I’ve mentioned before that I’m scheduling my travel around events I’m attending — typically larps — and this past week has been a good example. I attended a larp in Finland, and had another scheduled this past weekend in the Netherlands. But in between I could have been anywhere. Since these events are often psychologically grueling¹ you want to find someplace calm and relaxing. And ideally close, so you don’t have to travel far.

I found Delft. And so I spent most of the week in what is simply one of the most ridiculously charming places I’ve ever been. It’s small, with about 100,000 people, and the Old Town sort of feels like a bunch of rogue Imagineers for Disney spent years designing a Netherlands area for EPCOT, then set it loose and let it go ever so slightly feral in the wild. It doesn’t have that sterile feel that a lot of places with a lot of tourists do, maybe because it’s got so much history packed in: it’s the birthplace of Grotius,² the home of Vermeer, the final resting place of William of Orange, and filled with all the bicyclists and canals and churches and cute-if-pricey restaurants you’d want.

The Netherlands (along with places like Germany and the United Kingdom) is really easy mode for international travel for Americans. You’re hard-pressed to find people who don’t speak English, you can puzzle out the bathrooms and electrical sockets and train schedules without too much effort, the food is strange but not so strange that you’re tempted to retreat to the ubiquitous global fast-food chains. That makes it a bad tourist destination for me — I leveled up from the basics years ago — but an uncommonly nice place to live for a few days.

I was in the Netherlands to play On the Styx, a pretty little jewel-box of a larp (16 players) in which the pantheon of Greek gods were convening in modern times.³ I was playing Dionysus, god of wine, parties, debauchery, intoxication, and divine mysteries, spending the present era as a louche drunken beach DJ with a sideline in all manner of pharmacologicals.

I spent most of the weekend drinking. Alcohol at larps is still something of a divisive issue; many games forbid it completely, citing safety concerns or location policies. Other games allow it, but there’s generally attempts to keep players from overindulging — even in On the Styx there was plenty of non-alcoholic wine for those who wanted their characters to drink heavily.

But On the Styx also provided real alcohol for the players, and the thought of playing Dionysus and drinking fake alcohol didn’t feel right, to me.⁴ So I drank. Mostly terrible wines and the Dutch equivalent of wine coolers.⁵ But I’ve got a reasonably high tolerance, and I was extremely careful about pacing myself. I didn’t even manage a hangover the whole weekend.

I was kind of hoping my game would benefit more from being slightly buzzed the whole time, but I honestly don’t know if it made a difference. It certainly fit the character I was aiming for, who I’ve always gotten the sense is the focus of all these crazed, hedonistic rites rather than a participant.⁶ But I’ve never really been a fan of getting really drunk, and I wouldn’t have able to play the game if I had. I don’t regret trying it, but I’d have to think a lot before I considered trying it again. I’m still a fan of having alcohol available in most larps⁷ — being able to offer a toast with real champagne or have a glass or two of wine with dinner can really enhance an experience — but much more than that is probably not worth the effort.

So how was the game? Sixteen players is the smallest group I’ve played a weekend-long game with, and I have to say it was a delight. The game is in the classic larp form of “get X number of people who generally don’t like each other much together and let them bicker” which only works if you have interesting characters (Greek gods, check) with strong personalities (Greek gods, check) and conflicting motivations towards each other (Greek gods, check).

There was a small manor rented for the game, and the organizers prepared meals and played servants for the game — an excellent way to provide characters the gods could boss around and lord over, since they certainly couldn’t do that to each other very easily. There was no plot to speak of, so the game was entirely driven by personality dynamics.

The real key was a strong group of players who were always willing to share play or include you in melodrama, forcing themselves into scenes which needed more excitement and backing off to allow quiet character moments to play out. I figured my role was best as an instigator, providing excuses for other players to find play, so I passed out drinks whenever I could and spiked everyone’s ouzo with LSD⁸ and kept an assortment of pills⁹ at the ready.

The game supported a nice mix of light, silly roleplay coupled with some dark themes and emotions. I tend to play big games, which often go for huge drama by sacrificing smaller, more personal moments. This is the second Dutch larp I’ve played this year¹⁰ and both emphasized that intimate play over the grand.

There’s a lot of hand-wringing over the cost of larps shutting out a lot of potential players, but I think games like this prove that’s not really the primary issue. This was easily half the cost of Odysseus and a third the cost of any of the College of Wizardry events. And yes, those are different experiences — if you really want to be running around a castle waving a wand and firing off magic spells, you’d be disappointed¹¹ — but it’s hard for me to argue that the core of the experience, the emotional journey of your character, can’t be just as deep and affecting. All you really need to do is find people willing to run them.

Next: Budapest (BUD) to Sarajevo (SJJ)
Prev: Bastille Day, 2019, Netherlands

Footnotes

¹ And that certainly applied to Odysseus

² He is Groot

³ I spent an incredible amount of time trying to figure out how we had 16 players with only 12 gods in the pantheon. Eris and Hecate were two of the obvious additions, and I felt like an idiot when I realized early on that Persephone wasn’t either. Dionysus sometimes is or isn’t, but he’s generally regarded as replacing Hestia and she wasn’t a character, so that didn’t count.

Turns out it was Hades, who is certainly a major god, but it turns out isn’t an Olympic god. Big divide between earth gods and sky gods in Greek mythology.

⁴ Although I’ll admit, I didn’t feel that way about any of the drugs I was passing around. I’m not so committed to roles that I’ll indulge in heavy psychoactives for them. Oh, and it turns out there are a lot of companies making completely legal non-addictive mentholated tobacco-free snuff that comes as a white powder. This is important news in my circles.

⁵ Wine coolers aren’t a thing — not that they’re really a thing in the United States these days, either — but alcopops are doing just fine in your supermarkets all over the world.

⁶ There were apparently mystery cults which worshipped Dionysus as a god of moderation, which have got to be some of the worst mystery cults out there.

⁷ Alongside substitutes for non-drinkers, of course

⁸ I ordered Spongebob Squarepants blotter paper from someone on eBay and had a brief moment of panic when I realized I had no way to verify it was safe. Given the price it would have been the deal of the century if it was actually dosed with anything, but I ended up trying some myself the morning of the first day just to be sure. It was clean.

⁹ I think I’ve eaten more tic-tacs in the past five years pretending they were various pharmacological agents than I have simply eaten tic-tacs straight up.

¹⁰ The first being Cirque Noir

¹¹ Although get cast as Hecate and I bet you could make it work