I larped a lot this year. Mostly because I went to a whole larp convention and overfilled my schedule there, but also because my friends at Goblin Market in Chicago have been running more and more games themselves.

I wish I had played this larp before I wrote the Dune larp. Or maybe I don’t wish that, because likely I would have just made a cheap imitation of this great game.

Shadow Soirée is a secrets and powers larp written by Alison Joy Schafer and Gale Pollard, and I will never ever miss one of their games if I ever have the chance to play one again. I could write a whole glowing review of this game (and maybe I will), and I’m sooo glad it made its way onto my Be-Con schedule. It isn’t a game I’d recommend to an inexperienced player, but it was exactly the kind of game that I love: complex in plot and mechanics.

Gay. 80s. Artist. Vampires. That’s all that you really need to say about Fangs Gallery, a capital-V Vampire larp inspired by Andy Warhol’s The Factory. I actually played this one twice, but only once this year! It’s extremely rules-light and relies mostly on you being willing to be a dramatic vampire artist. This one was written by the Goblin Market folks and they’re doing a much longer version this spring that I will sadly miss out on.

This year, I elected the Pope in Chicago. Conclave, by Willow Palecek, is set in 1492, and you’re all cardinals and bishops and the like, or a handful of kings, all trying to vote on the next pope. It’s been a stalemate and dammit, you need to make a decision or there will be a schism! I played this one at Be-Con. Characters are very light—you don’t get much of a personality, but you do get ideals. For example, I played a character who had some ideas about the Templars, those dirty heretics. It was more complex than that, of course. What was fun about this one is that the entire larp is done through negotiations and voting. It’s Model UN but make it medieval!

Aes Sidhe is a dark fantasy fae larp by Dawn Daigneault and Michael Oldziej that I played at Be-Con. When I saw the description of this game, I thought it was going to be about fae politics and culture moreso than the game actually was. I don’t know if it was just my character or what, but my game ended up being more ridiculous than serious and “dark fantasy.”

Another Goblin Market production! Fallen London is a browser-based sort of choose-your-own adventure sort of gig. It’s hard to explain, and it’s got a ton of lore. This game focused on the power of belief, and I spent most of my time being in love with a snake and being cultishly romantic with a being I’m not sure had the best of intentions, so I’m not sure what everyone was doing at all times. But I did manage to convince a few people that reality is totally overrated as a concept!

This is a larp by Espionage Party and was pretty short and sweet. It’s about people on a space station deciding whether they should relocate to the other side of a wormhole. For us, it played very goofy. It sort of plunged into chaos by the end, and it didn’t feel like it had a very clearly “hey, we’re ending it now!” point. I’m not sure how well the game itself was set up to let you explore the themes of cultural inclusion, individuality vs. cooperation, and plunging into the unknown either, but… they were there! I had fun with this one and wonder how it would play out with a different group.

THIS is the larp that I can’t stop thinking about. It is a Hamlet time loop game by Reggy Granovskiy. Super small cast, as you can imagine—it’s just the characters from Hamlet. The mechanic was really creative, and the concept was just… ugh, it’s so good and I can’t wait until it’s like out and ready for real. It had moments of tragedy, of drama, of romance, of comedy… I played this one at Be-Con with a group of AMAZING larpers and I’m so happy that I did. (I was Guildenstern.)

I played Power Cycle GMed as a house larp with one of my favorite GMs Tasha Robinson, who I believe also wrote the game but please don’t quote me on that! It’s about employees at a video game studio getting together for a party, but… there’s a twist! Which I won’t spoil here. It had a very cool mechanic tied into the twist, so I can’t talk much about that either, but what I loved about this game is how it fostered both paranoia and solidarity all at once!

Another house larp! This is a larp by Alex Helm, where you play as members of a local amateur theatre putting on a production of Les Miserables. Yes, there is singing involved! You get to act out the whole musical and all of your backstage drama. I was Inspector Javert, a total asshole on and off the stage. I love the musical, so getting to larp as an actor playing in the musical is the next best thing after actually getting to be in the musical. Thanks to Jon for running this at his house when it had a huge waitlist at Be-Con!

This larp was very special to me because it was the first one written and run by my friends Haven and Gia. This larp was everything I wanted Aes Sidhe to be in terms of fairy lore and fantasy. I got to play a banshee, and you know I screamed… in the middle of a public park. Yes, we played outside in the summer! It was great! It had very simple mechanics and was the rare game where I got to play a villain who couldn’t simply manipulate her way into getting her way.

Another Goblin Market larp, though Court in the Act is written by Freeform Games. It’s a murder mystery set in the Elizabethan court. Characters are taken directly from history, which is awesome. Have you ever wanted to pit Marlowe and Shakespeare against each other while insulting them both behind their backs in a French accent? Well I got to! The game felt like a fanfiction in many ways, and we got to resolve the tension between Mary and Elizabeth in a way that was satisfactory albeit incredibly unrealistic. It also had great mechanics for discovering secrets and goals.

Played this one at Goblin Market, too! Toil and Trouble is by Kristen Hendricks and Warren Tusk. It’s the smallest larp I’ve played so far, with a cast of only 6 people. Three of them are witches conducting a ritual to decide the fate of three men of destiny. One man will be happy, one will be king, and one will die. It played very similarly to Conclave, in that it was almost completely negotiation. However, it had much more character building, some dueling mechanics, and even some witchy superpowers. Toil and Trouble was elegant and so beautifully tragic.

And a final larp yet again played at Goblin Market! If you’re a fan, you already know: this is an Edward Gorey inspired larp! YES. ALL OF MY GOTH KID DREAMS. This game is clearly named after two of Gorey’s books, but I think the most important inspiration is the Dwindling Party. In the game, you and the other characters are one by one done away by either monsters or each other. Then, you write your own rhyming eptitath before rejoining the the party as a frightful creature! Orli Nativ, our GM and the writer of this larp, had a wonderful workshop that got us comfortable with getting into the strange characters we’d be embodying. The game also had a great character creation!

That’s right! I wrote TWO larps this year!

My first was an ill-advised journey into larp-writing: a 60-person Dune larp. Luckily, I had a great team with me of Ryvre Hardrick, Trey Alsup, and Alexander Sprague. I wrote a ton of characters after reading through a lot of lore. Yeah, I had read the first book and seen both the Lynch and Villaneuve films, but I needed something more. So I read the Dune Encyclopedia because there’s no way I’m going to read any of the Brian sequels…

We ran this game at Gen Con, which was also my first time ever GMing a larp, let alone at a convention. Overall, it went well, but it had its share of difficulties. Luckily, I am if nothing else a very good GM and I can think on my feet and juggle a lot of things all at once. I learned a lot from this experience. Mostly that my hubris sometimes cannot be trusted. But I also learned that I can do hard things on a deadline. I’m excited to polish this one up to run it again.

This one Alex and I wrote by ourselves and ran at Be-Con! No, it’s not really karate. It’s all rock paper scissors, essentially, with a few mechanics that mix up the odds. While we were watching the final season of Cobra Kai, Alex and I knew that we needed to make a Cobra Kai-inspired larp. I really had a good time with this one and can’t wait to bring it out to players again.

So that’s my 2025 in larp wrapped! I was thinking about writing a similar post about all the TTRPGs I played this year (because there are a lot of those, too), but that’s probably not going to happen until 2026.

Happy New Year, everyone! Make it your resolution to try a larp!