What is Nocturne?

Nocturne is a live roleplaying game run in Oxford, set in a mythical fantasy world. The players pretend to be fictional characters in this world, and run around in the woods on Friday nights, fighting each other with padded latex weapons. Some of the players take the part of heroic warriors and sorcerors and scouts and priests, others take on the parts of the bandits, goblins, wolves, zombies and other monsters they must fight against, the villagers and damsels they must rescue, the villains they must overcome and the gypsies and tavernkeepers they will talk to along the way.

Basically, the aim is to go out there, run around and have as much fun as possible! We don't take it too seriously, costume is nice if you want to make the effort but by no means essential, (certainly not as essential as dressing up good and warm!,) and hamming it up and having a laugh is encouraged. Cheap homemade weapons are provided to fight with, although a few people like to spend some cash on buying proper professional latex swords and stuff.

Each player has a heroic character which they play, and people take turns at doing so - each week about half the players play their heroic characters, and the other half run around being all the goblins and so forth for them to heroically overcome.
Every time you play, your heroic character gets more points to spend, and they can then spend those points on becoming better at fighting, or casting spells, or whatever other skills they want to learn.

There are a lot of complicated bits of system on this website, which may all seem a bit daunting at first. But you don't actually need to read or understand any of it to play - just turn up to the pub before we set out, tell one of the people who knows what they're on about what kind of character you'd like to play, and they'll help guide you through it.

There's also a great deal of background stuff on this website - that too you can freely ignore. Basically, the background stuff is there for those who want to know all about the world they're playing in, and tie their character and adventures into it, and just generally like having lots of background to the world they're playing in - it can be mostly ignored by those who aren't interested and just want to turn up on the night and have fun. People have played for ages, and even run adventures themselves, without having read a bit of it.

There are a few bits of background it's useful to know, you can find a brief summary of the really important points here.

Each adventure is run by a different person, but there's one person in overall charge of keeping things organised, who is known (aptly enough) as the FLRP Organiser - a new FLRP Organiser is elected annually by the members of OURPGSoc, (the Oxford University RolePlaying Games Society,) and you can contact the current FLRP Organiser here if there are any questions about FLRP you want to ask.
FLRP stands for Fantasy Live RolePlaying, in case you were wondering!

Also, everyone should preferably take a look at the basic training section before their first FLRP, as it covers the main essentials of FLRPing and reading it now will save time on the night.

Oh, and if you want to know when and where it's happening, and other useful things like that, you might want to have a look here. We usually charge each player a couple of pounds to cover costs, but your first time is always free, so there's no reason not to give it a go!