I’ve been in the United Kingdom, yet again, for what seems like forever. I wanted to be elsewhere for most of it, but it didn’t work out that way. I have a friend trying to schedule a PhD defense in Europe that I was expecting to meet up with, but that got delayed. I was expecting to have my residency permit in Portugal at the beginning of February, but it’s still being processed.¹ So I flew in for a larp in the UK and just kind of stayed.

I also ended up staying far too long in London.² That was a weird and lucky confluence of events: I was invited to an event just outside of London, I found out a friend from NYC was visiting London with family, there were a number of people staying late after the run I played and even more coming in early for the following run. So I booked in for a few days and kept extending it for a few days in either direction until I had booked in for a whole week. I then ended up doing the same thing for Edinburgh.

I’ve been to both cities often enough that I really don’t have much left I feel compelled to do. I finally got to visit the London Mithraeum.³ And I crossed the Scotch Whisky Experience off my list, a touristy event best done with other tourists.⁴ But I was mostly in both places to spend time with friends, and when I wasn’t doing that I did nothing. I had a lot of nothing to catch up on: Quantumania,⁵ Poker Face, Disney’s Dreamlight Valley.⁶ I can’t complain.

The big larp — the whole reason I had come to the United Kingdom in the first place — was Giovanni: The Last Supper. It ran mid-February⁷ near Exmoor, at an astonishing venue/manor house which shall remain nameless.⁸ It was a Vampire: the Masquerade larp, which means it was ridiculously popular; the organizers quickly expanded to six runs to handle the demand. The larp was scheduled over five days. Everyone arrived on the Wednesday for workshops, then played over the following three nights. The game ran from 4pm to 3am,⁹ with more workshopping and calibration in the early afternoons.

The game was set in Italy in 1454. There’s a famous adventure for VtM called Giovanni Chronicles I: The Last Supper but as near I can tell this had nothing to do with it beyond the time period and the fact there was a big party with a lot of vampires.¹⁰ The plot was pretty straightforward: Claudius, one of the leaders of the Giovanni family, had obtained a set of humans with magical blood-borne talents and was holding an auction for vampire society. The attendees could bid and win them, claiming them for your own, presumably turning them into vampires for your own clan. The first night you got to meet the humans, the second night the auction was run, and the last night you got to claim them.¹¹

I was cast as Markus Musa Giovanni, one of the canon characters in VtM, a member of the Giovanni clan who was renowned as a diplomat, a traveler, and a scholar. Those more steeped in the lore than I am may recognize the character is dead by the 15^th century; the organizers took ample liberties with canon, adjusting the timeline, altering relationships, or even outright adding or rewriting large sections to make their mix of characters work. That isn’t necessarily a criticism. I heard as many people praise the alterations as not, and playing canon characters in canon events can lead to games which feel stale and unsurprising as participants hew to the way events are “supposed” to play out. But changes do put a burden on the players. Not only do you need to know all the canon surrounding your character, you need to keep in mind where it differs from the official stories. My character sheet was 34 pages long; there was an overwhelming amount of information to keep on top of.¹²

It was also a little odd that the organizers allowed players to submit their own characters. Half of my major relations were not present at the larp. Some clans were distinctly underrepresented; a severe disadvantage when playing politics. The game might have been better if the clans were more balanced, and that probably starts with the casting. Another issue was that that there were only two organizers, and they both had decided to play characters in the game themselves. I really don’t like that as a design choice. If you had an issue or a question you’d found yourself having to interrupt a scene they were engaged in,¹³ and there were times when they’d slip off for a private scene and couldn’t be found at all.

But overall the game ran pretty well. My room was comfortable.¹⁴ There was plenty of food, even if it was on the whole surprisingly bland.¹⁵ The venue was stunning, everyone’s costume was fantastic, and people were deeply into their characters from the start. The game played out in the classic larp style you might call “Standing around looking fabulous and being catty.” I had a good time the first night of play and a great time the second night. And then I just ran out of things to do.

Larps are collaborative narrative structures. They’re fictional, in other words. They don’t extend into the real world.¹⁶ If I ascend to Emperor in a game, imperiously wave my hand, and order my troops to march to Gaul we all understand this will not actually result in war in Europe. We’ve agreed in the larp to pretend that it will, to accept the shared reality for the duration of the game and play off each other.

There’s a problem here, though. Our characters extend beyond the limits of the larp. If my character is rich, presumably there are bank accounts and properties and underlings awaiting my instructions. If my character has children, they’re living somewhere out there in the fictional world. If my character is secretly a serial killer, presumably there’s a trail of bodies and clues somewhere for someone to stumble upon.

There are, broadly speaking, two approaches to dealing with this issue.¹⁷ You can rely on using the organizers to manage your connection to the greater world, to confirm that your money has indeed been transferred or your children remain safe at home or the police have just discovered your latest victim. This works, but means the organizers can be a bottleneck for play and forces them to make decisions about the direction of the story. The alternative is to trust the players to do all that, instead. I can declare I’ve invested my funds in your business venture or I’ve called my spouse to check on the kids or that there’s been reports of a murder victim found down by the river. Now the players have complete control over the narrative — generally a good thing — at the cost of having to coordinate rather a lot out of character.

Giovanni: The Last Supper relied heavily on the latter, having the players negotiate everything outside the play space. When I did a ritual to reveal information about an ongoing plot, I had to talk to the player trying to keep the secret so I could reveal it. And especially on the last day, I found that that gave the game a kind of weightless feeling; I stopped believing there was a fictional world beyond the boundaries of the house we were in. Promises of political alliances, deals in money or blood, even the vague threats stalking us from beyond the wards felt pointless.¹⁸ There was plenty I could have done in the final hours of the game. I just wasn’t motivated to do any of it.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about why that happened. Inside Hamlet locks you in a castle and stipulates right up front that there’s nothing you can do about it, and that works just fine. Part of it is that Inside Hamlet is very clear about those limitations from the start. But I think there’s something bigger and more subtle going on.

In Inside Hamlet, you’re collectively telling the story of Hamlet. All the characters are loosely based on one or another of the characters in the play, the noble houses are all replicating the same family dynamic as Hamlet’s, and the story you’re enacting of personal ruination is mirrored by the larp itself. You’re all telling the same story, in some manner. You’re a part of something bigger. In Giovanni: The Last Supper, that’s not true at all. There is no overaching plot, no grand threat which everyone faces, no all-encompassing question to resolve. The larp doesn’t even have an ending, really, beyond “everyone goes home.” I never really got the sense that everyone was working together to tell a story.

I had a lot of great play with the other Giovanni family members, but that centered on why I had been brought back from the dead. It all got explained by Claudius early on the last day.¹⁹ My personal game was wrapped up in figuring out how I died, and the crucial scene where that would be revealed just never got the pivotal players together to run it.²⁰ My game just fizzled out.

I did sneak in another larp while I was in England. Labyrinthe is “… a high fantasy, deeply immersive Live Role-play (LRP) system staged with in our atmospheric chalk cave site in Chislehurst, Kent."²¹ You toss together a character, throw on some larp-safe armor and grab a foam sword, and run through about eight hours of adventure while meandering through a series of caves.

If this sounds old-school, it’s because it is. Labyrinthe was founded in 1985, and has been running continuously ever since. By some quirk of fate, they haven’t even significantly changed the rules in thirty years.²² So it’s this amazing window looking back into what larping was like right at the start of the hobby.

I played a Brown Wizard, which is earth magic²³ — I’ve always been horrifically bad with foam swords, which eliminated some of the simpler classes — and the only real drawback is that to cast spells you need to call out the appropriate ritual, and no one had thought to bring any light. The caves aren’t tremendously dark, but the lighting is often tinted or dim and the cheat sheet I had was in a remarkably small font. I was constantly asking the ref to remind me of the words.²⁴

It was tremendous fun, to put it mildly. I had been invited by a friend who arranged the whole thing²⁵ and we played through a scenario designed to highlight the standard tropes: a number of villagers had been kidnapped by what turned out to be a dark elf,²⁶ upon tracking them to their city we discovered it was the work of a ritualist who subsequently sacrificed them as part of a deal with demons, we proceeded to one of the hell planes where we fought a number of nasty monsters before managing to free the villager’s souls in time for dinner. There were eleven players, a ref who managed the encounters, and about five NPCs who played all of the various creatures we fought.²⁷

It’s all a little silly — not that dressing up in Regency garb and spending an evening declaring you’ve absolutely zero interest in chatting up the uncouth-yet-eligible gentleman who’s been glancing at you across the ball room isn’t — and I’m going to suggest the description of the experience as “deeply immersive” may be a bit of a stretch.²⁸ But if you’ve any interest in larp history, or even if you’re just old enough to have played these kind of games back in the day, I can’t recommend the experience enough. I even kind of want to go back.

I’ve spent the last two weeks coasting, really. A side effect of my lifestyle is that I generally can just stop and live out of a hotel room indefinately, if I choose to. And sometimes that’s great; better to chill for a week than burn yourself out. But it’s been twice that, and everyone I wanted to hang out with left long ago. Maybe I should have headed to Glasgow — I know some people in Glasgow — but I didn’t.

It’s gonna be more of the same for a while, at least; I’m flying now to spend a little time in Berlin with a friend before playing another larp, but after that I’m still waiting on that residency permit. My friend’s PhD defense got scheduled for late March, so at least I know where I’ll be at the end of the month.

This is a big reason why I started traveling. It’s far too easy to find myself waking up and going back to sleep with only an increasing pile of takeaway containers to mark the passage of time. But things are progressing, even if I’m not progressing them. I guess I’ll sleepwalk through the early Spring, hit a larp²⁹ and a larp convention,³⁰ and see if April doesn’t bring me some more motivation.

Next: Berlin to Copenhagen
Prev: Prague (PRG) to London (LTN)

Footnotes

¹ Portugal announced they’re ending the visa program I’m using, although they still haven’t changed the law and I’m assured that existing applicants will not be affected. It’s still anxiety-provoking, and I’d just as soon like to have the visa in hand before they get around to it.

² Ironically, shortly after I had declared it the worst city for digital nomads in a talk.

³ It had been closed for significant parts of 2020 and 2021, for COVID and refurbishment, and for some reason whenever I was in London in 2022 I wasn’t able to fit it in. It’s worth seeing — it’s free and quite nicely presented — but there’s more impressive Roman ruins scattered around the United Kingdom. Modern London’s built on top of a treasure trove of Roman foundations, but they rarely come to light. The Mithraeum went undiscovered until 1954.

⁴ There are far better whisky tastings in Edinburgh, but if you know absolutely nothing about Scotch it’s a very entertaining introduction. Tragically, the famed Malt-Disney-esque ride down a river in a whisky barrel is being refurbished and is due to reopen in June. I’m annoyed I’ll have to come back if I want to do it, and heartbroken I didn’t get to see the undoubtedly cheezy original one as it reached the end of its 40-year-old run.

⁵ Playing at the Everyman in Edinburgh.

⁶ Don’t judge me

⁷ My run, anyway.

⁸ The venue management is apparently worried about driving away their wedding business if they were involved with such unsavory types as larpers, and given how much more lucrative weddings are I can’t blame them.

The venue really was amazing, with ample public space, large sofas and loveseats to regally perch upon, and comfortable bedrooms all decorated in what I’d describe as an eclectic early 1900s style that could easily pass for any time from 1750 to the present day. Or maybe even the 1450s, if you squinted.

⁹ In theory, anyway. Players got thin on the ground once you got past about 1am. I understand there’s a strong contingent of people who feel they’re playing vampires, dammit, and they want to wake at dusk and sleep at dawn. I am not one of them. And I believe almost every player over 35 returning to a 9 to 5 job agrees with me.

¹⁰ I’m still a little confused as to why one would reuse the title. Even having played the larp I fail to see many similarities.

¹¹ Or have other vampires steal for themselves, or kill them in a fit of pique, or do whatever you wanted, really. Vampires are monsters, and the setting really doesn’t shy away from that.

¹² One of my friends, playing a completely made-up character, had a character packet that was 110 pages long.

¹³ And, conversely, if you were having an in-character conversation with them you’d find yourself getting interrupted by out-of-game concerns.

¹⁴ That may have been a function of where you got placed. There were a couple tiers of rooms and some of the players in the lower tier were housed in a set of attic rooms which were reportedly extremely drafty — particularly a problem during a cold snap in February.

¹⁵ The caterer is apparently popular in fest larps, meaning they’re used to feeding hundreds of people who have burned thousands of calories tromping across fields all day. That doesn’t excuse the apparent unfamiliarity with salt and herbs but does help explain why everything was carb-heavy. It did arrive on time and didn’t run out.

¹⁶ This isn’t quite true; I would hope the experience of a larp is memorable enough to remember and affect the way you think and feel about the world after the event. Bleed is probably the most commonly discussed aspect of that. And in an ongoing campaign events might carry over from game to game. But you take my point.

¹⁷ And most larps I’ve played rely on both, to a greater or lesser degree.

¹⁸ I have a friend who refers to the ability to affect things in the broader fictional world as “deformability,” a clunky phrase which basically means the world beyond the immediate characters responds to your actions. I can send spies to see if you’re secretly involved in criminal activities and they can be spotted, leading to a shootout and possibly triggering a police raid of your place of business.

As players, we could have simply negotiated that between us. But what we can’t do is coordinate that across all the players. Neither of us may know there’s a someone with a mole in the police department, a mole who’s now aware of our escalating feud. For that kind of coordination, you need the organizers.

¹⁹ There’s something a little deflating about working incredibly hard to discover some secret only to have it all explained, not because you figured it out, but because you reached the point in the game where it no longer mattered. You might as well have not bothered. Also, if the revelation of some grand secret changes absolutely nothing, you should probably consider some rewrites.

²⁰ I know scheduling key scenes in a larp feels like scheduling sex when you really want it to feel magical and spontaneous, but we’ve all got busy lives. Suck it up. Book ahead.

Side note for organizers: either set your game in a genre when everyone can keep checking their phones, or sprinkle working clocks throughout your venue.

²¹ According to their website, anyway

²² Among other things, that means the rule book is heavily influenced by the simplicity and clarity you might remember from such classic RPGs as Advanced Dungeons & Dragons and RuneQuest. Luckily the people there are friendly and more than willing to explain what you actually need to know to play, which isn’t actually all that much if you just want to pick up a sword and start bashing monsters with it.

²³ One of the spells on the list I had access to was “Summon Gnome Child” — gnomes being the elementals associated with earth in the setting — and I really didn’t want to find out what it did.

²⁴ The “Detect Magic” spell required me to repeat “I call upon the elements of fire air, earth and water; reveal to me where you may be found. Detect Magic!” and it was just complicated enough that I never remembered it.

And yes, you had to say it just like that, every time.

²⁵ Some of whom had grown up playing Labyrinthe and were delighted to see how little had changed.

²⁶ No longer represented in blackface, thank the gods.

²⁷ Mostly by just having the ref explain what they looked like, as actually changing costumes and makeup would have been wildly impractical.

²⁸ This is one of those games where you’re required to call out the amount of damage you do when you hit someone, so battles are filled with a dozen people yelling out “Triple! Triple! Triple!”

²⁹ WereWar

³⁰ The Smoke, again in London.