25 years ago, Mr. and Mrs. Hurst and Mr. and Mrs. Hawthorne met at the Hawthorne estate for the Hawthorne event, bringing their children as well as other desirable matches from their acquaintance. After just a month, they emerged from the extended stay with six engagements, which led to six marriages. A great success, that reflected well on their abilities to matchmake, and to ensure comfortable lives for their ancestors. 

Now, Mrs. Hurst and Mrs. Hawthorne are both widows. The year is 1813 and they are doing it again. The successful couples are invited back to the Hawthorne estate with their unmarried children. The children are set to become pawns, the adults willing accomplices and the older generation puppet-masters.

Love and Duty is a regency larp about being stuck in a stiff society, trying to find a way to navigate it, while still feeling the same emotions as we today would. It is about portraying realistic characters, who feel and love and grieve, but aren’t allowed to forget about the consequences of their actions. 

For the older generation, it is about matchmaking, control, manipulation and gaslighting. About deciding the fates of others, and being their puppet-masters.

For the middle generation it is about the consequences of actions 25 years ago, about the shared past experience within the group, and the couples that they finally ended up in. It is about good and bad marriages, about parenthood and seeing the children be controlled in the exact same way as the parents were.

For the young generation it is about falling in and out of love, being treated as pawns in a game and being manipulated and forced into accepting the match that the family deems appropriate. It is about finding what you can resign yourself to live with, and grieving for what you actually want but can never have. 

All the while, the servants watch things play out in front of them that might affect their lives forever. They know better than anyone else what is going on, but instead have to focus on keeping the house running, and to make everything go as smoothly as possible, while engaging in their own workplace politics and plots.