This page is primarily for those who have attended The Forbidden History before, particularly the later runs. There have been many changes over the years, but for the 2026 runs we are making some big ones to both make the larp more sustainable to work with and to try to make the participant experience more streamlined and even.
Character Writing
The biggest change lies in what has often been a special thing with The Forbidden History. For each run, we’ve tailored everything from gender and sexuality to specific themes and details in characters. We’ve rewritten ethnicities and backgrounds to fit those that players have requested, all to make it a close to home experience with a lot of real life parallels. We have also adjusted which track and year students are in as well as their Secret Societies, according to individual preferences.
We are changing parts of our approach to this. The workload has been so immense, rewriting, editing and proofreading over 100 characters each time, sometimes reducing the overall quality of a group, a dynamic, or a relation, without properly adjusting for it in the grander design simply due to lack of hours.
However, we are not doing away with it entirely! Never fear. Instead, each character and group dynamic will now have certain aspects that are unchangeable while others might be flexible. This allows us to maintain the ideal group and class dynamics, narrowing down the changes our writers have to make while still retaining some of what makes The Forbidden History special – the very personal experience.
Sign Up and Casting
What this above means for you as a participant is that we will no longer have a short sign up and then a much bigger casting form sent out at a later date. We will now let everyone select themes and groups in their sign-up sheet, prioritizing them according to the themes and wishes that you might have.
After that, we will send out a flagging form where you can coordinate with others who have signed up that you might want to play with. However, try to make sure that you have compatible signups when it comes to group themes, if you are signing up together.
This also means that we will try to assign spots according to group interest. From previous experience, we know that the groups offer very different experiences. We want participants who actively want to larp the themes they offer, and to save us the time of trying to make things fit when they really don’t fit preferences-wise.
This will influence our acceptance of participants, so while it is still a lottery, each group is randomized individually. You will have a higher chance of getting a spot if there are multiple groups you are interested in or if you are alone in wanting to play in them.
Politics
We have revised and updated the circumstances of St. Theodora’s place in the world, in Lower Silesia in 1986. We have taken in opinions and expertise to accurately reflect its position in a complicated region and adapted it to the Cold War reality of Poland in the 1980s. The full circumstances are available in the Player’s guide that is made accessible for all participants.
AI Policy Change
At The Forbidden History we want our focus to be on original creation, no matter the quality. From the organiser side we have never previously used AI, but we have allowed participants to generate text via AI. Going forward, we would like to stop all use of AI connected to this larp, and hope that you as our participants will join in this.