A Nordic-style larp about the power of the magic circle.
Run 1: 6-9 May 2022
​Run 2: 14-17 October 2022
Bedford, UK

In the midst of a thick forest, there was a castle that gave shelter to all travellers overtaken by night on their journey: lords and ladies, royalty and their retinue, humble wayfarers.

I crossed a rattling drawbridge. I slipped from my saddle in a dark courtyard. Silent grooms took my horse. I was breathless, hardly able to stand on my legs; after entering the forest I had faced so many trials, encounters, apparitions, duels, that I could no longer order my actions or my thoughts.

​About the larp

I climbed some stairs; I found myself in a high, spacious hall. Many people—also transient guests surely, who had preceded me along the path through the woods—were seated at supper at a table lighted by candelabra. As I looked around, I felt a curious sensation, or, rather, two distinct sensations, which mingled in my mind, still upset and somewhat unstable in my weariness.

The larp is set in the court of The Wounded King, and recounts the noble deeds of lords and ladies dwelling within. No, that’s not true. The larp is set in the modern day, and tells the story of regular people struggling in their grey, mundane lives. No, that’s not true either. Let’s try again. The larp is set in a very special castle...

The Charade

I seemed to be at a sumptuous court, which no one would have expected to find in such a rustic and out-of-the-way castle; and its wealth was evident not only in the costly furnishings and the graven vessels, but also in the calm and ease which reigned among those at the table, all handsome of person and clothed with elaborate elegance. 

Inside the Castle, we stage the Charade. We do not speak of its nature, or fully understand its rules. You can be anyone in the Charade – a queen or her page, a knight-errant on the quest for the Holy Grail or a holy maiden seeing visions from God, a servant, a jester or an herbalist – painted in indigo and vermilion on a Tarot card.

In the Charade we feast and we dance, we duel and we reminisce about the crusades. We knead bread and tend to the livestock, compose courtly poetry, pray and sing hymns, and seek the Philosopher’s Stone. We perform irreverent plays, break our chastity vows, make deals with the Devil – and we flagellate to atone for our sins. But most of all, we try to forget about the Plague.

The Plague

At the same time, I remarked a feeling of random, of disorder, if not actually of license, as if this were not a lordly dwelling but an inn of passage, where people unknown to one another live together for one night and where, in that enforced promiscuity, all feel a relaxation of the rules by which they live in their own surroundings, and—as one resigns oneself to less comfortable ways of life—so one also indulges in freer, unfamiliar behaviour.

Outside of the Castle, the world is being ravaged by the Plague. The Plague has no name, no cause and no cure. It turns the world grey, noisy and confusing, it makes the air hard to breathe and the food taste of plastic. It mesmerises you with television screens and deafens you with elevator music. It muddles your thoughts and makes you forget the courtly ways and the values of beauty, chivalry, honour, and the duty to your liege. It makes you betray the King, God, and your sweet Dulcinea. Instead, it fills your mind with alien words and phrases: nine-to-five, retirement funds, carbon footprint, custody, mortgage, financial crisis, chemotherapy, 12 steps, microtransactions, swipe left to say no, rush hour, service is disrupted due to a passenger on the tracks, please hold, all of our lines are currently busy, put on your own mask before assisting others, stand clear of the closing doors.

Characters and Personae

We remained seated, looking one another in the face, with the torment of not being able to exchange the many experiences each of us had to communicate. At that point, on the table which had just been cleared, the man who seemed the lord of the castle set a pack of playing cards. They were tarot cards, larger than the kind we use for ordinary games: Kings, Queens, Knights, and Pages were all young people magnificently dressed, as if for a princely feast.

The larp has two layers: you, playing the larp, will play a character – a regular, modern day person. Your character, in turn, within the castle will stage the charade, and embody a medieval persona. The degree to which the persona is present in the character’s mind varies between characters – some have lived in the Castle for more than a decade and fully believe they live in the medieval world, and are only rarely haunted by dreams of neon-lit cities, some treat the charade as temporary escapism from their everyday life and feel fully in control of it (and yet, more and more yearn to go back to this world when back in their real lives). For all of the characters, however, the level of immersion in the charade will dynamically change during the larp – they will all be caught in the tug-of-war between reality and fantasy.

The character sheets provide backgrounds, motivations and relationships both on character and persona level. The core of the character sheet is the interplay between the character and their persona, which will be explored in psychological detail.

The metaphysics of the Charade are intentionally undefined; the interpretation of what happens in the castle can differ depending on the character. Is it just an innocent game, easily forgotten once we leave the castle? A shared delusion? A bizarre cult? A drug-induced hallucination? The ultimate theatre performance? If so, who is directing it? Are we being possessed by the spirits of the past inhabitants of the castle? Do we choose our personae, or do they choose us? Is this experience healing us or dragging us into madness?

Structure and Themes

We began to spread out the cards on the table, face up, and to give them their proper value in games, or their true meaning in the reading of fortunes. And yet none of us seemed to wish to begin playing, and still less to question the future, since we were as if drained of all future, suspended in a journey that had not ended nor was to end. There was something else we saw in those tarots, something that no longer allowed us to take our eyes from the gilded pieces of that mosaic.

The larp will start with a few hours of workshops on Friday afternoon. The in-character part of the larp will start on Friday evening and continue until Sunday evening. It will consist of continuous fluid-time play, encompassing several months in the life of the community, with real-time communal events like a royal wedding, Carnival, Lent, Easter, and the arrival of the Plague demarcating the progress of time. 

As the larp progresses, the looming threat of the Plague becomes more and more real; in order to escape it, the characters push the Charade to its extremes.

The larp explores the themes of: escapism, alibis, self-expression, search for meaning, idealised relationships, emergent social rules, delusions, and larping itself. The tone is dramatic, somewhat theatrical, and gradually more and more surreal – but all this is underpinned by realism, kept behind closed doors.

The larp will be using standard, well-established safety techniques. There will also be several meta-techniques exploring and enhancing the interplay between the two levels of the larp.

Join us

The initial sign-up period ended on 29 December 2019, but you can still fill in the sign-up form to be added to the waiting list. Because of the pandemic, our waiting list is quite short and you have a good chance of getting a spot.

We look forward to playing with you!

One of the guests drew the scattered cards to himself, leaving a large part of the table clear; but he did not gather them into a pack nor did he shuffle them; he took one card and placed it in front of himself. We all noticed the resemblance between his face and the face on the card, and we thought we understood that, with the card, he wanted to say “I” and that he was preparing to tell his story.

​-- The Castle of Crossed Destinies, Italo Calvino