Players

Run at Festival of the Larps, 2017

by Warren Tusk, Sarah Judd

"We hear as well of the lost city Lyber, where acolytes of a spider goddess and a serpent god fought an endless, bloody war."

-- From The World of Ice and Fire

It is a vast city, a glorious city, home to literally tens of thousands. It is a city of brick walls and stone ziggurats, of bronze-forged spears and crimson-dyed cloaks. Above all it is a city of wisdom, filled with learned priests who speak the words of the gods.

It is also a city of shadows, a city of terror and death.

For as long as anyone can remember, the two cults have sought to destroy one another, and all of Lyber has been their battleground. Knives flash in the dark. Curse-tablets are buried beneath the gates. Strange, terrible words are whispered into the ears of the mighty.

The priests explain that they are only agents of higher powers -- that their battles are merely earthly manifestations of the celestial battle between Zashar and Idran- lil. They swear that the blood will not cease to flow, cannot cease to flow, until the struggle of the gods comes to an end and the fate of the world is decided. Some believe them. Some mutter cynically about political rivalries, economic factions, pride and custom grown wildly out of hand.

Whatever the truth: with every passing month, there are more corpses in the streets, and the city grows weaker.

Soon it will be too weak to survive. Already, the self-righteous Fisher Queens have sent their envoys to the Bellflower Palace, and threatened to conquer the city for its own good. Already, the greedy Cymmeri warlords have begun to raid. Lyber is dying. Everyone knows it.

In times such as these, princes and potentates grow desperate. If nothing else can save them, they will seek even to force the hands of the gods...

Garmon II, the Bellflower King of Lyber, has summoned before him the senior clerics of both Zashar and Idran-lil. He has feasted them with the finest delicacies that his royal household can offer; he has honored them with coronets of gold; and he has locked them all within his underground dungeon. By his decree, they will not emerge until they have ended the feud between their faiths.

Now, six priests are sealed together within the deepest chambers of the Bellflower Palace, and one way or another they must decide what they are going to do. They are possessed of secret arts and deadly martial skills. Patriotism, and love, drive them towards peace. Godliness, and hate, drive them towards murder. And all the while, they must breathe in the strange vapors that rise up through the stone -- the vapors of divine oracular insight --

Lyber is a six-person LARP written by Warren Tusk and Sarah Judd. It is a Bronze-Age-themed game about the nature of human civilization, about doctrinal conflict, and about complicated personal relationships.

It is technically a Song of Ice and Fire fan game, in that the city of Lyber is part of George R. R. Martin's literary universe. That said, the quote at the beginning of this writeup is literally all of the Lyber-related content that exists in canon, and everything else is our own invention.