Epos Daimon, The Antifascist Magic School for Teens – mssv

Skip to content

Epos Daimon, The Antifascist Magic School for Teens

May 22, 2026

35–52 minutes

No comments on Epos Daimon, The Antifascist Magic School for Teens

Let’s say you want to teach teenagers about the dangers of toxic communities like the manosphere. You could talk about the politics and history of fascism and explain why the Nazis were evil. You could show them a movie. You could even get them to play a live action role playing game (larp), to give them a really visceral, immersive experience.

If you’re gonna do that, you might set it in a magic school, because historically those have been one of the most popular kinds of larps for kids.  But there’s a couple of problems here. For one thing, magic schools have a pretty unsavoury association with Harry Potter and J.K. Rowling. For another, most fantasy adventures portray the protagonists as rebels fighting against fascists.

That’s great if you want to fight comic book villains, but it doesn’t address the fact that toxic communities are pulling in more and more young people today – people who think they’re the heroes fighting for good, people who are attracted by the sense of belonging and dignity and purpose that these communities offer.

How do you teach that? Well, a magic school larp might work – if you had the teenagers play the fascists, not the rebels. That way they’d get to understand and experience first-hand just what it is that attracts people to these toxic communities – the rituals, the certainty, the binding of an in-group through exclusion and bullying, the constant praise from authority figures.

Now, if you were going to do that, you’d have to design it incredibly carefully. Partly because it’s a serious and sensitive topic, and partly because if it’s too didactic, teenagers will simply check out. But mostly, it’s because you can’t risk accidentally teaching teens that fascism is actually awesome. To be really careful, you need to prepare them for the experience months in advance, and have a lot of good onboarding and safety mechanics.

Epos Daimon 2025 (via Efterskolen Epos)

That’s what Epos Daimon does. It’s an antifascist magic school larp in Denmark where teenagers role play as fascists. Players are high ranking students at a prestigious school at the very heart of a theocratic, fascist regime. For four days, they hunt down witches and monsters, they denounce their parents as rebels, they build technology for the state, they sing songs and go on marches and take part in rituals. Students who break the rules aren’t cast out – they’re drawn in closer, re-educated, assimilated. They discover for themselves just how quickly their morality can slip when they’re praised for it by teachers and nobles, when that’s what the entire community is doing.

Epos Daimon was designed by Katrine Wind, a veteran larp designer, for a boarding school called Epos that uses larp as an educational tool. It’s inspired not by Harry Potter, but Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials universe. If you’ve read those books, you know a big part of that universe is that every person has their own “daemon”, an animal that represents their souls.

That was key to Daemon, a larp for adults designed by Katrine, and it was also crucial when Katrine adapted it into Epos Daimon for teenagers. In the larps, players are paired up, with one playing the human and the other playing the daemon. It makes the experience more powerful and more safe, because it means no player is truly on their own, even when they’re being bullied within the game.

Epos Daimon 2026 (via Efterskolen Epos)

I was immediately intrigued when I first heard about Epos Daimon last year, and the more I’ve learned about it, the more I think it could be an incredibly valuable way to illustrate to teenagers the dangers and the allure of toxic communities – one they won’t instantly tune out.

During my conversation with Katrine, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed the origins of Epos Daimon, how she made a theocratic fascist regime feel real, the extensive preparation, onboarding, and debriefing that students underwent, her theories on "river rafting [larp] design" and "dyadic play", and her background as a larper and larp designer.

I also produced a video essay which uses our conversation almost in its entirety. If you plan to quote anything, please use this written interview as we’ve made corrections and provided the full context here, since English isn’t Katrine’s first language.

Thank you so much for being here, Katrine. So first, can you tell me a bit about what Epos Daimon is ?

[Epos] is a boarding school for 15- to 16-year-olds in Denmark that uses larp and play as an educational methodology. Students go there for a year, and are there during the weekdays and some weekends, away from their parents. Each year they have a trip, usually abroad, where they go to a longer larp. For many years, they’ve done a...