Club Inferno is a larp within the Nordic Larp tradition. It is played with a focus on the many small individual choices that contribute to desperate or hopeful consequences, somewhere down the line. We play collaboratively to weave a story together.
Atmosphere
What kind of atmosphere do we want for Club Inferno?
We want Club Inferno to feel like a pulsing, beating world of thrill, danger, sex, exploitation and corruption – but also one of hope, desperation, love, friendship, loyalty and freedom. You could say that the Club exists in two layers.
The top layer, what everyone experiences and sees when they look around is famous people doing drugs, undercover cops enjoying the fruits of their corruption, people making out against a wall, Androids being bought and used in the backrooms, music drawing people to the dancefloor and celebrating nobodies doing shots in the bar or ordering in noodles to go for a few more hours.
The underlying layer is very different. Imagine you could look at the same scene but with eyes that can see what’s going on inside those people. The famous people seeking for meaning and hoping that they can replace their Android that they fell in love with, because they’re reaching their 4-year expiry date. Someone seeking to sate their forbidden desires. Cops driven by hatred for the Androids and wanting them dead. Androids trying to hide their new-found freedom and pretending to be the slaves that people expect, or trying to free their kin who have yet to break their bonds. The dancefloor helping people forget about their daily struggles. The nobodies hiding their Android-rights sympathies under veneers of anonymity and obscurity.
We will play the larp in these two layers. Everyone there at the club needs to pretend that things are just as normal. That it’s just yet another club night. Yet, almost everyone will know that there are bigger things at stake. Survival, freedom, control.
Location
The Inferno Club will be built within an existing off-game club space, a space used for bdsm/fetish parties. That means that parts of that interior will still exist, and we plan to utilize it as background imagery and atmospheric additions to what might be happening at the Inferno Club. However, these themes are not prevalent in play and are primarily there as backdrop.
There will be a noodle bar, a dance floor and several more private areas for socializing and testing and trading of Androids. We are hoping to keep the music volume low enough for a majority of the evening so that it does not drown out the play that will happen in most of the areas.
The club will be decked in scenography suitable for the Androids Universe.
Rules
We will use very simple rules for calibration during the larp. These will be explained in the workshops, but consists of Tap Out (to de-escalate or stop the direction of a scene) and Off-Game (to give instructions or to break a scene) primarily.
We will use realistic theatre interactions for intimate encounters (keeping underwear on) but in a gender-irrelevant variant that uses some inspiration from Ars Amandi, as well as a simulated but physical technique for violence that will be demonstrated in the workshops. In order to enjoy and feel comfortable at the larp, everyone needs to be okay with the following themes (Even if many characters are not directly involved with all these themes and you do not have to engage with them personally, you must be okay with them happening around you):
* Light violence (Slaps, etc)
* Theatrical, simulated sex (With underwear on)
* Exploitation and slavery
* Non-consensual or coercive intimate play
* Verbal abuse
* Objectification
There are of course others, because in a situation where a good part of the larp consist of Android characters, many situations with those characters involve some of the above.
However there will be no play on any kind of racism, homophobia, sexism or any other themes of similar, real-world oppression. In the Androids Universe, oppression happens between Humans and Androids, the privileged (Police, Famous people, etc) and the nobodies, and between criminals and regular people, as well as on personal themes, but never on real life minority oppression. These things do not exist in the future as depicted in the Androids world.
Acts
The larp will be played in three acts:
Act One – Evening
Act Two – Night
Act Three – Morning
Evening will be arrival, it will be dealings and wheelings, introductions, surveying the goods, making plans for tests, and so forth.
Night will be loud music, perversions and beating hearts, blood pumping, decadence and abuse. Violence and sex is masqueraded by the music from the speakers.
Morning will be for consequences, for escape, for dealing with the conflicts of before, of death and choices. When the police come for the illegal models, will you go down with them? Will you let them be taken? It will happen, but perhaps not to everyone, not to the ones that manage to bribe their way to see another day.