To the Canon Desk,
Our fantasy campaign ended its summer chapter with an elaborate royal assassination. At least, some of us believe it did.
The scene took place at night. The king stood on a balcony. A conspirator raised a crossbow, someone rang the town bell too early, and a smoke bomb rolled under the throne instead of in front of it. When the smoke cleared, the king was on the floor and our healer was shouting that she could still save him. Then the event organizer called time because the park lights were shutting off.
Since then, our group chat has divided into factions. The assassin says the king died because the bolt struck him before the bell. The king says he was only unconscious and remembers squeezing the healer’s hand. The healer says she never felt the squeeze because she was looking for her glasses. Two guards insist they carried a living king away. A third guard says they carried “a royal body,” which has not helped.
Our game runner wants to publish the official recap so the autumn chapter can be written. Every proposed version makes someone angry. We have watched three phone videos, but one shows only smoke, one is mostly a stranger saying “Whoa,” and one proves the bell rang without proving anything else.
How do we determine what really happened without making the loudest person the winner?
—Long Live the King, Probably
Dear Long Live,
My condolences to the king on his death, recovery, second death in the group chat, and present administrative suspension.
Your party is trying to solve three different problems with one verdict. You want to know what physically occurred, what each character experienced, and what the campaign needs to treat as true next time. Those questions overlap, but they are not identical. LARPing becomes much easier to discuss once everyone stops asking a single exhausted word—“really?”—to carry all three.
Begin with the least glamorous account: a sequence of observable events stripped of interpretation. A crossbow was raised. A bell rang. Smoke appeared. The king went to the ground. The healer approached. The scene ended before the players completed an agreed resolution. This account will feel offensively incomplete to everyone, which is a sign that it may be useful.
Next, let each participant state what their character reasonably perceived. The assassin may have seen a clean shot and fled believing the king dead. The healer may have begun an uncertain rescue. The guards may disagree because confusion was the actual experience of the scene. You do not need to flatten those perspectives merely because the campaign keeps records. A shared world can contain people who left the same balcony with different beliefs.
Finally, decide the minimum fact the next chapter requires. Does the story truly need to know whether the king’s heart stopped under the smoke? Perhaps it needs only to know that the king vanished from public view, the court has announced no successor, and several factions are acting on incompatible reports. Congratulations: your production accident has generated politics.
If a definite answer is necessary, do not pretend you are discovering it from perfect evidence. You are making a ruling now because play must continue. Name the criteria before taking positions. Which outcomes were clearly performed? Which rules were communicated in advance? What preserves the meaningful choices people made? What creates playable consequences rather than merely rewarding whoever argues longest after midnight?
The game runner should facilitate this process, but should not emerge from a private chamber holding a stone tablet labeled CANON. Write a short proposal, invite corrections about observable facts, and put a deadline on discussion. If the remaining choice is genuinely arbitrary, choose openly. A coin toss is more honest than a twenty-seventh message disguised as jurisprudence.
Do not use the videos as sacred replay technology. A camera records one rectangle, not the whole event. It may establish when the bell rang. It cannot tell you whether a hand squeeze was intentional, noticed, or dramatically sufficient to reverse a fictional poisoning. Evidence is helpful right up until it begins wearing a little judge’s wig.
Your published recap can preserve uncertainty instead of hiding it:
A bolt crossed the balcony as the warning bell sounded. Smoke swallowed the throne. By the time the guard reached the royal chambers, the king was gone. The assassin claims success. The palace denies everything. The healer will not say what happened beneath the smoke.
That paragraph gives each participant something recognizable without awarding total ownership of the truth. It also sounds much better than “We ran out of park.”
Afterward, improve the structure around major endings. Give one person responsibility for confirming a scene’s resolved state before time is called. Leave ten minutes between the climax and losing access to municipal lighting. Establish a quick post-scene check in which the central players say what they believe happened while the memory is fresh. This will not eliminate disagreement. It will at least ensure that everyone begins disagreeing from the same parking lot.
Most importantly, tell the group that ambiguity is not evidence that the scene failed. The scene produced fear, conviction, confusion, competing testimony, and a kingdom unable to agree about its own future. Kings have ruled for decades and achieved less.
The king may be dead. The campaign is plainly alive.