I’m just returning from Goetia, a larp by Omen Star. It was great to see a lot of friends, and further reassuring to know my recent health issues didn’t hamper my game much. That’s a relief. My recent life experience has been epochal life changes against a backdrop of utter mundanity. It’s nice to know I can still go fuck up someone else’s life, even if they’re only fictional.

Goetia is one of those larps where, having heard the description, I knew I had to sign up for it. The players take the roles of occultists who have each, in their own way, dedicated themselves to one of the demons listed in the Ars Goetia. One fateful weekend, they gather and allow themselves to be possessed. This is, to nobody’s surprise but the occultists, a Bad Idea™.

The game was played in roughly five acts. The game starts with the humans arriving. That evening there’s a ritual and the demons possess everybody. The next morning the humans wake up and have to come to terms with the events of the night before. The demons return and there’s a grand banquet. Finally the demons leave, giving the humans a last chance to say goodbye before divine retribution — in the form of angels with baseball bats — is visited upon them. No one survives.

The larp was designed as a sandbox. Everyone was given their characters and the schedule of events, and then largely left alone to make their own drama. The organizers stuck to organizing, and it’s a mark of how well-organized the game was that in the middle of one of the worst storms in the UK in 2023 I barely noticed the weather.¹ The food was ample, on-time, and tasty. The accommodations were reasonable.² Everything ran smoothly from my point of view and having organized larps I know that isn’t actually the case, which I suppose is the point of organization. The organizers give all the credit to their crew³ and the crew was absolutely stellar, but you don’t end up with a stellar crew without stellar organizers.

I enjoyed myself quite a bit. As a human I was playing Danny Wilson, a filthy rich practitioner of sex magick who had screwed their way across most of occult society. This was a fun, flirty role in which I hit on most of the players and half of the furniture. I really can’t emphasize enough the advantages of playing an outgoing character in sandbox games; since everyone needs to find their own play it’s easier to do it when you’ve got a solid character reason to talk to people.

The demon side was more challenging. My demon was Samigina, the “sin scrivener,” a minor Marquis of Avarice responsible for keeping the rolls of all who die in sin. They mostly wanted a promotion, so figuring most people would be playing their demons as over-the-top embodiments of malice and cruelty I decided to play Samigina as a petty, dull bureaucrat. In other words, I played for comedy. This turned out to be a blast. There is no conversation which cannot be directed by a particularly determined sort of person towards the possibility of advancement. I misunderstood innuendo. I ignored subtlety. I was bloody-minded in my pursuit of a promotion, and I got there by the end of the game.

So I had a great time playing the game, but I didn’t play it the way the organizers intended, and I wasn’t the only one. This is, of course, the great threat of sandbox games. You can veer off the expected path for hundreds of reasons, most of them unanticipated by the designers. And when that happens, as a player, you are often entirely on your own.

Most sandbox games aren’t true sandboxes, where the designers set up the world and then disavow any agency in how things play out like the larp equivalent of deists. There’s usually some attempt to shape the play, by pushing out events at certain times or having NPCs meandering around trying to nudge play in certain directions.⁴ And virtually all designers put their thumb on the scales by writing characters they expect to interact in particular ways; I might write character A with a deep, secret passion for character B and then write character B with a hidden loathing for character A and giggle about it when the sheets for A and B are distributed.⁵

In Goetia, the design — explicitly stated — was that your demon would end up torturing your human. So the moment of peak dramatic tension is the morning of the second day, where your human is coming to terms with the horrible things their demon made them do the previous night. For many people, that’s exactly how the game played out. They sinned in the evening and repented the following morning, after it was tragically far too late.⁶

But it seemed to me that wasn’t really written into all the characters. My demon had virtually no connection to my human as far as I could tell, and while I suppose being controlled by a bureaucrat is a kind of torture for a libertine it’s not the kind that’s going to cause a lot of anguish in the morning. Other players felt their demons were entirely too simpatico with their humans for there to be any real friction between them.

In my case, that meant I spent the first day having an incredible amount of fun as a human, then having to drop that and find an entirely new game as a demon, then having to drop that and go back to the human the following morning, where far too many people were wandering around being absolutely miserable. I really wanted to return to all the plots I had set up as a human, but it just wasn’t possible. The game had moved on. And then we were back as demons for the banquet, and then had the barest of interludes as a human before the game was over.⁷

This was further hampered by the fact that the demons were largely static beings. They’re thinly drawn and basically one note in the source material⁸ plus you know they can’t be harmed so there’s no real stakes there.⁹ This is not a problem if you play the game the way it was designed because in that game the demons are mainly devices to propel the human play, but it doesn’t give you much to work with if you go off the rails.¹⁰

I honestly don’t know if this is an issue. If you’re designing a sandbox game some people are inevitably going to head off in strange directions, despite your best efforts. Maybe some of the characters needed to be refocused, or the expectations for the game needed to be more clearly communicated in the time leading up to the larp.¹¹ Maybe some thought and design needed to be put into things for players to engage with if they went too far afield. And maybe it’s just the way these things go, sometimes.

One of the highlights of the weekend was dinner on Saturday night, mentioned rather coyly in the design document as the “Devil’s Banquet.”¹² I had been talking with the organizers before the game and had some idea of what was coming, but even then it was overwhelming. It was conceived as a seven-course dinner with each course honoring one of the seven deadly sins. The courses were, in order:

1. Envy: green split-pea soup.

2. Wrath: a tagine with tofu and a drizzle of hot sauce.

3. Sloth: Roasted cabbage. The plates were not cleared.

4. Avarice: Cous cous with saffron, butternut squash, and garnished with gold leaf. The guests served themselves.

5. Gluttony: a cup of mint tea.

6. Pride: a trifle.

7. Lust: poached lychee with a tequila lime sorbet sprinkled with pink peppercorns and rose petals, served on a glazed ceramic vulva.

The trifle requires a little explanation. The the dish was announced as “a Trifle,” some picture-perfect bowls were distributed to the tables, and everyone tasted what was assumed to be the first dessert course to discover it was in actuality savory. Almost meat-flavored, in fact.¹³ Many diners found the dish unpalatable and it was, at least for that first bite when you were expecting whipped cream and sponge cake and got yogurt and sun-dried tomatoes.¹⁴

The food was good. Not just cleverly themed but really actually very very good. It’s probably the most technically accomplished food I’ve eaten outside a professional kitchen, and I can imagine crowds of Londoners happily dropping £150 a plate for the experience.¹⁵ If I have anything negative to say about the banquet, it’s that it was too good. I was annoyed to have a larp going on during dinner. If I’m going to have a really good meal, I want to be someplace I can savor it, with friends I can share it with, lingering over each dish. But that’s not larp. At least not this one.¹⁶

As someone who loves larp and loves food maybe just a little bit more, it’s got me thinking about the ways we integrate the two. An organizer needs to feed everybody if you’re running a larp longer than about six hours. A lot of games treat it as an afterthought, something you can tack on at the end. I’m starting to wonder if that’s the better approach; great food is inevitably going to detract from a larp, just as much as a great larp is going to detract from the food.

But I’m never going to be happy with that approach. When I organize a larp, I’m trying to create a world for my players to inhabit. Food is a vital part of that. I’m going to need to think about ways to integrate the two. It’s a lot harder than it seems.

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Footnotes

¹ The weather caused a massive amount of flooding, rendering some roads impassible and some rooms in the location uninhabitable. That it was reduced to a scenic element for the players is no small feat.

² The game was hosted at Ingestre Hall, a Jacobean mansion since turned into a Residential Arts Center. They have dorm-style accommodations of the type where you have to assemble your own duvet and cover and there’s a row of shared showers down the hallway.

³ Insisted I mention them specifically, in fact

⁴ In Goetia both the organizers were playing NPCs, and given my experience with Giovanni: The Last Supper I was a little leery of that, but it worked fine. I think the primary difference was it was very clear the organizers were there to organize first. I was never reluctant to approach them out-of-character with concerns, and the few times I saw them involved in scenes they were always focused on promoting or propelling someone’s game forward.

⁵ In most larps I’ve played, character A and character B will end up married.

⁶ I know there are people out there who still have religious convictions against pretending to be demon-summoning cultists under the impression that it’s glorifying witchcraft or Satanism but a quick survey of these games suggests they’re all more puritanical than the Hays Code. Goetia ends with a mass slaughter of the humans by angels for their transgressions, surely the spiritual equivalent of going down in a hail of gunfire.

⁷ One of the disappointments of the final act for me was that there was no firm cutoff where everyone was back in human form. I wanted to tie up a few loose ends and have final scenes with some people, but as often as not I’d track someone down to discover they were still possessed by their demon and tying up those loose ends instead.

Note to designers: if people are being asked to split their time playing two characters during a game, you are halving the time either character will be available for interaction. Be aware of it.

⁸ Okay, the source material is really kind of an odd jumble of traits — Samigina appears as a tiny horse who will teach you the liberal arts, so they’re your go-to if you want to learn ethics from a pony — but they’re still these formless, timeless beings and unwieldy to hang a character arc on.

⁹ A friend pointed out the demons in the game don’t have any culture beyond their hierarchy, which may have been why so much of the demon game revolved around status and shifting allegiances.

¹⁰ I’ve been thinking about Baphomet, which is another game in which obscenely powerful beings possess and torment humans, and that neatly works around the problem in two ways. First, there’s only two of them, so you never have a situation when everyone is possessed at the same time. Second, you’re only possessed by them for 5-10 minutes at a time, so you spend the vast majority of the game as a human.

¹¹ One of the things I wish I had done right in Triumph is communicate those expectations to the players. I did try. I wasn’t entirely successful.

¹² The idea behind the banquet goes to the organizers, but credit for the planning, the menu, and running the kitchen for the feast goes to Harry Harrold, who deserves all the accolades. I have only managed to attend two larps where Harry was responsible for the food, but ever since the first one I’ve made an effort to apply for every one I’ve been aware of.

¹³ The entire dinner was vegan, which didn’t make this any less unsettling.

¹⁴ Pride being, in this case, literally hard to swallow. I thought it was decent if a little strong, once you wrapped your head around what you were eating.

¹⁵ I’d want to tinker with the menu a tiny bit — I’d start with a cream of cucumber soup with mint and lime, best served cold, as an example — but that’s a quibble at best.

¹⁶ The rhythms of a meal in a restaurant don’t map well to the rhythms of a larp. I can easily imagine a game among a group of diners where the meal is the larp, but as soon as you put that meal in a larger context I’m having trouble getting things to line up. You’re either sacrificing the larp for the practicalities of eating or you’re not getting properly fed. It’s why buffets are so popular at larps, and I think it’s telling that all the rest of the food in Goetia was served off game.