David D. LevineScience Fiction Author

At the beginning of December I participated in a LARP called Heirs of the Dragon. This LARP, inspired by George R. R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire novels, was set at the Great Council of 101AC, 180 years before the events of the main book series and 30 years before the Dance of the Dragons. The LARP took place in its own timeline, such that the events of the LARP did not necessarily have to be consistent with those of any book or TV show set at a later time.

This was an “international blockbuster LARP,” meaning that it had a large cast (130 players), a highly detailed and immersive setting (the marvelous Czocha Castle in Poland, which dates to the 13th century and has hosted many a LARP), magnificent costumes (provided by the players), and prewritten characters. It’s one of the best LARPs I have played, although I did have a few issues, most of which I would ascribe to myself as a player.

This report will include SPOILERS for the game. Be warned!

The scenario of the game was this: it’s been a hundred years since Aegon Targaryen, “Aegon the Conqueror,” came out of Valyria with his two sister-wives and three dragons and conquered Westeros, becoming the first King of the Andals and the First Men. His grandson, Jaehaerys Targaryen, has ruled wisely for over 50 years and the Seven Kingdoms are generally peaceful and prosperous. But, unfortunately, his two sons Aemon and Baelon both predeceased him, leaving the succession in question, so he has called a Great Council of all the lords of the great houses of Westeros to decide who should succeed him. The game took place over three real-time days at the Great Council, with the final vote to determine the succession as the climax of the game. Although the Great Council in the books had over a thousand attendees, the LARP had only 130 and only 40 of those were Lords of their House and thus voting members of the Council. The remaining players and NPCs were relatives, vassals, servants, hangers-on, and foreign guests.

One of the major aspects of game play involved which of the Seven Kingdoms a character belonged to: the North (of whom the most prominent house was the Starks), the Iron Islands (Greyjoys), the Vale (Arryns), the Riverlands (Tullys), the Crownlands (Targaryens), the Westerlands (Lannisters), the Reach (Tyrells), the Stormlands (Baratheons), and Dorne (Martells). (But wait, I hear you cry, isn’t that nine? Well, the term “Seven Kingdoms” refers to the seven kingdoms conquered by Aegon; the Riverlands and Crownlands never had kings of their own.) Your character’s Kingdom determined your major allies and enemies, your family history, your style of clothing, and to a surprising extent your personality.

I played Grover Tully, Lord Paramount of the Riverlands, and my partner Alisa played my wife Celesse Tully. This was a position of considerable political power, roughly equivalent to the Governor of a US State, but ruling the Riverlands was like herding cats and many of my bannermen (vassals) were not the sort of people who could just be ordered around. The Strongs of Harrenhal had the largest castle in Westeros and ambition to match; the Freys of the Twins held the only crossing of the Trident River and guarded their toll monopoly jealously; the Mallisters of Seaguard were focused on the predations of the Black Star pirates at the expense of the needs of the inland Riverlands; and the Brackens and Blackwoods had been murdering each other for centuries. But as Alys Rivers said in House of the Dragon, “House Tully is not the largest house in the Riverlands, nor is it the richest, but it is the most stable. The Tullys’ wisdom has kept the river houses in line for centuries. They would kill each other to the last man if it were not for their liege lord.” So I elected to play the character as one who ruled through persuasion and negotiation rather than force. I will say that this strategy generally worked well, and I managed to get through the whole game without any violence between the Brackens and Blackwoods, so yay me.

I really got into the whole Tully thing. The organizers of the LARP had recommended several costume makers, and I’d ordered top-of-the-line costumes for me and Alisa, in the house colors of red and blue with beautiful scale and fish details. I also went so far as to have custom leather-scale armor made with a Tully fish sigil on the breastplate. And, of course, there’s no point having armor unless you’re ready to fight, so I obtained a LARP sword (which barely fit diagonally in my largest suitcase) and took sword fighting lessons (at a lightsaber academy in the basement of the nearly-dead Lloyd Center mall, believe it or not). I never really got very good with the sword, honestly, and the one time I really used it was in the grand melee, where I got eliminated quite quickly, but I think I looked and felt better than I would have if I hadn’t taken those lessons.

As you might expect if you’ve read the books or seen the TV shows, the LARP was absolutely packed with drama. There were so many different games being played at once: the national political game (who should succeed Jaehaerys); the national economic game (largely focused on two major projects seeking funding and resources); various regional and local political and economic games; games of romance, marriage, and fidelity; games of personal rivalry and jealousy; games of intrigue, espionage, and murder; games of mysticism and religion. Almost everyone was involved in at least two or three of these subplots at once.

As Lord Paramount of one of the Seven Kingdoms, the national political and economic games were naturally very important to me, especially the major question of succession which was the reason the Grand Council had been called in the first place. Although there were many claimants to the throne, most of them had extremely dubious claims and many people, including me, dismissed them out of hand. The two serious claimants were Princess Rhaenys Targaryen, the only child of Jaehaerys’s eldest son Aemon, and Prince Viserys Targaryen, the eldest son of Jaehaerys’s younger son Baelon. One of the big conflicts in my character sheet was that my character felt that Rhaenys had the stronger claim, but my wife Celesse — who had a vote of her own on the Council as the representative of her birth house Grafton — favored Viserys. Should I order her to vote my way? Also, given that the Grand Council was being held at Harrenhal, in the Riverlands, the Riverlanders were the largest single delegation and if they could all be persuaded to vote in the same way I could perhaps use this for leverage. (If. Ha ha.)

Although my character sheet told me I preferred Rhaenys, I felt that both claimants deserved a fair hearing and so I set out to meet both of them personally. However, although I did join in a bear hunt with Viserys (which was awesome) and had several personal meetings with him on questions regarding his potential rule, I never managed to have a meeting with Rhaenys. We were both so busy! The one time she managed to find me and say “hey, can we talk now?” I was busy trying to arrange a wedding and had to beg off. I found Viserys very personable and reasonable — someone you could have a beer with — and it didn’t hurt that Viserys’s player had played my son in a previous game and we already had a good player-to-player relationship. In the end my personal feelings toward Viserys, as well as my concerns about Rhaenys’s husband, the loose cannon Corlys Velaryon, made me change my mind and vote for Viserys. (Viserys had a loose cannon of his own, his willful and murderous brother Daemon, but my conversations with him convinced me that he was more likely to be able to hold Daemon in check than Rhaenys could Corlys.) In the end, as it happened, it was Viserys who won the election, though in the previous run of the game it had been Rhaenys.

The national economic game also occupied a lot of my time, and was a major source of frustration for me as a character and as a player. This part of the game was more structured than other aspects of the LARP. The Small Council had proposed two major projects: a Royal Fleet for the defense of the coasts, and a River Road from Casterly Rock in the west to The Eyrie in the east. Only one of these two projects would receive funding from the Crown, and the winner would be the one whose patron gathered up the necessary resources — specific quantities of wood, grain, horses, stone, and such — first. Anyone could declare themselves a patron, but the resources were distributed among the most powerful houses and the only way for a patron to collect together enough resources to make the project fly was to negotiate, buy, or extort them from their holders. The resources were represented by paper certificates; they could be stolen or destroyed, but doing so would remove the resource from the game rather than transferring it to the thief. Forging certificates or signatures was not permitted. So if you wanted 500 wagons of wood you really had no alternative but to find someone who had it and get them to sign it over to you somehow.

The River Road, which ran directly past the Tully seat of Riverrun, would benefit the Riverlands and the Tullys enormously and so I was absolutely gung-ho for it, so much so that I considered attempting to become its patron myself. But then my son Walter decided to try for it, which pleased me greatly: I could use my influence to push the project without seeming egotistical, but if he failed it wasn’t my political neck on the line. And it would be educational for the lad to try even if he didn’t succeed. But it quickly became apparent that three of the major houses — the Lannisters, the Strongs, and the Celtigars — each controlled almost enough resources to make the project work, but none of them was willing to give up any of those resources to the others, creating a stalemate. The problem was ego. We all knew that if one of the projects got funded, the successful patron would be strongly considered for one of the open seats on the Small Council, and each of those three Lords had his eye on that seat. It did no good for me to protest, as I repeatedly did, that the Small Council had not explicitly promised the seat to the successful patron (and, indeed, in the end it went to someone else). And no matter how much I argued, wheedled, and tried to persuade, none of them would budge. This ate up almost a full day of the game for me and I was so frustrated, both in-character and as a player, by my inability to make any progress that I wound up going to the organizers for help. Eventually the Royal Fleet project got funded first and the whole thing just collapsed. (Lord Roote did manage to pull it together just before the end of the game, with no help from me. Good for him.)

This is one area where I think I might have had a better game if I’d played my character differently. As I said earlier, I played Lord Tully as one who ruled by negotiation and compromise rather than force. But I was Lord Strong’s liege lord and I could have straight-up ordered him to turn over some of his resources to the Lannisters (with whom Walter was already allied) to make the project go forward. But a combination of being conflict-avoidant (as a player) and a not-unreasonable fear that such an order would be rebuffed and/or would lead to Lord Strong trying to have me killed (as my character) led me to dismiss that option. If I’d had the strength of will, and the willingness to “play to lose,” to force the issue I might have gotten a nice meaty dramatic scene or two out of it even if the project didn’t actually go forward. And even if I got killed… well, this was a George R. R. Martin game and character death was definitely something that the organizers had planned for. I would have been able to come back as another character.

A side conflict of the River Road project wound up being another major part of my game. One of my vassals, young Lord Roote, wanted to build a bridge across the Trident River at his seat of Lord Harroway’s Town. This would benefit the Riverlands as a whole, so I was definitely in favor of it, and furthermore we both saw that it could easily be added to the River Road to the mutual benefit of both projects. But House Frey, whose own bridge over the Trident was the primary source of their income and power, was violently opposed. I had a number of ideas to resolve the conflict, including funding improvements to the Frey bridge as part of the River Road project or hiring Freys to advise on the Roote bridge, but the Freys adamantly rejected all such overtures. And then Frey troops attacked Lord Harroway’s Town, burning 250 wagons of grain (a resource which had already been signed over to someone else to support the River Road project). No lives were lost, but only because Lord Roote had caught wind of the attack in advance. I went to Lady Frey demanding restitution and she flippantly offered one gold nugget (about 2% of the value of the destroyed grain).

That night I lay awake for about three hours agonizing about what to do. The Freys were my vassals and I could technically order them to comply, but based on my interactions with Lady Frey I suspected that she would just say no and/or try to have me killed. I considered alternatives including: taking her aside and quietly saying “you know, I could order you to do this, won’t you please just be a pal and do it?”; doing the same where others could hear; taking her into a private room, making her kneel before me, and commanding her to make restitution, emphasizing that I was not doing this in public so as to allow her to save face; and doing the same in public as a big dramatic scene, with the intent of publicly embarrassing her. The question I kept asking myself as I considered that last alternative was “am I a big enough player to make that scene work?” Eventually what I wound up doing was getting a couple of big guys with swords to stand behind me as I took her aside (not in front of everybody, but not in a private room either) and told her gently but firmly that she must make restitution… and she immediately agreed to do so, though she paid only the value of the grain and nothing more. Lord Roote said he was satisfied with this outcome, so I decided to call it a win. But, again, if I’d really been “playing to lose” I might have gotten a bigger scene out of it.

The biggest, most dramatic scene I was involved in was almost entirely a fluke. It involved Lord Mallister, one of my bannermen and also, according to our character sheets, one of my best and oldest friends. Unfortunately, as it happened, he was the patron of the Royal Fleet project (not too surprising given that his seat of Seaguard was under constant threat from pirates) while I was, of course, backing the River Road project, so our friendship was a bit strained and we didn’t spend a lot of time together. Also, I heard a troubling rumor that he was actually selling weapons to the Black Star pirates, at the same time he was publicly working hard to defeat them. So this was the situation when I found myself with nothing to do for a moment and wandered outside to the dueling arena.

There were basically two situations in which a duel could occur: Matters of Honor, and Trial by Combat. Matters of Honor were usually to first blood, but Trial by Combat — in which the Gods were asked to indicate the guilty party by making him lose — could be to first blood or to the death. But I had no idea what was going on when I heard the sound of a crowd and went outside. There I saw King Jaehaerys officiating over a Trial by Combat between my good friend Lord Mallister and Lady Greyjoy of the Iron Islands. And, as I arrived, she had just gotten him on the ground with her sword at his neck. “He sold weapons to the Black Star!” she called out to the crowd. “Weapons they used to kill two of the Starks, and hundreds more!” Then she grabbed his wrist, pulled down his sleeve, and displayed to the crowd a Black Star pirate tattoo. “There you have it!” she cried to the crowd. “Undeniable evidence of treason!” Then she looked to the King. “So what’s it to be?”

King Jaehaerys was an NPC and also one of the game’s writers. He knew everything about everyone. He looked at me and said “He is Lord Tully’s bannerman, so it shall be his decision.”

I gulped and walked out onto the dueling ground. As I passed the King I asked, sotto voce, “Must it be death?”

He said yes.

So I walked out in front of everyone, with the crowd staring and the King looking on impassive and the combatants panting and Lady Mallister screaming “You don’t have to do this! Send him to the Wall!” and I spoke to them all, saying “I take no joy in this. This man was a friend, but he betrayed his King. He betrayed your trust. He betrayed my trust. He has committed treason, and so he must die.” And so Lady Greyjoy brought the sword down, and then for good measure she hacked his hand off and held the bloody relic high — the Iron Price. I knelt and put a hand on my old friend’s cooling cheek, and I cried real tears and said I was sorry.

I did get one great scene that played out exactly as I’d planned it. One of the biggest secrets in my character sheet was that I had killed my own father. He’d been losing his capabilities, and failing to manage the budget or maintain the castle, and making bad decisions (including banishing my commoner girlfriend and making me marry instead some minor noblewoman I’d never met, though that part turned out okay in the end), and it was clear that as long as he remained in charge things would continue to get worse. So I’d poisoned him, making sure to cover my tracks, but I was increasingly haunted by that decision… and, in particular, feared that the Gods, particularly the Stranger, were preparing some form of retribution for my crime. I did, I think, a great job of performing guilt and secrecy and dropping dark hints, but the point of a secret in LARP is that it must eventually come out, and I was just waiting for the right opportunity.

The opportunity arose during the Faith of the Seven prayer service on the second night of the game. Lady Tully was a very faithful follower of the Seven and I was also an adherent, though not so stalwart, so we were among the minority who attended the service (as opposed to the orgy, which was held at the same time). The ceremony was held in the sept, which I believe had been a wine cellar of the actual castle and was suitably atmospheric and echoey. We all lit candles and recited the Litany of the Seven Paths, and then the Grand Septon, an NPC and a fine actor, gave a compelling but brief sermon, ending with a request that if anyone felt the need to speak they should do so now.

And I did. I totally broke down crying and confessed that I was a kinslayer, that I had murdered my own father, but that I had done it for the sake of the family. “Family! Duty! Honor!” I wept, pounding my chest with each word. It was the Tully house words and I had done my best all game to keep them in mind. “Family! Duty! Honor! … Family! Duty! Honor!” The Faith of the Seven doesn’t do confessions, I think, but that was sure good for my soul and I felt a lot lighter after that. (Walter later asked if I needed to fear the King’s Justice, as a confessed kinslayer, but honestly I never considered that and, indeed, there were no consequences to my confession except that a number of players said they thought it was a great scene.)

One of my biggest worries, according to my character sheet, was my son Walter. Even though I’d set him up with a nice knighthood and sent him off to the Citadel to study to be a Maester he didn’t seem particularly interested in either war or academia, or girls. But I’d heard rumors from the Citadel that he’d been researching poisons and exchanging letters with unknown parties, and I was worried sick that Walter was going to poison me as the Gods’ punishment for my own patricide. So my character sheet said that I was getting increasingly paranoid about him, and also couldn’t trust his mother, who I assumed would take Walter’s side in any conflict with me. This problem was at the very top of my mind for literally months before the game. But when we arrived in Poland and actually met Walter’s player, my worries evaporated and I couldn’t be paranoid the way I was supposed to. He was such a lovely person and I never, ever got the vibe off of him that he was planning anything nefarious. So I dropped that aspect of my character and played my relationship with Walter as that of a concerned father who was worried that his son didn’t seem particularly ambitious. Later in the game I did ask him about the horrible rumors I’d heard that he’d been researching poisons, but he explained that he was doing it for a friend and I thought nothing more about it. And then he stood up and declared that he was going to try to be the patron of the River Road, and even though that plan foundered on the resistance of a few powerful Lords I didn’t think less of him for it.

I was also proud of Walter when, after approaching several young ladies (and keeping me informed as to his progress) he went ahead and proposed to Lady Johanna Westerling, and she accepted! I was genuinely pleased and proud. (Also glad that I have learned to pack an engagement ring for all LARPs.) Okay, there was that nasty rumor that she was pregnant with a Lannister bastard but I was prepared to overlook that, and Walter said he’d postpone consummating the marriage to make sure that there would be no questions about the firstborn’s parentage, so all was good, right?

There was a lot to do to make the wedding happen. We needed to negotiate the dowry, of course, and sign the betrothal contract, and make decisions about inheritance (the Westerlings were a pretty significant house themselves, and we eventually decided that the first-born son would inherit the Tully name and estate and the second-born the Westerling name and estate), and find a venue for the wedding, and find the necessary cloaks for the Westerosi wedding ceremony, and oh yes an officiant! We were beyond happy that the High Septon himself (basically the Pope!) agreed to officiate, and we set the ceremony for 10am the next day. But at 9am the next day there was an unexpected funeral (well, not that unexpected, this is a George R. R. Martin game after all) and as it was a member of the Royal Family who had died the High Septon officiated at that as well. But as long as it didn’t run long we’d be fine. And then, halfway through the ceremony, the High Septon started coughing up blood, and died right there in front of everyone.

Okay, I will admit that some of us had known that he wasn’t in the best of health, but it was still a shock and the timing couldn’t have been worse. Not only had we lost our officiant, but in the wake of the Pope’s death every other clergy person of the Faith of the Seven was running around with their hair on fire and none of them were available to stand in for him. So we had to postpone until… well, we didn’t know when. (It was right around then that I failed to meet with Princess Rhaenys.)

Then, as we were coming back inside after having our portrait photos taken (it was an out-of-game event but I made sure that Johanna and her lady-in-waiting Eleanor were included in the Tully family portrait), Johanna asked “are we back in game now?” and as soon as I said yes she clutched her stomach and fell over in pain. Blood everywhere, she said. (We were not allowed to use fake blood in the castle, so that was one thing where you had to take a character’s word for it… everything else in the game was “what you see is what you get.”)

I summoned a Maester and he looked her over and said that she would be fine. But… I knew from my reading that the drug Moon Tea could be used to induce miscarriage, with exactly those symptoms. Still, though, I thought we would all be better off with a miscarriage than a baby of questionable parentage, and so all I did with this information was to reassure her that we loved her and would welcome her to the family despite any peccadilloes in her past… as long as she promised to behave going forward, hm? Despite that teensy little incident, we did manage to make the wedding come together and they finally got married in the morning of the last day of the game. And everything went well for the happy couple after that, except that Eleanor decided to run off to Essos. Oh well, it’s so hard to find good help nowadays.

It was only after the game was over that we learned that Johanna had actually been pregnant with someone else’s child, but had claimed that it was Jason Lannister’s and blackmailed him about it, at the same time she made a contract to marry Walter. Walter and Eleanor convinced her to drink Moon Tea without any of them knowing that the actual father of the child had already sneaked some into her regular tea. This turned out to be quite bad for Johanna’s health and would probably mean that she couldn’t have children. Also she was beating Eleanor black and blue all the time, which explained why Eleanor ran off, and furthermore Johanna was planning to kill me and Lady Tully as soon as we got back to Riverrun. All of this was completely unknown to me, though Lady Tully had her suspicions and was making her own plans to push Johanna down the stairs at the first opportunity. Fun times.

That wasn’t the only time I was far too trusting. At one point, late in the game, one of the Starks came to me and said “The Wildings are absolutely pouring over the Wall… ten thousand already, with forty thousand more behind them. And if they get through the North, the Riverlands will be next. You must send every man you have to the defense of the realm.” And so I did, sending a raven to Riverrun instructing them to send all our troops to the Wall (I had a pretty respectable army) and asking all of my bannermen to do the same. All of them complied — including the Freys and the Rootes, who only agreed to do so if they got to see each other’s letters immediately before handing them over to the ravens — but most houses did hold a few hundred troops back for defensive purposes. I should have done so as well, because later I realized that I’d just left Riverrun completely defenseless on the word of one random Northman. Mind you, he was telling the truth (though the number of Wildings had grown quite a bit in the telling), and in the end nothing bad happened because of my gullibility.

Oh, and I also found out after the game that Walter had told me a teensy fib about why he was researching poison. He had actually given the poison to his boyfriend (!?) which he used to kill his wife. (!?!?!) But he wasn’t planning to kill me after all, so that’s all right I guess. (The boyfriend wound up getting sent to the Wall, which is kind of the Westerosi equivalent of the YMCA.)

So. Bottom line, it was one of the best LARPs I’ve played and I would totally play it again. As I said, there were so many different games being played at the same time, and I would love to have participated in some of the others. I never visited the tavern or the whorehouse, or the Godswood, or any of the secret passages (yes, there were secret passages), and I only saw the dragon (yes, there was a dragon) out-of-game. I think if I had the choice I’d be a Maester next time… there were some wicked intrigue, mysticism, and assassination plots going on there, and I’d get to go into the raven loft (which I’m told had a spectacular view). But in the end… I played the game, I even attended a wedding, and I did not die, so I guess I won.

Credit to Charmed Plume and Wonderlarp for the LARP and Rekografia for the photos.

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.

When I was a kid, there was an ad that ran in virtually every comic book for a “Polaris Nuclear Sub” that was “Big Enough for 2 Kids” and “Sturdily constructed of 200 ib. test fibreboard.” Of course I begged my parents to buy it for me, but my dad pointed out that “fibreboard” was just cardboard and we had plenty of that. So together we built a submarine our of cardboard boxes, and it was better than anything we could have mail-ordered for $6.98 plus 75¢ for shipping and handling.

Fast-forward to 2024, when I learned of the existence of a Live Action Role Playing event called Feindfahrt (), an anti-war LARP held in the submarine set originally built for Das Boot (1981), which also happens to be one of my favorite films ever. Of course I had to sign up for it, and as I write this I’m on a plane home from Munich where I just finished playing it.

Massive SPOILERS for the game follow. Proceed at your own risk.

The fictional premise of Feindfahrt is that after the capture of the German submarine U-505 (this really happened, and the sub is currently on display at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago), the Allies decided to staff the captured sub with a mix of US and UK sailors and send it deep into enemy territory on a secret mission. The intent of the game was to give players a sense of how oppressive and cruel the life of submariners during WWII was, with a good dose of interpersonal drama as well. It wasn’t intended to be a realistic submarine simulation or a strategic military game, but a game of communication and psychology in a tense and claustrophobic setting. There were 35 players of all genders (playing characters of all genders, in one of several departures from historical accuracy) drawn from countries including Germany, France, the Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, Finland, and the UK. I was the only person who came all the way from the USA for the game, though several other players were Americans who lived in Europe.

The Das Boot set is a life-sized recreation of the full interior of a Type VII-C German U-boat, 60 meters long and about 6 meters wide. During filming the set was mounted on a hydraulic platform that could tilt through 45 degrees in 5 seconds in both the pitch (fore-and-aft) and roll (side-to-side) dimensions to create dramatic scenes of diving, rolling in high seas, and being shaken by depth charges. Today the set sits on solid ground under a tent at the Bavaria Filmstadt studio. Which, given that the high temperatures in Munich this week were 39-45 degrees Fahrenheit, meant that it was as cold as the North Atlantic in there. However, we were forewarned about this, so I packed two sets of long undies, lots of wool socks, and a heavy sweater and I was reasonably comfortable the whole time.

As you can see from the above diagram, the boat was equipped with a Heckin’ Torpedo Room, an E-Machine, and a Bug Room. (Not really.) From left to right they were Aft Torpedo Room; Electric Engine Room; Diesel Engine Room; Galley; Non-Commissioned Officers’ Quarters; Control Room and Conning Tower; Officers’ Quarters, Radio Room, and Sonar/Hydrophone Room, Head, and Forward Torpedo Room. When I say “quarters” I mean “tightly packed bunks with a narrow passageway in between;” the enlisted men slept in shifts in hammocks slung between the torpedoes. Note the size of the little red person at the forward end of the top diagram; we’re talking cramped here.

We spent 12-13 hours per day in the sub, but we didn’t sleep there. The set did not actually have enough bunks to sleep 35 players even in shifts, and also it was terribly cold and the head wasn’t functional. So we all had to find our own accommodations in a nearby(ish) hotel (I chose the Bio-Hotel Alter Wirt, https://www.alterwirt.de, five stars would stay again) and commute to the submarine each day. We could easily leave the set whenever we wanted to, for bathroom breaks or just to decompress, and took our meals in a heated building nearby. I personally never felt particularly claustrophobic.

The set was not and had never been a real submarine. For one thing, the interior walls were painted black to create a claustrophobic feeling, whereas in a real sub they are painted in light colors for exactly the opposite effect. The controls and indicators were almost all nonfunctional and in many cases not technically accurate. Many parts that would have been metal in a real sub were made of wood or drywall, and were also over 40 years old, so we were repeatedly reminded to be careful not to break the sub. Despite these limitations the whole thing was incredibly detailed and immersive and I would definitely describe it as the Biggest, Best Toy EVAR. Also, the LARP organizers had repaired the diesel engine prop so that it moved realistically (after being broken for 18 years) and added some functional instruments such as depth gauges, battery meter, and speedometer; Arduino-powered interactive hydrophone and sonar; telephones for communication between the bridge, engine room, and torpedo room; and video screens so that people in other parts of the boat could see what was on the periscope. And there were speakers throughout to provide realistic sound effects such as rushing water, the hull creaking under strain, and depth charges exploding nearby.

In most European LARPs I’ve played there are a few non-player characters (NPCs) mixed in with the players to provide advice, guidance, and emotional support and keep the game from going off the rails. In this case, given the small cast of 35 players and confined play space, we had just one NPC, the Chief Engineer. But the organizers also did have cameras throughout the sub and were listening in on all phone conversations. This meant that sometimes we had to do things such as, for example, calling the bridge from the engine room to report that the speedometer was showing zero when the engines were running all ahead full, after which the speedometer would quickly correct itself. There was also a “red phone” (actually black) which we could use to contact the organizers directly. The organizers, in turn, could communicate to us in the form of radio transmissions from HQ, at least when we were surfaced.

Our characters were pre-written and assigned to us based on a fairly brief questionnaire about our preferences. The character descriptions were well-written and quite detailed, giving a full rundown of the character’s background, personality, motivations, and relationships with other characters. I played CPO Robert Johnson, the Chief of the engine room, a highly experienced and trustworthy engineer who was generally on good terms with everyone — though he could be stubborn and persnickety on technical matters. The one person on the boat he didn’t like was the Executive Officer, under whom Johnson had previously served on the submarine Seahorse. The Seahorse had sailed into a minefield in a storm, killing most of the crew, and Johnson blamed her captain (now U-505’s XO) for the disaster. However, other player characters who had also been there considered him a hero for saving anyone at all. Johnson also disliked the boat itself, as his father had been the engineer on a civilian ship that was torpedoed by a German U-boat early in the war, but saw it as his duty to keep this cold-blooded German war machine running smoothly for the sake of the mission and the crew.

Creative costuming is a big part of many LARPs, but in this case we were all in uniform, so all we had to provide was dark pants, dark waterproof shoes, and whatever long undies we wanted. US Navy sailors were issued khaki shirts, cardigans of various colors, and white sailor caps; Royal Navy sailors got dark blue cardigans and hats with ribbons; and officers got pea coats and big fancy officer hats. (Amusingly, I was Royal Navy, the only non-American in my watch; my watch mates were all American, but all played by non-Americans.) We also got embroidered name tags and drinking cups with our character names on them. I was rather alarmed that my name tag was bloodstained, and I was informed that my character in the previous run had lost an arm!

Having been handed our characters and issued our orders by headquarters, everything else in the game was improvised. It was up to each player to decide what to do and say minute by minute, and we each reacted to developing situations and other characters’ actions according to our characters. But we were given some guidance to keep the game moving and fun: to choose drama and action over passivity and inaction, and to treat each other as experts in our fields and accept any improvised technobabble as gospel. Thus, if a player said that the frammistat needed to be reflanged, then by God that frammistat did need reflanging. This created a potential problem when I wanted to send a junior ensign on a wild goose chase: I had to make sure that the other members of the crew, most of whom did not have English as a first language, understood that a request for a “left-handed monkey wrench” or “sixty feet of waterline” was NOT to be treated as gospel but as a nonexistent item, a deliberate prank.

The first half-day of the game was spent in orientation and workshops, as is typical for European LARPs. We spent time in groups getting to know the other members of our duty station (bridge, engine room, or radio/torpedo room), our watch (we were divided into two watches), our navy (US or UK; there was some tension between the two), and in some cases sailors we’d served with previously on the Seahorse or other vessels. We then got a tour of the set and some instruction in “how to U-boat.” In the afternoon we got into costume and into character for a shakedown cruise near Bermuda (where the sub had been taken after being captured). We took the sub and crew through their paces and uncovered some issues, notably in communication. (Bridge: “Engine room, take her down to 15 meters.” Engine room: “Not our department, you’ve got the controls for the ballast tanks and dive planes right there. We make ship go fast and slow, you make ship go up and down.”)

My Engine Room crew’s jobs were to run the diesel and electric engines as commanded; use the rudder control wheel to direct the sub’s heading, again as commanded; keep all mechanical systems running smoothly; and fix anything that went wrong. Given that most of the controls on the sub were nonfunctional props, this involved a lot of “stare meaningfully at a gauge while tweaking a knob” and “pretend something broke and pretend to fix it.” As the game went on, though, there was less making-up of problems and more problems appearing from sources external to our team, which made for more satisfying play. And everything is more fun when you work with other people, so I made sure to send people out to fix things in pairs.

We really did start to work together as a team and I felt a great camaraderie with my people. One superstition we decided on as a team was that it was bad luck to point at anyone or anything with one finger — you should instead use two or more fingers, a thumb, or your whole hand. (This is, apparently, a real superstition in the Swedish Navy). If you violated this rule you had to knock three times on the overhead to regain your luck. Like saying “Macbeth” in a theatre, this was our superstition but anyone around us could get dinged for running afoul of it.

Then we skipped forward in time a few months for a scene set at a drunken party in a Scottish coastal town right before launch. But the party was interrupted by an air raid siren, and we all staggered out into the street heading for the nearest shelter… and then the bombs started falling, with real explosions and fire all around. It was a spectacular and dramatic opening to the game! Once we arrived at the bomb shelter we flashed back three days to a meeting with an Admiral in which we were all requested to write a letter to our next of kin, to be delivered in case we did not come back. On that sobering note the first day of play ended.

Before the second day of play began we were offered a chance to “calibrate” with other players about what we might want from them or offer to them. I said my character sheet indicated I was not bearing up well under the strain, and that I intended to have some kind of break late in day 2 or early in day 3, though I couldn’t say when or what kind of break it would be.

The second day of the game opened with us already out at sea, where we received our orders: join a German U-boat wolf pack and accompany them back to their base, where we would use our torpedoes to destroy an important fuel depot which was protected from aerial attack. To many of us this seemed like a likely suicide mission, and my pointed questions about how exactly we were going to get away from the exploding sub pen were waved off.

We successfully located the wolf pack and made contact with them using stolen German codes, but then the pack moved to attack a civilan convoy. After one of the German subs torpedoed an Allied ship, we fired a second torpedo into it to demonstrate our bona fides. This was, for many of us, a morally indefensible choice. The captain pointed out that the ship was already sinking when we torpedoed it, but others protested that we’d almost certainly killed people who might otherwise have made it to lifeboats. As we submerged and ran from the scene, I collapsed in tears, saying “I feel like I just killed my own father!” As my crew helped me move through the bridge to my bunk one of the bridge officers asked if I was okay. “I’m a fucking war criminal!” I replied. Eventually, with the help of my crewmates, I calmed myself down, but I wasn’t the only one who had severe qualms about our actions.

As we made our way through the minefield surrounding the base I was called to the bridge to offer my technical expertise on getting the sub out of the harbor after launching our torpedoes. With the help of my second in command, my best friend on the boat, I advised that we would need at least two sub lengths ahead of us, or one length behind us, clear of any obstacles in order to reverse course. I was ordered to work with the sonar operator to make that decision — as soon as the fuel depot blew he would send out a ping and I would have five seconds to choose a course for our escape based on what came back. The ping showed clear both fore and aft, so I recommended a forward path as the quicker of the two options. That got us out of the immediate vicinity, but as we were beginning to run away another sub fired a torpedo at us. Thinking quickly, the XO — the man I believed had killed the Seahorse — ordered us to fire one of our own torpedoes at it, with the fuse set to just five seconds. The two torpedoes detonated right in front of us, damaging our bow but allowing us to slip away in the chaos. Thinking us destroyed, the Germans did not pursue and we made it through the minefield and into the open ocean without further incident. Thus ended the second day.

Calibrating at the beginning of day 3 I said that I’d been happy to be the supportive officer, directing my crew and doing my best to make sure everyone got as much game play as they desired, but I would like to do more fixing of problems as an individual contributor. (Cue ominous foreshadowy music.)

The third day’s play opened with us steaming away from our successful raid on the fuel depot, when we were ordered to pick up a “high value target” off the coast of The Netherlands. On the way there we had a strange noise on the hydrophone which my second-in-command speculated might be something caught in our propellors. I suggested reversing the engines briefly to clear the possible problem, and damn if it didn’t work! Later on there was a distressing hiss coming from something on the bridge; I tracked it to an air leak and patched it with period-appropriate chewing gum.

Evading both German and British ships as we approached the German-occupied Netherlands, we rendezvoused with a German speedboat, which handed us a defecting German scientist who specialized in the behavior of gases under pressure. But as we headed back out to sea the speedboat was intercepted and sunk by a British destroyer. The destroyer then pursued us, pounding us with depth charges. (I don’t think there was ever an in-game reason given why we didn’t just surface and surrender.) We took heavy damage and began to sink uncontrollably. Water shot from the walls (thankfully it was warm water) and I and the other engineers worked feverishly to patch the leaks. Once we got that problem solved the air compressor, which was needed to start the engine as well as to blow the ballast tanks, began to hiss and spew high-pressure air and we had to fix that. But though we stopped the air leak, the compressor itself was shot. Eventually we settled on the bottom, well below our maximum rated depth, with the hull creaking alarmingly and batteries and air running out fast.

With no air compressor to blow the ballast tanks or start the engines, and no forward motion to make use of the dive planes, we were well and truly stuck on the bottom. I had the idea of attempting to start the diesel engines (usually a Very Bad Idea while submerged) in hopes of pushing compressed air from the engine to the ballast tanks, but that didn’t work. I tried asking the German scientist who specialized in pressurized gases, but she didn’t have any ideas we hadn’t already tried. We did have hand bilge pumps but pumping them with all our might didn’t help. Finally the NPC Chief Engineer presented an unexpected solution involving sending volunteers diving into the pitch-black bilge (actually they went outside the sub, with hats pulled down over their eyes, and could only work as long as they could hold their breath) to find some strangely-shaped knobs, fit them to the corresponding attachments, and thus open the necessary valves to permit the bilge pumps to pump water out of the ballast tanks. This felt to me like an arbitrary escape-room-ish puzzle, and it left most of the players just shivering in the dark with nothing to do but hope it would work, but we did manage to find all the necessary valves before running out of volunteers and it did indeed work, allowing us to pull ourselves off the bottom and limp to the surface.

So we cheated death… barely. But as we were triumphantly steaming home we received a third assignment: to torpedo a ship carrying a German super-weapon. Upon receiving this order I lost my temper and repeatedly insisted that the sub was too badly damaged to survive anything resembling combat. This turned into a heated exchange with the Chief Engineer. He and I stood practically nose-to-nose, me with my arms crossed on my chest, saying with cold fury “In my professional opinion, SIR, any attempt to engage the enemy will inevitably result in the loss of this vessel and all hands, SIR.” He ordered me to conduct a full inspection and repair all problems found. “I can tell you without doing an inspection that this vessel is beyond our capabilities to repair, SIR. We need to return to port and careen her, SIR.” He repeated that this was an order. “Then I am insubordinate, SIR.”

He relieved me of command and had me hauled to the brig. But we didn’t have a brig, so he said to put me in the head. But there was only one head and we couldn’t afford to be without it. Another officer, more sympathetic to me, offered to take me off my superior’s hands, and he was happy to be rid of me. By this point I realized that my choices had been reduced to: die handcuffed to my bunk, or do what I could to save my crewmates (and most likely die trying). I chose option 2. I told my new commanding officer that I’d do what I could, but it would take as long as it took and I would be honest in my assessment of the situation. He set me to work beginning with the forward torpedo tubes, which had been damaged by our own torpedo as we escaped from the fuel depot the previous day.

We broke for dinner at that point, and several players inquired anxiously as to whether I was okay. “My blood is fizzing,” I said, “but I’m having a blast.” In the LARP community we call this “type 2 fun,” meaning that “my character is miserable but I’m enjoying myself.”

After dinner I kept trying to fix what I could in the time remaining, but I was really pessimistic. Basically, as I’d thought, the ship was absolutely beat to shit. “If we fire even one torpedo,” I said, “I estimate the chance of it getting stuck in the tube and detonating right there is over 25%. And I don’t recommend taking the boat below 50 meters.” The XO gave a big angry speech about how our duty was to the Navy and to Britain, that we were to follow orders, that this was not a democracy, but that we would do as we were told, without question, in order to save democracy from the fascist threat. But I realized that my loyalty was, and always had been, not to the Navy or to Britain but to my fellow crew members, and that saving their lives was more important to me than duty or honor. I had sacrificed my reputation, my position, and finally my career in attempt to save them, and spending all those chips hadn’t worked. But I had one chip left — I could work as an individual to try to fix the ship — and so I resolved to spend that one as best I could.

I was continuing to try to fix the spavined engine when we intercepted the target and, somewhat to my surprise, did manage to successfully fire a torpedo and sink it. But the target vessel was not alone — the area was swarming with German destroyers — and in fairly short order they began depth-charging the hell out of us. Explosions pounded our ears, I flung myself around the engine room like a member of the Star Trek bridge crew, the depth gauge fell and fell, and the lights went out. Then we heard the music indicating the end of play. Game over, man.

We all silently filed out of the sub and walked back to the air raid shelter, where we saw the same Admiral we’d seen before instructing a lieutenant to send the usual condolences to the families of those lost on the Allied ship we’d helped to sink, and also those lost on the U-505. Then we heard a voice reading a letter. It was, I soon realized, one of the letters we’d written to our next of kin in that same room at the beginning of the game. More and more voices joined in then, all the letters overlapping in a Greek chorus of farewell. I certainly recognized my own words in there, and I imagine most everyone else did as well. And then the game was over. Roll credits.

There was an afterparty, but between jet lag and emotional exhaustion I faded out after less than an hour. As I walked past the sub on my way back to my hotel, I noticed that the sound system had not been turned off and there were still gurgling noises coming from the tent. Bubbles coming up from the bottom, I guess.

That ending felt so right and seemed so inevitable that I figured it had been on rails, but afterwards we learned that runs 1 and 2 of the game (we were run 4) had made it home alive, so our fate really was open, at least to some extent. I can’t point to any specific decision that sealed our doom or could have saved us, but I think that out-of-game timing was a big part of it. We succeeded in our first two missions quite quickly so there wound up being time for a third at the end, which is the one that killed us. If we had finished our second mission closer to the end of the day Saturday, the game might have ended there with us still afloat or even home safe.

The pivotal moment of the game for me was when my character stood up on his hind legs and defied authority, even though it didn’t change the outcome (or perhaps made it worse, as he might have succeeded in repairing the ship if he hadn’t wasted time in rebellion — though I strongly doubt it). It reminds me of my favorite scene in the Westworld game, where I resigned from my job and threw in my lot with the robots — though in that case I did manage to save some lives, including my own. Perhaps I’m just a rebel at heart? But I can tell you that, unlike my breakdown on the previous day or my Westworld resignation, I did not plan that scene, or even anticipate that it would happen. It just emerged naturally from my character in the moment, especially from his experiences on the Seahorse (it said in my character sheet “He has sworn never to blindly trust an officer again when it comes to life and death”).

I don’t regret my actions, and indeed my conscience is at peace knowing that I did everything I could to save my crewmates. But in retrospect I’ve come to the conclusion that my character was actually in the wrong. In the end we achieved our goal — we achieved a major strategic victory — albeit at the cost of our lives and the ship, which is most likely the outcome the Admiralty expected when they gave the order. My attempt to disobey orders salved my conscience in the moment but in the larger context of the war was counterproductive and morally wrong.

On the other hand, if you take a bigger step backwards, was the war itself morally justified? But better people than I have been arguing this point for centuries, so I know I’m not going to be able to answer it. But considering these questions from the perspective of a realistic, immersive experience is, I think, the main point of this LARP.

Feindfahrt cost me a lot more than $6.98 plus 75¢ for shipping and handling. But in the end, the fun you make yourself is always the best.

I recently returned from Tunisia, where I played in the Sahara Expedition LARP organized by Chaos League. This was a Live Action Role Play game loosely based on the stories of H.P. Lovecraft, in which we were seeking the (fictional) lost city of Zerzura in the (actual) Sahara Desert. It was one of the most intense LARPs I’ve ever played.

This report contains SPOILERS.

LARP is a big tent, incorporating many types of game, and Sahara Expedition was of the species “International Blockbuster LARP,” which means that it had a large cast (about 80 players) drawn from all over Europe and the USA, a realistic setting (a hotel and two campsites in the Sahara Desert), 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 about twelve single-spaced pages — and we were expected to arrive with appropriate costumes and equipment for the 1934 setting. In addition, many period-appropriate props and set pieces were provided by the organizers, along with tents, mattresses, and three delicious meals each day (I was extremely impressed by the food, especially given that it was being prepared from scratch by a small crew in the middle of the desert).

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 and we were free to play our character as any gender we chose. Most of the players were white — I believe there were two people of color and one Asian — but where tensions existed between the European player characters and the local people they took place mostly offstage and were based on differing priorities rather than any sense of superiority or inferiority. What the game did draw from Lovecraft was a sense of “cosmic horror” in which we were forced to confront situations and phenomena far beyond mortal ken and face vastnesses of space, time, and power which strained the human mind even to contemplate. This was not the kind of horror LARP in which costumed NPCs jumped out from behind dunes to frighten the players — the horror was instead existential and subtle. But, as we were warned at the beginning, it wouldn’t end well for any of us.

The expedition was a joint venture of four institutions: the Royal Geographic Society handled cartography, documentation, and logistics; Miskatonic University handled archaeology, art history, and linguistics; the W. Isynwill Foundation handled clairvoyance and spiritism; and the Legion handled security and medicine. Each player was associated with one of the institutions, and the first letter of our character names and a specific color of scarf or clothing made it immediately obvious which institution a character belonged to. (Having every member of the Royal Society’s name begin with R was simultaneously very helpful and extremely confusing, because it could be difficult to keep over twenty R-names straight.) In general the relationships between the groups were cordial and cooperative, as we all worked together to solve the many mysteries and obstacles the expedition encountered in the desert. Most of the conflict in the game was interpersonal or with the inimical desert and cosmic forces.

Each of us had a specific job to do. I was part of the Royal Geographic Society’s Documentation Department, tasked with recording the expedition’s discoveries and producing a documentary film of the expedition. I myself was the scriptwriter (typecast much?) and I worked with the director, assistant director, cinematographer, still photographer, and actor. (Yes, just one actor. He was very good.) My partner Amy, diving into the deep end on her first LARP, was the still photographer. The Documentation department didn’t have any specific responsibilities regarding digging up artifacts in the desert, decoding ancient tablets, mapping routes, or conducting seances with the spirits of long-dead pharaohs, but we did get to be present for all of those. As with the Documentation departments in which I’ve worked in tech, we had a top-down overview of the whole project rather than being siloed into just one specialty, and that was pretty cool.

On the first day of the game we awoke in a four-star hotel on the edge of the desert, where we had a full day of out-of-character workshops to acquaint us with the other members of our institution and department, the equipment and responsibilities of our individual jobs, and the various techniques and metatechniques that would keep the players physically and psychologically safe in the game (including safewords and techniques to escalate or de-escalate inter-character conflict). Then after dinner, we put on our costumes for an in-character gala to celebrate the beginning of the expedition. This was, for many of us, the first time our characters were meeting each other before setting off for the desert, and given that we would be working closely together and many of us had previous relationships with other characters it was a bit of a scrum, with everyone trying to make contact with all their work and social relations at once.

Those previous relationships were an extremely important part of the game. It was a bit like Lost, in that the number of people who had extremely significant backstory with other characters — many of whom had not seen each other for years or decades until happening to find each other on the same expedition — was far beyond what chance alone could explain. As players we knew that this was to create drama, but as characters we suspected that there were dark and mysterious forces at play. “The veil is thin here,” we frequently told each other. So between reconnecting with long-lost loves or enemies, doing our jobs, and trying to find the clues and unravel the mysteries to make our way to the lost city of Zerzura, we did not lack for things to do each day.

On the morning of the second day we checked out of the hotel (leaving behind all inessential baggage to be picked up after the game) and piled into a caravan of 4×4 vehicles, driven by professionals, which took us across the trackless desert to our campsite. “Bouncing across the Sahara Desert in a 4×4 had not been on my bucket list,” I said as we powered up one side of a dune and slid down the other, “but now I’m adding it so I can cross it off.” The campsite itself consisted of one large tent for meals and group gatherings, just big enough for the 80 of us; several medium-sized tents for headquarters, cooking, and medical (one for in-character medical and another with real doctors); and about 14 traditional Berber tents with six mattresses each for sleeping. These were open on one side and were held up with unfinished sticks, but were quite sturdy and perfectly adequate for the conditions. (It was in the 70s-80s F during the day and 50s-60s at night.) We divided ourselves up among the tents by institution and, where feasible, by department.

We really were deep in the Sahara Desert — an hour’s drive from the nearest town, surrounded by miles and miles of nothing but sand and the very occasional bush. We were sufficiently equipped with food and drinking water, but there were no showers, no sinks, and for toilet facilities we had “the world’s largest litterbox.” (We were instructed to bury our waste, including toilet paper, but to pack out any wipes or other trash.) The term “taking a dune” quickly took over from “going to the bathroom.” And it was sometimes a bit of a challenge to walk far enough from camp for a bit of privacy without either getting lost (especially at night) or running into someone else on a similar errand.

Each day we had a schedule of meals, morning and afternoon work sessions, and meetings with our departments. It was kind of a workplace LARP, and in addition to doing our jobs we also had to file reports with our superiors (and they with theirs) and coordinate with other departments. The archaeology and art history departments, coordinating with cartography, went off into the desert on “sub-expeditions” to dig up new sites whose locations had been determined by examination of cuneiform tablets, decorated vases, and notes from the previous, lost, expedition, and the Documentation team tagged along to record the excavation. Each sub-expedition unearthed new artifacts and information, which when examined and decoded led to additional new sites and new insights into previously unearthed artifacts. Occasionally photographs would come back from the lab showing people and markings that hadn’t been visible when the photo was taken. The spiritualists and astral travelers of the Isynwill Foundation performed seances and rituals on the artifacts as well, which revealed more clues. (In-game we were expected to take the insights of the spiritualists as seriously as those of the archaeologists and linguists.) Each new clue led us closer to the lost city of Zerzura.

But there were also forces trying to stop us from reaching our destination. We found evidence of recent rituals in the desert, with protective amulets and messages of warning, indicating that the local people were opposed to our mission. Our supply caravan vanished, leaving only a skeleton gnawed clean by beetles and a letter demanding that we turn back. Ancient documents, when translated, warned of a nameless evil that should not be disturbed. The spirit of the great pharaoh also warned us not to open the gate. But did we listen? Heck no! Every warning made us still more determined to overcome all obstacles and achieve our goal. “To Zerzura!” was our toast and our watchword.

Each of us was provided with a diary in which to record our progress, but we were instructed not to turn each page before it was time, because the diary also included pre-written entries that told us how to behave as we drew closer and closer to our goal… and descended into madness. We knew from the beginning that we would all go mad, but each of us had our own path and our own timeline. My own madness took the form of the increasingly insistent voice of my dead college girlfriend — a woman with whom I and one of the other characters had both been in love back then — calling me a coward for having abandoned her and demanding that I apologize. So I repeatedly dropped to my knees in the sand and apologized tearfully to someone who wasn’t there.

Late in the first day in the desert we received a packet of letters and newspapers from home, which of course had significant news for just about everyone. In my case it was a news article indicating that the parents of my dead girlfriend, acting on new information, had exhumed her body and discovered that she had not died of a fever but of poison! I sought out the other character who had known her back then to deliver the news, which led to an extremely fraught and accusatory conversation in which many old wounds were reopened… and then suddenly her demeanor changed, and I realized I was talking not to my colleague but to our departed lover, who was speaking from Beyond through my colleague’s mouth. (My colleague was from the Isynwill Foundation and for her to be taken over by a spirit was not entirely unexpected.) She repeated her accusations of my cowardice and betrayal; tearfully I insisted that I had loved her and would do anything to make up for the harm I had done. “Avenge me!” she said. “How? When?” “When it is time, you will know.” Then she went calm and said “It has been so long since I have had a body,” then reached out and touched my cheek. “I recognize that touch,” I said, and collapsed in a flood of real tears. The scene — entirely improvised by both of us — had played out with such reality and intensity that I was completely overcome.

When I recovered myself I discovered that my colleague had passed out and now lay completely insensate on the sand. Others came by, attracted by the noise we’d made, and attempted to revive her, to no avail. Eventually members of the Legion physically carried her to the medical tent, where she was attended by both Legion doctors and Isynwill psychics. “How long was she under the spirit’s control?” I was asked. “It felt like 20-30 minutes.” “What? Ten minutes is the limit! She could die! What were you doing, running a seance without support!” “It wasn’t supposed to be a seance! I had no idea this would happen!” Eventually they told me to go to the mess tent and get something to eat while they continued to tend to my colleague. Half an hour later she showed up at the mess tent, demanding to know what had happened. She remembered none of it.

After my head had cleared I considered what I’d learned, using both in-game and out-of-game information. If I were to avenge her during the game, that implied that the murderer was someone who was present in the Sahara… and my colleague and I were the only characters who shared that bit of backstory. So, I concluded, it must have been my colleague who had poisoned our mutual girlfriend, jealous that she had loved me more than her, and “when it was time” she would, I guessed, confess the act and I would be called upon to avenge her. But could I really take a living person’s life on the say-so of a ghost? I met with my colleague’s player out-of-character and discussed the mechanics of a choking scenario. (There are stage combat techniques to create an impressive choke without risk of harm to anyone.) We were both familiar with these techniques and discussed time, place, and boundaries. And then I asked “So… did you kill her?” “What?” she replied, completely blindsided.

It turned out that the whole “avenge me” thing had been something the other player had improvised, not something from her diary or character sheet! So I reconfigured our confrontation, instead simply meeting her in-character to tearfully discuss our mutual lost love and discuss the fact that sometimes “vengeful spirits” were not actually who they claimed to be. We had a very sweet reconciliation on a dune and stared off into the sunset side by side.

Meanwhile, we drew ever closer to Zerzura. On the second day in the desert we set off across the dunes, a two-hour walk standing in for a fourteen-day trek, following clues found in a newly discovered diary from the previous, lost expedition. Our baggage followed, on a caravan of actual camels. And then we arrived at the previous expedition’s camp, which stood empty and untouched. There we found additional documents revealing the previous expedition’s fate and outlining the final rituals to open the gate to Zerzura! All we had to do was wait for the stars to align.

By this point I, both in-character and out, had what I’d describe as “senioritis,” which is to say that I was no longer paying a lot of attention to my job or interpersonal relationships but was prepared to see out whatever came next. We’d come this far, and turning back was not really an option. My partner and fellow player Amy mused out-of-character that we might possibly be in an actual cult, and at that point I couldn’t say for sure that wasn’t the case.

The sun went down and the stars came out, a vast and spectacular desert sky including the Milky Way and numerous shooting stars. We gathered in a circle and began chanting words in a long-dead language. And then…

Okay, I did say at the top of this report that there would be spoilers. I even wrote up a description of the finale. But I feel that, out of respect to the organizers, I should keep that information to myself. If you really need to know what happened, send me a private message or email. Suffice it to say that it was spectacular and a quite satisfactory ending to an amazing LARP.

And no one lived happily ever after.

I’ve just returned from Spain, where I participated in a Live Action Role Play event called “The Continental,” a game of international super-assassins set in the universe of the John Wick movies. This was the first international (English-language) run of the game, which has been run several times previously in Spanish. This report contains MAJOR SPOILERS for The Continental.

If you’re American, when you hear “LARP” you probably think of a live-action D&D game, in which friends go to a park for an afternoon, hit each other with boffers, and fling tennis balls at each other while shouting “Fireball!” But in Europe there is a whole different LARP culture. European “Nordic-style” LARPS (there are also other names, indicating subtle differences in play style) focus on improv role play, deep immersion, and character development with the intention of creating a rich emotional experience — I often use the phrase “real emotions in fake situations.” My personal favorite style of LARP is often referred to as “Blockbuster” LARPS — these have an international player base, typically cost hundreds of dollars for a ticket, and involve anything from 50 to 200 players, all in costume, in a realistic setting, improvising a grand immersive theatrical experience together over the course of three or four days.

This style of LARP depends on the players being intimately familiar with their characters — their background, goals, priorities, and personality — so that they can improvise interactions with other players in real-time. Typically players receive detailed character sheets weeks or months in advance, and also have the opportunity to communicate with the organizers and other players over Discord or some other messaging platform to answer questions and work out details of the characters’ relationships before the game begins. In the case of The Continental, this “co-creation” process was raised to a higher degree than any other game I’ve yet played.

After our initial roles were assigned, which gave us our primary backstory, goals, motivations, and skills, over the course of several weeks we were invited to select four “secondary jobs” or subplots. In each round of secondary job selection we were presented with a broad set of scenarios, each with two or more “traits” (characters within the scenario), and asked to indicate which five traits we were most interested in adding to our characters. Many of these scenarios were based on pop culture; for example, a scenario called “You’ve Got A Friend In Me” involved two traits called Buzz and Woody, with the Buzz character being an overconfident newbie in a situation in which the Woody character was an old hand.

After we submitted our preferences the organizers distributed the traits among the players in a way intended to give people what they wanted, balance play, and provide an interesting experience for everyone. After four rounds of this we each wound up with four subplots; we were informed which players had been assigned the other traits in our selected subplots and given a set of questions to answer with them. For example, I wound up as Buzz in “You’ve Got A Friend In Me” and I had to work with the character who’d been assigned the Woody trait to determine what situation we both found ourselves in and how much we knew about each other’s issues. We had to submit our answers to the organizers before the game so that they could be aware of all the subplots and help make the whole thing work; occasionally they would provide feedback such as “this subplot impinges on another one, would you mind making a few changes?”

The co-creation process was intended to assure that everyone had a rich set of relationships with the other characters so that there were a lot of opportunities for game play when we all arrived in Spain. In a few cases I even wound up in multiple subplots with the same person, which is actually pretty realistic for a close-knit international criminal community. On the whole, I thought it was successful, but I have to say that it was a lot of homework to do for a LARP and, when push came to shove, some of my secondary jobs didn’t get a lot of my attention during the game because I was too busy with other things. I also found that I was involved in two additional subplots because they intersected my main plot, which increased the complexity still further. My suggestion to the organizers would be to reduce the number of secondary jobs from four to two.

This game also had a lot more in the way of “mechanics,” or defined mechanisms for game play, than other LARPs I’ve played. Many LARPs divide the players into “factions,” which are groups of characters having ally and/or enemy relationships with other factions as well as having interpersonal relationships within the faction. In The Continental, the factions were eight criminal families — mine was The Red Circle, an Eastern European / Russian gang specializing in human trafficking — plus the Administration of the High Table, the staff of The Continental, and a fairly large number of independent operators. In addition, family members and independents had specific roles within their group: The Boss, The Slayer (specializing in combat), The Aid (specializing in healing and drugs), The Fisher (specializing in hacking and communications), and The Supplier (specializing in logistics). Each of these roles came with particular abilities and responsibilities within the game.

Slayers were assumed to be wearing Kevlar at all times and to have a higher chance of success on a physical attack against a non-Slayer player. Aids could create “drugs” in-game by combining certain defined substances. For example, anything red and sweet had a calming effect, while bitter brown substances were stimulating. By combining these substances in different proportions we could create truth serums, poisons, stimulants, and knockout drops as needed. To fulfill my role as Aid I brought a selection of flavor extracts and food colors from the grocery store. Players were never required to actually consume the substances, but the colors and flavors were intended to allow other Aid players to guess as to the composition and effect of a “drug” if they encountered it in-game.

The game had a custom app (which was Android-only, requiring a few of us iPhone bigots to rent Android phones for the weekend) which was used for in-character messaging, financial transactions, and resource management, and the app was particularly important to the Fisher role. Fishers had the ability to attempt to hack another player twice a day. The hack attempt involved guessing the answer to the character’s security question, which in some cases could be determined by a web search on the character’s code name (each of us was named after a mythological figure, such as John Wick’s code name of Baba Yaga) and in others could only be determined by social engineering on the player. A successful hack would allow the hacker to view the victim’s messages and transfer money and resources out of the victim’s account. Bosses and Suppliers also had special capabilities within the app, used for inter-family warfare.

I will admit that this all sounds really complicated, but in my opinion it worked well, and most of the time we were just improvising our interactions with each other as in any other LARP. To me, the mechanics added a dimension of realism and interest to what was already a very engaging and interesting game.

My character, codenamed Khors, was The Aid of The Red Circle, but shortly before the game I was given the option to also add the role of The Fisher because they needed more Fishers. I made good use of both roles and really enjoyed the game play opportunities they offered. My character also had a peculiar quirk of doing people favors and demanding repayment in minutes of the person’s time. These minutes could be demanded at any time and place of Khors’s choosing, and reneging on the deal would risk sanction from The High Table. Khors sat at the right hand of The Boss of The Red Circle — played by my real-life partner Alisa Wood-Walters — and was extremely traditionalist and family-focused.

My character’s main backstory point was that, six months earlier, a promising young Slayer named Poludnitsa had decided to leave the life of crime completely, marry her sweetheart, and live happily as a civilian. Poludnitsa had been the beloved protegee of The Boss, and Khors had also been a mentor to her; we were both disappointed with her decision but she went ahead and did it anyway. And then, at the wedding, gunmen had burst in and slaughtered Poludnitsa, her fiancé, their daughter, and several members of the wedding party — including, interestingly enough, some Red Circle members whose untimely death allowed the current Supplier to assume his position. Strangely, no other members of the family had been present at the wedding.

Unbeknownst to anyone but myself and one other player, Khors was the one who had called in the hit.

When I read this in my character sheet I immediately knew that keeping this secret, especially from my Boss, would be vitally important to my survival. But the situation was even worse than I thought, because a couple of weeks before the game I noticed on Discord that Poludnitsa was a player character! I messaged the player and she confirmed that she was indeed that Poludnitsa, and that she would be out for revenge on whoever had done this to her. After quietly panicking, I decided that my best strategy would be to get out in front of the situation by declaring “Poludnitsa! I’m so glad you aren’t really dead! Let us work together to find the guilty party!” and then use all my resources to pin the crime on some scapegoat.

Did I mention that none of us at The Continental were nice people? To quote from the Player’s Handbook: “This is a story about villains meeting in a hotel to be even more villainous. It’s a story about hierarchy, violence and fear. A story about people who believe themselves beyond good and evil, doing terrible things to stay where they are. They’re also people with conflicts, relationships, and emotions, but most of all, they are assassins.” So I grinned, rubbed my hands, and prepared to Be Evil.

You may recall that in my write-up of the Fairweather Manor LARP I mused on the question of what makes the difference between a good and an evil character and reflected that I could have played my character there as more evil than I did. This was my chance to try evil up to the hilt, and I feel that I did a good job; Khors was cold and calculating and self-centered, willing to lie and cheat and smile at his friends even as he plotted their demise. But, interestingly enough, I also managed to be friendly and engaging and funny while I was doing it. I think that’s just how I am, and I’ll try to keep that in mind as I write villains going forward.

After a few days in Barcelona recovering from jet lag and enjoying the city, the cuisine, and the Gaudi architecture, Alisa and I caught the LARP bus to the 15th-century Castle of Sant Mori which would be portraying The Continental of Girona. It was a beautiful, character-filled, and luxurious locale and the beds, bathrooms, and food were all first-rate. As is fairly typical for European LARPS, Thursday afternoon was spent in workshops: orientation to the space, consent and negotiation, how to simulate violence and sex, and the use of some objects specific to this LARP such as “drugs” and weapons. Then we got into our costumes (and we were a very sophisticated-looking bunch indeed) and were mostly in-game for the rest of the weekend.

Of course the first order of business for me was noticing that, to everyone’s surprise, Poludnitsa was back from the dead. Not unreasonably, she was suspicious when everyone in the family greeted her return with happiness — we all knew that we hadn’t wanted her to leave the family — but everyone else was sincere (to the best of my knowledge) and, for myself, I genuinely liked the player, which made it easier for me to smile and lie convincingly to her face.

I’m usually a terrible liar. I wear my heart on my sleeve; indeed, often other people can tell my feelings better than I can myself. For this reason I’m always one of the first people killed when I play Mafia or Werewolf. Or perhaps I just have a suspicious face. But in this game I was able to maintain the deception completely. Perhaps it’s because player-me really liked player-her so it was easy for me to be generous and kind to her even though character-me had tried to have character-her killed. Or perhaps it was because the whole situation was fictional — everything we did and said was a lie, so the lies-within-lies were emotionally the same as the surface-lies. But for whatever reason, I was able to carry off the lie and was not found out by Poludnitsa or the Boss until I got sold out later in the game.

Dealing with Finding The Real Killer was only part of my agenda for the game. For one thing, the Adjudicator had just shown up, with her Four Horsemen, saying that the Girona Continental was rife with “rats” loyal to the Bowery King, and determined to ferret them out. Also, John Wick was out there somewhere and kept leaving taunting messages. (The game took place between John Wick 3 and John Wick 4; Wick was known to have fallen from the roof of the New York Continental, but his body was never found and he was widely believed to have survived.)

In addition to all of our personal plots and subplots, there was the business of inter-family warfare and attempted territory grabs. When we had a family meeting to discuss how we would defend our territory, our Supplier proposed a genius idea based on the strategy of John D. Rockefeller: use the Red Circle’s existing transportation networks (given that the family’s main business was human trafficking, we had extensive and highly secure routes all across Asia and Europe) to negotiate mutually beneficial deals with the other families in which we would transport and protect their cargo in exchange for a share of the profits. His negotiations with the other families were extremely successful and we were never involved in any attacks. What he did not tell them was that Rockefeller’s strategy had eventually left him in control of a railroad stranglehold that let him milk every other company in the country for everything they were worth. Brilliant!

I met with the character Tsukimi, who was the one who had actually done the hit on Poludnitsa and was the only other person in the game who knew I was responsible (he had hired the other gunmen, but they didn’t know who I was and I didn’t know who they were). But, given that we knew that if either of us sold out the other we would both die, I felt I could trust him to keep our secret. We discussed who best to scapegoat for the crime and settled on Ares, an NPC (non-player character) who was the Continental’s bouncer — a frightening psychopath whom my character also had other reasons to want to get rid of. Also, he had facial scars, which was the one thing Poludnitsa remembered about the gunman who had (nearly) killed her. We both started spreading rumors about his involvement, and I worked with other close allies to tighten the net.

On Friday, the first full day of the game, I came up with a truly evil plan of which I am inordinately proud. As Fisher I had already hacked a few people, a fun little mini-game in the Continental app, and so knew that being able to see and screenshot another person’s private messages was a thing. So I took some screenshots, downloaded the official Android font, and photoshopped up a message from Ares to a person unknown (the recipient of a message was not visible in the screenshot, which was perfect for my purposes) saying “The wedding job is ON. Leave no survivors.” And then — and this is the piece de resistance and something that only my character could have done — I called in one of the favors Khors was owed to launder the evidence.

Before the game I had negotiated with a few other players to go into the game owing Khors minutes, and one in particular was the Boss of a completely unrelated gang for whom I had quietly treated an embarrassing sexually-transmitted infection in exchange for five minutes of his time. So I took the screen shot I had just forged to him and said “show this to me and the other members of the Red Circle, and tell everyone you received it as an anonymous txt and have no idea of its source or authenticity. Do this and your debt to me will be discharged.” It worked beautifully; the messenger was completely neutral (indeed, clueless about the whole situation) and there was absolutely no reason for anyone to suspect that I was the source.

Using the forged message as evidence, we got authorization from the manager of the Continental to bring Ares in for interrogation. We gathered in a small upstairs room well equipped with LARP weapons, sat him in a chair, and pounded him with questions. “Who did you send this to?” I demanded, showing him the forged message. “Who put you up to it?” Of course he denied all knowledge. The Boss told me to give him a truth serum, which I did, but I explained that there’s no such thing as a true truth serum and a sufficiently dedicated psychopath will continue lying as long as they believe their own lies. And Poludnitsa did a fabulous job threatening and eventually torturing him. She got right up in his face with a full load of vitriol; she punched him in the face, dislodging a tooth (it rattled on the floor, a great moment; I have no idea how long the player had been holding it in his mouth); and she broke his kneecaps and shoulder with a (foam rubber) hammer and crowbar. Throughout this the Ares player stayed perfectly in character, laughing and saying that he couldn’t have done it, because if he had been the one pulling the trigger she’d be dead. It was a magnificent scene.

But eventually the whole thing kind of petered out. It was clear that neither drugs nor torture would get him to confess, and furthermore it seemed that he had in fact not done it. So the Continental staff took him away and patched him up (he wore a sling for a while but we all kind of agreed to ignore the broken kneecaps) and we were back to square one in the Search For The Real Killer. I assured Poludnitsa that I would not rest until justice was done.

And then on Friday night: disaster. Both Alisa and I spent the whole night terribly sick, with horrible vomiting and diarrhea. I was certain it was food poisoning — the food had been absolutely delicious but there’s always the possibility that something sat out unrefrigerated too long — but in the morning the organizers assured us that we were the only ones who had gotten sick. Lots of people asked me if I’d drunk the tap water, which I had; I’d had no idea that it wasn’t safe. And though the water was potable, I guess that the bacteria in the well water in rural Spain was too unfamiliar for our American stomachs. The organizers and other players were sympathetic and helpful, bringing toast and Gatorade, and we both slept most of Saturday. Indeed, Alisa, who had had it much worse than me, missed the entire last day of the game, but I managed to haul myself out of bed on Saturday afternoon. I felt I owed Poludnitsa some closure.

By the time I found her and caught up with what I’d missed while I was sick (and boy howdy had it been a lot) the jig was completely up for me. She had managed to follow the trail to Tsukimi, who had pulled a rabbit out of his hat: he had not, in fact, shot Poludnitsa’s daughter at the wedding, but had saved her, and she was alive and safe. He offered to return the daughter to Poludnitsa and tell her who had called in the hit, in exchange for safe conduct for himself and one of the other gunmen (the actual one with the scar). She took the deal and Tsukimi sold me out. Bastard. So Poludnitsa and I talked out-of-character (in the LARP world we call this “calibration”) about how our end game would play out, and then we did it.

Our final scene was absolutely beautiful. I had earlier given Poludnitsa a poison tablet and the corresponding antidote, for her to use in extracting information from someone. (I had not realized at the time I’d given it to her that the “someone” was Tsukimi. Oops.) However, she had not wound up using it, and still had it in her pocket. So she took me aside for a drink, told me that she knew I was the one who had been responsible for slaughtering her family, and then looked me in the eye as she dropped the poison pill I had given her in the drink and handed it to me.

I drank it down without hesitation.

The poison took about half an hour to work. We stood chatting for a while until I started to get shaky and — for real — my Apple Watch warned me that my heart rate was elevated. (Remember what I said earlier about “real emotions in fake situations?”) Did I want to sit down? Yes I did. She led me to a chaise longue by the pool and lay me gently down in the sun. I was starting to get a little incoherent, and honestly I don’t remember everything I said — I remember I said “murder is a young man’s game” and “I only did it because family is more important than anything, even my own life” — but I was crying real tears. “Are you scared?” she asked me. Yes, yes I was. I was shaking and crying and choking and she looked me right in the eye and said “I will burn The Red Circle to ash, I will destroy everything you have worked your whole to build, and you will know as you die that it was me who did it.” And I went “gkk” and died.

Being dead is boring. Eventually Continental staff showed up and took my body away — obviously a heart attack, so sad, but not a violation of the rule “no killing at The Continental” — and I was led backstage for the final phase of the game. We’d been told to bring an all-black outfit to wear in case we died before the end of the game, so I changed into it, and then I and about a dozen other early decedents were issued bulletproof vests, gas masks, and machine guns. We would now be anonymous minions, coming in at the end of the game with the Adjudicator to excommunicate this Continental for being an unredeemable nest of rats loyal to the Bowery King. Our instructions were to die quickly at first, but to keep coming back stronger and stronger until everyone was dead.

The final slaughter was magnificent. We fanned out through the castle and killed and killed and killed, and almost everyone got a nice dramatic death. One — the same Boss who had laundered the evidence for me — stood behind a door with a hammer and bopped each incoming minion on the head, over and over, until eventually he was overwhelmed. Bodies were piled everywhere. A few characters, including the Red Circle’s Supplier, had obtained safe-conduct tokens and survived, and a couple, including Poludnitsa, had joined the Administration during the game and were now on the minions’ side. (This was, in fact, the worst possible outcome for her character — instead of dying with the knowledge that her little girl was safe, she was now even more deeply embedded in the system she had tried so hard to escape.) And so the game ended.

After the thank-yous and the applause and the requests to please return all borrowed props and costumes over here, we stood for a group photo. Instead of “Cheese!” everyone said “Weak!” which baffled me until I realized that’s the Spanish pronunciation of John Wick’s last name. Later, on Discord, Poludnitsa’s player posted “Oh god I loved the wedding plot so much … and that Khors was the one ordering the wedding massacre .. my poor heart! Ha. I had an amazing game!” One of the organizers replied “Khors was very very smart in this run, he was able to make it very complicated for Poludnitsa. In other runs, everyone spills the beans too soon XD”

I was so happy. Still dead, of course, but happy.