I arrived back in the United Kingdom to run And Then There Were None. I don’t know why I came in quite so early, with nearly three weeks before the first run. Part of it was I didn’t want to wrestle with my Schengen visa, still cooling off from the spring. And part of it was I guess I thought being physically here would help, in some way, if something happened like the venue fell through. That’s probably ridiculous, but better to have time to kill than free-floating anxiety.

I spent much of the time just kind of drifting around, filling out some of the things on my list that I hadn’t gotten to.¹ I hadn’t made it to the London Science Museum, where they’ve built a working Difference Engine #2 and — to my unexpected delight — have a V2 rocket in the distinctive black-and-white test pattern as well. I’d never been to Canterbury, and it was absolutely amazing.² I visited the International Antiques & Collectors Fair in Newark-on-Trent.³

I also visited the Isle of Man. The Isle of Man is another of those weird places I tend to love. Smack in the middle of the Irish Sea, it’s been invaded and ruled at one time or another by quite a few of its neighbors and somehow managed to retain its self-governing status, probably by being too small to bother with just as England was formalizing its empire. It’s a British Crown Dependency⁴ and that brings a whole host of weirdness. There’s no Manx citizenship; it’s covered by UK citizenship laws. It was never a part of the EU, even while the UK was, but was explicitly included in the EU customs area. It’s explicitly mentioned as being part of the territorial scope of the Brexit withdrawal agreement but that’s the only mention of it and, like so much in that agreement, what that actually means is far from clear.

The Isle of Man is mostly known for the cats, the motorcycle race, and the pernicious amount of money laundering going through the lax corporate oversight directly into the London financial markets. I mostly knew it from Cremaster 4, which is set there. And so I caught the ferry from Liverpool to Douglas, walked past the bronze statues of the Bee Gees by the docks, and checked in to a hotel for the weekend.

What I found, paradoxically, was a microcosm of England, if you excise London.⁵ It’s really is a kind of distilled essence of the British Isles; sandy beaches, historic castles, rambling farmlands you half expect to see hobbits frolicking through. I took a couple short walks and visited Peel Castle, but really should have spent more time and done things like bike the coast or hiked from one end of the island to the other.⁶

Maybe that’s not enough of a reason to visit; if I wanted the seaside I’d visit Brighton and if I wanted rambling I’d visit the Lake District and if I wanted castles I’d visit Northern Wales. But I guess if you’re in a rush and want it all at once — or more likely if you’ve got three or four days but a pathological hatred of switching hotels — you could find it all here. And it would be lovely.

Gradually, though, I found myself spending more and more time sorting things out for And Then There Were None. Broadly speaking, there are two phases you operate in when you’re running a larp. The first is expansive. You’re constantly adding things: characters, plots, set pieces, costume designs. That’s the early, generative phase. You’re creating something out of nothing. It’s also the fun bit.

And Then There Were None has lots of fun bits. There’s the character documents, newspaper articles and telegrams and receipts and personal letters. There’s the script for the blackmailers, who’s invited everyone to the house to die and takes time to taunt them over the course of the weekend. And there’s a proper 1930s dinner party to plan.⁷

But at some point you have to start hacking away at the design, removing elements. That’s important — jam too much into a larp and you end up with something confusing, no matter how cool each bit is isolation.⁸ The larp’s generally better for it.

Call that the contraction phase. It starts orderly, making sage decisions about what’s central and peripheral to your design. But as you get closer and closer to the game, it devolves — at least it always does in the games I’ve run — into a mad scramble just to get the game to run at all. For me that part started about two months before the game, when my codesigner stepped back from the game for personal reasons.

That’s never a great feeling, all the more so when it happens two days after you’ve sent in the final payment for the venue. It wasn’t just the loss of a collaborator; I had been relying on them to supply significant parts of the runtime, from a van to haul supplies in to volunteers to fill out our ranks to connections for help with last minute dropouts to a old-timey radio that could play music over bluetooth.

So I decided to move forward anyway, and I gave up on keeping the budget balanced. Starting the project, I hadn’t seriously expected to break even, but I thought I had a reasonable shot of staying within 10% of the budget. That, tragically, went out the window.⁹ So there were Unexpected Airfare Expenses to bring a runtime coordinator over from the United States and Unexpected Car Rental Expenses to get a car to ferry everyone around England and Unexpected Petrol Expenses to pay a friend to haul the wine and supplies to the venue and Unexpected Gun Expenses renting replica pistols.¹⁰

Even with all this, things were coming together. Everyone currently on the organizing team had caught their flight and made it into the country, which had been a major fear of mine.¹¹ But with two days before the first run started, two people dropped the game. And having just managed to deal with that emergency another two people dropped a day later.¹²

So the 48 hours before the start of the first run were a kind of weird haze where I was scrambling to buy last minute supplies¹³ and fill in the missing spots. We were able to convince one of the drops to rejoin provided they tested negative for COVID the day of the game,¹⁴ hauled ourselves up to the Lake District, bought all the groceries, finally reached the venue, and discovered the WiFi was completely crap and we were far enough into the countryside that cell service was dicey.

You’d think, when you’re in that scramble to run a game, that cutting bits of the design would at least save you money. After all, if the venue tells you you can’t run a marching band through the house, you don’t have to pay for a marching band. But once you’re this close to the run date, it’s more like the venue mentions the marching band thing when you turn up, you’ve already paid for the marching band, and you’re going to have to eat the cost. And you still end up renting a sound system so you can play John Phillips Sousa at high volume during the climax of the larp.¹⁵

Through some miracle everyone turned up on time for the first run. And no one dropped at the last minute from the second run. I caught some weird, intense sinus infection between the first and the second run that had me nearly incapacitated for weeks,¹⁶ and of course there was some ridiculous expensive mishap after the second run.¹⁷ But the actual runs? They ran nearly flawlessly, almost exactly as designed.

Many larps — the larps I grew up playing — use a lot of intervention on the part of the organizers to keep things running smoothly. You can see that influence from its table-top heritage; you have a GM playing everything in the world that isn’t one of a limited group of PCs. Someone has to be the evil necromancer and the morally questionable liege lord and the rampaging army in the borderlands. And most larps evolved along similar lines. Even as the number of PCs reached the dozens or the hundreds, you’d have a major plot running throughout the game — often across multiple games — and while in better games that plot is responsive to player action it remains largely conceived and executed by the organizers.

To keep that plot on track, there’s a tendency for larps to flood the zone with NPCs and organizers to adjudicate interactions and crew to drop plot-relevant props. Particularly complicated plots might involve shunting particular players into special events or even pulling some players out of game to walk back things that got out of hand. It’s a fine way to run a larp. It’s also incredibly labor-intensive.

And Then There Were None is just as heavily plotted — everyone dies, after all — but it’s designed so it doesn’t rely on NPCs to communicate plot or keep things on track. We tell the players right at the start how things are going to play out¹⁸ and that’s what happens. The choices the characters make literally can’t affect the outcome of the game,¹⁹ which means the organizing team doesn’t have to spend time patching things up when they go in unexpected directions.

So having three people run the game is eminently doable. The original design called for two organizers and three assistants, which would have been an absolute snap. As it was, the game ran surprisingly well even with me flagging under the weight of exhaustion (first run) and a sinus infection (second run).²⁰

The disadvantage, obviously, is that you lose almost all control over what’s going on; which is another way of saying you put all your trust into your design and your players. Larp organizers already have a surprisingly tiny window into figuring out what’s going on, and the fewer people you have circulating in the game the more you cut down on that view.²¹

Still, I find myself partial to it. It’s not just that I’m lazy.²² It’s that your larp already depends on your players to succeed. Knowing that — and knowing the vast majority of interactions are going to be between players, no matter how many NPCs you’ve got running around — it just kind of makes sense to me to double down on that. Give your players the tools they need to be amazing, then get out of the way and trust they will be.

I suppose it’s easy to say that for what’s essentially a tiny game, with only twelve players per run.²³ Smaller numbers of players means a more strictly curated player list. But honestly, we were more reliant on getting the thing in front of the right kinds of players; there were enough drops over the year that we ended up with a pretty mixed group of larpers from different traditions by the end, and I don’t think a single one seemed out of place.

I’ll have a better sense of how I feel about this sort of design in a few months when we run Triumph.²⁴ Triumph is built along similar lines, with no external plots to react to and virtually all play driven by interplayer dynamics. It’s a much larger game, of course, with more set pieces and an incredibly complicated arena combat on the final day. But really, we’re going to tell the players what’s going to happen at the start of the game, and then the game’s going to play out that way.²⁵ We’re going to trust the players and the design. If you aren’t prepared to do that, why even bother running a larp in the first place?

Since getting back from the Lake District I’ve been holed up in a variety of rooms, mostly in London, mostly ill. I had my immediate plans to hang out with a friend shattered — theater tickets for Friday and a fancy meal Saturday²⁶ — and spent the subsequent week convinced that every day I was going to wake up back to normal and being disappointed in the morning.

I’ve generally been well enough to go out, if only for a few hours at a time, especially as I’ve slowly improved and my cough has reached a level that doesn’t immediately signal plaguebearer to passersby.²⁷ I saw a couple shows — Much Ado About Nothing²⁸ and Back to the Future: The Musical²⁹ — and had afternoon tea at the Rosewood Hotel.³⁰

But the most unique thing I went to was Phantom Peak, a self-described “World’s First Fully-Immersive Open-World Adventure."³¹ You can buy a ticket for a five hour block either Friday or Saturday night or Saturday or Sunday afternoon. What that gets you is entrance to a rather impressively decorated space designed to look like steampunk hit a California Gold Rush town circa 1870. The space isn’t huge, but there’s a lot jammed into it — a promenade lined with storefronts, several bars, a creepy mine — and it’s all populated with actors who serve as quest givers and quest hubs and general entertainment.³²

The overarching plot, as far as I could figure out, is that the town was ushered into its present prosperity by Jonas,³³ owner and founder of Jonaco, who now controls more or less every facet of existence in Phantom Peak. There’s an app you download which provides quests for you to learn more about the town, and many of the quests end up piercing this myth and benefiting one resistance movement or another. These quests end up being the bulk of what you end up doing while you’re there.

The quests are surprisingly fun, if ultimately a bit limited. You get to run around the place talking to people — a union rep, a cranky librarian, a moony telegraph operator — and punch in information at various screens³⁴ to get further along. But like a lot of these things your advancement is completely limited by what the app tells you to do; at no point do you have a real choice. There aren’t even really any puzzles to solve beyond a “find this poster” level of complexity.³⁵

It’s possible there’s some of that hidden away; there were a lot of signs around suggesting you become a citizen of the town by playing various carnival games.³⁶ Maybe that unlocks something. But the core of the experience appears to be hanging out on what one hopes is a sunny day, munching on some slightly-overpriced street food, drinking some beers, and moving methodically through a series of straightforward fetch quests. I’d go back. I only got through ⅓ of them, after all.

I’m currently holed up in the BLOC hotel at Gatwick, waiting for a morning flight to Stockholm. The BLOC hotel is ridiculously expensive and does away with frivolities like furniture and windows and separating the shower from the toilet. What it does have is solid WiFi, a large and comfortable bed, and a location about twenty steps from the departure gates at the South Terminal of Gatwick. My flight isn’t ridiculously early in the morning, but I’ve leaned not to be figuring out the trains at Victoria station at 6am.

I’m heading to Knutpunkt. Last year’s event was a bit small and a bit raucous, being the first big event for a lot of larpers after COVID canceled the last one. This one will include a number of friends from the United States I haven’t seen in forever³⁷ so I’m especially looking forward to it.

It’s nice to be leaving the UK. I’ve been here far too long, and I’ve spent most of my time here anxious, sick, or exhausted. This morning was actually the first time I didn’t feel any of that; I wandered through Covent Garden without anyone to meet or any place to be, just getting a haircut and a bite to eat, happy to be feeling normal for once.

That won’t last. KP is always wild, and I’m coming right back to the UK for a vacation with a friend before coming back to the United States for another busy couple weeks. But it’s where I am at the moment, and I haven’t been there in forever, so I’m just enjoying it while I can.

Next: Linköping (LPI) to Newcastle (NCL)
Prev: Zagreb (ZAG) to London (LHR)

Footnotes

¹ One of the predictable faults of an English-language global travel guide is that it vastly overweights sights in the United States and the United Kingdom. Of the 1,000 places you’re supposed to see before you die according to 1,000 Places to See Before You Die nearly 54 of them are in the UK.

I don’t mind so much. It’s not like the places which get mentioning aren’t worth seeing, and I’m spending an exorbitant amount of time in the UK because I can’t spend that time in Schengen. But it’s a further reminder not to take the list all that seriously.

² You can’t exactly call it a well-kept secret, but it hadn’t really occurred to me it’s not even 90 minutes on the train from London. You probably can’t squeeze it in if you’re visiting London for less than 4 days but you absolutely should if you’re staying more than that. It’s small enough that you even manage it on a day trip without feeling like you missed out.

It’s touristy, but it’s been that way since Becket was killed, so it’s earned it. The city planners had the bright idea in the ’60s to reroute the A2 around the town rather than running it plumb through the center and it’s since been turned into a pedestrian zone. There’s some nice museums with Roman artifacts — a lot turned up in the wake of the bombings from WWII — and some things with Chaucer and enough historic architecture which survived to make it worth rambling around for an afternoon.

The real jewel of the place is the cathedral, of course. And speaking as someone who’s seen quite a lot of cathedrals, it was really surprising. It’s not especially fancy or gaudy. But it’s got a really calming presence about it; it feels anchored in the community in a way that I rarely feel in such a overwhelming structure. Maybe that’s largely from the Anglican tradition, which was always less magisterial than the Catholics — it shares a kind of relaxed vibe with the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, an Episcopal cathedral in NYC. I’d like to think it’s because of its history with all those pilgrims; you focus your religious practice on people seeking hope and mercy, and it eventually becomes second nature.

³ The largest antique collector’s fair in Europe. I don’t know what I expected. I had thought, hey, I’m running a 1930s era larp in a few weeks and I can pick up some cheap set dressing, which I could have done but I had forgotten I didn’t have a car and had no way to haul anything like that around and as awesome as some bottles from the turn of the century or some period tea sets would have been I’d just end up tossing them at the end of the game.

In the event it ended up being hundreds of dealers — at its peak it handles 2,000 booths — all set up in a massive field and selling jewelry and prom dresses and distressed furniture and vintage signs and linens and toys and 30-year-old computer games and Lladro statuettes and taxidermy specimens and chandeliers and sculpted lamps and beer steins and children’s books and choir robes and glass vials and novelty records and flags and replica guns and historic pens of dubious historical value and painted cattle skulls and music boxes and automotive parts and framed illustrations and small bronze sculptures which might have been from the 1920s but looked more recent and mass produced. And everything in between. Most of it I’d have classified as junk and most of the rest I thought was overpriced. But most of it was at least vaguely interesting, and I’d have been more up for browsing if it wasn’t such a blisteringly hot day. And if I were trying to decorate a mansion in a style politely referred to as “eclectic.”

⁴ My current favorite title for Elizabeth II is Lord of Mann.

⁵ A state of affairs that rural England can only dream about

⁶ Easily done in a single day

⁷ I insisted upon, and got, an aspic salad course.

⁸ Early drafts of And Then There Were None intended to have different methods of murder, but in the end that was simplified. Everybody gets shot. Some methods are simple to make convincing and larp-safe, like poisoning and strangulation. Others, like hanging and decapitation, are really hard. It really didn’t add much to the design.

⁹ I honestly don’t know how much I’ve spent — I couldn’t bear to track it — but since I would have had to refund everyone’s money and eat the cost of the venue myself, I at least ended up spending less than that.

¹⁰ I found it impossible to rent a replica firearm in the UK that looks right, feels right, and makes a convincing noise when fired but is safe to use indoors at close range. I’d have thought I could find cap guns which would work, but they’re all cheap plastic and painted garish colors so they can’t be mistaken for the real thing. Cap guns are pretty unreliable, as well.

I have a pretty big loathing for having to yell “BANG” when you shoot someone so everyone knows you’ve fired a shot, but at least it’s unambiguous. And it’s not like we had much choice.

¹¹ One of them was responsible for all the food for the weekend, the other was the only one of the three of us with a valid driver’s license — mine had expired a month before the game, which I only found out when I tried to pick up a rental car myself — and thus was the only realistic plan I had for actually running all the errands and getting to the Lake District.

¹² And Then There Were None requires a full compliment of twelve players to run. I will strongly advocate you design a game which can handle last-minute dropouts — larpers are notoriously flaky — and if I could have thought of any possible way of doing so with this design, I would have.

¹³ Protip: I don’t care how commonplace or easy it is to buy something, if you can do it a week or a month before the game, do it. This goes double if you’re picking things up in a country you’re unfamiliar with. Case in point: white vinegar is not commonly available in grocery stores in the UK, at least not in the five we stopped at looking for it. It’s cleaning supplies.

¹⁴ They had dropped because they were staying with someone who did test positive for COVID, so I had to put together a quick survey asking if the other players were okay with them attending as a close contact of someone with COVID, and then confirm we were moving forward, and then spend an exciting morning finding out if they were going to test positive anyway.

¹⁵ This is a hypothetical example, although now I can’t help but imagine larps where it would be entirely fitting for a marching band to wander through at the critical moment.

¹⁶ It was nasty. No one ever told me your eye ducts can clog up and when that does snot will ooze out of your eyes and glue them shut. I am not better for knowing this, let alone for living through it.

I tested regularly and it never showed positive for COVID. And I never lost my sense of smell. AFAIK, I still haven’t had COVID.

¹⁷ The rental car was driven into a tree with sufficient force as to bend the suspension, rendering it effectively inoperable. I wasn’t driving, I wasn’t even in the car, and I still haven’t gotten a straight answer over what exactly happened.

¹⁸ Okay, we aren’t entirely forthcoming at the start of the game. But we give players all the information they’re going to need at the start.

¹⁹ It’s a little weird for someone who’s as solicitous about player agency as I am to design a game which removes so much of it, but it is a game based on And Then There Were None. It’s about the growing sense of dread and panic as your death inevitably approaches. I removed the absolute minimum amount of player agency I could imagine to make the game work. And, critically, I communicated this to the players before the start of the game. You know what you’re gonna get going in.

²⁰ I remain eternally grateful for both of the people who helped me run the game, under difficult circumstances. It couldn’t have happened without them. I was nearly useless the first day of both runs. They deserved at least one extra set of hands.

²¹ I mean, you still have to be careful what reports you’re getting back. Your tavernkeeper will generally tell you everyone’s bored and drunk and you should up the excitement. People playing monsters randomly wandering around will tell you everyone’s an adrenaline junkie hopped up on meth and Red Bull and you need to chill the game out.

²² If you’re generous, you can read lazy as “am well aware that I’ll be exhausted no matter what before the first player shows up and would just as soon do as little as possible from that point on.” Both are true.

²³ We’ve been calling And Then There Were None as a “boutique” game, meaning something like “as expensive as a blockbuster larp with similar scenography ambitions but many fewer people.”

²⁴ Spots still available, for Citizens, Mentors, and Triumphs!

²⁵ I don’t know what you’d call this sort of design. A Deist game? Some larp theorist has probably already claimed this territory.

²⁶ Both were handed off to people who were in a much better condition to enjoy them.

²⁷ There’s plenty of official guidance on how long to isolate if you catch COVID, but basically nothing on what to do if you caught a sinus infection that wasn’t actually COVID. If it were COVID I was basically clear to wander around a week ago, which is the point I started doing indoor things again with people.

²⁸ The show I skipped when I was really sick. I rebooked for a week later. It was incredible, and yet another mark on my “Shakespeare plays I’ve seen live” list which I’m not really tracking but sort of am.

²⁹ I, uh … look, I went with a friend who’s a BTTF superfan. The actor who played Doc Brown — Roger Bart — was incredible. The rest kind of mechanically hit the plot points of the movie and did it relentlessly through some unmemorable songs. The only songs which stood out were the songs from the original, and that’s not great.

³⁰ During lockdown, when I was running a my Dracula Dossier RPG campaign, the players ended up arranging a sitdown with an asset in London — and given the character and the situation I Googled for great places for tea and found the Rosewood. I’ve kind of wanted to go ever since, so when a friend suggested we meet for brunch on my last Sunday in town, I was pleased to check it out.

The Rosewood’s thing is the “art” tea, which tends to mean Dalí. So we nibbled on finger sandwiches and ate tiny cakes shaped like a telephone with a miniature lobster on top and split a chocolate egg balanced on porcelain fingertips with a flower growing out of the side, and it all seemed only slightly more ridiculous than afternoon tea usually does.

³¹ This claim is laughable on the face of it, but it gives you a sense of what they’re aiming for.

³² The actors are all pretty great, more than you might expect. Maybe it helps that they’re playing such broad, tongue-in-cheek characters; when we had to talk to the Doctor about the mysterious ore that’s powering most of the town’s gizmos they narrowed their eyes and asked if we had any nefarious plans. We assured them we did not, and they replied “Oh, too bad. You see, I’m an Evil Doctor, and I do appreciate a good nefarious plan.”

³³ Variously described as “our savior,” “the greatest, most benevolent being in existence,” and “the most impressive specimen, mentally or physically, ever to walk the earth.”

³⁴ All with satisfying real switches to click or buttons to press

³⁵ You’re probably not going to draw in the numbers you need to sustain this kind of place — they’ve already promised special Halloween and Christmas events — with even moderate escape room kinds of challenges. But I was kind of hoping for some, all the same.

³⁶ At £1 a go, I knew better than to throw much money at any of them without a ringer on my team.

³⁷ Many of whom were supposed to be there last year before Norway got pissy with the vaccine proofs