In late July, Boston-based immersive theatre company Incantrix Productions, in partnership with NYC’s Sinking Ship Creations, will bring one of their famed pub crawls to Greenwich Village in New York City. Players will be grouped into sets of sets of five to eight people as they become investigators who are visiting a number of different bars to locate the strange Doctor Thurgood’s final invention: the mysterious time-hopping “Infinity Engine.” Participants should expect multiple puzzles and opportunities for role-playing as well as interacting with actors planted at various drinking establishments.

We spoke to Caroline Murphy of Incantrix Productions and Betsy Isaacson and Ryan Hart of Sinking Ship Creations to learn more about the upcoming interactive experience.

No Proscenium (NP): Tell us a little bit about yourselves and your respective immersive companies.

Caroline Murphy (CM): Incantrix Productions is an interactive theater company based out of Boston. We’ve been running professional productions for the public since 2016. Our stories have a neat premise: each individual production can be enjoyed on its own, but all of our Incantrix Universe productions have an interwoven storyline that serves as a meta story layer for audiences that enjoy coming to multiple events. That means you can choose your level of engagement from very casual attendance to very serious participant.

Betsy Isaacson (BI): Sinking Ship Creations is a badass immersive theater company that’s been chugging along since May 2018. We started off with Project Ascension, a big ol’ cyberpunk LARP, and now we’re at the point where we’re trying to take on a new immersive experience every two months. Of course, since we can’t write a new LARP every two months we work with new authors as well as with established companies — like Incantrix Productions — to bring new awesome stuff to New York under our aegis.

Ryan Hart (RH): All of us are particularly dedicated to LARP as an artistic medium, and bringing it to new audiences. We’d been looking for the chance to work together for some time, and The Infinity Engine provided an excellent opportunity.

NP: What, in a nutshell, is The Infinity Engine about?

CM: The Infinity Engine is the first chapter in the Incantrix Universe storyline. It takes place in 1904, and participants take on the role of recruits into a secret organization. They are asked to look into the last will and testament of the late Prof. Nigel Thurgood — famed inventor of the Infinity Engine. The problem, though, is that Thurgood protected his secrets by giving different pieces of a puzzle to different contacts. Because of that, participants have to track down these associates, finding them in their local haunts and earning their trust. If you like bar crawls, scavenger hunts, and wacky characters in steampunk-era costuming, this is the game for you.

NP: What inspired Sinking Ship Creations and Incantrix Productions to team up to create this experience?

BI: Sinking Ship’s season so far has been pretty…heavy. The Mortality Machine, White Death, and FADE and we’re reading the newspaper and even real life looks pretty grim these days and we wanted to do something a little more fun. So we’ve got The Infinity Engine, where you can play characters like “Typhoon Tell — Flying Ace” and “Noor Pickwick — Polymath Professor” and bap around bars hunting down members of semi-ridiculous secret societies. It should be a gas.

CM: Incantrix has long wanted to bring our productions to NYC, and Sinking Ship has a lot of alignment with our aesthetics and writing style. The partnership is a natural fit.

NP: How is the idea of a pub crawl incorporated into the experience? What do steampunk, LARP, and pub crawls have in common, anyway?

CM: The idea behind the pub crawl is two-fold. First, it’s way more fun to be in a real-world location, trying to track down a shady contact in a dimly-lit bar; it heightens immersion and makes things feel much more real. Second, it’s sometimes easier to be brave with the social context of chatting at a bar (and bars love getting the additional foot-traffic).

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Steampunks love to dress up and roleplay, LARPers love to dress up and roleplay, and many people enjoy doing so with a cocktail/mocktail in hand.

RH: One of the exciting things about The Infinity Engine is it shows off a style of LARP we don’t see as often — a pervasive style LARP. A pervasive LARP occurs in a natural setting… like a bar or a subway station… and usually has non-participants in the area of play. There’s a tremendous amount of immersion and unique stories that can be told with this style, and we’re beginning to do larger scale projects in this style. By setting the experience in a pub crawl, Caroline has created a pretty innovative example of this style.

NP: How is the audience incorporated into the work? What kinds of choices can the participants make?

CM: Right from the get-go, audiences need to make choices about what characters they will help or hinder. There’s more than one secret society for people to choose between, and choose they must! Those choices impact the outcome of each group’s run of the game (i.e., there are different endings you can get.)

RH: One of the things we’ve learned running LARPs for our audiences: they need to be trained on how to play (we often call it on-boarding). In particular, they have to understand what they have to actually do — we need to set expectations. The Infinity Engine does this in an ingenious fashion; you know walking in “this is a pub crawl; I go to bars, get drinks, and meet people.” By going through these actions (familiar to many New Yorkers), they’re immediately able to immerse and start making those important decisions with the help of our actors.

NP: How are you designing around audience agency, consent, and safety given that it’s a pub crawl? Are these bars open to the general public while the event is happening, for example?

CM: The bars are open to the public, and our actors have no physical touch interaction elements with any audience members. We are providing sober actors, puzzles, and story. Consent/agency/safety in this case is the choice on the part of the audience to take whatever relative risks are associated with going out into public, just like any other time they might go to a bar/restaurant. We are in no way administrating the space, the bars are responsible for their venues, but our actors have the right to refuse an interaction as they deem necessary. We have escalation procedures that we teach all of our actors in the event of any emergency.

RH: One of the particular areas of expertise that I feel LARP has to offer the rest of the immersive community is in participant safety: we’ve all done a lot of work where our participants have total agency, and that means we also have to manage risk. There’s a couple of major risks accounted for in the design of The Infinity Engine… alcohol and the presence of non-participants are the big ones. This puts constraints on the sort of material we can include, and the experience fits squarely in an area that limits risks in the ways Caroline talked about.

NP: Who is the ideal participant or player for this experience?

CM: Someone who fancies a bit of whimsy, dark whimsy albeit, but plenty of fun and goodheartedness. Someone who enjoys a bit of spycraft; scavenger-hunt style challenges and some approachable but somewhat challenging puzzling. If you’re looking to put on your steampunk-adventurer hat and uncover some mysteries, this is the game for you.

RH: I think The Infinity Engine really appeals to our target audience: the New York City adventure-seeker who really desires something to try something new. I think that spycraft Caroline mentioned is the key: we’ve done some pervasive work before, and every time someone has that thrill of ducking out of sight, sneaking a message or otherwise living out some sort of small urban adventure… then they’re hooked.

NP: What do you hope participants take away from the experience?

CM: The enjoyment of working together to make choices and solve mysteries while meeting a cast of interesting characters.

RH: I just want people to try something new, and hope they enjoy it. We have a great taste of a style of LARP that is new to many LARPers, and accessible to people who never tried LARP before. We think it’s a great “first-time” experience.

The Infinity Engine runs on July 27 in Greenwich Village. Tickets are $49 — 65.

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