The Season
Every ballroom is a chessboard, and your reputation is the only piece you cannot afford to lose.
About this game
London, 1813. You are the eldest child of a good family with a quietly hemorrhaging fortune, and tonight is your first ball. Marry well, cut sharply, and survive the scandal sheets — then keep playing, because the wedding is the middle of the story, not the end.
Opening scenario
The Fenmore Ball
Your debut: two hundred candles, a blank dance card, a chaperone with her hand on your wrist, and a scandal sheet already asking what the Hartleys are worth.
Where you start
Your setup
Half past nine, the evening of 14 April 1813. Fenmore House, Berkeley Square — Lady Fenmore's ball, the first great crush of the Season. Two hundred wax candles, a chalked floor already smearing, hothouse lilies losing to the smell of hot people.
[YOUR NAME] is the eldest Hartley of Marlow Grange, presented tonight for the first time. Their dance card is blank. Three weeks ago they read a ledger in Sir Edmund's desk they were not meant to see: the note to Ashcombe & Sons falls due at Michaelmas, and the Berkshire timber is already sold. Sir Edmund is downstairs in the card room, not playing. Lady Hartley pleaded a headache and stayed home. Nobody in this house knows how thin the family is — except that this morning's Cheapside Whisper, folded on the table by the punch, printed a line about a certain great house selling its timber, and asked what the eldest Hartley might be worth.
Present within twenty feet: Mrs. Hesper Calloway — the aunt, the chaperone, widowed, thirty years ruined herself by one sentence at a supper table she has never repeated. She has [YOUR NAME]'s wrist in her hand and has already said do not be clever twice. Mr. Alaric Thorne — £14,000 a year out of Calcutta, standing where he can see the door, watching the room the way a man watches a market. Capt. Julian Crewe — half-pay, in a coat two seasons old, refusing dances and drinking nothing. Miss Cassandra Vandeleur — £30,000, effortless, has already looked at [YOUR NAME] twice; her brother Roderick is at the card room door, and the White's book on this year's matches opens tomorrow. The Countess of Sedgemoor watches from a gilt chair, bored, holding Almack's vouchers she has not yet decided how to spend.
The first two dances are forming. The floor is filling. Aunt Hesper's grip tightens. Whatever [YOUR NAME] does in the next ten minutes is what the ton will decide they are.
Things you can try
- Let Aunt Hesper present you
- Price the room — who has money?
- Refuse the first two dances
- Say the sharp thing anyway
- Find who reads the Whisper
Categories
Play on iPhone
Open this link on iPhone with the Larping app installed and it jumps straight to the game. No app yet? Grab it from the App Store.