Goetia was an event run by Omen Star – the team of Kol Ford and Rebel Rehbinder. It took place at Ingestre Hall over the 19th to 22nd October; that was its first run, and as of the time of writing Omen Star have not stated definitively whether or not a second run will take place. It is, however, definitely Omen Star’s intention to keep running other events, and the Goetia concept included some experimental features worthy of note, so a review can both serve the purpose of analysing the Omen Star house style and considering lessons learned from the experiment.
The concept of the game runs as follows: somewhere in the 1930s, a clique of occultists is gathering to carry out one of the boldest magical operations ever attempted. The majority of the attendees have cultivated or obtained, wittingly or otherwise, an ongoing relationship with the spirits of the Ars Goetia, the most brimstone-infused section of the grimoire known as the Lesser Key of Solomon. The secret society which has organised the gathering consists primarily of people who have ended up in a similar relationship with the Fallen – those who were not cast out of Heaven for participating in the original revolt (as was the case with the Goetia) but who were ejected subsequently for procreating with humans and siring the Nephilim.
By purposefully allowing themselves to be possessed by the Goetia and the Fallen, the gathered occultists hope to stage a re-enactment of the Second Fall – the time when the Fallen, cast out of Heaven, purchased for themselves a place in Hell. What they do not realise is that in the world of the supernal and transcendent, time is an illusion – and what will transpire in the house will not only be a re-enactment, but the actual reaching of the deal itself. And the deal will be sealed with their lives…
How this translates to a LARP is as follows: each player ends up with not one but two characters, their human occultist and the Goetic demon who will possess them. (The Fallen were NPCs played by members of the crew.) As structured by Omen Star, the story pans out over two days (following OOC workshops on Thursday evening and Friday morning to early afternoon): in early Friday afternoon you play your humans, having just arrived at Hoxton Manor. After nightfall, a mass ritual is roleplayed and the characters are all possessed by their demons, who from this point are in command; the human being is stuck as a passenger in their body, able to act only to the extent that their demon chooses to let them out.
Come Saturday morning, your human character has reasserted themselves (though your demon can jump in whenever they wish), and must deal with the emotional fallout of what happened last night – and the dawning horror that nobody can leave the grounds of the house. Saturday evening sees the demons return in force to enjoy a seven-course banquet served up by the Fallen as part of their bid for entry into Hell, the forging of the pact between the Goetia and the Fallen, and the abandonment of the humans by their demons, as they cast aside their mortal vessels and abandon them to their ultimate fate.
A Nordic Route To Dante’s Inferno
Omen Star unabashedly took a “Nordic LARP” approach with this one. It’s not a term overly foregrounded on the game site, but organisers and crew used the term repeatedly at the event itself to describe the overall ethos, and I think that was the right call, since “Nordic LARP” is the sort of thing where the definition is fuzzy, but people tend to have fairly strong ideas about what it means anyway. In an in-person discussion, instant clarification is possible in a way which it isn’t when putting out a static website advertising a game.
I’ve not used it before on the blog a lot, in part because I want to write for a readership which doesn’t have extensive LARP knowledge (since the bulk of the articles here are about tabletop RPGs), in part because the more I avoid using it, the less I need to to clarify my personal definition of it. Now, though, it’s time to define how I use the term, since I’m going to be analysing a game which calls itself Nordic, I ought to define the lens I’m looking that through at the start – then if I’m completely off-base, you’ll be safe to ignore me, right? The NordicLARP.org definition of the term talks a bit about the way such games tend to be organised, a feature arising from the particular social structures and logistical models favoured by the scene the term originated in, with concepts of “non-profit self-organisation” emphasised. I’m not sure I’d put much weight on that, though; to to my mind there’s absolutely no reason why you can’t run a game which is otherwise wholly Nordic on a for-profit basis, and certainly I’ve participated in plenty of games which were not remotely Nordic but could still be described as being arranged on a “non-profit self-organisation” basis.
My definition of Nordic LARP, then, comes down to how the game works in practice. To my mind, Nordic LARP tends to be the sort of thing which emphasises the following characteristics:
- Minimalist rules – often, but not always, to the point where the only defined rules relate to fundamental safety and consent concerns.
- A major emphasis on creating satisfying narratives or deep character immersion; these are not the sorts of games where you can show up, sit by your group’s campfire all weekend, show up to the big battles, and go home again and get much of a full game experience.
- A collaborative approach to game outcomes; rather than fostering OOC competition, Nordic LARPs tend to create environments where even if your characters are at each others’ throats, you’ll tend to do things like agreeing with each other which of you (if either) comes out best from a fist fight if your characters lose their temper come to blows.
- In light of that, there’s also a greatly decreased emphasis on “hard skills”. Doing well in combat is based on an agreed understanding that your character is good at combat – it’s not a factor of you being any good at LARP fighting. You will probably not have to solve any codes by hand or otherwise resolve puzzles with your own brain power in order to get IC advantage or advance the plot.
- A slant towards emotional catharsis being the point of the exercise, though this is by no means universal enough to be a key feature of the definition. I’ll talk more about this in the next section.
These characteristics are not necessarily unique to Nordic LARP, mind – but when you find all of them coming together in one place, you’re likely to find something which tastes Nordic, even if that’s the result of convergent evolution rather than direct inspiration. For instance, the UK’s “freeform” tradition – rooted in LARPs with minimal to no system – developed in parallel with the Nordic LARP tradition (and, in its early years, had little overlap with it), and ticks several of the same boxes (and in some instances will tick all of them).
Some games I’ve covered here could be argued as being at least somewhat Nordic, even if the organisers would not necessarily use the term. A Meeting of Monarchs was very much compatible with the Nordic ethos. The EyeLARP family of games – including some I have covered here like Land Without a King and Second Breakfast – have varying levels of “Nordic-ness”; Second Breakfast uses a very Nordic style to hit an emotional range that a lot of Nordic LARP neglects, whilst Land Without a King tended a bit more towards high adventure than is typical for Nordic LARP, but the way combat was resolved through a simple “win the fights you think you should win, take the wounds you think you should take” approach meant a collaborative attitude could get you further than typical.
For that matter, Anarchy – the historical game I co-ran – was highly freeform and so was, in many respects, a bit Nordic-adjacent; it had a somewhat more involved character generation system and combat system than seems typical for Nordic LARP, but the former was largely designed to create interesting plot through establishing characters’ social position and material stakes in the kingdom (and therefore identify things which could be threatened by the civil war) and the latter was kept astonishingly simple, the better to create an environment where combat is a terrifying situation where, once someone has made the decision to unleash violence, nobody can be too sure how it will end.
Possibly the most un-Nordic feature of Anarchy – beyond the emphasis on player-designed characters and the provision of a downtime system – was that Anarchy included strong themes of political and social competition. (It was, after all, a game about a civil war.) This tended to mitigate against a highly collaborative approach to play – if everyone is agreeing who will win or lose in a particular conflict, it might be possible to tell stories in which the characters are greatly surprised by sudden, shocking betrayals and twists, but it’s significantly harder to tell stories in which the players (and referees!) are surprised by outcomes. The trial by combat at event 4 of Anarchy, in which the murderer of King Stephen’s heir fought one on one with the commander of King Stephen’s armies over the slaying, would have been vastly less tense and memorable had the players in question agreed in advance how it would go, and in the end the way it actually went played out (both in terms of the outcome, and what happened to get to that outcome) turned out to be a serendipitous accident which perhaps nobody would have foreseen.
That said, you could work competition into Goetia if you wanted. The referees made it clear that if you wanted to play a “non-transparent game” – in which you didn’t know what other player characters’ agendas were and it was possible to be surprised by characters socially outmanoeuvring you – you were welcome to. Several character briefs lent themselves to this – particularly when it came to demons seeking advancement or out to conserve their positions in their demonic courts.
At the same time, whereas at Anarchy we did have a system which helped us define people’s social standing, landholdings, and so on – and therefore could define things which people could go after and establish stakes in interpersonal conflicts – all of that sort of thing was abstracted out in Goetia; demons had their ranks in their courts, and humans likewise had an implied level of social cachet and personal resources, but none of it could really be targeted through gameplay without the player in question yes-anding it; similarly, you could draw your dagger and stab someone at Anarchy on the spur of the moment, Goetia‘s lack of a combat system not only encouraged but outright required players to come to an agreement on how fights would go.
The more rules-light a LARP goes, the more it will tend to downplay game tactics and amplify character immersion and narrative – that’s not because you can’t do character immersion and interesting narratives in rules-heavier LARPs, you can, it’s more that without a tightly structured rules set you can’t have much in the way of a satisfying tactical game, just like you’re not going to get a game with lots of puzzles around code-cracking if you don’t actually seed coded messages in the game. The more defined rules and structured areas of gameplay you strip away from a LARP, the shorter the list of things to focus on you have; character/setting immersion and narrative construction are basically the bits which persist the most. That being the case, the convergent evolution of UK freeforms and Nordic LARP is no surprise.
That said, given the above considerations I think the difference between Nordic LARP and other very rules-light traditions of LARP comes in the type of emergent narrative prized. Politically competitive UK freeforms and the like embrace the emergent narrative that comes from people all seeking to advance their personal agendas without knowing each other’s agendas; Anarchy did this, and likewise with its combat system it prized the emergent narrative that comes from violence being a risky and dangerous endeavour which can backfire on the perpetrators. Nordic LARP, conversely, often passes up the emergent narrative which comes from surprises, and from game systems which can yield outcomes which neither participant would have expected or thought to propose, and instead embraces the emergent narratives which come from players collaborating on the OOC level to agree on how IC conflicts resolve. Sure, you lose unpredictability on an individual conflict basis – but when lots of people are doing this in one event, you still have unpredictable and surprising outcomes which arise from how all those little agreed-upon events bump into each other.
Solomonic Demons, Cathartic Consequences
Another characteristic of the Nordic LARP scene which often gets cited is the embrace of catharsis. This is by no means a universal – emotionally intense, cathartic roleplaying is by no means required under the NordicLARP.org definition I linked earlier, for example – but in places where I have seen Nordic LARP discussed, the Nordic scene tends to have a bit of a reputation for skewing in that direction.
This can reach the point of caricature; the archetypal Nordic LARP is a non-genre game, taking place in the contemporary world, in which all supernatural, fantasy-based, science fictional, or other trappings which might nudge the game into genre tropes are absent, and the scenario is rigorously focused on a realistic topic and usually results in characters enduring grim trauma and feeling a lot of feelings about it. In other words, the LARP equivalent of a arthouse kitchen sink drama, full of little people having big emotions and with political themes pushed to the fore.
As is always the case with caricature, this is an exaggeration, and kind of unfair; there are plenty of Nordic LARPs which take place in recognisable genres, or historical settings, or otherwise displace themselves from grounded, contemporary, realistic plots in favour of something a bit more out of the ordinary. Equally, caricatures don’t work unless there’s at least a shred of recognisability in there; if I had a LARP which fit that bill, advertising it in Nordic LARP spaces would probably see it fill up somewhat faster than advertising it elsewhere.
In some respects, Goetia doesn’t fit the caricature. It’s a historical game based around summoning demons from a specific real-world tradition of magic, and for the most part treats them as though they are real. Although one could regard all the events of the game as purely psychological if you really wanted to, it would be a bit of a stretch; in particular, the mass extinction of all the occultists at the end of the weekend is really hard to chalk up to non-supernatural occurrences.
And not all the human characters had the same depth of understanding of the subject matter – some definitely had not the first clue of who the Goetic demons were and what qualities the grimoires ascribed to them, and the odds of someone like that being able to pluck out of thin air the correct name of a demon, their correct rank in the courts of Hell, and their correct qualities as outlined in the grimoires, and then convincing themselves they have been possessed by that demon are astronomical. The chances of an entire collection of dozens of people abruptly latching onto the idea that they are all possessed by Goetic demons, with no two people subconsciously electing to be “possessed” by the same demon, is likewise too much of a long shot to be worth thinking about.
Sure, very astonishing coincidences happen all the time in real life – but the coincidences we buy as par for the course in the everyday world strain credibility in narrative. Narratives want to make sense in a way real life doesn’t, and at least from the perspective I saw it’s far more plausible to assume that Goetia is a supernatural narrative – specifically a horror story – than it is to try and cling to a non-supernatural interpretation. And ultimately, psychological horror is still a flavour of horror, so whichever way you cut it, we’re in the realm of genre fiction here.
If Goetia veered away from the caricature version of Nordic LARP by opting for genre fiction and a whiff of the fantastic over kitchen sink realism, it made up for this from the emotional perspective; a lot of characters went through the wringer at this game, and there were big, generous scoops of what’s often called “Type 2 fun” – the sort of thing which is perhaps gruelling at the time but is very enriching to look back on (as opposed to Type 1 fun, which is wicked awesome at the time and wicked awesome later).
Actually, there’s an interesting split there between the human and demon experiences. The demons, at the end of the day, were very much in control and driving their humans like they were stolen cars. The parallel between this and players in an RPG having their characters make risky or outright bad decisions which give them a harder life for the sake of better gameplay is noteworthy, and absolutely intentional – one of the big themes of the game was taking a situation where we’re already putting a mask over our own personas, and then adding another mask into the mix.
The result of the demons being here to show up, negotiate a deal, eat a banquet, and then leave before the bill comes due was that Goetia ended up offering two distinct flavours of fun, at least from my perspective – my demon was my avenue for Type 1 fun, my human for Type 2, and this seemed to be a common experience. Although in principle our demons are just as doomed as the humans – more or less all of them have to go back to Hell at the end (mine didn’t but he fell in a black hole instead – long story), none of that was stuff we had to actually experience. Some demons could have a rough time – get ganged up on, lose out in demonic politics, whatever – but they seemed to be the exception and hey, they still got a big banquet out of it.
Conversely, our humans were ruined. Many of us cried our own tears whilst playing our humans – always a sign you’ve got to that sweet emotive Type 2 goodness – the game ended with stacks of dead humans lying on the floor, and generally speaking if someone was screaming in horror or weeping uncontrollably or otherwise breaking down, it was going to be a human, not a demon.
A genuinely clever concept in the game – and one which perhaps could have done with being emphatically highlighted even more than it was (it was mentioned verbally but very easy to lose track of, in part because of the emphasis on the scheduled not possessed/possessed/not possessed/possessed act structure) – is that after the initial possession, your demon could snatch back control or relinquish control of your character at any time. This could absolutely be used to control how much Type 2 fun you had and when – if you wanted a bit more, just have your demon relinquish control when you’re in a demon-rich environment and see what happens, if you wanted a bit less have your demon step in to keep those bad feelings far away.
I ended up saving most of my Type 2 fun for my last half hour – after spending the event having comprehensively convinced himself that his demon, who’d been psychologically manipulating him for his entire life, was going to make sure he was OK, my human was finally abandoned by his demon in the middle of a circle of Wrath demons who wanted to kick my human’s ass. The ensuing curbstomp was only the beginning of his torments, thanks to the way I’d handed over to my compatriots the means to absolutely emotionally destroy him after wrecking his physical shell.
That half hour or so of suffering the torments of the damned was intensely cathartic, to an extent which I don’t think I’d have reached had I allowed my human to crack earlier; the slow build-up of hypocrisy and denial on the human side, paired with the increasing excitement on the demonic side about the vicious betrayal to come, helped ratchet things up to the point where there was a whole lot of pressure built up inside my human, and a gratifying explosion once the pressure cooker burst.
It did mean I ended up missing out on the judgement of the angels, but for the purposes of my character’s narrative I think that was useful; I think his story is more satisfying without any firm narrative hints that he was either an essentially innocent person manipulated from birth or a guilty accomplice who went along with evil long past the point he should have been asking question, and whilst the angels of this setting are not exactly pleasant customers we are expected to OOC agree with, the symbolism of being judged and struck down by an angel is still the symbolism of being judged and struck down by an angel, you know? That the organisers were open to characters dying just before the angelic denouement was very pleasing, as are the stories I heard from people who felt their angel encounter really helped tie their narrative together; equally, I wonder if it would have been useful to have some way of surreptitiously signalling “I want the angel that takes down my character to be very stern and judgemental/very forgiving/extremely enigmatic/whatever” in order to calibrate for the end you think is best.
First Run Rough Patches
The game, then, panned out wonderfully for me, but I had struggled with some aspects in the weeks leading up to it. Had this been something I had only experienced by myself I might be more hesitant to raise it here, but I became aware of enough people experiencing enough pre-game jitters that I think it’s worth commenting on some of these issues; we do the medium no favours by not cracking open the black box and seeing what the data says when this happens.
To be fair, a good chunk of the issues I had – and more or less everything which seemed to be reflected in a wider variety of players’ experience – arose from the unique circumstances of this being the first run of Goetia, and Goetia having been among the first games Omen Star advertised, but Omen Star actually having run a brace of games between the initial promotion of Goetia and the event finally coming about. Towards the start of the in-person pre-game briefings, we were asked to raise a hand if we’d never been to an Omen Star game before, and it was mentioned afterwards that the proportion of raised hands was higher than expected.
That had knock-on effects: it means that a large chunk of the player base had no real sense of how Omen Star’s house style worked in practice, and it meant that they’d signed on largely based on the initial publicity. In the intervening time between the initial call for players and the actual event, Omen Star have had further chances to refine how they explain their game concepts, communicate axioms, and generate buy-in. It seems likely that if they did a second run of Goetia and they took the opportunity to comprehensively refresh the pre-game publicity, things would be different.
In addition, this was a game with pre-written characters assigned by the game team and, due to the nature of it, this meant we had two briefings – one for our humans, one for our demons – which meant the writing workload was effectively doubled. Human briefs emerged in June, several months prior to the game, along with a spreadsheet detailing which player was paired with which human and demon (and which of the Seven Deadly Sins each demon was associated with).
By comparison, demon briefs ended up emerging significantly later – only emerging around two and a half weeks before the game. I have no reason to think this was planned – so far as I could tell the plan was to get them out earlier than this if possible, but things slipped. These things happen, of course – there was an entire process of writing, revising, and editing which had to be undertaken with the demon briefs, after all. (Incidentally, as I understand it the team made sure outside contributors providing writing got paid, which is a classy move given how much unpaid voluntary effort is made use of in LARP.) That’s a chain with a lot of links in it, where disruption at any point could delay delivery.
My hunch is that this will be different in future runs. At the end of the day, unless the game’s concept changes so radically that it is no longer the same LARP, any subsequent run of Goetia will still play on the idea of the 72 Goetia as defined in the old grimoires, and whilst the composition of the player group will almost certainly change between runs, the source text ain’t changing. Although it’s possible – even likely – that future runs will see the demon briefs revised in light of feedback from this run or to adjust to the casting needs of later player groups, and even possible that human briefs will get rewritten en mass, the basic job of taking (most of) the descriptions of the Goetia and translating them from vague writeups in grimoires into player character briefs has been done, and so future runs can skip straight to the revision and editing stage for the most part.
At the same time, the emergence of the demon briefs seemed to prompt a lot of questions and some amount of confusion – I experienced this, so did others. A big part of it is that, whilst we had our human briefs but didn’t have our demon briefs, it was easy to not be too concerned about gaps in our understanding of the concept and the intended setting – because the biggest gaps were things like “What are demons in this universe?” and “How does Hell actually work?” and “What do we actually get out of tormenting humans and inspiring sin?” and whatnot. It was easy to make the assumption that all of that would be in the demon briefs, and that once we had the demon briefs in hand, the two halves of our briefs would mesh and all would become apparent.
For me and for others, this was not quite the case. This meant we were left with a clutch of questions, and with two and a half weeks left to go before an event wirh a significant number of logistical hurdles to clear the referees didn’t seem to have time to deal with many of them in the lead-up to the game. It’s only natural that there’d have been an inclination to say “don’t worry about it, we’ll deal with it on the day” – and also natural that this didn’t quite cut the mustard with some of us. (My sibling in suffering, if I could simply stop worrying about something because you suggested I didn’t need to, my life would be so much easier.)
My own demon brief – and those briefs I saw – did a reasonable enough job of explaining who my demon was, what he wanted, which of the demonic courts he belonged to (each court ruling one of the nine circles described by Dante and being aligned to one of the Seven Deadly Sins), and what the internal politics of that court were. So far, so fine as those specifics go – but there were broader, more general questions about the nature of demons and Hell which were not specified in our briefs, not specified in the pre-game promotional material, not explained in the briefing document which went out a few days before the game, and not explained in pre-game discussions or responses to queries.
Much of this got outlined in-person, during the pre-game briefs, but the number of metaphysical questions which came up during the first briefing threatened to bog things down, and I can’t help but think that getting some sort of big-picture guide to Goetia‘s infernal cosmology distributed in good time before the event would have saved precious time at those briefings – and had it come out significantly before the demon briefs, we may have been better-prepared to interpret them. Fundamentally, a high-concept LARP like this lives and dies on participant buy-in, and the entire build of your LARP from the moment you first advertise it to the moment you call “time in” is an opportunity to create, foster, and sustain buy-in – why waste it?
This is not a theoretical gap either – in actual play, I ended up making a mistake and looking silly in front of the organisers, in part because of a gap in the setting information which was not included in our individual demon briefs, not covered in the basic information distributed to all players (which included little on the specifics of Hell), and wasn’t covered in the pre-game briefs. Specifically, I ended up in confused conversations with two NPCs (played by the main refs) early on into the first “possession phase”, which I then had to check in with them to retcon, when it turned out that they were not playing Fallen Angels (those had not shown up yet), but were playing Goetia of the First Circle, who were not aligned to any specific Sin’s court. My assumption is understandable for three reasons:
- Their nametags didn’t include a Sin court, and all the Goetia I was aware of were arranged into Sin courts.
- Our briefs gave up writeups of what our Sin courts thought of the other Sin courts, but (at least in my case) made no mention of the existence of Goetia associated with the First Circle, and gave no explanation of what their function was. I had no reason to think such Goetia existed.
- Almost all of the briefing materials we’d seen made it very clear that the PCs would all be possessed by Goetia aligned with the Courts, and that NPCs played by crew would be possessed by Fallen, and so I worked on that basis.
To be fair, there were brief mentions, in the rundown of the NPCs which was appended to the game document after a flurry of queries, that the NPCs in question would be possessed by the demons in question… but nothing in the demon briefs about who those demons were and what their function in Limbo was, and given that there was over a dozen such NPCs, those details were extremely easy to overlook. One can see why I would have made the error that I did.
Other major metaphysic aspects were left largely unstated until we were all physically at the LARP – such as the fact that this game takes place in a cosmos where God and the Devil, as distinct entities you can talk to, may be believed to exist but do not directly manifest and no demon has ever directly talked to either, and in fact only 100 supernatural entities can canonically be said to definitely exist: the 72 Goetia, the 21 Fallen, and the 7 Archangels. This was a surprise to me, and a surprise to several other participants, several of whom suddenly urgently asked questions about stuff in their briefs which seemed to contradict that.
It is also a completely needless surprise – there is absolutely no reason why the concept shouldn’t be explicitly laid out, and indeed no reason why the referees should not have been able to put out a complete list of “These are the names of the Goetia, these are the names of the Fallen, these are the names of the Archangels”. All of those names ought to be known to and infamous among the 100, after all. There was an angel name on my character sheet and it took several queries to the referees before the game to get some clarity as to whether the angel in question would number among the Fallen.
In all fairness, it’s very easy as a referee to assume that some things were more obvious to the game participants than they actually were. The Theory of Mind problem in establishing what information you have actually successfully communicated to your player base, and whether you gave it the correct level of prominence, is a perennial issue. If you are steeped in a game’s metaphysic and underlying concepts and plot structure and whatnot to the extent that you need to be if you are writing the thing: things which seem obvious to you, because you have been eating, drinking, and breathing them through the creative process, may be far from obvious to your players.
With this metaphysic stuff, all would have been peachy if Hell were very undefined, and we were free to simply improvise or make up details as we wished. As it stands, though, it was evident from the briefing materials that the referees had a very specific idea of what Hell was, how it was structured, and how it worked – and equally evident that we’d only had a fraction of it communicated to us prior to the event.
Perhaps more would be apparent to people who had read every single demon brief – but I shouldn’t have to do that to get the big-picture general overview Hitchhiker’s Guide To Hell. As a result, I was struggling in the build-up because I felt like I didn’t have the tools I needed to get into the mindset of someone who’d known Hell for eternity. It would have been a great help to me and others had some sort of written briefing gone out covering this information well in advance; sure, in-person explanations were available at the game, but different people absorb information in different ways, some people find written briefs easier, and it saves a ton of time at the event itself if the referees have been able to get a written brief out which can head off a swathe of those in-person questions at the pass.
In discussing it with Kol, the impression I got was that there was a desire not to overwhelm people with a lot of deep metaphysic stuff, but to write briefs from what was explained to me as a “very mortal perspective”, out of a concern that stuff written from a more esoteric point of view would scare or intimidate people. Look, with the best will in the world, if someone’s putting hundreds of pounds down on a ticket to your demon LARP (and putting in still more expense of effort when it came to costuming, props, and travel), then you can put good odds on them being very interested in going deep on the demon stuff.
More generally, I think it’s far better to give out the information but make it clear that people don’t have to read and digest it if they don’t want to than it is to just sit on the information. In the former case, you support the people who need that information to feel like they have a handle on the LARP, whilst also supporting the people who want to avoid information overload by tagging it as being optional. In the latter case, you are certainly supporting the people who want to avoid information overload, but you are kicking the legs out from under people who feel that they need that information to effectively play their demon? It does not matter how much you say to a player “You don’t actually need to know that to portray a demon…” – they are their own expert on what they personally need. Some people may be happy to fake it until they make it, but others certainly are not.
One last point on the demon briefs: I felt that a lot of those I saw were very “siloed” by Court. I had a good idea of what my interactions were with other demons inside my Court; I had basically no interaction with demons outside of my Court. (I had a list of stereotypes I believed about the other Courts in general – but no out-of-court political entanglements specifically.) I took a look at a cross-section of the demon briefs and this seemed generally true of those I looked at.
In some respects, this was useful in emphasising a tight Court theme – but equally, more information on how Courts bicker and fight between each other could have helped spice up the demonic politics and simultaneously shed light on . It was very easy to simply decide that only your Circle of Hell was important that all the others were simply irrelevant – an attitude which might be IC appropriately selfish for demons, but OOC doesn’t make for engaging game. Within the Court of Avarice we ended up having to do some pre-game calibration (and I took my brief in a different direction, with the assent of the refs) to help make the internal politics a little more dynamic, because whilst in concept the idea of a Court where all the demons in question are very, very good at keeping hold of what’s theirs is perfect for “Avarice” as a theme, stasis is less useful for LARP as a medium.
Creed & Communication
Different people have different communication styles, and one thing I would praise Kol and Rebel for is having a handle on what their own communication styles are (both in terms of their strengths and weaknesses), and making sure to explain that to us at the start of the pre-game briefings – Kol is a very good person to talk to if you need someone who will listen in depth to what you have to say and get into the weeds, Rebel is the one you want if you need a definitive, snappy answer. That’s really good to know.
At the same time, some of Omen Star’s best communication around the game was slightly hidden under a bushel. In particular, Omen Star have a little creed they read out at the start of their games, and which was in the briefing document which went out a few days before the event. It’s basically a mashup of a quick manifesto and an conduct/E&D policy, and it goes a long way towards clarifying how they run their games. It’s not (as of the time of writing) on the Goetia site, or on the root Omen Star page; it might be buried somewhere on the page of one of their other games, but I wouldn’t consider that sufficient for the purposes of Goetia. It’s a sufficiently useful statement of intention that I think it should be included somewhere on the subsite for each of their games – because someone who is only playing Goetia (or just plays Sacrament, or only cares for Cyberpunk London) should expect to find everything important on the subsite for that one game they are interested in without trawling around elsewhere.
The Omen Star creed, as it applies to a particular game (and I can spot some ways in which the creed may necessarily be tweaked in one direction or another for a particular game), is information it serves nobody to keep back. It’s good that it’s read out at the start of events, and I’m glad that they do that (and also glad it’s terse enough to avoid becoming an interminable speech which will lead people to tune out). It’s also good that it was in the written briefing, and that should continue. It would be even better if it were put front and centre on their game sites when they are soliciting signups – then they are more likely to get signups from people heartily approving of it, and drive away signups from people who would flatly refuse to go along with it, to everyone’s benefit.
This isn’t the only example where getting a really tight statement of what the game was going for out there at the start would have helped buy-in immensely. The bit where Goetia clicked for me came at the start of the first in-person briefing, when Kol enunciated the very basic principles he was building the game from (namely, playing with the idea of LARP as taking on other personas by having additional layers of personas, and structuring the game around a banquet) and laid out some significant stuff about the metaphysic. That was very good – it meant that I could go on to propose useful adjustments to my character briefs which leaned harder into what the game was doing, and that the game team and I were finally not talking at cross-purposes. However, if I’d read those words much earlier, I’d have got to that point much earlier – and be much more relaxed in the build-up.
Sacramental Secrets
One more point before I get out of the critical filling of the compliment sandwich and resume gushing about stuff that went well… Something which was a surprise to me, and did not seem to be explained prior to us actually getting to the event, is that Goetia took place in the same continuity as Sacrament, a different Omen Star game in which the player characters are Nephilim – descendants of the Fallen Angels trying to make their way in the modern day. This, and the associated metaphysic, was not really explained to participants who did not ask the right questions, and led to some bits of plot falling a bit flat.
In particular, the way the Nephilim harvest sin and interact with the Fallen was intrinsic to what the Fallen were offering the Goetia, and that meant that without the Sacrament context a lot of the offers the Fallen were making to us largely didn’t make sense to those of us who weren’t Sacrament participants. We largely were able to bluff our way past that, but it did mean the negotiations did not seem to go all that smoothly and lots of other players expressed confusion to me about what the point of the Fallen were and what they could offer us.
The decision to not explain the metaphysics of sin in the Goetia/Sacrament universe to us may be the biggest informational gap not plugged by the pre-game briefings, and the confusion that caused is the biggest argument for a general-purpose Hitchhiker’s Guide To Hell explaining the metaphysic in broad terms. In particular, it was not well-understood at all why the Nephilim were handy for harvesting and crystallising the sins of humanity, and why making a deal with the Fallen would significantly enhance our capacity to harvest sin. Humans sin and go to Hell anyway, and Heaven is happy to damn them for the most part – one could be forgiven for asking “Why do we need you when plenty of humans damn themselves anyway?”
In a game themed around the Fallen making their pitch to the Goetia, the stakes of that pitch simply weren’t explained to those who did not specifically ask, and I feel like if the theme of the game is specifically “a big banquet where a major pact is central to the proceedings”, it’s probably important that everyone sitting down to dinner has an opportunity to get a clear understanding of what the actual stakes are, even if their characters opt not to care. Getting stuff like this written down saves reading it out again at the event, and makes more space in briefings to run through preparatory exercises.
In addition, the Sacrament connection put tight limitations on how Goetia could pan out. The pact between the Goetia and Fallen was always going to happen, closing off the option for an ending where the Goetia spurn the Fallen – which would otherwise be a perfectly legitimate dramatic option. I suspect this is because the pact happens in the Sacrament backstory, and so was locked in.
Likewise, all the human characters die at the end of Goetia, no exceptions. This is certainly grim and horrific, but also feels like the game is cheating itself of the option to have some human characters endure fates worse than death. If we’re going this dark already, how about stories where the living envy the slain? I suspect this comes down to the Goetia characters needing to be cleanly tidied away to avoid warping the backstory of Sacrament – but why should the events of Goetia be considered canonical for the purposes of Sacrament? Why should the events of Sacrament constrain Goetia?
I think the Sacrament connection here is a mistake. It may have helped creatively in some respects because by setting games in a common universe you can drag and drop the metaphysic and other setting features from one to the other, and thus save labour – but you don’t save yourself the need to explain stuff to people who didn’t play Sacrament, and in this case I think the “Fallen negotiate for a spot in Hell” stuff would have landed much better had this been explained.
Furthermore, there’s better ways to get the same level of labour-saving without the constraints that come with setting the games in the same continuity. You can just plain use the same metaphysic in two different fictional universes without the baggage of canonical events and just not bother worrying about it, like how some of the clans from Vampire: the Masquerade show up in similar niches in Vampire: the Requiem as thematic clones with no continuity connection. If it would seriously bother you to do that, declare they take place in a multiverse of parallel universes and then it genuinely doesn’t matter either way – then Goetia and Sacrament are different timelines which can diverge as much as you like. However, I don’t think this sort of wiki-tickling devotion to continuity actually serves you particularly well if you’re presenting what are essentially one-off games.
Bottom line: not everyone is going to be aware of Sacrament, not everyone who is aware will care for Sacrament as a concept, and in general the more Goetia has to avoid trending on Sacrament‘s toes, the less Goetia can focus on being the best Goetia it can be, damn the consequences for any other game, and I think a Goetia that is less than 100% focused on Goetia is a diminished Goetia. Goetia has no responsibilities towards Sacrament, and Sacrament has no responsibilities towards Goetia, and the only responsibility either game has is to the participants of that specific game. Neither LARP should be allowed to trip the other up, and the best way to ensure that is to allow them to share inspiration and ideas but not worry about putting them in a shared continuity, because then they have absolutely no responsibilities towards one another and can dedicate themselves to being wholly their own thing without any worries about cross-game consistency..
(One could also legitimately question whether the Nephilim start traipsing towards themes of racism which, per the version of the Omen Star creed in use in the game, weren’t really meant to be present. Possibly in the metaphysic “Nephilim” inheritance is not strictly speaking through genetic heritage… Nonetheless, taking a narrative about a certain class of people being different from others and marked out for destruction as a result – literally as a result of bad breeding – and setting in the 1930s kind of can’t help but have certain resonances.)
Time Captives
Setting the game in the history of Sacrament had a mixed result, but setting it in a real-world historical time period offered benefits. The 1930s puts the characters close enough to the shock of the First World War that their social and emotional world will bear fresh wounds from that, and close enough to the start of the Second World War that more chaos can begin to feel inevitable. In terms of occult history, the Golden Dawn has shattered, the Theosophists are well into a slide towards increasing factionalism and irrelevance, and both Aleister Crowley and Dion Fortune and their associated magical orders are fading away. A few dozen occultists could very easily blunder into such a gap and disappear, carrying with the vestiges of a Victorian occult tradition gone moribund and clearing the decks in time for new traditions to arise after the distraction of WWII is resolved.
Another advantage of setting the game in history is that a fair few Goetic demons are associated with predicting the future. (“Predicts the future” and “helps you find treasure” and “teaches you stuff” seem to be the usual go-to abilities that people ascribed to them when writing the Pokedex; eh, if you’ve committed yourself to writing 72 entries you’re going to repeat yourself a bit.) At least as far as my brief went, my demon was rigorously silent about what I should expect from the ritual itself – but my character’s backstory saw him predict WWI and the Spanish Flu, and I had great fun as my human cooking up poetic ways to allude to future events which my character didn’t understand but my demon did, and similar enjoyment as my demon talking about how the world was about to change and that was why I was about to enact my Special Plan.
Other parallels present themselves. One of the PC groups was a violent vigilante gang of ex-soldiers who brutally beat down those they had persuaded themselves were evil, because their patron demons had got them hooked on a divinatory book which picked out targets for them to go after. This group were not overt fascists, and the book thing meant that their criteria for deciding who to exact vigilante violence against differed from historical fascists, but at the same time it felt like they were a stone’s throw away from simply going after entire groups if the book told them to. In the context of a game where (in the iteration of the Omen Star creed being used) themes of racism were to be set aside, this is about as close to a depiction of vigilante violence the game could get without crossing that particular red line.
Some players found it a little difficult that the game was not set in a specific year. I understand the impulse to be imprecise – it can help convey the message that people shouldn’t feel obliged to go deep on the historical detail. Equally, you can just say that – and giving a precise year gives people whose game would be enhanced by going deep the opportunity to do that. Preventing people geeking out about the history may have been partially the point – it’s not the main focus of the event and there may have been a worry that dry historical detail could crowd out high emotional drama if allowed to run unchecked. Still, I think it should be possible to set expectations about how people shouldn’t expect others to sweat the details without pre-emptively yucking the yum of those who especially enjoy the details.
The Layers of Consent
Interactions between the demons were not merely violent. All demons were interested in sin, and an entire court was dedicated to Lust, and so there was an erotic component to the game – the sort of thing which many LARPs either simply do not include or treat as outright abstractions. Omen Star set out easily-understood rules on OOC consent and how to handle physical escalation within scenes – both in terms of simulated violence and more intimate activities – and carefully reiterated them during the briefings, but otherwise allowed people to take things as far as they wished within those boundaries.
The limit for how far people should go in IC spaces seemed to be “all’s fair so long as the OOC consent is enthusiastic and underpants stay on” in terms of the actual physical activity taking place. As far as the IC basis of what was going on, there was a complication here; the Omen Star creed, as applied to the game, stated outright “we will not be dealing with themes of sexual assault or sexual violence”. Whether this was strictly true depended on your reading of that.
Certainly, in terms of the characters currently in control of the bodies in question, this was true – if you were possessed at the time an intimate interaction was happening, whatever was going on was absolutely something your demon was consenting to, if you were not possessed any sexual interaction had to be something your human was consenting to. However, there was an important wrinkle, significant enough that the organisers had to issue a verbal clarification on it during the briefings: inherently, if your demon was doing something along these lines, there was every chance that it was something your human didn’t consent to (though this may vary depending on your IC relationship with your demon), and if that thing involved another possessed individual, odds are it didn’t involved stopping to check in with the human being involved.
This inescapably is a form of sexual assault – taking over someone’s body and puppeteering them in order to have sexual interactions with someone else’s body which is also being puppeteered is an absolute nightmare fuel situation unless there’s been some very enthusiastic consent from the possessed parties beforehand, and – especially given that the game largely assumed that your demons were out to ruin their humans – this clearly wouldn’t be the case in the vast majority of instances. This inescapably hardwired themes of nonconsent into the event, which would have been avoidable only if Omen Star had redesigned to take out sexual interactions altogether.
There’s the health warning which anyone who wants to attend to Goetia ought to hear: if it is a dealbreaker to you to have a LARP event where nonconsensual sex happens, on any level, Goetia is not for you, and I imagine that it will be put front and centre in any revised game materials. Whilst ample techniques were suggested both for opting into and out of such activity and for removing yourself from spaces where it was happening, the latter techniques of course only come into play once activity is happening (or very obviously about to happen) which are past your red lines, and can’t protect you from, say, inadvertently overhearing a hushed conversation later on about the matter. It was not a problem for me and did not appear to be a problem for anyone at the event – but I can absolutely see someone whose red line is “I do not want to even hear about IC nonconsensual sex” having trouble. That red line is a completely valid one to have, and I’m aware of many events where you’d have no trouble provided everyone follows the content rules, but equally short of a fundamental redesign of this aspect for the game, it’s not a red line that’s compatible with what Goetia is going for.
I did not partake myself, but having it going on in the background did enhance things. If you’re going to be a demon idly discussing global human extinction, nuclear war, cosmic horror, cosmic majesty, who got punished worst in the Fall, antinatalism, and other heady topics, having a debauched backdrop to do it against certainly helps make it feel more like you’re the aristocracy of hell chewing over forbidden concepts in a maliciously self-centred way, rather than some dork waffling emptily in a dull drawing room. (The latter was more my human’s speed.)
In here, and in the violent horrors people were inflicting on each other, the real sense of being in the revels of the damned came through. That is not an experience everyone’s going to want to go after – but it’s something that Goetia ably delivered on in the crunch. Omen Star are soliciting feedback from participants which includes “How likely are you to play this larp again?” as a question, so subsequent runs of the event are not impossible. I probably would not go for a second run, simply because by and large I prefer not to replay one-and-done LARPs, but I would fully expect a second go-around of Goetia to chart an even tighter course into Hell – just as it’s likely that the experience of Goetia will enrich later LARPs designed by them.
As a last note, I do recommend this article from the master chef himself, explaining how the banquet itself was constructed; the mission brief of banquet-as-storytelling was very capably handled.
Refereeing and Reflection 
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