You can expect a mix of political scheming, 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, and dancing, entering trance-like states, shouting naked in the woods, covertly assassinating rivals, 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.

While the backdrop of the LARP is a raucous party, full of drinking, dancing, and (faux) sex, the core of the LARP is focused around intense rituals and political machinations.

We can give you a more party-focused character, but the party is the ritual, and all characters will be engaging in these cult rites.

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’re still scoping out sites for the playtest, but you can expect a campsite 2-3 hours from NYC that has cabins with electricity and running water available.

Right now, we’re looking at sites in upstate NY, Eastern PA, and NJ.

Ticket prices will depend on site fees. Sign up for the mailing list to be the first to find out how much tickets will be and where you can apply!

We’re working to keep tickets as affordable as possible, with subsidized tickets available for people in difficult financial situations.

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. Yawn. 

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’m getting a tattoo from one of my favorite versions by Anne Carson, which I highly recommend reading. Its subversive approach to the already-subversive source material is in the ethos of this LARP, 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!