The small, intimate dinner parties at Gale Manor were famously known for their deal making and score settling. If you were invited, you knew you’d made it into an elite circle of the rich and powerful. If you made it out again intact, you knew you were someone special.
No one knows for sure what happened at the last bloody dinner party at Gale Manor. There are police reports with redacted pages, news articles, podcasts and a sensationalist documentary. There are ghost hunters and psychics and internet sleuths. They all say they’re searching for the truth, but everything is spiced with cruel voyeurism.
And then there’s you.
Maybe you’re ghosts or spirits. Maybe you’re the psychic imprints sunk into the walls from that terrible night. Maybe this is actually hell and not an empty building poised to become the next celebrity haunted house.
You don’t know. All you know is the loop: a small window of time played over and over and over again. To say that you’re trapped would imply that you could have any existence outside of the loop. To say that you are aware of the loop would imply that it would even matter. All that matters is the growing storm of resentment and anger that’s roiling in your gut. All that matters is that with each loop you are able to push a little more, thrash a little harder.
All that matters is finally getting satisfaction.
The Blast Shadows of Gale Manor is an experimental playtest of a black box style horror larp. In it, players play through a repeated 30 minute loop of time where characters escalate in hostility with each subsequent loop until violence and death break out. The characters’ memories of what came before are wiped clean, but their hostility isn’t.
Play if you like: black box theatre, a restricted setting, escalating emotional stakes, tragic endings, limited but essential mechanics
Don’t play if you don’t like: violence, death, experimental mechanics, repetition of scripted moments
If you wish to sign up for Gale Manor, please click here. It is running on Saturday, November 8, from 12:30 PM to 4:30 PM. This event is organized by Kim Lam.
Characters for this game are pre-written, and chosen/distributed at start of play. Costumes are optional but welcome. If you wish to costume for this, dress for a modern dinner party for movers and shakers. As a black box theatre design, neutral, dark-coloured clothing is the otherwise preferred default.
Signups for this LARP are on a first come, first serve basis. There is a minimum number of 6 players for the event to run, and it caps at 10. Players 18+ only, please.
Prairie LARP 