Costuming Your Character for LARP and Tabletop

Ways to Set the Tone Without Breaking the Bank

Come chat with designers of games and costumes about getting into a character by getting into their clothes. The things we wear change the ways we present ourselves and carry ourselves, and we can use that to our benefit. Shopping your closet and learning some simple tricks to alter a garment can expand your options without shrinking your wallet.

Meguey Baker (she/her) started playing rpgs with her sister and two friends in the 1970s. As a co-designer with her husband, her work on their award-winning Apocalypse World broke ground with attention to the characters' relationship to sexuality, and in their newest game Under Hollow Hills, a key question is how characters are in relation to each other when times are good and when times are bad. Meg has a background in counseling, education, ritual design, and dance. She believes everyone has a story worth telling, and that we are all connected. She is the assistant curator of a local history museum, where she delights in the stories of all kinds of relationships.

Jonaya Kemper (she/fae/femme/they) is a game designer, educator, and activist, who specializes in the power of transformative games within marginalized populations. A graduate of NYU’s Gallatin Graduate School, Jonaya traveled the world to explore how embodied roleplay experiences like larp, can transform marginalized player’s perspectives of self. Their theory of emancipatory bleed garnered the prestigious E. Francis White Award for work that has impact and significance beyond the academy. Working across the game design spectrum to create innovative, engaging gameplay and equitable spaces, they have helped design large scale international events in stunning locations like Atropos’ Forbidden History, to smaller intimate experiences like Feeding Lucy, which can be found in Honey and Hot Wax: An Anthology of Erotic Art Games distributed by Pelgrane Press. Currently Jonaya is the Lead Game Designer of the NSF funded P3G project at Carnegie Mellon University where she also teaches embodied game design.

Misha Bushyager is a longtime gamer and designer working on making sure the next generation of geeks sees themselves represented. She's one of the founders of New Agenda Publishing and a founding curator for More Seats at the Table, a newsletter highlighting gender-marginalized designers. She worked on Orun, #Feminism, Fate of Cthulhu, Lovecraftesque, Misspent Youth: Sell Out With Me, Masks: Unbound, and the as yet unpublished larp Nightingales. She's a panelist, writer, editor, and sensitivity editor for tabletop RPGs and larps. You can find her on Twitter as BGGameworks or on her website blackgirlgameworks.com.