The LARPers included both diehards and the newbies. Every year, Pennsylvania-based Alliance sees around 50 to new faces. According to Todd, a higher-up in Alliance, new players tend to be college-age or recent graduates.
For the lifers, LARPing becomes their main social outlet. According to Michael Ventrella, a founder of Alliance, dating is common among LARPers and there have been more than a few weddings of people who met there. Some of the veterans have been around for so long their kids sometimes come to events. While visiting Alliance, I met players who work in biomedical engineering, tech, insurance, cybersecurity, law, healthcare, and accounting.
Lauren grew up in Pennsylvania and attended nearby Binghamton University. At college, Lauren was heavily involved with Humans vs. Zombies, a popular live-action game played at colleges across the US. Humans vs Zombies is basically a complicated, weeks-long version of tag that spans an entire campus.
It's kind of like entry-level LARP, allowing players to act out a zombie takeover using sock balls, marshmallows, and foam-dart guns. Zombies was huge at Binghamton," Lauren says. One time, we had a police officer get out of his car and tell us to try to make him a zombie. We were like, 'Should we try? We might get arrested. After college, Lauren met a few guys who told her about Alliance while attending an anime festival in Baltimore.
In a short time, Lauren was hooked on the game, making fast friends and constructing elaborate characters. She met her boyfriend Colin at Alliance. Scott right is an insurance analyst who has been playing for nearly 20 years, and Tim is a warehouse supervisor who's been playing for about eight. Both have arguably nerdy pasts. He was initially skeptical but quickly got hooked.
