"Serious Cryptography" is good. There's an updated edition dropping later this year.

"Real World Cryptography" is also good.

A better book for what audience? The scientifically minded can do much worse than "A Graduate Course in Applied Cryptography" by Dan Boneh and Victor Shoup (on which the online cryptography course is based). For a more practical angle, I agree with other commenters on this thread: "Cryptography Engineering" (Ferguson, Schneier, Kohno), "Serious Cryptography" (Aumasson) and "Real-World Cryptography" (Wong) are pretty solid.

What LARP involves academic comparisons of cryptographic algorithms? Whatever it is, it sounds like my sort of thing ;)