Things to Consider

You’ll sometimes see people saying your “kit’s never finished” and that’s completely true. Your kit doesn’t have to be perfect for your first game. Your character will grow and have experiences that change them and the kit should reflect that. The wastes are a grimy place filled with messy threats. You’ll probably pick up mementos from adventures and other players to add on.

There are a few things to keep in mind when putting together a costume. First, it needs to be safe. No sharp points or edges. Save the edge for your characters. Safe for you too, can it take a hit without a hard point digging into you?

Second, it should be comfy. LARP costuming is different from things like cosplay. You will basically be living in your costume or functioning as a person for hours at a time. Do tests. Put on your costume and move around. Sit, stand, kneel, lay down, crouch, walk, jog, run. There’s also human needs to consider. Make sure you can eat and use the bathroom easily. Whether it’s while in costume or it’s easy to take off.

And now the final point, story. Your kit will tell a story. It doesn’t have to from the start, but it eventually will. Whether it’s a collection of stains or little gifts from other characters or trophy pieces from a big bad. Your costume won’t be anywhere near complete starting out and it’s okay to have gaps or blank spaces on it. You can and should fill those in as time goes on.

Actually Making It

Materials and Parts

Start with a good base that will stand up to normal wear and tear and manufactured wear and tear. Stuff like clothes you’ve never worn or worn too much is a great place to start. Leather and fabric scraps for patches. For armor, you could use soda tabs and make tab mail. If you’re a little craftier, you could make painted foam armor plates to stick on a jacket.

Weathering and genre-ing

This is the fun part. You’re going to muck up and damage whatever you have. There’s an abundance of ways to distress clothing. Some of the more common methods are:

  • Splashing or spattering or sponging it with watered down acrylic paint

  • Sanding down clothes where the joints are

  • Dragging a serrated knife to create little snags and tears

  • Spraying with watered down bleach

There’s so many other ways to do it, get creative. Of course, clothes aren’t the only things to distress. Whatever your character owns should look beaten up a little. Trinkets shouldn’t look fresh out of a box. They should look like they’ve been dropped a few times and kicked down the street. In fact, that’s not a bad way to genre that stuff.

Putting it all together

This is a very literal part of the process. You have all these cool kit pieces and accessories, now you should attach them to each other in some way. Bolts, rivets, contact cement, barge glue, velcro, and even just plain hand sewing are great.