David D. LevineScience Fiction Author

I’m just back from Poland, where I participated in a science fiction LARP called Eclipse. This was an “international blockbuster LARP,” meaning that it had a fairly large cast (150 players), a highly detailed and immersive set (a futuristic dome complex near Krakow called Alvernia Planet), costumes (most of us wore standard jumpsuits, which we had the option to rent or buy, but many people accessorized or modified the standard jumpsuits to suit their characters and some brought their own costumes, which was okay as long as your outfit clearly indicated which division you were in by its color: brown for Soft Science, gray for Hard Science, and green for Explorers), and prewritten characters. It was an incredible experience which I have described as “like living in a science fiction movie” — specifically a cross between Arrival and Interstellar.

This report will be spoiler-free. I have also prepared a report with spoilers which is password-protected (the password is “eclipse”, all lower case) to prevent people from learning details about the game inadvertently (and to keep the page from getting slurped up by search engines or LLMs). If you think that you might ever play this game, I encourage you to not click that link, because it’s a lot more fun If you don’t know what’s coming.

The scenario of the game was this: it’s 2059 and Earth is going to hell. A worsening series of climate catastrophes called “eclipses” have killed millions, disrupted economies and governments worldwide, and led humanity to conclude that the only viable option for survival is to find a Planet B. With the fortuitous discovery of a faster-than-light drive, missions have been sent to seven potentially habitable planets, with instructions to assess their suitability for mass colonization. If at least one planet passes all the tests, the rest of humanity will follow. Our mission, Eclipse 7, was the last one to leave Earth and was investigating the planet Gliese 628A (pronounced glee-ASE-uh).

Alvernia Planet, the venue for the game, was an amazing complex of domes connected by futuristic glass tubes and equipped with high-tech sliding doors — it was a fabulous locale for this game and was an important part of the immersion. It had originally been built as a set for science fiction movies, I think, but I don’t think it was very successful in that function, as it had a very specific look (as though it had been designed and built by Cardassians with assistance by H. R. Giger) and didn’t have the movable walls or lighting trusses you’d expect to find on a film set. I’m told that it had served as the office of a radio station for a time, and stood vacant for a while. It’s now an event venue, and had housed the traveling Harry Potter exhibition right before we arrived. Players slept in hotels nearby, with buses provided at the beginning and end of each day, and lunch and dinner were served each day. The food was vegetarian and was… okay.

This game had aspects of a “workplace” LARP and a “parlor” or social LARP. The “workplace” aspects of play involved researching the planet and determining its suitability for colonization, and the “parlor” aspects involved all the interpersonal drama between the crew members and also with their loved ones back home (there was limited FTL communication with Earth). Each character belonged to one of three divisions — Soft Science, Hard Science, and Explorers — which determined what you’d be doing during the workday. Soft Science, which should really have been called Linguistics, involved attempting to establish communications with any Non-Human Intelligent Lifeforms (NHILs) encountered on the planet. Hard Science, which should have been called Psionics, involved using a technological brain interface to establish mental contact with any NHILs or other entities encountered. And Explorers, which should have been called Archaeology, went outside the domes to explore any artifacts or structures in the forest nearby.

Each character also had a background in one of six Academies which had been established to vet and train crew members for the Eclipse missions. Each Academy had a specialty and a vibe. The Argo academy specialized in strategic planning and its alumni were considered cold and calculating. Blackstone (security) was confrontational and vengeful. Deepwater (psychology) was analytical and hesitant. Echo 432 (communication and diplomacy) was intellectual and arrogant. Lighthouse (medicine) was empathetic and self-sacrificing. Steel Valley (technology) was competitive and insecure. A character’s Academy had a strong influence on their personality, their social circle (members of each Academy tended to have shared backstories and socialize together outside of working hours), and also determined their “SideSpec” — their secondary function outside of their main day job. As part of their SideSpec each character had an emergency procedure which they might be called upon to perform in case of necessity, but hey, who reads the safety card anyway?

Each character was identified by a nickname or callsign, the first letter of which matched their Academy (for example, the names of all Blackstone alumni began with B) and which generally gave you a very strong hint as to their personality and backstory. My character, Spot, was called that because he was a former undercover cop and was very good at spotting details. I hated the nickname, but Spot was an interesting character who was working hard to overcome the trauma of his last undercover assignment — the failure of which had cost him both his job and his sweetheart — and figure out who he would be going forward if he wasn’t going to be a cop any more. However, Spot had a lot less relationship drama in his life than some of the other characters — he never fell in love or got into a fist fight — and the workplace aspects of the game were the heart of the experience for me.

Spot was a Steel Valley alumnus, as you can tell by his name, and worked in the Soft Science division. Once the existence of NHILs was established (early on the first day of the game, which was Sol 59 — our 59th day on the planet), our job in Soft Science was to attempt to establish some kind of vocabulary and begin exchanging messages in hopes of working out a mutually agreeable way of sharing the planet. During each shift, each five-person work group was assigned a concept, or “lemma,” to attempt to communicate to the NHILs using sounds, gestures, props, thoughts, emotions… whatever we thought might possibly work (at the beginning of the game we knew nothing about the NHILs). Each group would then formulate a “sign,” or expression of the concept, and one member of the group would go into the “containment grid” to perform the sign and observe first-hand the NHILs’ reactions, if any. The other members of all the groups would remain outside the containment grid, watching on video, taking notes, and biting their fingernails. We had five two-hour work shifts during the game, so each Soft Science character would have one opportunity to meet the NHILs in person.

Oh, and there was a black hole that would be passing through the system late in the day on Sol 60, but it wasn’t expected to come close enough to the planet to cause any trouble.

Each player was given an Android tablet with a custom app that was used for messaging, planning, alerts, and reports. The app worked well, though the wifi was occasionally spotty. After each work session everyone was asked to submit an answer through the app to a question about the NHILs, based on what they’d learned during that session. For example, the question might be something like “What is the NHILs’ attitude toward other species? Are they A) assimilationist, B) cooperative, or C) antagonistic?” Everyone’s answers would be fed into an algorithm which determined the options for the mission going forward. In this way the players had input into the eventual outcome of the game. I have heard that there were 20 possible endings.

One other aspect of the game is a little difficult to explain but worked beautifully in practice. Each character had an “Earth Affection” — a person back on Earth who was their best beloved, and who had been promised a ticket on the very first colonization ship if the planet proved hospitable. (If it didn’t, not only would our loved ones be stuck on a dying Earth, but we would not be returning to join them; we’d disassembled our space ships to build the base, and no rescue mission was planned.) We were invited to bring a photograph of our Earth Affection to pin up on the “Earth Wall” bulletin board — as seen in Battlestar Galactica, inspired by the World Trade Center after 9/11 — and of course I brought a picture of my late wife Kate. If you’re one of my gay square dance friends, you will understand what I mean when I say that standing in front of the Earth Wall felt very much like the Memorial Panels at the IAGSDC convention, and my tears there were real. During the game we had two opportunities to call our Earth Affection, and for these sessions each player was paired up with another player, with each playing the other’s Earth Affection in turn. So in addition to Spot I also played another character — the Earth Affection of another player — for two seven-minute sessions, and that other player played Spot’s Earth Affection for two seven-minute sessions. Those twenty-eight minutes were some of the most emotionally intense of the whole game for me.

All in all, Eclipse was one of the most immersive and intense LARPs I’ve ever played. The setting wasn’t quite as amazing as the actual Sahara Desert, but it was incredibly cool, and the production values and special effects exceeded the very high mark set by Expedition Sahara. The stakes for the characters were incredibly high, the emotional intensity dramatic, and the ending highly impactful. I cried many times.

If you’d like to know more about my experience in Eclipse Run 3, you can read my report with spoilers (the password is “eclipse”, all lower case). But if you think that you might ever play this game, I encourage you to not click that link, because it’s a lot more fun If you don’t know what’s coming.

I am writing at the airport on the way home from Philadelphia, where I played in the Miskatonic University North America LARP organized by Chaos League in conjunction with Reverie Studio. This was a Live Action Role Play game loosely based on the stories of H.P. Lovecraft, which took place at Miskatonic University in Arkham, Massachusetts in 1924.

This report contains SPOILERS.

Miskatonic NA is an “International Blockbuster LARP,” which means that it had a large cast (about 116 players), an immersive setting (the delightful and historic campus of Bryn Mawr University), and very substantial advance preparation by the organizers and players to deliver a fully immersive experience. Each player was preassigned a character with a detailed background and personality traits — my character sheet was nine single-spaced pages — and we were expected to arrive with appropriate costumes and props for the 1924 setting.

Up until this year, all the international blockbuster LARPs I have played in have taken place in Europe (except for Expedition Sahara which was in Tunisia). However, beginning this year the European LARP phenomenon seems to be migrating to the United States, and in many cases these LARPs are games which have originally been presented in Europe and are now being run in the US with a US partner. In this case, Miskatonic University had been run seven times in Poland by Chaos League, and they were now teaming up with Reverie Studios to run it twice in Pennsylvania. I participated in US run 2. (In 2026 I plan to play in two other LARPs that have been similarly ported from Europe to the States: Bard’s Tale and Conscience.)

Although this game was inspired by the works of H.P. Lovecraft, it wasn’t based on any specific Lovecraft story and it certainly did not include Lovecraft’s sexism or racism. Characters were all written without specifying gender or race; the players, mostly American, represented a variety of backgrounds (admittedly, mostly white) and a broad diversity of gender identities and presentations. What the game did draw from Lovecraft was themes of madness and “cosmic horror.” This was not the kind of horror LARP in which costumed NPCs jumped out from behind pillars to frighten the players — the horror was instead existential and subtle.

The game took place in the last three days of the 1923-24 academic year. Most of the characters were first-year students, with a small number of players being professors (these players were responsible for creating their own lectures and exercises, and they all did fabulously with them). A few non-players portrayed more advanced students, other faculty members, and staff. Every student had an academic course of study — my classes were in anthropology and ancient languages — and belonged to one of six “Societies” (these weren’t secret societies, more like fraternities) each of which had its own traditions, rituals, and flavor.

Life at Miskatonic was pretty much like life on any college campus. Some students were focused on their courses, others on socializing, and others on various e/x/t/r/a/t/e/r/r/e/s/t/r/i/a/l extracurricular activities. The players’ days were fairly heavily scheduled, with meals (provided by the campus food service, and quite good they were too), lectures, labs, Society events, and scheduled campus activities. But there was also a lot of free time, and students were also free to skip out on classes or other activities and/or stay out after curfew… and face the consequences of doing so. Every player made their own choices about how to spend their time, and so everyone had a different experience. No one got a lot of sleep.

Each player’s experience was very heavily influenced by their Society. A character’s Society was so central to their game that all characters’ names began with the same letter as the Society, so you could tell immediately when seeing someone’s name tag or even hearing their name which Society they belonged to… and hence a lot about their personality, priorities, and goals. My Society, the Lost Poets (whose names began with L), was focused on the arts; we spent a lot of our time talking about, making, and performing or presenting poetry, prose, theatre, painting, and drawing. The Enigma Society (E names) focused on solving puzzles, many of which were connected to the mysterious sarcophagus which had recently been discovered in the archives and was the center of the game’s overarching plot. The Mind’s Eye Society (M) was dedicated to psychology and the other sciences, while the Knife and Veil Society (K) was dedicated to the occult; they didn’t get along well at all. The remaining societies were Goliard’s Thorns (G, the goths) and Order 322 (O, the fascists), also traditional rivals. In general, students spent most of their non-class time with other members of their Society.

My character, named Lawson, was a poet. He had been born poor in Dublin, had made his way to America to seek his fortune, and had failed utterly there, winding up penniless, drunk, and sleeping on the street. He’d been a brawler and a drunkard and had hurt a lot of people, and making amends with those people was a big part of the character’s agenda for the weekend. But then one night he staggered into a cafe and berated everyone there with his lewd and insulting poetry. He’d been arrested for that, but some of those present were sufficiently impressed by his poetry and delivery that they took up a collection to bail him out… and one of them had been a publisher, who’d offered him a contract. Since then he’d become a rich and successful poet. Now, having made sufficient enemies in society that he needs to avoid the limelight for a while, he’s attending Miskatonic as an adult student, and really enjoying it. I chose to play the character with an Irish accent, and though I was a bit worried about maintaining it or getting in trouble for cultural appropriation, many people later commented that they’d been impressed by it.

When we showed up on the first day of the game our first agenda was moving into the dorms, which felt a lot like moving into the dorms in real life. We all met our fellow players — many of whom our characters had extensive backstory with but whom we were meeting in person for the first time — unpacked, and pinned our names and other ephemera to the cork boards outside our rooms. Then we all trooped down to the gorgeous Old Library for the usual half-day of workshops, in which we were introduced to the rules, metatechniques, and expectations that would keep players physically and emotionally safe, then had an opportunity to meet and coordinate with our characters’ close associates, fellow Society members, and study-group compatriots. Then we all got into costume and the LARP proper began.

My character, somewhat against my expectations, was more involved with his actual classes than with the mystery around the sarcophagus or intracollegiate shenanigans. The players who portrayed the professors were amazingly good at their jobs, providing fascinating and engaging lectures and exercises. Professor Petkov — one of the main “villains” of the piece, being a hardass and a sadist — was actually the most engaging teacher (and a fantastic player) and my character wound up respecting her intellect enormously. It didn’t hurt that she had a habit of breaking up the class into competing teams for group projects and my character’s (okay, my) group projects tended to win the competitions.

Outside of class my character engaged strongly with the Lost Poets, and these hours were among the most enjoyable and heartwarming of the game for me. We bonded fast and deeply, and had many late-night discussions on the meaning and purpose of art. The Lost Poets may not have investigated sarcophagus-related puzzles like the Enigma Society or conducted seances and exorcisms like Knife and Veil, but we were a real fount of gossip and our gala exposition (talent show) on Saturday night was a highlight of the game for many, not just in our Society. I really felt like I had met my found family in the Poets and I can’t imagine myself having been happy in any other Society. (I might possibly have said the same if I’d wound up an Enigma or Knife and Veil character, both of which I’d considered, but I would have had a completely different game.)

One of the key moments of the game for each player was their turn to read from the Forbidden Texts — a powerful mini-game within the game — after which, having been exposed to forbidden knowledge, our characters would begin to Descend Into Madness. For my own Descent, my character sheet told me that I would write a poem full of horrific imagery in which I imagined violently slaughtering my closest friends. But as I had spent much of the game making amends with people to whom I had done physical violence, and in each case I had expressed true remorse and a promise that I wasn’t really like that and would never do such a thing again, I felt that a poem involving physical violence would be too much of a blow to those recently-repaired relationships. Perhaps, in the spirit of “drive your character like a stolen car,” I should have gone ahead and done that. But I didn’t, and instead I chose to attack them psychologically instead. Since in this game everyone’s character sheets were open for all to read, I could look into my friends’ souls and find out exactly what I could say that would hurt them the most. I would write a cruel, insulting poem in which I plunged my knife deeply into my closest friends’ most tender and secret vulnerabilities.

My initial intention had been to just gather a few people together to read this poem, but with the upcoming exposition I realized that it would have more impact if I delivered it there. So I whipped out the poem in the hour between dinner and the exposition, then sat nervously waiting for my turn to come up. As I waited I realized that I couldn’t just step calmly to the podium and deliver this horrific screed, so I began to stare and tremble and mutter in my seat. Several people, concerned, came over and asked if I was doing okay, but all I replied was “black… black… everything is black” and “the show must go on, the show must go on.” When my turn came I charged onto the stage and delivered the poem with great vigor, gusto, and anger, and when I came to the last lines — in which, of course, I was cruelest to myself — I collapsed in tears on the floor. Many people came and helped me up, and I expressed surprise at finding myself on stage. The last thing I remembered was being in the audience. Had I fallen asleep and missed my cue? But no, they told me what I’d done and showed me the poem I’d delivered — written in my own notebook in my own hand. I read it and was utterly appalled, and ran around apologizing profusely to everyone I’d insulted. Fortunately they all forgave me, though for some it took a while. And, in a weird parallel to the cafe incident from my backstory, many many people came up to me and said that my poem and delivery had been exceptional and superb.

The other most memorable scene for me took place the following evening, before the climactic Gala that would conclude the game. Because by this point in the game everyone had been exposed to the Forbidden Texts, madness was endemic, and having already gone through my Descent and come out the other side I found myself, rather against my expectations and intentions, being one of the few trying to keep the Society on track to play our part in the Gala. One of the Society’s three Masters announced he was getting on a train to Carcosa (a location from the forbidden text The King In Yellow) and had to be gently restrained. But, hilariously, the character’s player was indeed getting on a train that evening, as he had to leave the game early, and so the character escaped. Another Master seemed to be doing all right until I noticed that she was scribbling maniacally in her notebook, and so I tried to talk her back to herself.

And then one of my best friends, a playwright named Little, returned from wherever he’d been hiding after nearly killing three people in a performance-art-piece-turned-chemistry-experiment… an amazing scene to which I’d been fortunate to witness the conclusion. He was still quite mad, with blood on his face (“don’t worry, it’s not mine”), but I took him aside, grabbed his shoulders, and told him that he was a playwright, not a chemist or a war criminal, and if that he’d just listen with his heart he could return to being his own true self. It was a long and impassioned speech — the scene, which involved just the two of us, ran to perhaps twenty minutes — and at the end of it he coughed up whatever foul spirit had been clogging his lungs and began to act somewhat more normal. But as we walked off to the Gala behind our Society banner I continued to be worried that he might relapse, that the Master who was still scribbling in her notebook might wander off, or that another friend — who was raving about some scheme to prevent the return of the evil elder gods which I judged had no chance of success but was also unlikely to make things worse — might do something desperate.

At this point half the students were mad, multiple schemes to save or destroy the world were proceeding, and I was convinced that whatever had been released from the sarcophagus would surely end us all — Miskatonic University at least, perhaps the Eastern Seaboard, perhaps the world — but, in the end, we all wound up dancing the evening away and only a few people died. The true cosmic horror would not be released until later, when an expedition from Miskatonic found the lost city of Zerzura in the Sahara Desert.

I believe that Sahara Expedition was written first and Miskatonic University later, as a prequel. I can recommend both games and I think they can be played in either order. Miskatonic University wasn’t as intense as Sahara Expedition but it was nonetheless immersive, emotionally engaging, and beautifully run and had a fantastic setting with many subtle but effective props and special effects. I can wholeheartedly recommend it and any other productions from Chaos League.