Players

by Warren Tusk and Elisabeth Cohen

Once, it is said, there was a mortal sage who wished to become a great power in the realm of demons. And so it was that he sought to emulate the forms and the practices of the demon kings themselves.

This heretic gathered Hellish essence into his soul, as much as he could possibly hold. Then he retreated into his sanctum and began to meditate upon various different aspects of himself. It was his intention to spawn demons from his own substance, subsidiary souls given independent mind and independent strength, that they might serve him.

Something went terribly wrong. Or perhaps not; who can say what, exactly, his plans might have been?

When the arcane surges faded away, the heretical sage had vanished from the realm of men. But in Hell, there had arisen from nowhere a Labyrinth Cathedral, a mighty twisting temple whose chapels and cloisters and libraries could not be counted. Upon the walls of that vast edifice were carved the stories and symbols of the sage-who-was-no-more. Those amongst the demon-folk who had known him claimed that perhaps a vague echo of his consciousness might be discerned in that place, although even they could not be sure.

And in the temple's secret heart, the great nave at the center of the maze, seven beings stood facing one another. Each of them was a demon prince or princess, a component soul of the Cathedral, born from a fragment of the sage-who-had-been. Each of them bore a different element of his drive, his purpose, his identity. Yet each of them far surpassed its origins, for they were all complete beings in themselves.

They waited there in the nave, contemplating their own minds and conferring with one another. They knew that they all had great destinies awaiting them in Hell, for their power was vast. Moreover, they knew that as soon as they stepped beyond the doorway of the Cathedral that incubated them, their roles and their natures would solidify into immutable truth. But so long as they remained within the conceptual womb, they were fluid, and could determine to some extent what they would become.

The seven souls of the Cathedral were bound to each other with ties of selfhood. They prepared to shape one another, just as they prepared to shape themselves.

And all Hell stood in wonderment and fear, waiting to see what would emerge...

The Path of a Thousand Whispers is a psychodramatic LARP for seven players. It is about being a person who used to be a part of a person. It is about the internal dynamics of a mind in conflict, with its various drives represented by different characters.

It is also about being a weird-ass demon doing weird-ass demon things.

Mechanics are very light. To the extent that they're there at all, they center on alliance-forming, coalition-building, and conceptual compromise. Most of the characters are not well-suited to doing any of those things.