About Us

elcome to BLADES - Bath Live Action Dramatic Encounters Society (or, informally, Bath Live Action Dragons, Elves and Stuff). We are the people to speak to if you are interested in any aspect of Live Roleplaying, from High Fantasy through to Vampire and Assassins.

First, however, for those of you who have no idea what I'm talking about, an introduction to Live Roleplaying (or LRP, to save myself the keypresses). LRP takes many, many forms, and here at BLADES we seek to cater for as many of them as there is demand for. The one thing that all of them have in common, however, is that the players are required take on a persona - a character that they play during the game. This persona may be very similar to that of the player, or wildly different. It need not even be human, in some cases. These characters are then put into a setting or scenario, usually set up by a Games Master (or GM). The players roleplay the actions that their characters take, aiming to resolve the situations they find themselves in.

If you've ever played a traditional "tabletop" roleplaying system, such as Dungeons & Dragons, this should all sound fairly familiar to you. The twist is that instead of sitting around a table rolling dice, we go outside and play out the adventure in real time and in costume, resolving combats by actually having fights, using safe weapons and a simple rules system.

There's a little more to it than that, of course. Dungeons & Dragons-style LRP isn't all we do. There's also Assassins, which is slightly different in that it runs constantly, whilst you go about your normal daily business. Only the GM knows who is playing the game, however. Each player will know only one other player - their target; they have to "kill" their mark before their own would-be assassin can stab them in the back. To quote a certain famous movie, "There can be only one!" To find out more about the various games we run, please investigate the navigation bar at the top of this page.

Finally, we are also able to supply training in various weapons, for use in both LRP and stage fighting. We are happy to bring our skills and equipment to help out other clubs within the Students' Union - for example, in 2002 we supplied weapons and stage fighting training to the Union's production of Caesar. For more information about the training and equipment we can provide, please contact the committee on committee@bathlarp.org.uk.