As I’ve mentioned, while it feels like I should be planning my travels by ear, booking transportation whenever the mood strikes me, the reality is that I’m scheduling everything months in advance. The need to worry about visas, and track how many days I’m staying in various countries, and trying to arrange doctor’s visits and rendezvous with friends and all these larps I’ve signed up for is a serious effort. I may be comfortable throwing a dart at a map and heading wherever it lands, but I’m far happier doing it six weeks before I need to head to an airport and knowing where I’m going to be sleeping well before I set foot there.

I was back in New York primarily to play Scapegoat, a pervasive larp designed by Sinking Ship Productions, and so the plan was to fly in Wednesday, play the game through Saturday, then spend Sunday and Monday recovering before flying out Monday night. Accordingly, I scheduled a whole lot of those annoying appointments I needed to get out of the way¹ over the week. But my aunt passed away, and it’s only by some passing miracle that my family was gathering over the one weekend I was going to be within 500 miles of it.

So I was able to shove some stuff around and hop a train at 3am on Sunday to spend the day with family, and hop another train on Monday to get back in time for my flight. I can’t recommend the travel — 16 hours roundtrip on a train is pretty grueling, especially if you’re just hopping on a transatlantic flight afterwards — but I got to spend the day with family, remembering my aunt, and it was worth it. Every second.

In between all those appointments, I was playing Scapegoat. Scapegoat is first and foremost a pervasive larp, meaning a larp that is played out in real-world locations² among people who are unaware there is a game being played. Earlier this year I played Trial of the Shadowcasters which did the same thing in Matera; locations around the city were designated as play spaces, often for certain periods of time when you could expect other players or characters to be there, and the act of playing the game involved traveling to various locations and interacting with the players you found there.

Pervasive games have been criticized on ethical grounds, since you’re necessarily going to be interacting with people who haven’t opted in and don’t know you’re playing a game. Most of the larps I’ve played have avoided the problem by simply ruling in-character interactions with people outside the game off limits.³ There’s still the concern of having someone overhear something disturbing or mistake some bit of in-game violence for real-world violence,⁴ but that was handled by having disturbing content confined to specific locations where it wouldn’t be seen by non-participants.

I can’t overstate exactly how ambitious this larp was. There were nearly a hundred players, and so over the course of four days there needed to be multiple locations at multiple times of day for people to gather — some public, like bars or museums; some private, like apartments or rehearsal spaces — all with an associated NPC to set it up and monitor how it was going. They loosely set up a plot thread to be played out over a number of these scenes,⁵ and then assigned relevant people to these scenes.

A big reason it all worked was the technology. Prior to the game a Discord server was set up, and so even during all travel and downtime, there were plenty of discussions and arguments and plot happening online, almost nonstop. Often it worked fantastically, where you’d drop out of game for a bit but still be able to chime in with a clarification or reveal something important to your group. Other times it could be a deterrent, where you’d be sitting at a table with four other people and all of them would be buried in their phones, addressing some emergency you weren’t involved in.⁶ Usually, though, it acted to keep you connected to the game in a way that you otherwise couldn’t be.

I have some quibbles with some of the design choices for all this,⁷ but in general it all worked remarkably well. The game was in many ways a love letter to New York City in all its glory, and playing out scenes at Grant’s Tomb or the Staten Island Ferry or the Campbell Apartment at Grand Central Terminal feels suitably epic. The organizers were clear before the game that these scenes were entirely optional; you could attend different ones or arrange scenes with other people if that fit your character’s arc better. But otherwise, at least for me, I found my story weaving in and out of other people’s arcs with elegance, if not quite grace.

Scapegoat was set in an urban fantasy overlayed across the real New York City. A secret group of magicians with their various traditions and politics were reaching the end of the treaty which had governed their society for a century, and needed to reestablish it. At the same time, the society was being stalked by two creatures of immense power and questionable motives, with rumors of a third on the verge of arriving and heralding Armageddon; the only known way of banishing them to prevent it was to sacrifice members of the society until those magical creatures retreated from the world.

I was playing Kestrel, a spymaster known as the “Master of Cuckoos” for his penchant for planting spies in the other groups. It’s the sort of character I really enjoy playing, especially in games with detailed, intricate worlds. I like having a lot of hidden information, and a level of understanding of how the pieces fit together which can be revealed to other players over the course of the game. The character was written so they had been secretly involved in a number of critical incidents in the history of the setting, which provided a level of notoriety⁸ — there were any number of rumors about what, exactly, I had been involved in — and a deep level of suspicion about my motivations.

Scapegoat was a larp with a ludicrous amount of detail, layered with secrets and fiddly technical details about the hows and whys of the operation of the world. It’s not my favorite style of game — trying to memorize all that information is no simple task — but I think in general it worked for this game.⁹ It did mean there were two levels of play going on constantly: the first a puzzle-box-like, information-heavy game where you needed to figure out the reasons and motivations of other characters to head off disaster, and the second an emotionally-wrenching exploration of loyalty and devotion and loss and guilt.

The puzzle-box worked, mostly. It certainly provided a lot of interesting play while people explored its contours. Shocking secrets were exposed,¹⁰ hard-fought negotiations were sealed, politics were upended with sudden revelations. And there were some people who lived solely for that game. I don’t quite think it was fully successful, though, because I’m unconvinced that the ultimate puzzle pieces were realistically available; the evil plots during the final scene were foiled more through vague guesswork and chance than through discovery, understanding, and active opposition. At the end, it felt a little like a detective novel where the crucial clues to solve the crime were written in the appendix.

But I don’t think it mattered, because I think the real game was the emotional side. All the macguffins and the hidden information and plots working at cross-purposes were remarkably effective at getting players into positions where they were forced to face themselves, the decisions they had made in the past, the friends and family they had lost, the sacrifices they had chosen to make. Maybe it’s a side effect of being an American game, but there were a lot of players who were primed and expecting to be playing that puzzle-box who ended up going through that emotional roller coaster instead.

I think that’s what makes larp magical, that catharsis, that connection to some kind of emotional truth. And it seemed like it worked brilliantly, for most of the players. I only got a bit of that, playing a character who had already lost so much they were numb to it, but it was still deep and powerful and unsettling in all the right ways. Manipulative, maybe. But I got to have quiet conversations with people and make them cry, sometimes from compassion, sometimes from sadness, sometimes from joy. And what more can you ask from a game?

Next: Birmingham (BHX) to Brussels (BRU)
Prev: Toronto (YYZ) to New York City (LGA)

Footnotes

¹ Like that Nigerian visa I need to get. I was able to get all my documentation, get my biometrics taken — I’m somewhat unclear on the reason I needed to get fingerprinted to visit Nigeria, but I did — and turn in my passport. I’ll be traveling on my second passport for the next month until I’m back in the States to reclaim my first one, and let me tell you there is nothing to make you feel more like a spy than deciding which passport you’re going to use at the next border crossing.

² Or, if you’re fancy, the “non-diagetic environment”

³ This didn’t prevent multiple people from asking if they could take my picture, but I was walking with a tricorn hat and a churchwarden pipe, and if there is one thing I truly love New York for it is that the only people who batted an eye were the tourists.

⁴ The 1990s were kind of a boom time for stupid larpers doing stupid things in public, and I think every larp community has their players-with-fake-guns-stopped-by-police and realistic-props-of-body-parts-found-by-joggers stories.

⁵ For example, negotiating a treaty that would be signed before the end of the weekend, or assembling the components and then performing a ritual

⁶ There was also the reverse problem, where you’d be involved in an intense scene which lasted an hour, only to walk away and discover you’d missed some critical point in a discussion 45 minutes ago — an argument over which location of a restaurant dinner was planned for, say — and now half your cohort was heading to the wrong place.

⁷ The locations were ridiculously spread out all over Manhattan and Brooklyn, so you’d have some scenes scheduled an hour’s travel by subway from other scenes (which made crashing more interesting scenes if yours was a bust something of a challenge). As the game progressed and you got more and more exhausted, you were still forced to schlep yourself from one corner of the city to another, so I ended up dropping quite a bit of money on cabs just to avoid yet another trip underground with interminable travel delays.

As a result of how spread out everything was, scenes were scheduled with a lot of time between them; you’d have a set of scenes scheduled for two hours at noon, and a two hour break before the next set of scenes at 2pm. If your first scene ended after 45 minutes, you’d have a lot of time to kill before the next one.

My only other complaint was that some of the slots were reserved for group meetings, generally over lunch or dinner. Which is all well and good, but often they didn’t have a restaurant chosen. And, yes, I understand it’s nearly murder to plan a group dinner for upwards of 15 people where you don’t know how many people are going to turn up until people do, but making your players do it doesn’t make it any easier, it just offloads organizer work onto your player base.

⁸ Many larps struggle with “famous” characters. Someone will be cast as a movie star or a supermodel, but with players already struggling to remember the identities of a hundred characters it’s rare to find the game that sets up the character dynamics effectively enough that the dynamics of fame are really felt. It’s a testament to the quality of the writing that people had heard enough about my character that I got that a lot; it’s utterly delightful to introduce yourself to someone and see them visibly recoil in shock when you tell them your name.

⁹ Another great reason to play someone who knows what’s behind a lot of the secrets is it greatly simplifies the confusion. No need to keep a dozen rumors straight in your head when you already know which three are true.

¹⁰ I know, because I got to reveal a number of them. Protip: big group reveals are fun, but if you reveal something truly shocking one-on-one, you get to do it more than once.