Have you ever had to admit to your boss that your gun got stolen because you were distracted writing poetry with your former childhood friends at the local discotheque? Sounds like a really bad day at work, right? It was actually an incredible scene I got to play in the Disco Elysium-inspired LARP, 97 Poets of Revachol, last September.
You’ve likely heard of, if not played, Disco Elysium, the role-playing game about an amnesiac detective and his long-suffering partner set in a fantasy realist world. You’re perhaps less likely to have heard about LARP; an acronym for ‘live-action role-playing game’.
LARP is essentially the slightly lesser-known cousin of tabletop role-playing, with the key difference being that you’re physically acting out scenarios. LARPs can range from a few hours of experimental non-verbal scenes in a dark room, to events with hundreds of people spending a weekend fighting each other in a field. Other video games such as The Witcher have been adapted into LARPs, but the surrealism and distinctive writing of Disco makes it particularly challenging to translate into another medium. Why do it?
The Best Detective Games Since LA Noire Watch on YouTube
Rolling, the organisers of 97 Poets of Revachol, is a voluntary organisation based in Terezín, Czechia. A whole international team of writers, designers and prop-makers worked together to make it happen, and they all had different motivations, as they told me through email correspondence. For example, admin lead Iva Vávrová tells me she “loved the uniquely ‘post-Soviet weird’ vibe of the game,” while project lead David František Wagner had “wanted to write games about poverty, creativity, hope, and despair in a mostly realistic setting.”