So many couples found love in Vampire: The Masquerade LARP groups

Kevin invited me for dinner and at first I thought it was a romantic date. In reality, he was asking me to go for a run. Vampire MasqueradeLive-action roleplaying games with him.

Our 11th anniversary was in August. The proposal we made was crucial to developing the trust and the spirit of teamwork that is at the foundation of our relationship.

The infamous ‘Most Likely to be a… Vampire LARPs, where people can play the same character for more than a decade, Northwestern University’s Dead City Productions game reset every year to ensure that freshmen would enter on relatively equal footing to the upperclassmen. We barely interacted during Kevin’s first year, but the following year we found that we’d both independently chosen to play similar characters.

That year’s game runners, called storytellers or STs, had built a game where the city was only loosely ruled by the hierarchy-obsessed Camarilla. This meant that players could play the characters they usually couldn’t: violent Sabbat vampire supremacists and independents who had their own agendas. We decided not to take advantage of this novelty and instead chose to be Camarilla members.

It seemed like a challenge, to try and be the forces of order within a chaotic environment. We wanted to create a system that other characters would have a hard time battling against. While other players showed up to games dressed in leather jackets and corsets, we projected our authority by wearing suits — holdovers from our time competing in high school speech and debate tournaments. Our political studies led us to use Machiavelli and Thomas Hobbes arguments in support of Camarilla Rule.

We hadn’t planned any of this ahead of time, but the similarities made our characters natural allies and made us want to get to know each other better out of character. It’s what made Kevin think we’d work well together as STs, and what made him ask me out on a real date a few months after that first dinner.

Our relationship really grew the following year once we took over as Dead City Productions’ STs, working with two other Northwestern students running a game for about 30 people for five hours every other Saturday. We spent our Friday evenings together plotting out how we would integrate the characters into the story, based on each one’s interests and background stories. Between games, we also fielded emails from players looking to use their characters’ influence on the game world to do everything from procure maps of the sewers to dig up bodies to reanimate as zombies. In envelopes, we placed character sheets and tokens of blood as well as rumors each character picked up on what was happening in the city.

But no plan can survive the contact between players. Over the course of a game session we met up in the hallway of the building where we played — which ironically had a church on the first floor — and shared an “ST huddle” to recap what happened and what we were planning on doing next before we heard someone shout “ST!” and had to scatter to answer questions and adjudicate combat.

Kevin and I became closer as a result of this stressful job. We both came to appreciate each other’s sense of humor and creativity and trust the decisions we had to make on the fly. After the game, we loved laughing and talking about the events of the night. We also shared our secrets with players.

We then played and organized several other games. Kevin’s a master of mechanics who knows how to command a room, while my comparative strength has always been predicting plots and the actions of other players. It was 3 in the morning when I told him that I had figured out the STs of a certain game planned to attack the city with werewolves. He didn’t appreciate that, even though I was right and it meant our characters were ready for battle.

Our wedding was attended by many Dead City Productions Players and STs. Many players also found love through our LARP. Many of them found their significant others through our LARP. Vampire LARPs around the world have proven to be a surprisingly popular way to find love, which was particularly true at the height of the game’s popularity in the ’90s and early ’00s — a time before dating apps and widespread social media use.

Tim Madsen played in a Chicago VampireOne World by Night is a network of international games set within the World of Darkness shared universe. As soon as he walked in and saw Sarah Hopps, he instantly thought: I’m going to marry her someday. They’ve now been married for more than 20 years.

Photo by Shay McAulay

Sarah had driven almost 1,000 miles to Chicago along with two or three cars’ worth of friends (from her Georgia LARP) who were looking for vengeance.

“A character got killed, and we were furious,” she said. “[Tim’s] character was trying to calm us down and talk us out of doing anything rash.”

Tim regularly traveled between LARPs in Springfield, Illinois; Kenosha, Wisconsin; and Chicago, but this was Sarah’s first time visiting another game.

“I was this squishy little 13th-gen Toreador with no points on my sheet and everything was very scary and intimidating,” she said. “[Tim’s]The character in Chicago had such a high position and so many important points. It was hot.”

Catherin O’Sullivan met Shay McAulay at her first Vampire LARP in New Zealand. She spent the first game hanging out in the background, watching and listening to other players until she was eventually roped in by a veteran character who wanted to know what she’d overheard. She loved the escape and the chance to hang out with people in-game and outside of the game. This included McAulay.

Seven years after their first meeting, McAulay played the prince, the Camarilla word for the vampire king of a town. His character needed a date for a ball involving characters from another game, so he decided to ask O’Sullivan’s character to join him.

“As we walked out of that particular scene, I just turned around and said, ‘I wish somebody would do that in real life,’” O’Sullivan said. “A couple of months later, he did.”

They’ve been married since 2008. The couple has been married since 2008

Monica Marlowe met her future spouse at her very first date. Vampire She attended LARP with her brother, in Cincinnati.

“We walked in and [Andrew], who is all of 5-foot-4, was yelling in character at one of our friends who’s over 6 feet tall,” she said. “I really liked him.”

Andrew Marlowe’s first impression wasn’t as favorable. It was a Sabbat Pack that recruited new members quickly through their in-character games. The Sabbats brought along a copy Operation The body was being dismantled.

“She was a pain in my ass,” Andrew said. “Everybody joined her. It wasn’t even close.”

Before they met, the two had played other tabletop and LARP-style games together.

“I had to tell him he liked me,” Monica said.

“Actually, four or five people had to tell me,” Andrew added. “I am notoriously clueless.”

They’ve been married for more than 23 years. Monica had been playing RPGs since high school, and while she’d encountered sexism when trying to join Dungeons & Dragons groups, she found Vampire Women are welcome to LARP.

Lex Crawford Page, Image Courtesy

“Vampire The World of Darkness is a very good game. [narrative-driven], and women are trained pretty much from birth to be political machines,” she said. “We have to learn to move within the hierarchy of other women in our schools and play the catty game. LARPing allows you to shed everything about yourself that you don’t want and be all the things that you do. It allows people to explore who they are in ways that they wouldn’t otherwise be able to do in the presence of strangers.”

Tim Madsen was attracted to the gender equality when he first started LARPing.

“I could smoke cigarettes and there were girls there and everyone was dressed up and they looked really cool,” he said. “I was like, It’s way more fun than just hanging around playing. Magic: The GatheringWith some guys.”

Marlowes knows 10 couples formed by LARP. In the late ’90s and early ’00s, about 90 to 150 people would gather in a bar in Cincinnati where the bouncers and bartenders had their own character sheets so they could intervene if anyone acted inappropriately without breaking immersion. After the game, they’d head to Denny’s to socialize out of character.

“LARPs give you opportunities to mingle with people who have shared interests and the same nerdy hobbies you do,” Andrew said.

“It’s just like a dating service,” Monica added. “You go to a game and you find somebody that you like. Some relationships are long-term, but others start as a casual hookup. There’s a joke where you ask, ‘Is this sex in-character?’”

The Madsens also know many other couples who met through LARP, and most of the friendships they’ve maintained for the past 20 to 30 years have come from those games. Sarah says that any kind of group can bring people together. VampireThe game features a blend of both in-character interaction and interactions outside the character.

“In D&D you’re playing heroes, while in Vampire you’re all politicking against each other,” she said. “That can cause rifts between people, but I think it also encourages a lot of social awareness in a way you don’t necessarily have at a small five-person tabletop game.”

McAulay prides himself on being very good at manipulating other characters, but O’Sullivan said that never concerned her as his wife.

“It was all part of the game,” she said. “I was reasonably certain he would never do that to me in real life. He knows what would happen if he tried.”

The Marlowes no longer LARP, but they typically tried to avoid conflicts by playing characters on the same side, though that didn’t always work out. At a convention Monica’s character was killed because she became bored.

Sarah Madsen tries to stay true to her characters regardless of what Tim’s character would think. They stopped playing regularly when they had kids, and haven’t played together recently because Tim’s character will have to kill Sarah’s the next time he sees her, and he really doesn’t want to do it. Sarah wouldn’t give me details for fear that other people in the game will learn all of her character’s secrets from reading this article.

“Prior to that [event], we were good allies for a long time,” Sarah said. “We had minor antagonisms in-character, but it didn’t seem like being married negatively affected our character relationships. “I think I’m able to trust.” [Tim’s] role-play to be separate from our relationship.”

LARP is not just about building relationships. It can be a great way to learn more and feel more confident in social situations.

“I found ways to be able to talk to people,” Tim said. “Talking to a stranger about my relationships is not something I would have ever done 20 years ago, but now I’m doing it.”

Monica explained that playing a role also allows for a certain amount of separation, which is necessary to allow personal exploration and growth.

“We have a lot of friends who have come out as either trans or nonbinary because of their experiences LARPing. You can embody somebody that you’re not in such an immersive way that you can kind of hide who you are until you’re willing to find that person that you’re willing to be vulnerable with.”