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?
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.”
97 Poets of Revachol is run in a former military hospital in Terezín that they rent from the town and help repair. The LARP was completely designed around the building. In Poets, you are one of 96 players who live in this derelict military hospital, known in-game as “La Cage”. They converted it to include not only apartments, but workshops, a bar, two music clubs and even a church with a stained glass window. It’s important to stress that the LARP doesn’t contain any of the characters or plotlines from the original game, instead offering an opportunity to embody a person in that world. As František Wagner put it, they could edit Disco Elysium out of the LARP “and it would still make sense, but we could not edit out the hospital.”
Disco is renowned for the chorus of skills that talk to the protagonist as part of his internal monologue. Poets has its own LARP take on this: The Unseen. These are a cabal of 13 players who represent different archetypal figures of the community and can’t normally be acknowledged by other players, unless they whisper commands privately to them. Each of the Unseen also represents core themes and conflicts of the game; the Social Worker is both controlling and genuinely caring, the Party Teen represents the high and lows of celebration, and the Old Hussar is a violent figure who also embodies ideals of self-improvement.
In the months leading up to the LARP, I was able to choose a shortlist of characters I wanted to play. I ended up with one of my top picks, Marie Pelletier, a Moraltintern Special Operative. Marie is an interesting character because she left La Cage for a better life with this centrist international organisation, only to have to return for a special mission that she must keep secret from the locals. On the first evening of the LARP, I was handed my costume, a blue Moralintern uniform with a bullet vest. From the moment I put it on, other people treated me with a strained deference.
The LARP is structured with roughly a day of workshops and then two days of play. The workshops are there to ease you into the experience, but they also teach you the safety mechanics of the game, such as safe words that can be used if people are feeling uncomfortable or need to stop play for any reason. There was even a dance workshop where we were instructed on the mechanics of dance battles (I won mine, just for the record).
In terms of the main game itself, certain events are predetermined, like the “Intermezzo” party on the second night where the surreal takes over, and the Battle of La Cage on the final day. By the end of the LARP, every character had to decide if they were going to side with the Globalists or the Nationalists in the struggle for the fate of their community. On a more granular level, my character had a main mission, as well as scheduled social activities and even church attendance. I won’t spoil the Moralintern mission, but I will say that it was highly surreal, involved walkie talkies and a huge antenna that we had to assemble as a four-person team.
There was always something to do, and the experience was pretty all-consuming. For the first 24 hours of the LARP, there was no official downtime, and with the option to sleep on-site, this meant you’d even wake up as your character. I actually opted to stay in a local hotel, which allowed me to have some unofficial scheming time and decompression with my roommate. Some of my most cherished memories of the experience are of walking the echoing hallways of the old hospital and seeing the bricolage of posters other characters had strewn around. My character was distanced from others because of the uniform, but I got to learn about them through their art. This feeling was shared by the organisers: “the sheer number of great paintings, sculptures, spray tags, and even songs was just astonishing,” they told me.
This is a sentiment shared by my co-player, James Hewitt, who in regular life works as a lead game designer at Warcradle. “One of the things that surprised me was the meaningful integration of art and creativity into the game – the idea that, even in a run-down shithole like La Cage, the human need for self-expression can’t be ground down.” As local DJ Jo, James ended up writing poems in-character, which then led him to rediscover writing as a hobby. “I think that’s testament to the magic of LARP, and specifically the magic of this game.” It was during that aforementioned poetry session at the local music club that Jo ended up swiping the gun I had misplaced, selling it off to make money to help his family.
Rolling will have two more runs of the LARP this summer, and plan to improve it following feedback from players. As a story created by a community, 97 Poets of Revachol really did feel like a spiritual successor to what inspired it. After all, the world of Disco Elysium was originally generated through a collective of artists and musicians developing their own tabletop RPG. Sadly, due to ongoing legal issues, it’s unlikely we will ever get an official sequel to Disco – though there are multiple spiritual successors in the works now from various groups of former developers. However, as Rolling says, “we must imagine Disco alive. It is only dead if you let it die.”