A LARP based at the University of Cambridge (though open to non-student members), No Flag, No Country is set on a recently-discovered archipelago featuring a portal to the Beyond, home of the supernatural and the dead. It also features the ruins of a previously unheard-of ancient civilisation, artefacts of magical power, and a lot of pirates.
A session at the "research camp" every Friday is followed by a smaller group of characters going on a more standard RPG adventure, such as "Raid the trap-filled tomb of rolling boulders" or "Stab up the Demon Cultists", on the Saturday.
More detailed setting information, rules, etc can be found on the game website
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No Flag No Country provides examples of:
- Anatomy Arsenal: Both Biomancy and Surgery top-level skills can give you these. Either by warping your body, or sewing bits of monsters on to it.
- BBC Quarry: Nearby Grantchester Meadows have represented everything from the Mystery Swamps to underground ruins.
- Cast from Hit Points: You can deliberately take wounds to power up your rituals, and improvised rituals sometimes do this to you anyway.
- Church Militant: The Church of the Builder wants a stable, ordered society, and to stomp anyone who messes with that.
- Clap Your Hands If You Believe: All magic works on this principle, using a belief that is personal to each individual. The difficult bit of rituals is finding an excuse for all the different beliefs to add up in a way that makes sense. "So, you believe your powers are granted by the Aspirant, she's got an iron-hard faith in engineering, and that guy runs on the Theory of Narrative Causality Okay..".
- Cool Sword: Want one of these? Play a Talismancer.
- Corrupt Church: Since the Gods don't communicate particularly clearly with mortals, this is entirely possible and leads to cases like the dubious sect of St Bjorn the Murderous.
- Demon Slaying: The Church of Aspirant love to do this, or have their undead minions do it for them.
- Elemental Powers: Entirely plausible, but Fire has a bit of a bad reputation due to a cult of pyromania.
- Fantastic Drug: In abundance. From berzerk-inducing mushroom spores to magical postcards that make you joyful when you read them.
- Heroic Sacrifice: You can take Wounds to power up a ritual. You can also take all the wounds and die to really, really power one up.
- The Scapegoat : The Hegemony overthrew the monarchy centuries ago, but have a Puppet King who is "Crowned" from a prisoner on Death Row, dragged out occasionally to remind people why monarchy is bad, and then executed whenever the Senate can't get the actual perpetrator of something. Conveniently, this means the "king" can be immediately present at any city that needs a bit of political theatre and has a murderer and a cheap brass crown in the dungeons.
- Necromancer: Can be played as anything from cackling cultist to Herbert West. Not innately evil, but when you can raise a bunch of tireless killbots...
- Our Elves Are Different: Mostly, they're pointy-eared Viking hooligans, with a supposed lifespan of about 150 years but an effective one of about 60 as they keep stabbing each other up in glorious duels.
- Reassigned to Antarctica: One of the many reasons your PC may have been sent to the archipelago of History, Theology, Mad Science and Horrible Ways to Die.
- Ritual Magic: There's a lot of this. Most of the complex powers are rituals that get better the more people you have in them.
- Rubber Forehead Demons: There's only so much you can do when everything the PCs meet needs to be represented by another society member.
- Robinsonade: Most of the NPC settlements were founded by shipwrecked sailors some time in the past few hundred years.
- Shout-Out: The name is an ironic reference to an Eddie Izzard joke about colonialism, since any native inhabitants of the archipelago appear to have died out suspiciously a few thousand years ago.
- Turn Undead: Subverted. They don't have any particular weakness beyond "beat the snot out of them".
