This is a LARP that I helped run first in October 2008, based on P.G. Wodehouse's Blandings Castle books. It was a written larp designed by Nathan Gribble, Steve Hatherly, Heidi Kaye, and Paul Snow.
Midsummer Mischief is set in PG Wodehouse's absurd world of England's leisured upper class in the early part of the century. This is a place where people shout "Wot ho!" and "You bounder!" and even "That's just not cricket!" A word of warning: this is not the real world. Here follows some useful (and not-so-useful) starting points:
- It is always hay-harvest weather in England: 54 holes of golf a day, or a swim before breakfast in the lake, morning in the hammocks under the cedars, tea on the lawn, and coffee on the terrace after dinner.
- Money is something you should inherit, get monthly as an allowance from your uncle, or win at the races.
- Small dogs bite your ankles.
- Babies are hideously ugly.
- Young boys are fiends.
- Aunts are harridans.
- Butlers have port in their pantries.
- All decent-sized country houses have cellars, coal-sheds and potting sheds for locking people in.
- Most handsome men have feet of clay.
- No decent man may cancel, or even refuse, an engagement to a girl.
- Blandings Castle is traditionally infested with impostors.
- Men and girls in love think only of marriage.
- Rose gardens turn a girl's thoughts to romance.
- A bedroom scene is either when you discover that someone has made you an apple-pie bed, or when one or more people come and search your room for policemen's helmets or miscreants hiding under your bed.
- All married couples have separate bedrooms.
- It is every young man's duty to steal policemen's helmets.