Shut Up, A**hole! or: How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Pass the Budget

Shut Up Asshole is a 6-12 player LARP about collective communication, coordination, cooperation and lack thereof, using the framing of a 1 hour budget meeting in a workshop-developed setting.

This setting can be as fantastical as "pixies tasked with planning a masquerade ball to impress their fae monarch" to as mundane as "ambitious video game company trying to create a romance MMORPG". Despite your characters' conflicting group roles and motivations, most of you are here to buckle down and do this unglamorous but important work in pursuit of your goal.

One of you, though, is secretly an Asshole.

Note: The role of the Asshole will be randomly assigned during character creation during the LARP.

Long Description

Originally conceived of as a training tool for leftist organizing, Shut Up Asshole is a 6-12 player LARP about collective communication, coordination, cooperation and lack thereof, using the framing of a 1 hour budget meeting.

You will portray a group struggling to pursue a shared vision with the limited resources available to them, in a workshop-developed setting which can be as fantastical as "pixies tasked with planning a masquerade ball to impress their fae monarch" or "militant radical space leftists taking over a galactic outpost on a remote asteroid belt" to as mundane as "ambitious video game company trying to create a romance MMORPG".

Taking on archetypal, yet exaggerated, group roles such as "Passionate Rambler", "Careful Veteran", and "Attentive Pedant", and with an inescapable and urgent deadline closing in, this is your character's last chance to influence the group’s very nature via the most influential, contentious, and banal collective process possible: passing a budget. Despite your conflicting roles within the group, as well as opposing motivations and priorities, most of you are here to buckle down and do this unglamorous but important work in pursuit of your goal.

One of you, though, is an asshole.

For whatever reason, the Asshole isn’t dedicated to getting the budget passed, and will act in ways—picking fights, creating distractions, confusing people, or anything else—that could very well stop it from happening. With only 1 hour on the clock, even wasting time is a death sentence for a decision.

Can the group as a whole manage to agree on a single thing before the meeting ends, or will bickering -- whether from the Asshole or not -- tear you apart?

Note: The role of the Asshole will be randomly assigned during character creation via drawing from a hat. The Asshole keeps their role a secret throughout the game but uses it to inform their play.