Chaosium brings actual play to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival
In partnership with Scottish institutions, the Call of Cthulhu publisher will host two shows at the famous avant-garde showcase.
The annual Edinburgh Fringe Festival is a global showcase for experimental art. For over a month, the Scottish city turns into a megadungeon of makeshift theaters for comedy, music, drama, and now, actual play.
In partnership with the National Library of Scotland, game publisher Chaosium will be debuting Live at the Library, a two-show Call of Cthulhu actual play event on August 23 and 24th in the library’s boardroom. “We felt the Fringe was ready for this type of event,” Mike Mason, the show’s Keeper, said in an interview with Rascal. While other publishers have been narrowing their actual play scope since the peak of the 2020 AP wave, Chaosium has produced high-quality APs like Graveyards of Arkham and Bookshops of Arkham, along with sponsoring smaller productions like Queen’s Court Games’ Harlem Hellfighters Never Die. Bringing the medium off the screen and onto the stage at one of the most famous cultural festivals in the world feels like a logical way to introduce actual play to new audiences who are already open to experiencing experimental art forms.
It’s not the first live actual play to debut at the festival—shows like Twenty Sided Tavern and the Scottish-born Tartan Tabletop had shows at the festival in 2022 and 2023 respectively—but it is a notable collaboration between a state institution and a major tabletop publisher, one that indicates potential avenues of growth for the medium outside the United States. Though the live theatrical subgenre of actual play has always been present in the tabletop ecosystem with shows like Acquisition Inc., it has been rapidly expanding in popularity and frequency, with Critical Role’s sold-out performance last year at Wembley Arena and Dimension 20’s upcoming show at Madison Square Garden.
