Tickets are $375 per player.

If you are facing financial hardship, we offer scholarship tickets and encourage you to still apply.

You can expect a mix of social deduction, intense transformative ritual, and debaucherous party. Depending on character casting, you can get a pretty different experience, with different characters leaning more into some elements than others.

The LARP will involve cult initiations, ritual chanting, shouting, nude dancing, entering trance-like states, sacrificing fake animals, and tearing enemies of the cult asunder with your bare hands.

You shouldn’t expect character stats, combat mechanics, or a highly-competitive player-versus-player environment. Instead, the focus is on cultivating a shared environment to tell a story as a group.

No. Actual sex is not permitted in the game space.

While this is an erotic LARP that deals with sex and sensuality as central features, all in-character sex is simulated theatre-style while wearing underwear.

Nope! You can play it fully clothed and not engage in the more erotic elements. In casting, we can give you a character who’s more focused on the spirituality and ritual or political maneuvering. We are confident in the ability to fully engage with this experience without going past your own personal boundaries regarding sex and eroticism.

However! You will see people who are nude and having simulated sex if you attend this LARP, regardless of your own level of undress.

Absolutely! The dancing in this LARP is all self-paced, with no choreography to memorize. If just swaying to the beat, hitting a tambourine, sitting or standing, is the extent of your dancing, we encourage that!

We will also be doing a short class on the basics of ecstatic dance, including exercises in movement.

All characters are bacchantes (maenads) or aspiring initiates into the cult of Bacchus.

Among the bacchantes, characters will range from newly-inducted members to powerful high priestesses.

Some characters openly or secretly members of the more conservative cult of Liber, there to drive the Bacchanalia into moderation, and some are undercover state agents.

Oh, and Bacchus is there in disguise. It’ll be fine.

No! While the majority are, characters across the gender spectrum will be available to play.

We actively encourage players of all genders to apply, and all players regardless of gender identity or presentation can play as any gender of character they’re comfortable playing.

We will be using an off-game phrase and gesture to signify out-of-character player needs as our main safety tool. We also will be using a tap-out system, which you will be practicing during workshops.

A participant advocate will be present at all times during the game and workshops, and there will be a dedicated out-of-character space for decompression if you need any breaks.

We will not be using an ok-checkin system.

Prior to the admission lottery, we will be emailing out a list of all the applicants, and give people a period of time to flag anyone they have concerns about. Each case will be reviewed individually. Nocturnal Mess reserves the right to withhold an invitation from anyone we believe may not be able to engage with this content in a safe and respectful manner.

NO. At Nocturnal Mess, we are here to support human ingenuity. All writing, art, and music used in The Bacchanalia Affair is created by actual fleshy humans.

The Bacchanalia Affair is the creation of Nocturnal Mess Productions.

Spite, benevolently. I was tired of being invited to “bacchanals” that were just parties where shouting “IO, BACCHUS” and suggesting dismembering a goat with our bare hands was frowned upon.  

Then I discovered Livy’s account of the Bacchanalia Affair of 186 BCE, and being a sucker for political intrigue, I became obsessed with it as a backdrop for a LARP. I think it mirrors our current society in unsettling ways, while providing enough distance from modernity to allow deeper investigation into issues such as state suppression of queer identities and enforcement of gender roles.

I also believe that LARP is the most inherently Dionysian art form, and that there’s nothing more fitting than a LARP focused around Dionysus-Bacchus, as a god of both freedom and the theatre. Greek Dionysia festivals often focused on plays, many of which dealt with themes of illusion and identity, and I believe that carrying on that legacy in our modern society is an important act of resistance. 

At a secondhand bookstore, I also stumbled upon a cheap copy of Euripides’ The Bacchae, and fate decided that it was the perfect time to revisit the text. It’s become a bit of an obsession of mine. I highly recommend reading it; it’s a short read and can give you an idea of the tone we’re taking with The Bacchanalia Affair. 

- Jacqui, lead writer 

Thank you to The Orphic Hymns Grimoire by Sara Mastros for core ritual design ideas. Also, thank you to Euripides for inspiring the urge in me to tear the head off of an authoritarian, hubristic king. EUOI!