Ebb Tide

But I’ll tell ya, if you’d seen it, when the bay is at high flood and the moon shines down spectral over Devil’s Reef…you’d know that there’s things sepulchured in those thalassian depths that outsiders have no business prying into.

Ebb Tide is a LARP about the Innsmouth Homeowner’s Association.

Long Description

In the summer, Innsmouth, MA, is one of Cape Cod’s hottest vacation destinations - a kooky kitschy paradise of surf shops and mini-golf courses. If you’re lucky, you might even spot one of the local unexplained atmospheric phenomena; the ghostly lights which flicker over Devil’s Reef on a long summer’s night. Before you leave, be sure to take a ghost tour of the old cannery buildings and hear the shocking story of the Douglass Disappearances, or buy a souvenir surf-board with a picture of one the Deep Ones, one of the town’s local cryptids!

But if you linger in the winter, when the summer residents flee back to the cities and the overpriced fish-and-chips restaurants shutter up their windows against the chill wind which sweeps across the desolate beaches, you might just catch a glimpse of a different Innsmouth. The Old Innsmouth. A place where the ghosts of salt marshes moan through the rotting rail-road pylons and cannery sheds, and the harbor remembers the bones of a thousand scavenged whales and shipwrecks. There’s fewer and fewer of them here every year, but the people who know the old ways still know - there’s things sepulchured in those thassalian depths that outsiders have no business prying into.

Ebb Tide is a three-hour LARP for 9 players about a meeting of the Innsmouth Home Owner’s Association to discuss the city council’s proposed plan to reopen Devil’s Reef beach to the public. This game will be loosely structured as a political meeting divided into sessions for formal comment and discussion and recesses for mingling and gossip.

Ebb Tide is a slice-of-life eldritch cozy-horror game, drawing on Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos, and reinterpretations of it in Ruthana Emrys’ Litany of Earth series. This game is written as a love letter to Cape Cod, and the strange vibes and dynamics of any beachside vacation community in the winter. It’s a game about home and transience, places changing and staying the same, absurd neighborhood politics, and growing up with the ebb and flow of the tides. The characters in Ebb Tide live in a reality with lovecraftian horror elements, but with a magical realist tone—the eldritch it is a facet of these characters’ day to day lives. There is an intensity and sublimity to it—but just in the ways that there is an intensity and sublimity to everyday life.

The town of Innsmouth in Ebb Tide is drawn from Lovecraft’s original novella, The Shadow Over Innsmouth, but our setting diverges substantially from the source material. Wheras Lovecraft’s Innsmouth was originally constructed as a racist, classist, and xenophobic metaphor, painting Innsmouth’s residents as an expression of his own hateful views of immigrant communities, our treatment of the setting aims to tell a story that respects and explores the point of view of the residents of Innsmouth rather than to othering them.