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Cormorant Key

Hurricane season brings a humbling reminder that, despite our technologies, most of nature remains unpredictable. – Diane Ackerman

It's 2006. Hurricane Matilda was just bumped up to Category 5, and is barrelling its way towards the Florida Keys. The governor has called an evacuation, but the locals know better than to try to leave. They don’t want to end up driving around looking for a hotel vacancy in Fort Lauderdale, or worse, stuck in a traffic jam on the overseas highway. Like any smart Floridians, the residents of Cormorant Key have boarded up their windows, filled their tubs with drinking water, and settled in to weather the storm.

Well, except for seven teenagers out on the beach in the middle of the storm, for reasons their parents just wouldn’t understand.

Cormorant Key is a 7-player magical realism theater-style LARP about hurricanes and impossible choices. Characters are all ages 12-15. The game has pre-written character sheets (6-8 pages) and will be cast in advance. While the game does contain fantastical elements, gameplay is all talking and feelings with no mechanics.

This is a game about growing up in a dangerous place with very little adult supervision, where nature is right up on top of you and things aren’t always what they seem. It’s a game about climate change, hard choices, manatees, unsettling feelings, even more unsettling magic, kids solving problems they shouldn’t have to, and unwavering love between siblings, between best friends, or amongst your entire inseparable teen friends group who you absolutely aren’t crushing on.

It doesn't feel like I actually wrote this game. In October of 2024, it seemed like Hurricane Milton, the most intense Hurricane ever recorded in the Gulf of Mexico, would decimate southern Florida. In the end, Milton (though still very destructive) de-escalated from a category 5 to a category 3 before making landfall. In doing so, it blew seven teenagers into my head. Teenagers who proceeded to scream at me until I got them down on a page. This game is essentially an Internal Family Systems exercise, and each character represents a part of me.

When I was three, my mother moved me across the country from Vermont to the Florida Keys because she started dating a guy who wanted to own a lobster boat. It was awful, and I ran away when I was 16 to go live with my dad back in Vermont. The Keys are a bizarre, magical, dangerous place where houses are built right on the water and nobody is putting a whole lot of effort into making sure kids don't drown or get eaten by aligators or get hit in the head by a falling coconut. I've always struggled to articulate the strange horrors of my childhood in a way that people can understand. This game is how I can make people understand.

Cormorant Key will run a total of six times before being indefinitely shelves. Usually, I run my games three or four times, get bored of them, and then plan to publish them or hand them off to other people. This is one game that I could not allow anyone to run. It's a part of me that nobody else gets to have.

Well, if I ever meet another LARPer from the Florida Keys, then, okay. They can run this LARP. I don't expect to. Most people don't leave.

Runs