Let the World Burn

Written by Peter Fallesen and translated into English by Rasmus Husted Legêne, Lizzie Stark and Peter Fallesen and pitched at London Indiemeet by Karolina Soltys

It has taken me a while to write up this game. To be honest it has taken me a while to make sense of it.

Let the World Burn is a beautiful story game (which can apparently also be run as a LARP) about a search for a lost love in a decaying world.

From the start the David Lynchesque nature of the game is very apparent. There are 5 characters in the game. The 3 ‘humans’ are male. They are P.E, the romantic, searching for his true love amid the ruins; C, a ghost represented in the form of a set of his teeth that P.E carries in his pocket, O.D, a self destructive wannabe nihilist who is searching for the one woman who he believed truly understood him. In addition to these characters are the spirits of Love and Destruction, influencing events around them but not being physical presences in the story.  

Over all this hovers the spectre Q, a woman about whom we learn very little.

During the game the 3 ‘human’ characters, influenced by love and destruction frame scenes around their relationships with Q in the past. Significantly Q is not in any of these scenes having just left or yet to arrive. All those scenes are framed in flashback and scenes with C are framed from when he was alive. Ultimately, at least in the game that we played, C was dull but stable, P.E. accepting, and O. D. destructive but lost.

In between these scenes the search for Q continues in various locations, in her apartment; at a wake; at a motel and throughout the city which is slowly degrading as characters begin destroying their parts of the city as a mechanic to win arguments.

We learnt that O.D had regular sex with Q in the alley behind the porn theatre, that P.E and Q had a dull sex life and a life devoid of adventure and O.D. certainly believed that she wasn’t the settling down type, although again Q only appeared through the character interpretations of her and wasn’t present at any time. We also learnt that C spent 3 weeks with her when she had temporarily split up from P.E and it had been the most meaningful 3 weeks of his life until she had just left. (‘No wonder you jumped in front of a bus’ Destruction said)

At the end of the game the characters have to decide whether their search for Q is driven by love or destruction. The answer then affects how the game ends.

The interesting thing about this game is that although it’s focussed around the search the ultimate mystery is not around what has happened to Q. It’s quite clear, following the wake scene, possibly even following the scene in P.E and Q’s apartment what has happened. The real mystery is around who Q is and how 3 people (influenced by Love and Destruction) see her as someone so different that they might as well be searching for 3 different women. Maybe this has something to say about the nature of love, that we can only understand aspects of others through our own view of the world. Thus Q is equally a devoted housewife, an impulsive exhibitionist lover and someone who is soft and tender enough to change someone’s world in 3 weeks.

Or perhaps Q is none of those things and has become a cipher for what the characters really want - someone like them. Perhaps Destruction could argue that love is always destructive because you’re taking a person with their own hopes and desires and moulding them into the image that you want them to fit. But Love could answer that maybe, even if you never know a whole person you can love the part that you do know with all your heart. And maybe the question of who Q really was is now unanswerable. Maybe it was always unanswerable. Maybe that was the point.

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Juggernaut review

It is July third, 1950. The Korean War is eight days old. National Security Council Report 68 is sitting on Harry Truman’s desk, a grim outline of the Cold War that is to enfold the world for the next 40 years. Alan Turing’s paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” is circulating for review. Cinderella is a box office sensation.And you have invented a computer that can see the future.Employing cutting-edge Ward-Takahashi identity derivations outside their quantum-theoretical framework, JUGGERNAUT processes enormous data sets, ostensibly in the service of code-breaking once the technology is proven and refined. The unstable geniuses behind the math have reached some curious conclusions that only experimental evidence can confirm. By the numbers, JUGGERNAUT —given enough resources— should be able to crack ciphers before they are even invented.

Juggernaut is a LARP for 4 - 6 characters who are testing the new machine - a computer that can supposedly see the future. All characters are pre-written and there are various reason why there might already be tension between them. Some are scientists and the character I played who worked building rockets under the Nazi regime before transferring to America (where we set the game) kept fighting with the military officer who had lost friends during the war. Other characters had equal reasons why there might be tension between them. In addition to personal reasons for strained relationships the game was set in an era of racism, xenophobia and McCarthyism so the atmosphere as the game began was one of tension and paranoia.

The contents of the game were a soundtrack to the machine working and a deck of 21 cards with different predictions on them. There were extra decks of cards that could replace cards in the original deck used to change some of the predictions so there is a re-playability value and I would be keen to play this game again, preferably as a different character.

The predictions themselves were unveiled when a character pressed play on the soundtrack and took a card when the soundtrack completed. The predictions began with relatively mundane events and political events in the future which our characters had no way of verifying. The challenge of the LARP was that all predictions about the team members on that day had to come true. The first card I drew was that I had lost a pen and would engage others in a search for it. Which I then had to do during the course of play.

I won’t go into details about the predictions. Discovering them and acting on them is the fun of the game. One of the players called Juggernaut an ‘improvised LARP’ and I think that’s a fair assessment. Every card you drew, you had to ensure that the events on it happened during the game and as the intensity of the cards increased it led to the team becoming increasingly paranoid, secretive and hostile towards one another.

  

As we started to get through cards and realised that some of the ‘predictions’ hadn’t been acted on one of the players had the idea of, in character, sorting the cards into verified (i.e. things that had occurred), unverified (i.e. things that were predicted to occur but that we hadn’t made happen yet) and unverifiable (things predicted for a future date.) This made it easier for players to see what actions their character’s still needed to complete by the end of the game.

The game lasted about 2 hours and was enjoyable. We did experience some issues of our character’s personalities altering as predictions came through in order to fit in with the predictions. However, there was some guidance given on each character and how they felt about the others so none of the alterations were incredibly drastic. It did make it difficult to play any of the characters in a nuanced way but in a 2 hour game this wasn’t a problem.

The game was partially immersive in an interesting way. On one hand I did feel the tension and paranoia increase with particular predictions, and in fact it was immersive to the point that I accidently opened the door a few times when I was pulling on it as hard as I could, forgetting that I wasn’t really locked in!

On the other hand I had to take a step back and work out how and when I could play out predictions and how I could give others an opportunity to play out their’s.

Overall if you get the opportunity to play this game, play it. I would advise that in addition to focusing on your character card and ensuring that your predictions play out you focus on your feelings towards the machine and how they change throughout the game depending on the predictions you receive. What happens if you are sceptical but the predictions, despite your best efforts come true? What happens if you start off believing in the maths but have a really, really vested interested in the machine being wrong? It would probably useful to have a brief understanding of the time period the game is set in to get the full experience of it.

This game strikes me as a very good beginner LARP that would work well for someone who wants to try out LARPing but hasn’t done it before.

Juggernaut can be purchased from Bully Pulpit Games

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