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Player Rules - Introduction

Committee Introduction

Welcome to the online version of the Tony Live Roleplaying System – BathLARP Variant ruleset. This is not identical to the last formal issue of the TLRS ruleset; BathLARP has continued to refine and update the rules since then, so if you want the original version you’ll need to use the original PDFs:

The Player Rules can be directly searched in Google using the site:bathlarp.co.uk tag (this will include any other public pages in the search).

Anything that looks like this is a restricted skill – check that your character’s Guild teaches it first before your character tries to learn it.

Anything that looks like this is a restricted skill that needs requesting from the Character Ref before it can be learnt whether your character’s Guild teaches it or not.

Thanks go to the following people for transcribing from the original PDF:

Tony Live Roleplaying System

The Author and Keeper of the Rules (aka Tony, “The Nice GM”) reserves the right to change the rules at a moment’s notice in the interests of fairness and/or game balance.

In a fit of right-on-ness, I’ll also add that although I’ve used the male pronoun throughout the rules, I in no way meant this to be sexist. I give readers the right to change all instances of “he” to “he/she” or to “she” in their own paper copy of the rules with whatever writing implement they deem fit.

Copyright © 1994 — 2006. These rules may be modified and/or passed on to others as long as the following restrictions are kept:

  1. This copyright notice is passed on with the rules whether the rules have been modified or not.
  2. All authors and editors of the rules are acknowledged on the title page, starting with The Author and Keeper of the Rules – Tony Cruickshank. (Fame at last?)
  3. No financial, or other, gain can be made when passing on the rules whether the rules have been modified or not.

Acknowledgements

Vast numbers of people have helped me create the Live Action Roleplaying rules that you see before you, most of them unwittingly. I cannot name them all, but I can at least make a start.

I’ve been an avid reader of science fiction and fantasy books from an early age but the one author I can definitively point to as truly starting me off on the journey is JRRR Tolkien. Similarly I’ve been an avid collector of roleplaying games, most of which I’ve never played. Even the bad ones at least showed me what not to do. If JRRR Tolkien set me off, Gary Gygax gave me a direction to go.

Back in 1986 when I started at Bath University I joined a Greek D&D campaign run by Ralph Elia (playing a Magic User called Sarminius, if I recall correctly). That campaign ran for many years and as well as providing no end of fun and fantastic memories (The party escaping from a city on an invisible, floating bear springs to mind) it also introduced me to many of my best friends, both directly and indirectly. From this single campaign a tangled web of other games sprang, introducing new friends and that process still continues to day. Ralph was also the first DM, as we called them in those days, to introduce me to the concept of changing the rules in the book and from there I went on to creating whole systems of my own. He was also my Best Man.

And finally we come to the Bath University Larping club, also known as Blades. I initially began creating these rules and running LARP games for friends, but in 1998 (or thereabouts) Gavin Lyndon and I started off the Bath Uni Club. We’ve both subsequently been forced to leave and I’m incredibly grateful for all the people over the years who have put in the enormous effort required to keep it going. This group of people, both past and present, is the main reason the rules exist, and the only reason the rules are more than an intellectual exercise to keep my ageing brain from descending into early senility.