The Carnival of Glories, by Tory Root
It's early spring, the rains are dying down, and the whole city's come alive for the yearly carnival. The parade's finished, the sun's set, masked revelers are trading kissing beads in the streets, and there's plenty of people looking for a cozy nook to have some fun. And whether you're a regular or a newcomer, the Frog's Lantern Wayhouse & Inn, with legendary chicken pies down one hall and a lavishly stocked dungeon down the other, looks like the perfect spot...
The Carnival of Glories is a kink party larp. It takes place in queer-normative, kink-normative fantasy world where people are wired a bit differently from what we know. Though it takes different forms and means different things to different people, everybody has an intrinsic need to exchange power, either as a dominant or a submissive. The ways in which that weaves through identity, sexuality, and differing cultural expectations about relationships is a core pillar of this game. Beyond that, expect to be hanging out, making out, and messing around. Like there's not a classic larp plot brewing under the surface. Just partying, hand sex, feels, or some combination thereof.
Some characters in this game have backstories that deal with abusive relationships, toxic families, grief and mourning, underworld violence, and sexual exploitation. This sort of content lives in fairly discrete pockets of the game and should be readily avoidable, given the large and variable cast. There are no bad apples or secretly malevolent characters in this game, just a few hot messes.
"It's a decorated war wound."
"I'm sorry, did you say DICK-orated?"
- your friend neighborhood mob
So a bit back, Tory played a freeform game about teenagers hanging out at a summer camp playing party games and it blew her mind. Like seriously, you can just write a larp about people hanging out and it's fun??? Look, sometimes playing a game changes how you think about larp in really obvious ways. Anyway, that fused with a) her long-standing desire to write a kink party larp of some sort and b) a bunch of worldbuilding and characters from a faltering novel, and this emerged. And people seemed to have a lot of fun.
At least for the first run, she has a large number of potential character concepts and will pick a subset to write up to best fit the cast. For the second run, she wrote a few more, and also wound up tweaking some existing ones. She suspects a static version of this game will never exist, since casting it is so particular and being able to adjust characters on the fly helps.
She'd originally intended it to run entirely with Ars Amandi, but like, spicy Ars Amandi. But in the first run, somebody wanted to bring some cuffs and floggers to play with, and that worked nicely enough that for the second run, she explicitly invited actual light bondage and impact play for those curious. Which also turned out to be a lot of fun.
All the public game information is available here.
January 28, 2023, at a private residence in Canton, MA.
June 24, 2023, at a private residence in Canton, MA.
March 3, 2024, at Intercon V in Warwick, RI.
The Carnival of Glories is a game for ten to twenty-something players which runs for at least six hours, including workshops, in some large comfy space with private corners, under the direction of at least one GM. Average character sheet length is about four thousand words. A few characters have preset genders, but most are pick-your-own-gender.