Coven 1934 is an occult horror LARP in the immersive Nordic style set during the American Dust Bowl in a small town at the edge of unreality and fate. It is inhabited by a mixture of the supernatural characters lurking at the edges of darkness, the mundane characters who live there, and those who straddle the line.

Reality is frail, and in a time of great uncertainty, all the rules for both human society and the natural world seem to fail. Desperation makes it impossible to hold onto lies, but chaos makes the truth uncertain. And the dust clouds keep rolling in, blowing black blizzards that choke the Earth. A strange and apocalyptic miasma pervades the place.

What kind of characters will we play?

All characters for Coven 1934 are prewritten by the staff. They range from the desperate and mundane to the sinister and supernatural. You might play a demon-tormented priest; a family of vagabond farmers searching for a lost child; or an elder of a dark coven. You might play a hungry supernatural parasite; a hobo that casts luck charms for the desperate; or a cultist of an occult god. All of these are possibilities, and more. We can’t reveal them all, as it might spoil some of the mystery and tension within the game.

Coven 1934 is set at the intersection between the mundane and the supernatural, set against the chaos and uncertainty of one of America’s darkest times, when all things precious and secure seem to blow apart into the dust that rolls over the horizons. The characters reflect that feeling and time.

Characters will be divided into three broad categories:

• The Mundane, those who have not touched the supernatural world before the events of the game, or who have remained willfully ignorant of them.
• The Touched, those who have some knowledge of the unnatural and strange, and might have some strange abilities of their own.
• The Unnatural, those who deal directly with forces of the occult or are one of those forces themselves.

The game will be divided between these types of characters; and you will be able to select your preference during casting.

The Rules

Coven 1934 will use a collaborative negotiation-based system, where you control your experience and can set your limits on how other characters can affect your game. Supernatural powers are also negotiated in a similar fashion. There will be an absolute emphasis on consent and pre-negotiation on what happens to your character.

Inspirations

The Twilight Zone; Carnivale; Sinners; The Dark Tower; American Horror Story; The Grapes of Wrath; Blood Meridian; the works of Stephen King, Tim Powers, and Clive Barker