Cold Days and Long, Lonely Nights

Amanda Rose spent twenty hours traveling–sleeping in airports, renting a car, and driving through a state I’d never set foot in before–arriving finally in the isolated and much-anticipated setting within which I would assume my character for the weekend: prohibition-era rural USA.

As Louise, soon to be dubbed “The Nunaway,” who had been raised in a Catholic orphanage prior to taking vows herself, I was terrified to be on the DiRossi farm. These secular folk certainly weren’t practitioners of faith; how would I fit in?

As it turns out, Louise fit in just fine. She learned that many of the civilians of faith are not, after all, free of ties from organized crime; their crimes simply go unnoticed in society, erased by the contents of their purses. She learned that priests wander the world, abusing her faith to manipulate those who aren’t educated in the true word of God. And she learned that there are good people, not merely sinful heathens, among practitioners of other religions.

In the process, she counseled a man away from suicide, soothed an injured woman, witnessed a grievous attack and was settled by the calming presence and kindness of individuals labeled criminals. She played a game of cards that connected souls and conversed for hours with foreigners, centering around the topics of free will and personal discovery. She attended an apostate’s Mass; a Purim Spiel; Chinese New Year. She lost herself in the darkness, and in doing so, she found her freedom to choose. She even developed, tentatively, a new sense of family and belonging.

All of this emerged at Velvet Noir.

Perhaps the most ethically crafted larp I’ve ever encountered, Velvet Noir is created by the team at Entropic Endeavors. Games occur quarterly in Petersburg, PA, and players flock from all over the US to play this consent-centered emergent larp. Created as a larp space meant to celebrate the queerness and diversity of 1920s USA not often depicted, factions are founded upon cultural distinctions as an act to celebrate and sustain players’ and characters’ cultures, rather than to homogenize them. In many larp spaces, this could immediately go awry, but Entropic Endeavors creates and maintains a culture of playing to lift, wherein emancipatory bleed is possible and players who abuse power imbalances are unwelcome.

I’ll definitely be writing more about Entropic Endeavors, Velvet Noir, and its creators in the future, likely within my dissertation. But for now, know that if you love larp but struggle with the influence of patriarchy and racism in larp mechanics and among the community, Velvet Noir is a powerful game waiting simultaneously somewhere in the past, and soon again in rural Pennsylvania, to welcome you.