something as simple as a board game night? You will often need three weeks of scheduling to get those five people in the same room for a few hours. You need to find a lot more time than that together to run a larp.
With that said – keep it small. The fewer people you need to get a project off the ground, the easier it is to get across that ground. For a 25 person larp I would recom-mend a core crew of 2–4 people. You might get a few more people helping out in the end, but in the planning stages it is best to keep it tight.
So now that you have 2–4 people who are excited by the same idea, it’s time to start planning.
Get a rough idea of both the game design and what practicalities are needed
In a well designed larp, practicalities and game design are tightly linked. Take the flower show idea. Discuss what you think you need to make it happen in the most basic of terms. Perhaps you decide that you need a location where you can host a flower arrangement show, with both indoor and outdoor spaces, and the location should ideally be a bit secluded if the ninjas are going to commit acts of violence. If players will be staying overnight for the larp, you will need somewhere to house them, and if people are going to eat, you will need a kitchen and somewhere to serve food. When you have a picture of what your larp design needs, you can start location hunting.
Location hunting
Locations are often one of the largest line items in a larp budget, and in this article I will assume that people will be sleeping at the larp. That means that you either need to find a location with enough beds for everyone, or a place where you are allowed to stay overnight on air mattresses or camping beds. As mentioned, the location is often the biggest cost for the larp and is the deciding factor when it comes to the size of the participants’ fees. While it is possible to have a location cost at basically zero for forest larps, there is often a hidden expense expected of the participants in that they need to bring their own tents. This is fine if you own a car and a tent, but is a huge barrier to entry if you don’t.
Luckily, larps for 15–35 people are at an advantage when trying to find cheap locations. It’s easier to find a cheap small location than a cheap large one. Much, much easier. There are a lot of venues of a size that suits a larp with 25 players. For example, venues meant for 50–200 seated guests often work fine for about 25 players, they have enough space to create zones for different types of play as well as enough space for people to bring out air mattresses and sleep at night. Small camping grounds, scout cabins, summer camps, etc. often have at least 25–50 beds. Both types of venues generally have kitchens that can handle at least 25 people.
The best cheap venues are often run by non-profits. Cultural organisations, com-munity- or village centers, churches, youth organisations, social clubs, sports clubs, etc. The problem is that you usually need to know about them to find them. They are generally not well known, not search engine optimized, they maybe have an ancient web site with a few blurry photos and a phone number to call. They are often on a shoestring budget and run by quirky, and in some cases elderly, enthusiasts whose trust you need to gain to rent the place – especially if you are going to make anything odd, like a larp. On the plus side, if you are an exemplary tenant, you can often build a great mutual relationship with these owners that secures you a location for future larps.
So how do you find out about these places? Asking is the key here. You ask around online and ask your local community. Perhaps someone’s brother-in-law lives next to such a place, or someone’s boss’s kid was at summer camp there. Tell people that you are hosting a weekend event with about 25 people who are staying overnight and you are looking for good cheap locations, either with beds for everyone or a place that allows overnight stays on air mattresses and camping beds. Places like that may also be listed on lists for local community gathering places, lists of available stages for cultural events, or lists of wedding venues.
Some places allow for overnight stay on air mattresses and camping beds if you get a temporary permit from the fire station. In Sweden, that means getting permission from the site owner, filling in an online form to inform the fire station, and adhering to certain standards like having no lit candles and keeping fire exits in mind when setting up the beds to ensure fire safety.
Feeding people
Feeding people tends to be the second largest item in a larp budget. Since this is about how to organise a larp cheaply I won’t go into catering and I will assume that the food will be cooked by volunteers, with or without help from the participants.
Choosing recipes
When feeding about 25 people you can just scale up ordinary household recipes. This means that the food cost won’t have to exceed a regular food budget for the participants, especially if you chose recipes with cheap ingredients.
Aim for really quick and simple recipes as cooking for more people takes a lot longer than cooking for only a few. Something you can cook in 20 minutes normally will take about an hour when scaled up five times to 25 servings.Things like heating up water takes a lot longer when you cook a bigger batch. In addition, unfamiliarity with the kitchen or the recipe will also contribute to everything taking a little longer than usual.
If you search for recipes, specify that they should be cheap and simple. Saving money is mostly about reducing the most expensive ingredients, which is usually protein. But don’t get fixated on saving money on things that are cheap. Sometimes it’s worth spending a little more to save the kitchen a whole lot of work. For example, chopping onions takes a lot of time and is uncomfortable when you chop to cook for 25 players. People will literally be crying their eyes out if they have to manually chop a lot of onions. Just buying frozen, pre-chopped onions is so worth it.
Special Dietary Needs
For most larps, the sign up sheets should include two text box responses for special dietary needs: One box asking what they are, and one box asking for how serious they are. This is important. You want to know what can kill people if there is minimal cross contamination and what might cause mild discomfort if they have to eat a lot of it raw. (Both are valid needs but require different levels of caution.)
If someone’s special dietary needs are so complex that you feel that it’s tricky for you to safely provide them food, contact that player and discuss it with them. People with tricky dietary needs run into this problem all the time and will generally have suggestions on how to sort it out. This might be in the form of recipes, suggestions, or that they are allowed to bring their own food to complement with. (If they bring their own food, give them a discount for the food they won’t be eating. They are saving you a whole lot of work and it never feels good to pay for food you can’t eat.) The event is volunteer run and it is okay to not have the competence to not handle all the allergies in the world. It is better to say no and allow them to bring their own food, than to risk injury or death.
Try to find recipes that everyone can eat. That eliminates both the risk of mix up, cross contamination and saves you the work of having to cook more than one variant of the meal. If someone has an egg allergy and none of the recipes contains eggs, and there are no eggs anywhere in the kitchen you just saved yourself a whole lot of stress. This might make it trickier or more time-consuming to choose recipes, but it’s generally worth the time.
Sometimes people can have conflicting dietary needs, in which case you might need to do different variants of the same dish, or have different side dishes. Just try to manage the risk and talk with the people with conflicting needs on how to best sort it out.
For breakfast items and snacks that are just served as they are, setting up the serving station correctly can eliminate or minimise the risk of mix-ups or cross-contamination. You can put the special diet stuff at a separate table to avoid mixups. Divide the special diet table according to allergy, like for example a cowmilk free section, and a gluten free section. This reduces the risk of someone without a dietary restriction accidentally eating all the special foods – as well as the risk of someone mixing up the spoons in different serving bowls and causing cross-contamination.
Send your participants the meal plan and recipes
After you decide on what you are going to serve, send out the meal plan as well as any recipes to the players. This will help people with special dietary needs double check if the food seems safe to them. In addition, many players just appreciate knowing what to expect when it comes to food.
Staffing the kitchen
You need someone to be in charge of the kitchen and that person needs to have enough kitchen knowledge to manage food hygiene and whatever special dietary needs the larp caters to. This person’s job is to keep the kitchen running safely. They may help out with cooking, but that is explicitly not their main responsibility.
On top of that, you can either use crew members or let players help out. If you have enough crew members this can be the easiest option, but it requires people to spend the entire event as kitchen staff.
Having players help out in the kitchen is also a good option. Most adults have the kitchen skills needed. Players are generally happy to help out an hour in the kitchen if the larp is low cost and volunteer run. Especially if the kitchen work can be done in character. You can often come up with reasons in the larp fiction why characters are helping out: culture, habit, religion, practicality, corporate rules, it’s a special holiday, “it’s what we’ve always done”, a whim or whatever. If it really doesn’t fit the fiction, you can cook or meal prep out of character, and let your participants use it as an opportunity to calibrate or take a breather.
For any hot meal, you need about 2–3 people to comfortably run the kitchen (remember, everyone is in an unfamiliar kitchen with new recipes) on top of the person in charge of the kitchen. After the hot meals, you need about 2 people doing the dishes if the location has an industrial dishwasher, or 3 people if it doesn’t. Things like breakfast and late-night snacks, where you just make coffee and set up a serving station, will usually require no more than two people.
Below is an example of how to distribute players helping out in the kitchen. My advice is that you just assign players to a meal and then give them the option to contact you if they need or prefer to switch to another meal. Often there are some people that for example are nonfunctional in the morning before their meds kicks in or people that might not be able to do the dishes due to skin condition etc. Or you might have someone that needs to opt out all together. Expect that you will have to make some changes, but just assigning players randomly or based on what makes most sense in fiction can be a good start. If players help out in the kitchen, send out what meal they are expected to help out with together with the meal plan.
| Meal | Number of people helping out |
| Friday Evening Snack | 2 |
| Saturday Breakfast | 2 |
| Saturday Lunch Prep | 4 |
| Saturday Lunch Dishes | 3 |
| Saturday Dinner Prep | 4 |
| Saturday Dinner Dishes | 3 |
| Saturday Evening Snack | 2 |
| Sunday Breakfast | 2 |
| Total | 22 |
Write clear instructions for each meal. This includes the recipes as well as listing for example what should be put out for the breakfast buffet and so on. Even though you have someone in charge of the kitchen, written instructions make things run much smoother, it means that the players can organise themselves much easier, and that substitutions can be made in the staffing schedule with minimal issue.
Logistics and volunteers
Next up on the list are logistics and volunteers. Logistics is usually a smaller budget post than location and food, but it can be a cost that sneaks up on you and your volunteers. That is why I added volunteers to this section.
One of the things that costs money is transportation. Well, sure, we are going to the larp site and back. But that is not the travel cost that sneaks up on you. Let us say that the organisers meet up regularly before the larp as well as run errands. Let’s assume about 20 trips at least. If you live some distance outside of a town centre, you can easily rack up gas costs of €150 for just one person. For some people, €150 is pocket money, for others it is a substantial cost. For some people, that gas money will never cross their minds because they don’t feel the difference, while others might really need that trip reimbursed to not have their private finances suffer for their volunteer work.
When organising a larp that runs on volunteer work, you need to address and figure this out. For example, if some volunteer runs a lot of logistical errands before the larp, and their car breaks down during those errands, what happens then? Think it through, discuss it, and decide on something. There are no obvious right or wrong answers, just honest discussions. Decide on a policy and plan accordingly. One larp I am involved in has the policy to pay for mileage, but if anyone doesn’t feel the need to be reimbursed, we won’t chase them down.
You can try to be smart about travel and other logistics to cut down the cost a little, but I think meeting in person can be one of the things that makes organising larps fun and is for many organisers a prerequisite for the larps to happen. So don’t go digital-only just to cut costs.
There is also player logistics to sort out. How can players get to the location? If it is possible to get there by public transport, then tell them about this and how to go about it. If you want to keep participants’ cost low, help them organise ride sharing. For a larp this size, ride sharing is usually the easiest way to sort things out if many of the players are local (or at least regional) and planning to go there by car. Spending some time on this in the planning stages saves both organisers and participants a lot of time in the end.
Stuff
By stuff, I mean props, costumes, makeup, first aid kits, special effects stuff, lighting, well, stuff. There is no limit on how much money you can spend on stuff, but gene-rally if you try to make a cheap larp this is one of the smaller expenses. You can borrow, rent, or reuse stuff, and after a few larps you will most likely have built up a stash.
Presumably, many of the people who run larps are larpers, who often know other larpers, and larpers tend to own a scary amount of stuff. Asking around if you can lend or rent stuff for a larp usually results in you getting offered a shitload of cool stuff – sometimes not exactly what you were looking for, but perhaps something you didn’t even imagine or know you needed. If you want to do things cheaply, adapting your vision to what you can get your hands on is a good idea. Just remember to give back to the community once you are the one that has the cool stuff, and someone else is asking.
If you need to buy something, you can often create low- or no-cost alternatives to things like sound- or lighting systems. A number of cheap, small, and strategically placed bluetooth speakers can be more effective than a huge professional sound system. A bunch of colour-changing light bulbs from the hardware store can replace professional stage lighting if you sneakily replace lightbulbs at the location before the game starts. And so on. For tricks like this, talk to your community and ask around. There is a lot of community knowledge on how to do this thing.
Other costs
Here you just lump together all the other things that might cost money. Pizza for the volunteers. Printer paper and ink. Odd little cost that doesn’t fit into the other categories. This is also one of the smaller categories in a regular larp budget. Its size and contents will vary between events, in accordance to varying needs. This is generally not where you can cut any significant costs, just make sure to have budgeted for the odds and ends.
Add a 15% buffer… (Or a 10%, 5% or 20% buffer)
Lastly, when you made a budget and added everything you think might cost money, then add an additional 15% buffer for unexpected expenses. Why exactly 15%? I dunno, that was what I learned when I started organising back in the bronze age and it has worked out for me so far.
Other organisers use buffers anywhere between 5–20%. It all depends on the economic risk level of the larp, how secure you feel about your budget calculation, if you are backed by an organisation that might support you financially if anything unexpected comes up, and what level of financial risk you are comfortable with.
I say 15%, because it is the number I like best. Usually you won’t touch the buffer, but whenever I’ve had to use it, then 15% has covered the unexpected expenses.
If you organise the larp under any sort of non-profit larp organisation that regularly organises larps or other events, any surplus can just be reinvested in future larps. Otherwise use it wisely; pass it on to other larp organisers, donate it to some larger larp organisation or to some cause you support.
Conclusion
Organising larps isn’t an exact science. But running a cheap weekend event for about 25 players is very doable with just a few determined organisers. As this article only covers the practical and financial aspects, I would recommend reading the freely available Larp Design book for all the other aspects (or just because it’s a damn good book!) I hope the main message you walk away with is that running a cheap weekend larp for about 25 people is not only doable, it is something you can do if you want to.
References
Koljonen, J., Stenros, J.,Grove, A.S.,Skjønsfjell, A.D., and Nilsen, E, (2019) Larp Design: Creating role-play experiences, Landsforeningen Bifrost, Denmark
This article is republished from the Knutpunkt 2026 book. Please cite it as:
Dalstål, Elin. 2026. ‘How to Run a Cheap Weekend Larp.’ In Seasons of Larp eds. Erlandsson, A., Svanevik, M., Holkar, M., and Brind, S. Gothenburg. Knutpunkt.
