Two days after returning from TUG 2026 in Canada, I participated in my first-ever LARP. It was the sixth run of the 97 Poets of Revachol, an international production for about a hundred players, held over five days in a former 19th-century military hospital in Terezín, Czechia, and set in the world of the award-winning Disco Elysium (2019) video game.

In this post, I am going to discuss the experience and what I learnt about both LARPs and myself.

Why I went

Most LARP players my age who I know, including my wife, have been LARPing since high school, and I get the impression that it is somewhat unusual to start at the age of 33. Not that there is anything wrong with that per se, but most people who enjoy LARP seem to discover it much earlier in life.

What’s more, I have had difficulty forming social bonds and navigating social situations from a young age and never quite learned to feel at ease socially, eventually settling into the rather solitary work of a tech consultant and contractor. It may therefore seem like a big step to make my first LARP an international event lasting five days and involving dozens of people.

My motivation was a combination of several things: I was excited to try something new that my wife and many people in her social circle enjoyed, I had thoroughly enjoyed Disco Elysium, and, despite my social unease, the sheer scope of the LARP was exciting to me in a way that a smaller event might not have been. I willed myself through the registration process before I could change my mind, thinking, “What’s the worst that could possibly happen?”

How it went before the LARP

In the year leading up to the LARP, new materials were gradually released. Profiles of all the players’ characters, including pictures and short biographies, were available online fairly early, along with general descriptions of the different factions they belonged to. Information about the setting and the broad shape of the story was also shared before the game.

At the time, this seemed strange to me. I felt that it might spoil some of the fun of discovering these things during play, and I was unsure how much I was expected to prepare based on the information provided. This feeling became even stronger when, during the workshops immediately before the LARP, I received a schedule for the coming days listing various events in advance.

My confusion stemmed from taking video games as the closest analogy. As it turns out, however, a content LARP like the Poets is more like a stage play: the script is out in the open; the fun lies in bringing it to life.

Players still discover plenty of new information through their interactions with other characters, so the “script” seems to be there mostly to (a) set things in motion, allowing the small society of players to sustain itself for several days without the organizers having to act as deus ex machina and constantly intervene to keep the game on track, and (b) give more ambitious players the opportunity to prepare intricate props and scenarios in advance rather than improvise everything on the spot.

In April, a costume guide arrived. Unlike at some other LARPs, where players are expected to provide their own costumes, here the organizers would provide most layers of clothing except for a few items such as shoes, underwear, and a skirt or trousers. Based on my understanding of Disco’s 70s/80s aesthetic and of my character, I spent a day shopping for clothes, then threw them into a corner of the room and promptly forgot all about it.

In June, one of the players who was playing my character’s child contacted me via Discord, and we discussed the parent-child relationship, including how the characters might interact, argue, and respond to different kinds of behavior.

July 22: From Brno to Terezín and evening workshops

After returning from Canada and spending a day in Brno unsuccessfully trying to recover from jet lag, I travelled to Prague on July 22 and took the player bus to Terezín. The other players came from all over the world and seemed extremely social. After arriving in Terezín around 7 PM, some of us, myself included, checked into a nearby hotel, while the others were going to sleep at the game location.

After checking in and arriving at the game location, players had a couple of hours to register at a tent, pick up their characters’ items from their apartments and the costume room, eat dinner, dress as their characters, and then head to the workshops scheduled for the evening. My mistake was deciding to take my character’s items back to the hotel, thinking I would make it back in time for dinner. Instead, I got lost in Terezín and arrived late, so Kris, one of the organizers, brought me dinner while I took part in the first workshop. Not a great start.

The workshops began with an introduction to the game world and the basic game mechanics. We learned, for example, how to signal that we were speaking “off-game” as ourselves rather than as our characters, how to move through a scene without being acknowledged when our characters had no reason to be there, and how to call an immediate “red stop” if someone was injured, a personal boundary had been crossed, or the scene otherwise needed to end immediately.

These introductory workshops for all players were followed by a guided tour of the entire game location, which occupied rooms across two floors of the old hospital building as well as several underground spaces. After that came meetings in smaller groups, such as the characters’ families and other core groups, and finally a speed-dating-style session with other important characters my character already knew. In both cases, the goal was to get to know one another and establish some shared ground rules for our interactions.

July 23: The second day of workshops, and the beginning of the game

The second day began with another round of workshops, this time covering the mechanics and game systems for weapons, shops, stealing, work, in-game mail, creating art, drugs, intimacy, dancing, group violence, age, money, the unseen voices, and more.

Afterwards, we met with our secondary groups, such as our factions, before moving to our characters’ starting locations. The game itself began at 4 PM.

How it went during the LARP

Rather than describing (and spoiling) the timeline of in-game events, let me now focus on my personal thoughts and experiences, both in-game and off-game.

Roommates

I shared the hotel room with three other people. One of them was a high-school teacher from Sweden whom we spoke with quite a lot. He gave me tips on other interesting international LARPs, such as Eclipse, Daemon, and others, as well as on recent video games similar to Disco Elysium, such as Esoteric Ebb (2026).

In exchange, I recommended some other interesting video games and a few places they should visit in Prague after the LARP ended.

The missing skills

It became clear almost immediately that LARPing draws on a peculiar mix of social confidence, improvisation, acting ability, and a good memory for people: all muscles I have exercised rather little and sometimes wonder whether I possess at all. I found the combination demanding from the start.

I was expected to approach strangers and hold conversations as a character with goals, opinions, relationships, and a history of their own; keep track of roughly a hundred faces and names; and, more generally, function as a member of this small fictional society. I found that quite overwhelming.

As a result, I spent a fair amount of time in the off-game room collecting myself and talking things through with the organizers. Special thanks go to Kai, who was particularly helpful, and to the organizers in the prop room, who patiently answered far more of my questions than they probably expected to during the game.

Having fun

During the LARP, there was an unusual emphasis on having fun. The organizers repeatedly stressed that the most important thing was to have fun and to make sure that others had the opportunity to have fun as well. Whenever I went to the off-game room, one of the first questions from the organizers or other players was whether I was having fun.

On the one hand, this is understandable. The organizers had spent countless hours of unpaid preparation trying to make the LARP work and be enjoyable, and the players had taken time off and often travelled halfway across the world to take part. More generally, the LARP community seems to attract, or perhaps produce, remarkably kind and empathetic people. On the other hand, it is not always entirely clear whether someone is having fun.

Early on, some of the players from my core group introduced me to the idea of different types of fun:

• Type 1 fun is fun both in the moment and in retrospect.
• Type 2 fun is stressful or unpleasant in the moment but becomes satisfying or enjoyable when you look back on it later.
• Type 3 fun is simply not fun at all.

It was unclear to me then, and it is still not entirely clear almost two months later, whether I spent most of the LARP having type 2 or type 3 fun, with occasional flashes of type 1.

At the time, exhaustion made it difficult to tell the difference between type 2 and type 3. Looking back, the uncertainty comes from somewhere else. I do not particularly mind having fumbled parts of the game in front of other players, but I do wonder whether my difficulty fully inhabiting the character made the experience less enjoyable for them. If so, that would push many of those moments into the type 3 category for me.

For example, I failed to follow through on several story lines involving other characters, simply because I was stressed and not a particularly effective vehicle for my character. In many emotional scenes, I struggled to portray the character’s emotions convincingly, if at all. During secondary-group meetings, I often struggled to improvise and respond in a meaningful way and slipped into the role of an observer instead. Taken together, this must have affected other players’ experience to some extent, disrupting story lines and breaking immersion.

The bleed

Over the course of the game, I gradually realized that my character would either have to sacrifice other innocent characters in order to survive or die with dignity. Despite my difficulty portraying the character, the gradual realization during conversations with their child, followed by the decision, the acceptance, and finally the violent act itself, became an unexpectedly emotional sequence for me.

In the LARP community, this is apparently referred to as bleed: the spillover of emotions between player and character.

I am not ashamed, but still surprised that, while I was waiting in the off-game room for the game to end after my character had just died, there were tears. In my case, those emotions stayed with me for nearly a week after the game.

Would I do it again?

The people were lovely, the food was great, the location was mesmerizing, and even though I am still unsure whether I had “fun”, it was certainly a memorable experience. The bleed also suggests that the game made me care about an imagined person, their child, and a decision they had to make strongly enough that the emotions survived the character’s death and followed me home for days. Clearly, something in the medium has resonated quite powerfully with me.

Shortly after returning from the LARP, I also spent some time as a cook at the Fantasy LARP camp in the Czech Republic, co-organized by my wife, so I think I am becoming more comfortable in LARP-adjacent settings and am slowly building some social ties with other players.

Poets will not have another run any time soon, since the military hospital in Terezín is now due to undergo repairs. Still, trying another, perhaps smaller, LARP now feels like something I might be willing, and perhaps even excited, to do, whether international or local.

Then again, despite reassurance from other players, the organizers, and my wife, as well as my own realization that the LARP was more demanding than I had anticipated, I still worry that I may be too disruptive a presence at future LARPs, even smaller ones. I am not sure whether my lack of social and acting skills, together with the distinct lack of type 1 fun, can be substantially improved simply by attending more LARPs, potentially at other players’ expense, or whether there are things I should work on first outside the game. And if I cannot improve enough, I still wonder whether it might be better to leave this particular kind of fun to people who are better equipped for it and haven’t spent the last decade of their lives being as socially withdrawn as I have.

Related work

If you’re interested in other people’s experiences with this LARP, perhaps ones that are a little more fun and less depressing than mine, see their posts. Most post-game discussion, however, seems to take place on a Discord server for past players, so as not to spoil the experience for newcomers.