I flew to Norway to play Allegience, a spy larp set during the Cold War. And I still have no idea if the game was any good. I know a lot of the players in a lot of the embassies had a great time. I know many of the players in the United States embassy did not, or at least found their game didn’t live up to what it could have been. But I’m more reluctant to make generalizations about the whole larp than usual, because I’m not sure there is a whole larp to talk about.

Allegience has one of the most ambitious designs I’ve seen in a larp. The game is set in 1970, in Skien, where for vague and unconvincing reasons the Norwegian government has relocated.¹ There were a couple dozen locations scattered over downtown Skien² representing the various embassies and common meeting places.³ The game was filled with about eighty players representing nine different countries: the United States, the United Kingdom, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, the German Democratic Republic,⁴ the Soviet Union, and Czechoslovakia. So you had diplomatic negotiations going on⁵ and immediately under the surface a morass of spying and defections and double-crosses and what seemed like dozens of star-crossed lovers trying to rescue their beloveds from the other side of the Iron Curtain.

The really tricky bit is that all the embassies were played by players from the country they were representing.⁶ To facilitate this, the game for each embassy was designed separately by a designer or a design team from that country. This helped give a particularly good sense of place for each embassy; there was an informal party at the United States embassy the first night where we played Elvis and Ray Charles and served hot dogs,⁷ while there was a lavish reception on the behalf of the East Germans the second night.⁸ But it also gave the overall game a very fractured kind of feel. Characters had plenty of connections across embassies, but there didn’t seem to be a high level of cohesion in the game.

I get the sense this worked better in some embassies than others. In the US embassy the game kind of got sucked into the disarmament talks, but there really wasn’t much intel of use in the disarmament talks, which meant there wasn’t a lot of intel being circulated, which tended to leave the spies with very little actual spying to do.⁹ So you had a set of characters whose plots were balanced between the professional and the personal¹⁰ but only the personal plots had any sort of life to them.

I was playing Walter Russell, the commercial attaché for the US embassy and secretly a true believer in Marxism/Leninism and a deep cover spy for the Russians. Walter had been recruited at college and dedicated their life to the cause, embracing the trappings of a capitalist functionary all while channeling as much intel to the Soviets as they could.¹¹

I did get some great scenes. A botched meeting with Walter’s handler¹² was rescheduled — in a ridiculous¹³ violation of spycraft — to the gala reception that night. I took the opportunity to angrily dress down the handler and break off contact until things cooled off.¹⁴ And right at the end of the larp I found myself given the name of a Soviet agent being exfiltrated to the United States, which I was able to pass on in time to get them arrested.¹⁵

So my game was fine, if a little disjointed.¹⁶ It worked better for a lot of people and worse for a few. But it wasn’t really the game I wanted. What I wanted was the sense of paranoia, the constant suspicion that anyone could betray you, the feeling of running black ops and having them go sideways and being forced to send in the cleaners. This wasn’t that game. And if it did a reasonable job simulating what life would have been like in the diplomatic corps of the Cold War era¹⁷ it was still a long way from the spy larp of my dreams, even if it had the decency to rain.

I extended my stay after the game and spent a few days in Oslo, because I wanted to hang out with any stragglers from the larp¹⁸ and because the Munch Museum wasn’t yet open when I was in Oslo last.¹⁹ Norway’s as expensive as I remember it; I booked the cheapest room I could find that didn’t look dreadful²⁰ and ended up a 15 minute ride from the city center on the T-bahn.²¹

I did wrangle an invite to the house of a friend for dinner, where I spent a lovely evening meeting their family, drinking a little wine, and getting my ass kicked by a preteen at Settlers of Catan. As luck would have it one of them²² was an ear, nose, and throat specialist and they graciously offered to check out my left ear, still blocked after getting sick eight weeks ago.²³ I spend so much time on my own and necessarily taking care of myself I can’t tell you how much it means to have someone you just met go out of their way to help you out.

But I’ve moved on, as always. I’m about to land in Manchester, for a few weeks in the UK²⁴ between destinations. After this is Portugal, and after that the preparations for Triumph in Croatia, and after that I’m finally free again. I’ve no idea where I’ll spend the lead up to the holidays²⁵ and only have a few things planned into 2023.

I’m looking forward to it, honestly. Having two larps to run has sucked up so much of my energy for so long I need to do nothing for a while. I’d be into that for a bit.

Next: London (LHR) to Lisbon (LIS)
Prev: London (STN) to Oslo (TRF)

Footnotes

¹ I really don’t understand why they felt the need to explain why we were in Skien. I found the flimsy excuse more distracting than simply pretending we were in Oslo.

² Thankfully most within a 7 minute walk of one another.

³ The Finns had a sauna boat. Everybody wanted to visit the sauna boat.

⁴ The Federal Republic of Germany wasn’t represented, which given how much fun it would have been I assume was due to practical reasons (i.e. a limited number of German players).

⁵ The immediate issue was MALART, high-level nuclear disarmament talks.

⁶ To a first approximation, anyway. The United States embassy had a notable shortage of US citizens residing in the Untied States filling its ranks, likely due to travel practicalities. The US ambassador was played by a Canadian living in the UK.

The Soviet embassy was staffed by a mix of Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians. The game was in the midst of being designed when the war in Ukraine broke out, which must have made for some interesting discussions.

⁷ Well, hot dogs wrapped in potato tortillas instead of hot dog buns, which I am 80% sure was a design choice.

⁸ They served a “hedgehog,” which appears to be an East German variety of the same kind of regrettable food you’d see in the United States in the ’70s. Raw seasoned pork formed into a ball and studded with strips of raw onion to look like its namesake. The contemporary version was, mercifully, vegan.

⁹ There’s also the problem that none of the players were invested in the talks the way their characters might have been. Have there ever been any great larps built around bureaucratic meetings?

¹⁰ And a hallmark of Cold War spy fiction is the way those worlds collapse into one another.

¹¹ I recognized the story — this is roughly the path Kim Phelby took — and while I doubt Walter would have made it as far as Phelby did that was at least their ambition.

¹² Every character had “moments” scheduled throughout the larp where one had a scene scheduled at a particular time and location. The one establishing my relationship with my handler got mischeduled, so I turned up to discover some random East German waiting as well.

Oddly, my character did not feel like explaining what they were doing at a Soviet safehouse to a stranger — or anyone at all, for that matter — and bugged out immediately.

¹³ Although not exactly unheard of

¹⁴ The best way to avoid suggestions that you were seen suspiciously chatting up a known Soviet agent, I figured, was to indignantly report contact with a hostile foreign power yourself and demand the appropriate steps be followed lest the impropriety derail your career.

¹⁵ I do feel somewhat guilty about that. But what’s a few dissidents rotting in a Russian gulag compared to the imminent Communist paradise, right?

¹⁶ As a last-minute ticket, I wasn’t expecting something incredibly cohesive. I simply didn’t have the time to prearrange the connections the game really required.

¹⁷ I mean, within obvious limits. One of the players who had some passing experience with those kinds of negotiations lamented at how nonsensical the positions quickly got. As anyone who’s seen their profession represented on television can attest, it’s far easier to convincingly mimic the form of something than the content.

¹⁸ Which largely didn’t work out, although I did get to grab a drink with a friend for a bit.

¹⁹ It’s worth a visit, and equally worth a drink in the café at the top, which has some amazing views of the Oslo harbor. The museum’s that weirdly brutalist architecture you see in a lot of modern museums (I’m particularly thinking of the Tate Modern and the Whitney) where they try to soften things with a lot of glass and a lot of negative space and it’s starting to feel a little derivative to me. But it’s got some great paintings by Munch and enough space to host some rotating exhibitions. I do appreciate museums which aren’t content to just display a bunch of art which feels less and less relevant every year, but make an effort to engage with more recent trends.

²⁰ If there’s a saving grace to the prices in Norway, it’s at least things are generally decent quality when you do get them.

²¹ Where I neglected to put the “Do Not Disturb” sign on the door only to have the cleaning staff accidentally bust through the chain trying to get in. Not that you needed to know not to put your faith in those things keeping anyone out for more than five seconds.

²² Not the preteen

²³ It’s apparently fine, and likely to just recover on its own in two to three months. I got a prescription for a nasal spray to help encourage it along. I’m going to be grateful it’s at least not painful to fly.

²⁴ Quite possibly the last time I’ll be in the UK before the New Year, but we’ll see.

²⁵ Although I do have Christmas and New Year’s plans