Curious Pastimes

Curious Pastimes (sometimes abbreviated to CP) is an organisation that runs one of the best-known live action role-playing campaigns in the UK. CP is a private, profit-making company headquartered in Moreton in the Wirral in Northern England. The company was formed in 1995, as a break away group from the Lorien Trust.
Curious Pastimes’ ongoing LARP campaign is called "Renewal.". The campaign uses its own set of LARP rules, adapted from the Lorien Trust Rules System. Renewal is a "Fest" Game, in which large numbers (typically hundreds) of players interact with one another and with a small number of briefed non-player characters, climaxing in pre-arranged mass battles between roughly even numbers at the two longer events. These battles represent one of the major variations from the "Gathering" parent-game, being exclusively Player-versus-Monster battles (the "Gathering's" battles are chiefly Player-versus-Player).
With approximately 800 players attending the main event in August, Renewal is the third-largest fest campaign in the UK, behind the "Gathering" and Profound Decisions' "Empire".
Events.
The Renewal Campaign comprises four events each year, culminating in the flagship event, also called "Renewal", held every year over the August Bank Holiday weekend. All the events take place on weekends; two of them run from Friday evening to Sunday afternoon, and two, occurring on Bank Holiday weekends, run to Monday afternoon. Curious Pastimes also runs a system for formally approving smaller events (see "below") staged by the various participating groups and "factions" throughout the year.
The events vary in size from 100 to 1000 people and present different aspects of the ongoing Renewal Campaign. The events are:
The May battle event was staged at Bispham Hall Scout Camp in Wigan until 2009, and "Renewal" was staged at Phasels Wood Scout Camp in Hemel Hempstead from 1998 to 2007. Both events were moved following negative customer feedback regarding the sites. Two smaller-scale events (40-70 players, peaking at 100 in April 2002) entitled "Prelude" (in March/April) and "Aftermath" (in September/October) were discontinued after Prelude 2002, due chiefly to rising venue costs.
Curious Pastimes classes itself as a "family-friendly" event, allowing parents to bring along children of any age. All children are entitled to full characters, though only those 16 or over are allowed to participate in the mass battles.
Sanctioned Events.
Curious Pastimes offers formal "sanctioning", allowing affiliated groups (generally groups who also participate in the Renewal Campaign) to run their own events within the ongoing Renewal storyline. There are degrees of sanctioning, ranked from ‘Level 1’ (lowest) to ‘Level 3’ (highest); lower-sanctioned events have little effect on the main Renewal storyline but can be organised and run with minimal involvement by the company, while higher-sanctioned events may have a concrete effect on events at main events but need to be extensively co-ordinated with company staff.
Mandala LRP, a non-profit company founded by some of CP's staff and volunteers, ran several small, ‘Level 3’ sanctioned events from 2004 to 2007; in addition, each of the factions runs one or two sanctioned events most years, bringing the total number of events taking place in the Renewal game world close to twenty in some years.
The Game World.
The game's setting is a unique unnamed fantasy world. The world is more or less Earthlike, and the known, populated continent that hosts the player characters and their communities is a temperate-to-subarctic landmass broadly equivalent to Eurasia.
There are nine intelligent humanoid races in the CP setting: "humans", "elves", "dark elves", "dwarves", four "greenskin" races ("orcs", "ogres", "goblins", and "trolls") and a variety of animal-human hybrids collectively known as "beastmen". All are more or less evenly-distributed across the world's population (and thus player base), with some variation among the different factions.
Factions.
The known continent is populated by a number of monarchies, nation-states and confederations known as "Factions", modelled very loosely on various real-world historical communities, with influences from fantasy literature, films and other sources, as well as original ideas. The majority of player characters belong to one or other faction, with the exception of a group of non-aligned players collectively labelled "mercenaries." The factions average about 100 in size at "Renewal" (i.e. 1/8 of the average "Renewal" turnout of 800), but are presumed to govern (or at least represent) populations in the hundreds of thousands, appropriate to those of equivalent pre-Industrial states.
In real-world terms, each faction is run as a more or less independent club, with a small administrative team assigned by CP and internal In- and Out-of-Character hierarchies. Many of the factions host websites for their members, and several of them stage small-scale "sanctioned" events set in the "Renewal" continuity. At events, members of a faction camp together; the factions' communal In-Character camps are the major focus of the game, with attacks against fortified camps and diplomatic missions between camps providing much of the storyline at each event.
The factions are:
Within the broad faction concepts stated above may be found a broad spectrum of characters, from the comical to the serious, from a range of historical (or pseudo-historical) backgrounds, and from the mean and humble to the high-heroic. Formally, Renewal is an "Open World" campaign setting, so players are permitted to submit any concept they wish, with the exception that neither gunpowder-weapons nor any more advanced technology are permitted.
The Empire of the Golden Isles.
Most of the non-player character groups (generally threats of one sort or another) come from the same nations and communities represented by the player factions (plus mercenaries) listed above; many of the ongoing antagonist-plotlines therefore revolve around treachery and civil war. However, over the years a number of non-player characters and monsters have arisen from nations, cults, and other groups that belong outside the general context of the known player-character world.
Foremost among these is the "Empire of the Golden Isles" (often referred to as the "Greenskin Empire" or just "the Empire"), a large empire of nonhumans (ogres, orcs, goblins and trolls) modelled on Feudal Japan, that supposedly rivals the collected population and magical and military might of all the player nations combined. The Empire originates on a previously unknown archipelago that lies to the south of the continent occupied by the factions, and roughly equal to it in overall land area.
They first became known to the player characters at Prelude 2001 (see above), and quickly fell into a war with the factions until peace was reached in 2004 (1104 in the in-character calendar). Now they exist as an imposing political and military presence, producing many of the high-profile non-player characters and several of the more "political" plotlines. Two recent events - "Fayre of the Empire" (Fayre 2005) and "Suukou Kaigi" (plot-event 2007) - took place on Imperial lands and were focused predominantly on the ongoing Imperial plotline.
Other Worlds.
The unnamed Renewal campaign world (sometimes referred to as "The Land") lies at the centre of the campaign's cosmology, surrounded by six more or less earthlike worlds and twelve supernatural worlds (including a plane of the undead, a plane of demons, a "pole" of spirits and the like). People from the Land very rarely travel to any of the other worlds, and the denizens of the other worlds only slightly more frequently visit the Land.
Several nations from one of the more earthlike worlds - the Keltoi, the Tagmatoi and the Amgeara (parallel versions of the Fir Cruthen, the Teutonians and the Al'Gaia, respectively) - invaded the Land in 1108 and 1109, before the portal connecting the two worlds was eventually sealed in 1110.