Curious Pastimes


Curious Pastimes is an organisation that runs one of the best-known live action role-playing campaigns in the UK. CP is a private, profit-making company headquartered in Moreton in the Wirral in Northern England. The company was formed in 1995, as a break away group from the Lorien Trust.
Curious Pastimes’ ongoing LARP campaign is called Renewal.. The campaign uses its own set of LARP rules, adapted from the Lorien Trust Rules System. Renewal is a "Fest" Game, in which large numbers of players interact with one another and with a small number of briefed non-player characters, climaxing in pre-arranged mass battles between roughly even numbers at the two longer events. These battles represent one of the major variations from the Gathering parent-game, being exclusively Player-versus-Monster battles.
With approximately 800 players attending the main event in August, Renewal is the third-largest fest campaign in the UK, behind the Gathering and Profound Decisions' Empire.

Events

The Renewal Campaign comprises four events each year, culminating in the flagship event, also called Renewal, held every year over the August Bank Holiday weekend. All the events take place on weekends; two of them run from Friday evening to Sunday afternoon, and two, occurring on Bank Holiday weekends, run to Monday afternoon. Curious Pastimes also runs a system for formally approving smaller events staged by the various participating groups and [|factions] throughout the year.
The events vary in size from 100 to 1000 people and present different aspects of the ongoing Renewal Campaign. The events are:
The May battle event was staged at Bispham Hall Scout Camp in Wigan until 2009, and Renewal was staged at Phasels Wood Scout Camp in Hemel Hempstead from 1998 to 2007. Both events were moved following negative customer feedback regarding the sites. Two smaller-scale events entitled Prelude and Aftermath were discontinued after Prelude 2002, due chiefly to rising venue costs.
Curious Pastimes classes itself as a "family-friendly" event, allowing parents to bring along children of any age. All children are entitled to full characters, though only those 16 or over are allowed to participate in the mass battles.

Sanctioned Events

Curious Pastimes offers formal "sanctioning", allowing affiliated groups to run their own events within the ongoing Renewal storyline. There are degrees of sanctioning, ranked from ‘Level 1’ to ‘Level 3’ ; lower-sanctioned events have little effect on the main Renewal storyline but can be organised and run with minimal involvement by the company, while higher-sanctioned events may have a concrete effect on events at main events but need to be extensively co-ordinated with company staff.
, a non-profit company founded by some of CP's staff and volunteers, ran several small, ‘Level 3’ sanctioned events from 2004 to 2007; in addition, each of the factions runs one or two sanctioned events most years, bringing the total number of events taking place in the Renewal game world close to twenty in some years.

The Game World

The game's setting is a unique unnamed fantasy world. The world is more or less Earthlike, and the known, populated continent that hosts the player characters and their communities is a temperate-to-subarctic landmass broadly equivalent to Eurasia.
There are nine intelligent humanoid races in the CP setting: humans, elves, dark elves, dwarves, four "greenskin" races and a variety of animal-human hybrids collectively known as beastmen. All are more or less evenly-distributed across the world's population, with some variation among the different factions.

Factions

The known continent is populated by a number of monarchies, nation-states and confederations known as Factions, modelled very loosely on various real-world historical communities, with influences from fantasy literature, films and other sources, as well as original ideas. The majority of player characters belong to one or other faction, with the exception of a group of non-aligned players collectively labelled "mercenaries." The factions average about 100 in size at Renewal, but are presumed to govern populations in the hundreds of thousands, appropriate to those of equivalent pre-Industrial states.
In real-world terms, each faction is run as a more or less independent club, with a small administrative team assigned by CP and internal In- and Out-of-Character hierarchies. Many of the factions host websites for their members, and several of them stage small-scale [|"sanctioned"] events set in the Renewal continuity. At events, members of a faction camp together; the factions' communal In-Character camps are the major focus of the game, with attacks against fortified camps and diplomatic missions between camps providing much of the storyline at each event.
The factions are:
Within the broad faction concepts stated [|above] may be found a broad spectrum of characters, from the comical to the serious, from a range of historical backgrounds, and from the mean and humble to the high-heroic. Formally, Renewal is an "Open World" campaign setting, so players are permitted to submit any concept they wish, with the exception that neither gunpowder-weapons nor any more advanced technology are permitted.

The Empire of the Golden Isles

Most of the non-player character groups come from the same nations and communities represented by the player factions listed above; many of the ongoing antagonist-plotlines therefore revolve around treachery and civil war. However, over the years a number of non-player characters and monsters have arisen from nations, cults, and other groups that belong outside the general context of the known player-character world.
Foremost among these is the Empire of the Golden Isles, a large empire of nonhumans modelled on Feudal Japan, that supposedly rivals the collected population and magical and military might of all the player nations combined. The Empire originates on a previously unknown archipelago that lies to the south of the continent occupied by the factions, and roughly equal to it in overall land area.
They first became known to the player characters at Prelude 2001, and quickly fell into a war with the factions until peace was reached in 2004. Now they exist as an imposing political and military presence, producing many of the high-profile non-player characters and several of the more "political" plotlines. Two recent events - Fayre of the Empire and Suukou Kaigi - took place on Imperial lands and were focused predominantly on the ongoing Imperial plotline.

Other Worlds

The unnamed Renewal campaign world lies at the centre of the campaign's cosmology, surrounded by six more or less earthlike worlds and twelve supernatural worlds. People from the Land very rarely travel to any of the other worlds, and the denizens of the other worlds only slightly more frequently visit the Land.
Several nations from one of the more earthlike worlds - the Keltoi, the Tagmatoi and the Amgeara - invaded the Land in 1108 and 1109, before the portal connecting the two worlds was eventually sealed in 1110.