97 Poets of Revachol is a high-production immersive larp set in an old, decaying building in the world of Disco Elysium. It provides a slice-of-life view of a community struggling with poverty, living in a progressively more polarised society.

A backyard revolution or struggle to keep the status quo. Fighting for freedom, ideals, and that nice armchair you want to steal for your living room. Transcendent music to be composed in your uncle’s cellar and effervescent paintings sprayed on tenement walls, covered with drunken graffiti scrawls. Broken windows composed into disco balls, shining over a dance floor filled with your neighbours and enemies. And secrets of the world manifesting themselves in old corridors.

Poverty, politics, art, drugs, and melancholy. That is La Cage.

We aim to create an immersive and thoughtful experience where the participants experience a slice of life in Revachol, in a world slightly different from ours but similar in many ways. You will experience the political turmoil of revolution in a shabby old tenement block and the lives of the poor, the artists and the students who inhabit it.

The game offers social realism and a gritty experience of people who have to toil in sweatshops to make ends meet. It focuses on the beauty – the art, the glitter of parties, the allure of designer drugs – that emerges through the cracks. It offers a supernatural, surreal aspect – rooms that speak to you and strange people who sometimes change into the voices in your head – the Unseen. All this is La Cage – a living, breathing community we hope you will help us create.

Revachol is a melting pot of cultures, where people from all over Elysium come and have their dreams crushed against its sooty walls and its throngs of people. In this environment, racism, prejudices, and simple ignorance flourish, and this is an aspect of the lore we will not shy away from exploring as well — whether it be fascist ideas of haplogroup supremacy, ethnic tensions, colonial traditions and misconceptions, or just simple culture clash. We intend to handle this thoughtfully and carefully. 

All in-game racism is directed at in-game ethnicities, which are fictional and only tentatively inspired by the real world. Players can choose their characters regardless of any off-game characteristics, and any off-game discrimination is strictly not allowed and will be addressed by our safety team. We will workshop how to play on this topic sensitively before the larp. During casting, characters that are specifically victims or active perpetrators of racism have a content warning – but the presence of the theme in the larp cannot fully be avoided.

One of the themes of our game is the surreal – that which lies beyond our immediate, measurable reality. The surreal, the supra-natural, and the infra-material play a key part in the world of Revachol, and none can say how much of it really exists. After all, the continents of this world are divided by the Pale, a white mass that speaks with long-lost voices and drives people mad. The prominent religion of the world worships the Innocences – saint-like people who actually exhibited mystical powers.

In the game, the supra-natural will come into play in many ways. Some might just believe in ghosts or the mould on the walls having a voice. Others might seek out glimpses of alternate realities in drug-induced hallucinations. In this larp, reality sometimes becomes a bit blurry – and that is ok. Has your painting just spoken to you in a revelatory vision, or was that just a bad trip? We may never know.

A key aspect of the supra-natural in 97 Poets of Revachol are the Unseen – a special group of player characters. At first glance, they are people who do not get noticed in everyday life. That weird old lady upstairs, the veteran begging at the corner, that young party teen everybody knows, but nobody really knows. In most situations, people just do not care about them. But if you blink – that ordinary cloak disappears, and they become the Unseen voices in your head, nudging you to drink that extra shot, finally tell your parents what you think about them, or to go and have another pointless argument with your wife. They are not real – but they can really, really play with reality. 

You might want to play an Unseen character if you like knowing and influencing the stories of other players, you enjoy a lot of creative freedom and responsibility in your larp, and you are OK with being more of a director behind the scenes than in the centre of the stage. To learn more about the experience, go here.

The larp is international, and we expect our players to come from various countries and cultures. As such, we would like to foster a space of tolerance and mutual understanding where we all assume the best intentions but also proactively guard our boundaries and ask for help when needed. Any off-game harassment or discrimination is unacceptable. There will be mechanisms for cutting play and opting out of individual scenes. There will also be an off-game space available at all times, and consultants will be able to help players with their game or any emotional safety issues. All safety mechanisms will be practised during the workshops.

We do not distribute roles based on off-game player traits, such as gender, age, ethnicity, etc. That also means players can’t request to play a specific type of relationship only with players with a certain characteristic – like wanting to play romance with only players of a certain gender or age. In cases where playing a specific relation with some people would not be comfortable, players can generally pick characters that do not have a firmly pre-written relation of that sort.

General content warnings

The following topics will be present in the game, and while you may individually avoid actively playing on a specific facet of them, they will be played on around you:

• In-game racism (unrelated to off-game race or ethnicity)
• Extremism, including ideologies similar to communism or fascism
• Violence, including domestic violence, psychological and structural violence.
• Substance abuse and addiction, including gambling
• Poverty and classism
• Real work. This is not very physically demanding for any characters, and some have even lighter jobs, but all characters have scheduled work times that players generally should use to play around the character’s job.
• Suicide
• Death in family, loss of a loved one, serious illness
• Physical play. A certain level of physical play is seen as standard, including touching, getting grabbed/held, etc. It will be possible to opt out of it, but opt-in or calibration will not be required for this sort of play.

Individual content warnings

Characters also have individualised content warnings. These mean that as a player of that character, you WILL meet that topic to a greater degree, and it is a significant part of the character’s pre-written content. Please note that we can never ensure you will not encounter additional content through free play or co-creation, but you can always opt out during play.

• Acts of racism (victim and/or perpetrator)
• Bullying
• Cult-like behaviour
• Domestic violence
• Handling prop corpses
• Handling taxidermy specimens
• Infidelity
• Mental illness
• Pregnancy, including abortion
• Leadership

Topics we avoid

Some topics are simply not part of the game. We will NOT include them in any plots, and you should also not use them as topics in your game. These are:

• Sexuality-based discrimination — characters will have a variety of sexualities. There will be no homophobia or other discrimination based on sexual orientation in our Revachol.
• Sexism — While individual characters may have stories with a gendered dynamic, our Revachol’s society does not operate with gender-based discrimination, and most characters can be played as any gender.
• Sexual violence — while some relationships can have toxic dynamics and pressures, there is no representation of rape in-game.

These are points where we have decided to step away from the source material in order for everyone to be able to enjoy the game without having to deal with real-life shit like this.

The event is divided into the following parts:

• Workshops (Wednesday evening to Thursday afternoon) — We give you your costume and your room, and you learn how to enjoy the game and have time to calibrate and co-create with your co-players. The workshops are mandatory and designed to work for both experienced larpers and first-timers to the hobby.
• Prologue (first hour of the game) — The local gang ambushes the Wild Pines convoy. The mercenaries retreat into an improvised hideout, the Gang licks its wounds, the locals see opportunities everywhere, and a unit of Moralintern officials arrives. The larp starts with pre-scripted starting scenes, which will be more cinematic to get everyone into the game.
• Chapter 1 (Thursday evening and most of the Friday) — Day-to-day life in La Cage. Political groups rally, the building’s secrets get uncovered, and the Gang escalates its violence. And still, work needs to be done, and art wants to be made. The chapter ends with the Gang and the Mercenaries leaving the game — the only question is how.
• The Intermezzo (Friday night) — The tyrants are gone, and the people celebrate. A long-awaited anodic music rave, a disco show for the old-timers, and general festivities. The surreal takes hold for a few hours, with the Unseen taking centre stage for a short while. The players of the Gang and Mercenaries play in special roles – returning as their younger selves or glam party personas.
• Chapter 2 (most of Saturday) — The morning after brings more sober questions. People are grasping for power, orienting themselves in the new environment, or just stealing comfy and expensive furniture left over by their former overlords. La Cage is changing forever, and still, life has to go on. Work to be done, performances to be performed, and grotesque pictures to be painted. The chapter culminates with elections followed by a traditional sports event that will end up with a fight between the hard core of the suzerainists and the globalists. Two precincts of the local police, the RCM, arrive, played by the former Gang / Mercenaries players.
• Countdown (last hours of the game) — Everybody knows that there will be blood on the streets as our part of the city descends into a battle between those who stand up for strong, independent Revachol and those who believe in cooperation and internationalism. Choices are made, the very few people with the privilege to leave do so, and all plots are finished.
• The Battle of La Cage — Unable to resolve their differences in a world that is falling apart, La Cage will either pick the side of an interconnected Globalist rule or a new sovereign, nationalist Revachol. Everyone comes out in the square, weapons or just pieces of furniture in hand. When the talks are over, and people run into each other, the scene freezes. We do not know what happens after that.