Cover of Something Wicked by Christian Jensen Romer
Victorian Strawberry Gothic Freeform
A Night at the Fairground

Something Wicked

A Victorian Strawberry Gothic freeform of ghosts, time-slips, murder and impossible love.

London, 1888. The Whitechapel murders stain the newspapers, a travelling fair casts lantern light across the Thames fog, and history seems to slip on its axis. Tonight the alleys fill with impossible guests: criminals and suffragettes, princes and pickpockets, spiritualists, time travellers and broken-hearted poets. Everyone has secrets. Everyone has something to lose.

About the Game

Strawberry Gothic: dark, romantic, haunted — but ultimately humane.

Something Wicked is a theatre-style freeform LARP set in a strange Victorian fairground where fiction, history and folklore collide. It is designed for experienced roleplayers who enjoy rich characterisation, moral dilemmas, and big, heartfelt scenes rather than puzzles or combat.

The game weaves together Jack the Ripper, Dracula, Sherlock Holmes, Ada Lovelace, the Pre-Raphaelites, Doctor Who, spiritualism and more into a single night of impossible crossings. It is tragic, funny, tender and occasionally gloriously ridiculous — a love letter to Gothic fiction and the people who haunt it.

Strawberry Gothic Mood

This is Gothic with the claws sheathed. Expect:

  • Romance, regret and longing beneath the gaslights.
  • Ghosts and monsters who are often more humane than the living.
  • Strange metaphysics that mirror grief, memory and desire.
  • Moments of absurd humour sitting beside genuine heartbreak.

Players are encouraged to embrace big feelings: doomed declarations on the riverbank, quiet reconciliations in the shadow of the Ferris wheel, terrible confessions in fortune-tellers' tents. The horror is never hopeless; there is always room for forgiveness, sacrifice or a last waltz before midnight.