When I first mapped out my autumn travel, I imagined I’d visit at least a little more of Czechia than Prague on this jaunt. I had gone so far as to book a few days in Karlovy Vary. But post-pancreatitus, all I wanted was to recover somewhere low stress and the thought of hauling my luggage and figuring out the Czech trains was a bit much. So I just booked a longer stay in Prague, and mostly kept to my hotel room.¹

Prague is still gorgeous, and still touristy, and I’m still amazed at how lovely the city is. It’s got a world-weariness about it that I find comforting. I realize the restaurants I’m dining in and the bars I’m hanging out in are more for tourists than locals, but the architecture is as glorious as it’s always been. That goes a long way.

I should have gotten out more, but since I was recovering I stayed in until some of the other players of the larp I was attending arrived, and I kept myself to a couple relatively short dinners out. Prague still isn’t great for vegetarians² but I ordered my way around the salads and poké bowls and noodle dishes available for delivery and did alright. I did visit the Lego Museum³ one day, and I’m still desperately trying to see Mucha’s Slav Epic again.⁴ But otherwise I’m happy to have stayed in, attended my larp, and be flying back out.

My flight leaves tonight at 9:15pm. I’ll be back eventually. I never stay away for long.

The larp I was in town for was 97 Poets of Revachol, a game set in the world of Disco Elysium. Disco Elysium is a cult⁵ computer role-playing game set in a post-communist world that’s settled into a stagnant capitalist funk, not far off from the sort of states which exist in Eastern Europe today. Stylistically it borrows heavily from the ’70s, with a lot of wide lapels and loud ties and chunky jewelry. I keep complaining much recent larp design seems stuck in a rut, and this certainly seemed different to me, so I felt a bit of an obligation to check it out.

The game was played at an old abandoned military hospital in Terezín which is pretty significantly run down,⁶ perfect for portraying a dilapidated apartment block in the poorest neighborhood in Revachol. You had an option to sleep there, although that involved mattresses on bare floors in unheated rooms; I took the upgrade to stay in a nearby hotel and enjoyed a hot shower every morning with zero regret. The food was basic but edible, even if there were a couple dozen wasps dragging their asses through the jam every morning.

I didn’t have any experience with Disco Elysium, my last attempt at playing it having gone badly,⁷ so I was more or less going in cold. It really didn’t matter, you can grasp the basics pretty quickly. The setting is really ideally designed to explore questions of political organization and migration and economic systems, with a pretty heavy dose of surrealism and spiritual beliefs on top. Throw in a bunch of gangs and drugs and groups working at cross-purposes and the larp practically writes itself.

The challenge, then is in figuring out how to balance all the disparate elements. I was playing “Saga, the Pale Whisperer,” an elderly immigrant who had washed up with their family having failed to navigate the Pale⁸ and ended up stuck. I could have leaned into the family drama, or the politics — a number of the groups were profoundly anti-immigrant and you could play off that — but I mostly steered towards the surreal. My connection to the Pale provided a in to the supernatural elements, and I spent a lot of time trying to work out what was going on behind the scenes, in a way which could have been dementia or could have been paranoia or could have been a genuine threat which needed dealing with.

Maybe one of the most interesting mechanics was the Unseen. In Disco Elysium your character is constantly arguing with different aspects of themselves; these are represented by full dialog trees you can explore whenever you exercise a skill. In 97 Poets this is elegantly duplicated by the introduction of “The Unseen,” characters who wander around and can’t be directly interacted with unless they talk to you first. They were played by other players, and had their own agendas and stories, but were also expected to gently push forward other player’s plots. This has been done before in a lot of larps, but here it struck me as a particularly clever and effective translation of the source material.

Honestly, overall I thought the game was great. The organizers, Rolling, tend to have a fairly regimented schedule about their games, and while I wish my scenes were a little more spaced out⁹ I can’t deny it provided a lot to do. If you’re good at coming up with your own drama this would get in the way of that, but if you were looking for something vaguely on rails the game pretty efficiently steered you into drama.¹⁰ If I had any broad criticism of the game, it’s because none of my plots really got tied up within the larp. And that made for a very awkward ending.

So my character was involved in a bunch of different plot threads. There were growing tensions with my family over whether to leave or stay, over what had caused them to get stuck in Revachol, over whether either of the children would become navigators in their own right. I was also a part of the Mold Conspiracy, a group of people who were convinced there was some deeper meaning behind the black mold which had been spreading throughout the apartment block. I was becoming disconnected with the world at large and in exchange becoming more attuned to the Pale and the Unseen. And there were were a few secret plots I was involved in, as well.¹¹

I had been pretty happy with how things were moving along. This is one of the few games I’ve played where everything was progressing towards a resolution of one sort or another by the end of the game. But over the course of the last day, for some reason, nothing seemed to land. A few plots got dropped because there was so much going on. Some things did reach a definitive ending — my family fell apart, in rather emphatic larp style — but it was very sudden and felt like there were still loose ends to tie off.¹² Others were resolving but everyone ran out of time and they had to be postponed to an epilogue after the game. And some things seemed to just run out of plot.

That’s always a risk with larps. So much of your game depends on what your coplayers want to play on, and reaching a satisfactory conclusion relies on them having the time and the interest to work with you to find it. But that wasn’t the whole problem. Sometimes plots won’t resolve, no matter how dedicated players are to resolving them.¹³

A group of us in 97 Poets — very minor spoilers ahead — had diligently followed up on the Mold Conspiracy. Attended every meeting, talked with a lot of different characters, followed all the instructions we were given. Finally we met for a final meeting. And absolutely nothing happened. There was no grand reveal, no ultimate revelation, no explanation for what was behind everything. We had put hours from each of our games into tracking it down, and had no payoff for the effort we invested. I’m still not sure if we missed something, or if someone dropped a ball somewhere, or if there just isn’t an ending written into the game.¹⁴

That’s the way real life works, a lot of the time. And there’s certainly a style of slice-of-life fiction which follows that logic; in Ulysses none of the characters end in a much different place than they started¹⁵ and it’s regarded as a masterpiece. Most fiction works to provide some kind of character arc, and those that refuse tend to feel unsatisfying.¹⁶ My game did feel somewhat unfinished. I was assured by some players that a few of my major plots would conclude in ways I liked after the game but it’s always disappointing to push off things like that. Anyone can narrate anything in an epilogue; you lose the cocreative element that makes larp so special. Things you manage to pull together within the game always feel more meaningful.

My advice to larp designers would be to take every character you write and every plot you design and ask yourself how it’s likely to play out. If there are a bunch of ways it could go, make sure all of them have some conclusion. Don’t include conflicting plots.¹⁷ It’s fine if players choose not to pursue certain plots or if they find resolutions you didn’t expect. But you should never have players working on things that are never going to pay off.¹⁸

As a player, just keep it in mind. It’s harder to get a sense of the big picture, especially if the game isn’t fully transparent. But your coplayers trust you to help them have a great game, just as you trust them to do the same in exchange. Do your best not to disappoint them.

Next: Rosh Hashanah, 2024, London
Prev: London (LHR) to Prague (PRG)

Footnotes

¹ Ironically, Korlovy Vary would have been a great place to recuperate. It’s a spa town. But I still would have had to figure out the transportation and it took a week for my digestive system to get back to normal, so I don’t regret skipping it for the moment.

² This isn’t quite accurate. It’s actually great for vegetarians if you avoid Czech food; there’s a ton of Vietnamese and Thai and Indian places. And there appear to have been a bunch of vegetarian and vegan cafes and restaurants of some ambition sprouting up. But if you’re going out to each with a large crowd of people you’re probably heading to a tavern or a pub, and those are still heavily invested in pig’s knuckles and pork roasts.

My advice: find a burger place. The Tavern has a moderate amount of space — better if you can make a reservation — and a lot of vegetarian options. Not great if you’re trying to eat healthy, but I doubt you’ll find that in a Prague tavern no matter where you go.

³ The largest collection of Lego in the world in private hands, apparently. It could have used with a decent dusting, but it was fascinating to see the history of Lego presented from an outsider’s perspective. Lot of strange models out there, and the changes in strategy over the years was engrossing.

My saddest takeaway: to see very clearly the shift over the years towards cross-promotion and branded sets. Sure, I guess it’s kind of cool to have a Moon Knight minifig or a Queer Eye Loft set, but it’s all starting to feel a bit corporate to me, less like something you play with and more like something adults assemble and glue together and put on display as a lifestyle accessory. I thought the coolest thing they had in the museum was a model of the Charles Bridge filled with minifig tourists and street performers and pickpockets and food vendors that would have been large enough for me to fully lie down on. That I loved.

⁴ Mucha made a series of incredible paintings detailing the story of the Slavic people, intended as their masterwork. I visited it almost a decade ago but it’s been the victim of a long-standing ownership fight and got moved out of Prague in 2020. That’s apparently all been resolved and it’s due to be returned to display in the capital … in a month or so.

⁵ I say cult, but it won Game of the Year, so it’s more cult in attitude than obscurity.

⁶ I do suspect there is no way the government of the United States would have allowed a bunch of larpers to run around a building in that condition.

⁷ It was shortly after my heart attack, and I had turned up at a friend’s place to recuperate. It seemed like the perfect time to try out the game, so I downloaded and installed it and fired it up. The opening scene has you shuffling around your apartment getting dressed, with your tie doing lazy circles while hanging off a ceiling fan. I tried to recover it and as a result of the exertion died from a massive heart attack.

I quit, uninstalled, and haven’t played since.

⁸ The Pale is this strange mystical mist which divides most of the countries in Disco Elysium from one another. It’s dangerous to navigate — my character was preternaturally good at navigating it, although they’d recently lost their touch — and prolonged exposure to it can make you sick or steal your memories or potentially reveal secrets.

⁹ I’d often have three scenes back-to-back-to-back followed by four hours of unstructured time, which was exhausting.

¹⁰ There were a surprising number of first-time larpers, most of whom were Disco Elysium superfans who were excited to get to play around in that world for a little bit. And I bet this approach to guided design works fantastically for them.

¹¹ Technically the Mold Conspiracy was semi-secret as well, but at our first meeting we discussed what our “secret greeting” should be and decided it was likely “Hey, have you heard about the Mold Conspiracy?” Plus my character was specifically instructed to bring up the mold every chance they got, so there wasn’t much point to subterfuge.

¹² Not that this is how it played out for me, but if you have an argument with a significant other and they run off and get hit by a car, sure, that relationship is over but you’re probably gonna feel like there’s unfinished business there with no chance to resolve it.

¹³ A related problem is the tendency for players to postpone decisions within the game. It is almost always a mistake, in a larp sense, to decide to do nothing or to “wait and see what happens.” Even making the worst decision possible in a situation generates more interesting play than leaving the status quo.

A corollary: when you have groups making decisions, never frame them as “Do we do X or not?” Instead decide between “Do we do X or Y?” Then no matter what, something happens when you get out of the meeting.

¹⁴ There’s a common error in larp design that I think comes primarily from role-playing games, where if you picked up the “nondescript stone” from the riverbed, and later you showed it to a jeweler who polished it into a “shiny jewel,” then later you can offer it to the weaponsmith who’ll exchange it for the legendary Sword of Improbability which lets you unlock a secret side-quest and get the good ending. This kind of thing makes at least some sense in a computer game, where players are expected to play through multiple times and will stumble upon your cool Easter egg eventually, or worst case encounter it in a walkthough.

But I’m playing your three-day larp once, maybe twice. I can’t restore to a previous save and retry decisions. Any effort you put into a plot which nobody sees is wasted effort, and if you thought up this really amazing thing for your players, why are you keeping it hidden from most of them?

I don’t think that’s what happened here based on the people I talked to after the game, but I can’t be entirely sure.

¹⁵ Okay, Stephen might, but even that’s tentative.

¹⁶ One of the most famous examples being Ned’s execution in A Game of Thrones. George R. R. Martin wanted to write something that felt like history, and history is full of false starts and dead ends — the Princes in the Tower disappear without a trace leaving generations of historians to wonder what happened to them — which never result in a satisfying conclusion. It’s history’s refusal to obey our narrative devices that makes it such a compelling read.

But even GRRM couldn’t keep it going. The later books have largely lost that feeling as the characters most important to the narrative have become more and more obvious over time. I half wonder if that’s why The Winds of Winter is taking so long, if the appeal of writing more fictional history like Fire & Blood and The World of Ice & Fire ends up being greater than the urge to finish a narrative. Kind of the way some people get obsessed with painting Warhammer miniatures but never actually manage to play a game with them.

¹⁷ What I mean by this is if one of the characters is searching for their long-lost mother, and the mother has a plot that could get them killed halfway through the game, you might end up in a situation where the first player cannot resolve their plot.

There’s a ton of ways to fix this. You could arrange for an anonymous letter to provide the information, or have another character discover the secret and make the connection. You could time things so that the revelation always happens in the first half of the larp. You could allow the character of the mother to return as a spirit or a ghost or a vision. You could design the game to be fully transparent, so both players will know about it ahead of time and can arrange their plots appropriately. All of these reduce or eliminate the chance that one of your players will be wandering around the game trying to make progress on something that’s never going to pay off.

¹⁸ The one exception is when the futility of the player’s actions are telegraphed well in advance. In Inside Hamlet there’s a whole subset of the game that’s obsessed with the defense of Elsinore and the movement of troops, and it’s made very clear up front your actions engaging with it will have no effect on the eventual outcome. You’re doomed to fail, even if your character doesn’t realize it. Knowing that going in lets you invest in it as a narrative device and play for drama rather than trying to win at it.