Hell is Other Santas

A Personal-Horror/Comedy LARP in the format of a Papal Conclave, to decide the true nature of Saint Nick / Santa Claus. Versions of Santa from across time and space find themselves drawn together in a strange liminal space to sort out the inconsistent mess their legend has become.

This game is about the horror of having no real control over how other people think of you, let alone History chooses to posthumously repurpose you, and the comedy of watching more than a dozen versions of Santa Claus grapple with this at the same time.

Long Description

Hell is Other Santas is a Personal-Horror/Comedy game in which the Horror comes from grappling with the fact that our identities are meaningless and that no matter who we are, we have no real control over the ways that other people think about us, let alone what history will choose to use us for, and the Comedy comes from the fact that this reckoning is taking place within the context of a Papal-Conclave-Style series of votes in a surreal extra-dimensional space, about the nature and character of Santa Claus. All of the candidates and voters are historical, canonical, real versions of Santa, Saint Nicholas, or major players in the shaping and reshaping of Santa’s identity, grappling over what being Santa should mean.

The line between candidate and voter is slim and permiable, as any character may come out of this room as the new official canonical version of who Santa Claus will be, should that particular Santa amass the necessary quorum of their peers votes. There’ll be an open mic for speeches, and time built in to rub elbows, get to know your fellow Santa candidates (traumatizing yourself and others in the process) make deals, negotiate, build like-minded coalitions, and almost inevitably sacrifice core parts of your identity for popular palatability, all between scheduled formal votes.

28 potential Santas enter, 1 Concept of Santa leaves.