In a story as old as time, I am so incredibly behind on blog posts—every single blog post I write tends to start with me saying this—but hey, at least the writing is going well! (Not that you would know this, since I never actually update this blog or any of my social media accounts to tell you about it… Ooops.)
But I did want to talk a bit about the awesome LARPs I played in 2025. They each deserve their own separate post, but it’s 2026 now, and I still have LARPs from… 2022, I think? that I need to finish writing about, so let’s be honest and admit that it’s not happening.
A Year of Horror… LARPs
In many ways, 2025 was a very unusual year for me when it came to LARPs. Not only did I do my first LARP as crew rather than a player, I mostly played horror LARPs rather than fantasy. Not to mention that two of the LARPs I went to were actually held in Denmark, of all places. (To those new to this blog, I live in Denmark and have done so my entire life.)
Let’s talk about each of them.
Rites of Spring
Rites of Spring was a folk horror LARP held on the island Livø in Denmark in April 2025. It was a game I had initially been very interested in, but I hesitated too long with signing up and all the spots got filled. So I put it out of my mind.
Then, less than two weeks before the game was set to take place, some friends were talking about how the organizers were looking for last minute crew, and I was like, “Huh, I do live about 1½ hour drive from the ferry port…” and before I knew it, I had chatted with a few of the organizers and then had to tell my manager at work that he should stop that nonsense talk about moving the deadline on the project we were set to release that week, because I had to go murder people on Livø.
(My coworkers are used to me by now, so nobody batted an eye.)
Now, the really cool thing about Rites of Spring is that Livø has like 4 permanent residents and the nature there is protected, meaning that apart from a small village with no modern buildings and the road leading from the harbor to the village, it’s all nature paths, forests, fields, beaches and swamps. It couldn’t be more perfect a setting for a folk horror game, and because we went there just before the tourist season started, the only people on the island were us and those few locals working on the island who had agreed to help us run the game.
The concept for the game was that a group of hippies had moved to the remote Spring Island decades ago, building a community there cut off from the rest of the world. But obviously this was folk horror, so they had also realized that the spirits of the island really liked human sacrifice, and that the occasional sacrifice would cause the island to thrive and its inhabitants to experience a form of euphoria they called “the Bless”.
All this wholesome murder cult stuff was disrupted when—at the start of the game—a group of outsiders arrived on Spring Island.
Now, because I was crew at this game, I am not going to talk too much about the actual events of the story, because I wasn’t there for most of it. Because of last minute player drop outs, I had taken on a pre-written player character, but the honest truth was that I simply couldn’t keep up with having to be both a player and a crew member, so I did an awful job at being Agnes Porter—a reporter for the local newspaper who really hated everyone from the outside world.
But setting aside how guilty I felt for letting down Agnes’s in-game relations by never being around, I did have a really great time at this game.
I went to Livø together with the majority of the crew the day before the game to help set up. The organizers welcomed us and gave us a briefing—and I have never heard the word ‘murder’ said this many times in a briefing before—before showing us around the island. We also got to meet the guy who usually runs the event center for tourists on the island, a man who is delightfully insane and all too ready to help us run a murder LARP.
After the initial tour, it was time for some actual work. Do you know how hard it is to raise a Maypole? I do now. That thing was bloody huge, and it took half the people currently on the island to get it up—and yes, because nobody else stepped up, I had to be the first one to make a dick joke about it.
Anyway, I heard it remained there until the end of June before the locals finally cut it down.
I also spent a whole lot of time carrying large rocks in order to make a grave in which we buried a skeleton with plot clues for the players to find in-game. And you know what? Not a single one of those bastards tried to dig up the grave in the end.
(All kidding aside, the players were lovely, but seriously… those rocks were really heavy, so being that respectful of the dead was unacceptable.)
Most of my time in-game was spent skulking around in a dark cloak and hiding in shadows, playing disturbing sound recordings or otherwise facilitating the player’s murder mayhem. I also got to NPC my first ever monster character when I portrayed the island spirit Spriggs… …and then I got completely stuck in a tree, because I couldn’t see a thing. Let’s not mention that again.
My favorite scene was probably the recreation of the murder of the Mother—the original founder of the island community, who everyone thought had died peacefully of natural causes. The way it played out was that the main organizer—who played the Mother—was going to be stabbed in a lake by five others wearing cloaks and animal masks at night, while the players watched from the other side of the lake. (Kudos to the organizer and the two crew members who actually went into a lake in the middle of the night in April in Denmark. I did my stabbing from the shore.)
There is nothing more hilarious than when you are all standing around in masks and cult robes in the dark, waiting around for the players to arrive, and one of the organizers muses on the conversations he’s going to have at the office the following week. “So, Jeff, what did you do on your vacation?”
Between playing a bloodthirsty nature spirit and stabbing people in lakes, I also got to help out with a baking contest. So, that’s nice.
The entire game ended with a giant purge where all the islanders chased down and murdered the outsiders—as well as those of the islanders who tried to help said outsiders. At this point, the players really did not need much organizer intervention, so I got to be my player character for the final scene and ran around, riling people up and encouraging more murder.
Great times.
To end this section, I will just put a list of quotes of stuff I overhead while hanging out in the organizers’ room between tasks, because it was all gold, and I wish I had kept a notebook on me whenever the organizers were discussing the game or the players:
“Look, if the yoga is interrupted by a 17th century witchfinder captain, that’s okay.”
“Wait, we lost the jar baby?”
“Don’t worry, they know the difference between ritualistic murder and normal serial killer murder.”
“Right, I’m googling ‘rat poison’.”
“Move it, we got a murder scheduled at that time.”
Road to Daggerfort: Winds & Waterways
Time for a somewhat shorter entry. Road to Daggerfort is a yearly D&D inspired tavern LARP on Funen in Denmark in July. It’s much more relaxed and less story-focused than the Nordic LARPs I usually attend, but sometimes it’s just fun to dress up as a flamboyant rogue and play some dice games. I went to the first game a couple of years prior with a friend, and since we had a good time we decided to return—even if we only attended for one of the four days of the game.
I played my swashbuckler conwoman rogue Kindra Sinclair—especially fitting this year as the game was pirate-themed. Of course, she ended up with the nickname Kindra “Lucky Butt” Sinclair because of a series of increasingly unhinged dice games, and I—who normally doesn’t engage in too inappropriate humor—might have broken the innkeeper with my dirty jokes.
(In my defense, he was the one who first mentioned Three Peg-Leg Pete and I felt my concerns about whether or not he varnished the third one were perfectly sensible.)
The Trip
The Trip was my biggest surprise of the year. I didn’t really expect much when I signed up for a LARP inspired by 80s slasher movies where I had to play an American college student on a field trip, but it turned out to be absolutely amazing.
The game took place in a forest just across the border in the north of Germany in August. I played Morgan Bennett, the so-called “New Kid”—part of the Rebels clique, dedicated member of the school newspaper “The Bleat”. I was a little concerned about playing this character, because reading the character bio was like reading about real-life Teenage Michelle.
Deeply invested in books? Check.
Favorite books being detective novels? Check.
Everyone else thinks she’s weird? Check.
Hanging out with the punks, not because she’s all that rebellious but mostly because they don’t care that she’s weird? Check.
The only time my acting skills truly got challenged was when my character got recruited to a Dungeons & Dragons game and I had to pretend to be utterly baffled by the concept of tabletop roleplaying (“Guys… I think I just got recruited to some kind of cult?”) despite usually being part of 4 different campaigns at a time in real life.
Luckily, I had a lot of fun playing the character, even if I didn’t get to play a character too different from myself.
The game started with a character who was part of the newspaper club—and who secretly had a huge crush on Morgan—going missing after being seen running into the forest and then everyone hearing a scream. The teachers insisted on nobody going into the forest and that they would look for her in the morning.
Obviously, the rest of the newspaper did not listen and repeatedly tried to sneak into the forest in the dark.
The rest of the game was a whirlwind of messed-up horror shit happening, and it was set up in a way that made it amazing to play a character who was into investigating mysteries, because there were plenty of clues to find to help piece together past events.
Really, any game where I get chased by a crazed ax-murderer and get a bunch of hippies to help me burn down a cursed tree is a good game, but The Trip was also excellent in-between the more dramatic scenes, which can’t be said about all LARPs.
Demeter
My last horror LARP of the year was Demeter in November. This was a LARP I have been wanting to do for several years and I finally found the time—mostly by saying “screw you, this year I want to get murdered on a boat” to all other events around that time. As the name might suggest, the game is based loosely on the journey of the Demeter, the ship that brought Dracula to England in Bram Stoker’s novel. And what makes it especially cool—apart from just being a really well-written Gothic horror LARP—is that the game takes place on an actual ship, the German sailing ship Pippilotta. You know what’s even more cool? That for the rest of the year, the Pippilotta is used to teach people traditional sailing, meaning that interested players get to help sail the ship with instruction from the crew. Sailing ships are really cool, y’all.
The ship set out from the port in Kappeln in Germany, before heading north to sail the sea around the small islands off the southern coast of Funen in Denmark. We sailed all through the day and docked during night, so most scenes took place on the ship with a few night-time scenes on land.
I played Vane, a gruff sailor running from his past. Every character was written so that you could play it as whatever gender you wished, but less than a week before the game I finally decided I wanted to play him as a man, so enjoy my improvised five’o’clock shadow made with eyeshadow.
(It worked surprisingly well, but if I sign up again, I’m going full bushy mustache.)
I had been worried about portraying a man like Vane—who I read as a very physically intimating person—because of my small stature, but my co-players were amazing, taking me serious whenever I threatened them with bodily harm, either by acting truly scared or matching my aggression with their own. It’s a problem I have often had when playing threatening female characters, because men would often respond by talking down to me or trying to be diplomatic, and the patronizing is as frustrating in LARPs as it is as a woman in real life. So it was so great playing Vane and actually get to feel scary.
(Also, I noticed that I was allowed to brood in a corner as Vane without anyone asking me to cheer up.
Whenever I play a brooding woman sitting by myself: “Is everything okay?”
When I played a brooding Vane sitting by myself: “Oh, that’s just Vane being antisocial, that’s normal.” )
As this is a recurring game, I will try to avoid spoilers—though maybe just skip this part if you’re planning on playing the game yourself—but a few of my favorite scenes are fairly spoiler-free. The most important thing to know is that the ship’s merchant, Harding, had made some choices that made him very unpopular with the rest of the crew. In the beginning, Vane did not particularly care either way and kept on relatively friendly terms with Harding because he needed information from the merchant. This led to a great scene where Harding was being threatened by Olgarem—one of the older sailors. Harding ran to the side of the ship where Vane was just standing around, putting Vane between himself and the knife-wielding Olgarem while frantically offering Vane bribes in order to get him to protect him. Vane just calmly asked what Harding could offer—with Harding still covering before him—before finally deciding that none of it was really worth taking on an armed Olgarem.
Actually, Harding provided a lot of my best scenes, like one where Vane had found out that Harding had lied to him about information he was looking for. The following exchange was had while Vane had a trembling Harding grabbed by the collar:
Vane: “You are going to tell me everything you know. Otherwise, you are going to find out why I had to leave Australia.”
Harding: “P-probably murder?”
Vane: “You’re smarter than you look.”
Considering it’s in the Player’s Guide that nobody survives the end of the game, I can also talk a little bit about my final scene—though a lot of the great details will remain unmentioned—where Vane killed a very surprised big game hunter—who wasn’t as good with a weapon as he thought he was—and stood up to continue his spree of violence, only to discover himself surrounded by corpses. Turns out, Vane was the only person still alive apart from the captain (making me the last player standing), but as he didn’t know that, he went full Slasher Villain mode and went up on deck, calling for survivors to come out and play.
Going into the game, I didn’t know if I was going to play Vane as a good or bad guy, but I think it’s safe to say that I went dark side in the end. Really, I blame his writer friend Petrovics, who was a little too encouraging of his violent streak…
Fast forward to me going ashore during the afterparty in order to wash off fake blood and beard, only to end up sitting on the cold ground outside a harbor shower building in the dark with a stray kitten in my lap for close to an hour—still in costume and covered in fake blood—getting very emotional. Eventually, some more players came by and I tried to hand off the kitten to one of them—it kept crying when I tried to leave it—but that just resulted in there being two grown women on the ground getting emotional over a kitten while covered in fake blood.
It’s a good thing no locals happened to pass by.
The trip back to Kappeln the next day went with cleaning and the sailor players singing so many sea shanties now that we weren’t busy harassing Harding.
—
This has been a rambling summary of the LARP games I played in 2025. I don’t yet have any games lined up for 2026… but my schedule was also empty at this time last year and look what happened. I can only hope I’ll get to play as many great games this year (and that my beard game becomes stronger).
Photo credit:
Rites of Spring: Toivo Voll
Road to Daggerfort: Stine Duch
The Trip: Felix Jenkins – jenkinsjenkins.de
Demeter: Felix Jenkins – jenkinsjenkins.de
Any photos without a caption are personal phone photos.
