Berlin to Copenhagen
Mar 20, 2023
Mieke Janssens
I’m currently on a bus to Copenhagen, thoroughly exhausted, after spending a week pretending to be a wizard in Poland. The trip to Copenhagen turns out to be a mistake; I have a friend arriving there shortly, which I thought meant Monday but actually meant Wednesday, so I’ll barely have time to see them in passing the morning I leave for The Smoke in London.1 The bus isn’t bad — there’s power sockets and the WiFi works pretty well — but I’d almost rather have taken a flight. The trip takes 8½ hours, so even with the pain of getting to the airport two hours early I’d have arrived in half the time, and the pain of being stuck a seat for one hour rather than a workday would have been worth the extra 20€ to me. But I’m mindful of the carbon emissions, and short-haul flights are particularly bad, so I’m trying to pick and choose.2
The saving grace is that this route takes you across a ferry. You go from Berlin to Rostock and then cross over to Denmark. There was a weird passport check by German authorities before we got on the ferry — they saw I had a US Passport and didn’t even bother opening it — and then we got to get off the bus for a couple hours while we crossed the Baltic Sea. The cafeteria was iffy and the buffet was overpriced,3 but it was at least two hours where you could walk around before getting stuffed back on the bus.
What I really wanted, in my heart of hearts, was a fast, cheap, efficient train ride. But most of the trains require at least three transfers and cost two to three times as much. And they aren’t even any faster. Maybe someday.
College of Wizardry was the first international larp I attended. I played in the second run, and had enough fun that I came back to Europe for a different larp and then Knutepunkt4 and then I left the United States so I could be closer to all of it. I would never started traveling the way I am now if I hadn’t attended that first event. That’s one reason I’ve never really returned to it; I’ve only played in one run in the seven years since.
In that time it managed to rack up 22 more runs and survive both the collapse of the management company and COVID. It’s a far better designed and organized game than it was back at the start. But that necessarily comes at a cost; the kind of wild, anything-could-happen feeling of the first few runs gets replaced with routine. In the early games, if you summoned a demon in the subbasement you had no idea what kind of trouble you were in for. Now you’ve got a pretty reasonable guess of the kind of narrative possibilities you’re opening yourself up to.
That’s ultimately why I decided to attend WereWar. WereWar takes a lot of the College of Wizardry expectations and breaks or subverts them. It’s set at a time when a war between witchards and werewolves has overtaken most5 of the world. Czocha is only one corner of the conflict, with the castle surrounded and the students at mortal risk. WereWar is plot-heavy, serialized,6 dark, and dangerous in ways that College of Wizardry isn’t.7 Your character can die without you getting a choice in the matter.
The game starts with Czocha under siege, with supplies dwindling and communication with the outside world all but cut off. One of the first things which happens is the arrival of “the Relief,” a motley assortment of witchards who have found a way to teleport to the castle through the stifling necrotic void which prevented travel. Official support isn’t coming — the war isn’t going well enough for Central Command to spare the resources — so Czocha is going to have to make do with those who volunteered.
I was playing Tribulation Swift, yet another member of the ever-expanding Swift family,8 a witchard serving in Central Command who specialized in asymmetric warfare.9 Tribulation was the sort of person you called in to find solutions for unsolvable problems, and got asked to join the Relief by some of the powers-that-be in Central Command who disagreed with the decision not to send help. The character was more-or-less designed to find plot and distribute it, and there was plenty of it. In retrospect maybe a bit too much; College of Wizardry relies on plot to backstop the emotional play, while WereWar relies on the emotional play to backstop the plot.10 So there was always something going on, some portal being opened to negotiate for crucial aid or some ritual being prepared to stave off immediate doom. I ran up and down a lot of stairs.
It was one of the best larp experiences I’ve had in the past year, even if it lacked for emotional moments. And I did have one great scene, one-on-one, with a werewolf who had been captured as a prisoner of war and thrown in the dungeon. I wanted to establish a trusted connection to the other side, some initial link that could be used behind the scenes to help bring the hostilities to a close. They were hurt and depressed, certain they were going to die, and wary of any overtures from the enemy. We reached a cautious détente, and I left promising to keep them safe. I couldn’t keep that promise; they were later tortured to death by some of the other players.11 That’s going to haunt my character forever.12
I had expected to return to Berlin for a few days and then travel a little around Northern Germany before heading to Copenhagen, but after the game I checked my schedule and realized all I had done by way of planning was buy a cheap bus ticket to Denmark. And a couple late NPC dropouts from the following week’s College of Wizardry run meant they were in need of replacements. I made an impromptu decision to stay and help crew the next run.
The following week was College of Wizardry 25: School’s Out, and if WereWar was an attempt to violently disrupt the conventions of College of Wizardry this was at most an attempt to gently shake them up a bit. It was set at the end of the school year, not the beginning, so the usual business of getting sorted into houses and embarking on new classes was replaced by presenting your senior thesis and choosing the next year’s prefects.
It was an exceedingly gentle game,13 with generally low stakes and relatively few consequences for failure.14 I mostly played Richard Fleischer, the harried CEO of Horizon Foods, a corporation recently sanctioned for violations of magical law without actually being informed of what laws they had broken.15 My job was to complain loudly and bitterly about the injustice while drinking in the tavern, so it was directly in my wheelhouse.
I generally don’t crew larps; I can afford to attend outright and figure the organizers would rather have another paid attendee.16 But it’s undeniably fun in a different way than playing them is. It’s true you rarely get a chance to freely decide how your character would act. Richard’s purpose was to kick off the mystery of why their company got sanctioned and to sit around waiting for the players to explain it, not to actually do anything about it.17 But in exchange you get to jump into a lot of other characters for a time. Over the course of the weekend, and in a game notable for having relatively few scene requests, I got to play a paladin, a founder of the school,18 a graverobber, and one of the fey. I ended with the most elaborate: the spirit of all the negative aspects of Faust, coalesced into dragon form. This involved seven latex horns glued to my face and an hour of sitting in the makeup chair, but the end result was undeniably stunning.
I’d do it again, gladly.19 But it’s a bittersweet feeling. I realized at the afterparty — and this was slightly true for the first run, as well — that I had spent my game trying to make sure other people had a great time. And playing the NPCs, it’s certainly what you signed up for. But with Tribulation, I really feel there’s a lot more to play on that we just never got to. And I find myself hoping I get a chance to.
Footnotes
1 It’s fine, because I’m going to have to leave The Smoke early to fly back to see them in Copenhagen during their PhD defense. Really, this whole thing could have been planned better.
2 I remain critical of the idea that individual rather than governmental action is going to do anything significant to prevent climate change, but that’s not an excuse to be oblivious.
3 You also couldn’t exactly tell the buffet was overpriced since you couldn’t see it from the entrance to the restaurant. I resolved to make it up on the free beer, only to discover I could get kind of drunk on Carlsberg if I tried hard enough.
4 Well, Solmukohta. It was the one on a boat.
5 All? The narrative team has been deliberately vague about the exact dimensions of the conflict, preferring to focus on events in and around the schools.
6 Each WereWar event forms a chapter in a larger story. The story’s not dictated to the players — the story team decides the storylines for the next event based on the decisions the players make in the previous ones — but the character will suffer the consequences of their choices from one run to the next.
7 You can certainly go very dark in a College of Wizardry game, but it’s something the players have to bring. It’s not going to get pushed on you by the story team.
8 Mainly known for their penchant for Puritan names.
9 In WereWar magic was slowly losing its efficacy, forcing most witchards to rely on rituals. Tribulation had lost their magic in a botched raid decades ago, and had long ago adapted to it.
I was nominally the councilor for the school. I expected it to be a bigger part of the game, but while plenty of characters were focused on restoring magic there didn’t seem to be many interested in playing the trauma of losing it in the first place. Which was not a big deal, since there was more than enough going on to keep everyone busy.
10 I wonder if having fewer plots but making the ones you have a little bigger and more complicated would give space for emotional scenes and cut down on the difficulty of keeping track of everything.
11 I spent most of my Saturday setting up and conducting the trial for the perpetrator.
12 I realize this probably sounds overwrought or melodramatic on the page, but it’s exactly the kind of thing that larp excels at; small scenes with intense emotional stakes. I really was for one small moment that intense, exhausted solider trying desperately and failing to keep the war from senselessly claiming yet another life.
13 The organizers admitted the cost of designing WereWar and CoW: School’s Out at the same time meant the darker plots naturally got put in the former and the sillier plots got put in the latter.
14 Not entirely unlike the college experience for most of those who can afford a pricey private education, come to think of it.
15 This was part of a plot where the guardians in the school, as part of their senior thesis, were asked to investigate and figure out what Horizon Foods was supposed to have done.
16 Both WereWar and CoW 25 were undersubscribed, which is a shame, because they were both polished, well-thought-out games that ran incredibly well. They could have handled bigger audiences.
17 There was a minor plot involving the sale of magical creatures as food that the players didn’t get far enough into before the end of the game to cause problems. There’s nothing for losing all sympathy from the players like having it revealed that you’ve been selling faun meat as a side hustle.
In Richard’s defense: it was totally legal, they weren’t in charge when the deal was made, and the letter revealing this information clearly said Horizon Foods had hit supply chain issues and couldn’t supply any faun meat. For the moment, anyway.
18 Durentius, with a lovely rooster-topped cane.
19 Although if I did another double run I’d probably wait for one which didn’t have the castle rented out between the two runs. It was a major pain having to break down the castle on Sunday and set it all back up on Thursday morning. And the fact that everyone was staying in hotels scattered around meant there really wasn’t as much hanging out together as I might have hoped.