Enlightenment in Blood Design Diary 1

One Night in the World of Darkness

It's Friday night and you're tired of staring at the walls of the hideout you share with your Anarch buddies. Life as a vampire is not as easy as the movies make it out to be, but tonight you're going out with your friends to party, to meet new people and to get into trouble.

And maybe, just maybe, find answers to some of the questions deep in your soul. Like what's the point of this all?

The basic idea of what we're trying to create with Enlightenment in Blood is the experience of one night in the World of Darkness. This is not a larp with a great, overarching plot or a grand unifying event that affects everybody. This is not the night when everything changed.

Rather, this is the World of Darkness as it exists from night to night. The shadows hide all manner of strange beings, and each one of them has their own hopes and fears, tragedies and aspirations. You as the participant will play one of these beings, and together you will create the experience of a living, breathing World of Darkness.

The inspiration for this larp concept came from the simple reality of scale. Enlightenment in Blood is designed to be a big larp, with hundreds of players. That means that it's possible to create environments that are unattainable if you only have five or fifteen or fifty players. Enough players means that there are the people who populate a real World of Darkness city.

Berlin is a wonderful city for this sort of an idea, and the setting supports it very well. The city has always been a standard building block of the World of Darkness. You don't have to look any further than all those city books, from Chicago by Night to Necropolis Atlanta. Even the nominally rural werewolves have their urban tribes, from Bone Gnawers to Glass Walkers.

The World of Darkness is a world of secrets, evil things hidden from view. It could very well be our world – a place where every nightclub DJ could be a vampire, and every manhole cover lead to the subterranean horrors of the Wyrm. It's a world of facades and hidden truths. Similarly, urban larps recontextualize cityscapes into fictional environments by adding a layer of narrative on the everyday milieu of thousands of people. And finally, long-lived or immortal characters can also embody the history of a specific place, making it both playable and immediately relevant.

These concepts are very close together, and perhaps that's why city larps have been popular in the history of the World of Darkness and why it felt so natural for us to go this route too.

The World of Darkness is not a nice place. It's not someplace you'd want to live in. But it can be a place of many wonderful, horrifying things that come to life when you go there for a Friday night.

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