“Everything is a designable surface”, as the larp designer, writer and theorist Johanna Koljonen (2019) says. This means that every single aspect of larp can be designed for particular effect: scenography, characters, workshops, communications, costumes… Even the absence of design can be designed. You can make the conscious design choice to leave a particular aspect of the larp open to the chaos of emergent play.
In many larp productions, the designer of the larp is visible to the participants. Perhaps they post about the larp on Facebook, run workshops or chat with players arriving at the venue.
If we take Koljonen’s maxim seriously, we have to conclude that the person of the designer is also a designable surface: how they dress, talk, come across. Is the designer stressed and angry or relaxed and reassuring?
The Second Run
In 2021, we made two runs of the larp Redemption (Finland 2021) and in 2022 we did two runs of another larp, 3 AM Forever (Denmark 2022). I was working with different teams but there was a subtle yet noticeable phenomenon in both larps: the first run had a nervous edge and the second run was more relaxed. This is one of those qualities that’s hard to quantify but when you run a lot of larps, you learn how to read the energy of the crowd. Running the larp twice back to back makes it possible to subjectively compare the vibe of two sets of players.
So what could cause such a difference?
For the players, the run they played was their first experience of the larp. Although there were minor adjustments, neither larp underwent substantial revision between runs. It was just the same larp, played twice.
However, one thing was different. Me. Us. The organizers. Talking with participants preparing to play the first run of both larps, I was nervous. We’d never run the larp before! Would it work? Of course I tried to keep cool but humans are often very good at picking up subtle social cues, especially in groups undergoing an intense process of socialization.
At the workshop of the second run of both larps, I felt relaxed, buoyed by the knowledge and experience gained from already running the event once before.
I started to wonder: was the nervous edge of the first run caused by the nervousness felt by us, the organizers? Did the players pick up on our emotional state and mirror it, the way humans often do?
Designable Surfaces
What are the different areas that can be designed for in terms of how the participant interacts with and experiences the designer?
Examples are social media, workshops and runtime, and discussing the larp after the event, for example at conventions or on messaging apps. There’s also a difference whether the organizer who’s interacting with a participant is someone tasked to do that, or a team member whose main function is something else.
Social media. In many larp productions, the first interactions are online. Social media posts, answering questions on Discord and Facebook. Maintaining a friendly persona is easier when communications are not immediate. If a prospective participant gets on your nerves, you can take a break, breathe, and then respond instead of going with your first reflexive take.
It’s a good idea to agree in advance who speaks with the voice of the larp in public, online spaces. This can be done by one person only, or several, depending on your chosen communications strategy. What matters is that everyone who speaks to participants projects a friendly persona and knows what they’re talking about. You should avoid disagreeing with each other in public as that damages the credibility of all communications very quickly.
The tone of online communications also matters. Going full corporate can backfire because it makes the larp feel sterile and unfriendly, not the communal experience so many larps strive to be. The question of the right tone varies by the individual but I usually try to go for a personable but somewhat official persona.
To be official, it helps not to reply to messages late at night and to keep the language and syntax correct instead of casual. You should avoid sharing personal emotions unless they’re positive ones related to organizing the larp: “I’m so excited to meet you all on site!”
To be personable, you can share carefully curated personal emotions related to the running of the larp: “I love seeing player creativity bring the larp to life!” You can empathize with individual players in a positive way and share updates from the larp team’s process: “We’re meeting with the team today!”
You have to find a way to use your own personality in a manner that feels natural to you, otherwise you risk sounding fake and alienating. If your communication feels forced to you, it might be a good idea to re-evaluate it.
On location. I recently played in the larp Gothic (Denmark 2023). The venue was a mansion in the Danish countryside and each run had only ten players. t. When we came to the venue, there were organizers busy making the larp run but always also someone whose job it was to talk to us. To sit down with us in a relaxed manner, asking after how the journey to the larp went. The workshops all followed this pattern, leveraging the larp’s limited number of players to make each interaction friendly.
This is an example of designing the designer.
When players arrive, they often feel nervous and jittery. They haven’t yet settled into the flow of the larp and they’re worried about all kinds of things, from their own play to food or accommodations. It’s enormously helpful if there are relaxed organizers present.
Chatting with the players is an organizer task. It should fall on those team members who have slept properly and maybe even enjoy talking to players. Meanwhile, the stressed-out scenographer should be allowed to build in peace.
Workshops are an obvious area where organizer presentation matters a lot. The energy projected by those running the workshop carries over to the larp. It’s important to feel that the experience is in safe hands, that you can trust the people you’re with and that everyone is friends here.
In situations like that, designing the designer means sending out the team member who can put on the most convincing facade of reassurance to talk to the players.
After runtime. The period after the larp event is the trickiest one in terms of designing the designer because of the question of how to set boundaries. When does the responsibility of the larp designer end?
Excess
It’s easy to be idealistic when designing the designer: we should always be accessible to participants, respond to every need and be available for emotional support forever even after the larp has ended.
The problem with this approach is the limited nature of the human being. If we demand everything of ourselves, we risk exhaustion and burnout. Because of this, part of the process of designing how you come across is about boundaries.
Before the larp, perhaps you’re only reachable via a specified channel, such as an organizer email address. You won’t do larp business on Messenger in the middle of the night.
During the larp, perhaps issues related to the wellbeing of individual participants are handled by a dedicated safety person. This way, the stresses of running the larp won’t cloud handling the needs of individual participants.
All of these design choices are about the wellbeing of the organizer. That too is part of how to design the designer. The best way to appear relaxed and cool in front of the players is not when you learn to fake it, but when you’re genuinely not suffering from intense stress. When you feel good, your participants feel good.
Bibliography
Johanna Koljonen (2019): Essay: An Introduction to Bespoke Larp Design. In Larp Design, edited by Johanna Koljonen, et al. Bifrost.
Ludography
3 AM Forever (2022): Denmark. Juhana Pettersson, Bjarke Pedersen, Troels Barkholt-Spangsbo & Johanna Koljonen.
Gothic (2023): Denmark. Avalon Larp Studios.
Redemption (2021): Finland. Maria Pettersson, Juhana Pettersson & Massi Hannula.
This article has been reprinted with permission from the Solmukohta 2024 book. Please cite as:
Pettersson, Juhana. 2024. “Designing the Designer.” In Liminal Encounters: Evolving Discourse in Nordic and Nordic Inspired Larp, edited by Kaisa Kangas, Jonne Arjoranta, and Ruska Kevätkoski. Helsinki, Finland: Ropecon ry.
Cover photo: Photo by John Hain. Image has been compressed.
My mother has always believed in having a big family Christmas. The director of a circus by profession, she brought that same organizational and creative energy into the way we celebrated the holidays. The way I remember Christmas from my childhood, it was really quite the perfect family occasion, thanks to significant collective effort.
I come from a secular family of Finnish socialists and the Christian connotations of Christmas were foreign to me when I was growing up. In Finnish, Christmas is “joulu”, a word with no inherent religious meaning. When we decorated our Christmas tree, the pride of place at the top went to the red star of communism.
Our Christmas consisted of a series of rituals. Going to the Christmas tree market with my stepfather and siblings and carrying the tree home. Bringing out the box of decorations and hanging them on the tree. The traditional Christmas breakfast, rice porridge. If you found the almond, you got to make a wish. One year my mother decided to cut down on sibling infighting by putting in enough almonds for all four of us.
Photo by Tuomas Puikkonen on Flickr. Photo has been cropped.
In Finland, we open the presents on Christmas Eve. That’s also when the most significant family dinner takes place. Nobody in our family played the role of Santa. Instead, my Mom would pretend that she’d seen Santa fly across the sky with the reindeer from a window in the furthest room in our apartment.
We ran over to look.
As we did this, my parents quickly took the giant burlap sack of Christmas presents into the hallway outside our apartment and silently closed the door. As we returned, my Mom would knock on the underside of the dinner table and say: “Did you hear that? It must be Santa at the door!”
We ran to the front door, opened it, and sure enough the presents were there!
As I grew older, my mother remarried and our group of siblings grew. I switched teams, helping my stepdad carry the sack of presents outside while my youngest siblings rushed to see Santa from the window.
The relationship I have with Christmas is positive and is not complicated at all, thanks to all the work my mother and the rest of the family put into it over the years.
In December of 2022, I played in the long-delayed Helsinki run of the larp Midwinter Revisited, with Anni Tolvanen as the project lead. The original Midwinter was created by Avalon Larp Studios and played in the U.K. in 2020, led by Martine Svanevik. Revisited was mainly created as a Finnish international production, expanded to twice the size of the original with new, redesigned and broadened content.
Midwinter Revisited is set in Santa’s Workshop. The characters are elves and Christmas is just around the corner, with everyone making sure the last gifts are produced so children everywhere will be happy and full of joy. The elves love their work and throw themselves at their long shifts with jolliness in their hearts.
Or put another way, the Workshop is a sweatshop where a workforce of elves is forced to endure long hours of tedious work while having to pretend they’re happy. Smiling is mandatory and those who are insufficiently jolly will be punished. Santa Claus isn’t really present in the daily lives of the elves and the Workshop is instead run by the Krampus.
The character I played was a part of this somewhat anomalous group in the larp’s structure. The word Krampus denoted an individual character, the principal villain of the larp. It also meant the collective group of characters working under her, of which I was part of. Finally, it acquired an emergent meaning as the physical location where we took recalcitrant elves for retraining. Officially called The Training Center, it was often also called just The Krampus.
The elves all dressed in Christmas gear: Lots of reds, browns and greens. The Krampus were dressed all in black, creating a striking visual contrast. Collectively, we were a cross between the wealthy family depicted in the TV show Succession and the staff of a torture facility.
There were severe class distinctions between the different elf families in Midwinter Revisited. They were made concrete by the living arrangements, with the physical location of the family’s domicile showing how wealthy they were. Still, for me as a Krampus character these distinctions were less visible because the design placed us above all of it.
The core themes of Midwinter Revisited were Christmas and capitalism. What is the meaning of Christmas? What does work mean under the demands of capitalist production? In the cosmology of the larp, the production of gifts created magical power which was hoarded by the Krampus and used to maintain control over the entire operation.
The simple genius of Midwinter Revisited lies in the way it treats Christmas with the utmost seriousness, while also leaving space to be playful. Christmas-themed movies and songs are often schmaltz or parody but this time, you as a player are really invited to consider what Christmas means for you. And not just from a political perspective, but in emotional and cultural terms as well.
What does the spirit of Christmas mean for me?
Sincerity is always difficult to pull off because it’s so close to cringe. Yet when it works, it’s very powerful. It was nice to be able to reflect on Christmas in a context that’s not saccharine, schmaltzy, or a parody, yet not without a critical edge either. What is this thing that permeates our society every year?
The way schmaltz was incorporated into Midwinter Revisited was particularly ingenious. All the tackiness of Christmas was right there, in songs, physical props, costumes and even the language we used. However, the critique of capitalism inherent in the larp’s design positioned the schmaltz for critical appraisal while also allowing us to play with it. A rare case where you manage to have your cake and eat it too.
Each of the characters belonged to a family, a work group, a club and a secret society, with the exception of the Krampus whose family was the same as the work group. This is classic larp design of course, making sure each character has a variety of social contexts.
One of the groups was dedicated to spiritual exploration of the meaning of Christmas. Every time I walked past the group and their collective gatherings, I felt a deep sense of larp envy. It looked so warm and communal! I considered joining in but felt that their play might be damaged by one more Krampus character.
The last hours of the larp were a chaotic, magical time. The revolt against the sweatshop capitalism of The Workshop Inc. had started but a new order was yet to form. Some were afraid, others freed by disorder. A crown of light seeming to represent the spirit of Christmas moved in the crowd creating a repeating scene of wonder and magic that felt surprisingly genuine. I had a moment with it too but I’d played a cynical Krampus character too long to be able to immediately shift gears convincingly. I felt sad afterwards because I wanted to explore that part of the larp’s emotional range more fully and didn’t entirely succeed.
When the signal for the last work shift of the larp sounded, most of the workers were on strike. Managers had to go down to the workshop to make toys, creating one of the most eerie sights of the entire larp. They were too few, too shocked, stooped under the harsh lights trying to keep the workshop running when the power they represented had already failed.
Christmas is celebrated in many different countries but these celebrations are not uniform in style. What’s normal in one country is strange in the next. Midwinter Revisited was an international larp, meaning that players came from many different cultures and brought their own assumptions with them.
The variety of Christmas customs wasn’t to the detriment of the larp. Each of the three acts started with the song O Christmas Tree, the English version based on the German original, called O Tannenbaum. I felt the song worked wonderfully as an anthem for the whole larp despite the fact that it had never been part of my own Christmas tradition.
The song shares the same tune as “The Red Flag,” the U.K.’s Labour Party’s anthem, which will become relevant later.
The concept of jollity was central to a lot of the larp’s rhetoric. The elves were constantly exhorted to be jolly, to be happy and enjoy their work. This was a key part of the larp’s critique of modern capitalism. It wasn’t enough that you had to work. You had to enjoy it, and if someone didn’t seem to be jolly enough, that was reason to punish them. There was a department called Jollity Assurance tasked with ensuring requisite levels of jollity at all times.
I can make the connection between jollity and Christmas in the context of Anglo-American Christmas culture but not really in my own. Finnish Christmas traditions have a somber quality, meaning that in the context of our Christmas you can be happy or sad.
One of our most famous sad Christmas songs is called “Varpunen jouluaamuna,” which tells of a little bird flying, hungrily looking for food in the frozen snow fields of the Christmas morning. A little girl gives the bird a seed, only to discover that the bird is her dead brother.
Adapting to the larp’s version of Christmas wasn’t as simple as adapting to the Anglo-American version of the holiday because it had more cultural depth and variety than that. It felt like we as players from different countries were looking for a Christmas shared across our particular cultural boundaries.
The larp’s soundtrack came with an interesting twist. It wasn’t limited to English language Christmas songs but also included a Finnish song and other non-Anglo ones. When I first heard a Finnish Christmas song on the soundtrack, I experienced a moment of cultural confusion, like I was shifting from one Christmas paradigm to another.
This wasn’t to the detriment of the larp at all. Rather, I experienced it as a moment of reflection on what the larp meant for me. What did it mean to navigate the different conventions of my own culture and that of Anglo-American cultural imperialism? What did that mean in the specific context of Christmas, with tram stops all over Helsinki decorated with ads celebrating Coca-Cola Christmas?
The Torture Queue
Oppression play has a long history in Nordic larp. Systems of oppression create action and emotion, making for powerful and dynamic larp. If you’ve ever organized a larp with a significant element of oppression you’ve probably found out that it’s hard work. People don’t oppress themselves! You have to put in the work to really make an oppressive system run.
One facet of this is when you create a system where a police force (The Reindeer Guard in this larp) arrest people and drag them to a punishment center. This can be a torture chamber, a prison, an interrogation or what have you, depending on the larp.
Running one of these centers in a larp is an art unto its own. There are many difficulties to consider. Experienced Nordic larpers often regard being interrogated or tortured as interesting larp content. Many steer their play purposefully towards it. In some larps, this has resulted in what is colloquially known as the “torture queue”. Because torture capacity is limited, characters and players have to wait before they can be tortured.
This is just simple logistics. If there are two torturers and a single torture scene lasts for an hour, this means that the larp can only accommodate torture scenes for two players every hour. If the larp has 100 players, this creates a significant bottleneck. Some players will miss out on the torture.
To resolve this issue, Midwinter Revisited’s design gave us in the Krampus our own space, the Training Center, a big classroom-like area with chairs and desks as well as a raised platform where we had our own luxurious Christmas tree, piles of presents and a table full of interesting knickknacks. The idea was that the Krampus characters were the only ones to be able to enjoy a luxurious family Christmas, and the elves being re-educated had to watch.
The point of the classroom setting was to do big oppression scenes, where one Krampus player could handle as many as six or even ten characters simultaneously. This way, the torture queue would not happen because scenes could roll all continuously, for as many characters as needed.
In practice, it didn’t really work out like this. For much of the larp, the Training Center wasn’t training anyone. We had the opposite problem from the torture queue: Often it was difficult to get people to come in at all.
I figured there were a few different reasons why this was. There were a lot of first time players at the larp and maybe it wasn’t obvious to them that playing oppression scenes is fun. That’s more of an experienced Nordic larper thing. Some players and characters may have tried to avoid getting tortured, as amazing as that sounds.
Some may have wanted an intimate one-on-one torture scene, and when that wasn’t in the cards, lost interest.
Photo by Tuomas Puikkonen on Flickr.
It was very difficult for us in the Krampus to draw victims in. The process involved tasking the Reindeer Guard with arresting individual elves and bringing them to us. Because we wanted to make larger scenes of oppression, the arrest lists we drew up often had five or six names.
The problems this situation created were many. Because the Krampus was somewhat separate from the rest of the larp, we often simply didn’t know what was happening. Because of this, it was often difficult to know who needed to be arrested.
It was very difficult for the Reindeer Guard to arrest multiple characters quickly. I’ve seen this issue in other larps as well. Going around the larp with a list of names and trying to find the right people takes time and often fails entirely due to larp chaos. Thus, I ended up giving the Reindeer Guard tasks that were either very difficult or actually impossible for them to fulfill.
The logistical problems of oppression play are absolutely not unique to Midwinter Revisited and many great scenes were played. The structural idea of scaling up the machinery of oppression was a good one.
In the larp’s third and final act, it was clear the revolution was upon us. The question was which way would it go. Will the old status quo be restored, will a paternal figure like Santa Claus (or a maternal figure like the Krampus) emerge or will the revolution lead to a workers’ paradise?
For my character, this was rather anxiety-inducing as I was part of the machinery of oppression. My character was a medical doctor of sorts and I spent much of the larp dispensing and withholding Jollity Pills, an all-purpose drug that could be amphetamines, antibiotics or a miracle cure. As a medical torturer, at first glance it didn’t look like I’d fare very well under the new worker-led regime.
I had a scene with another Krampus character where we talked about our worries for the future and the line we held onto was this one: “No matter who ends up in power, they’ll always need people like us.” Of course, the fiction of the larp ends when the larp ends, so the future of our characters remains unknowable, as it should be.
Midwinter Revisited had a mechanism where players could mark which Christmas ideology their character subscribed to at the end. White for a corporate option where Christmas is controlled by a company or a foundation run by the elves. Green for a religious or royalist wish to see a figure like Santa Claus or the Krampus returned to the top. Red for a Christmas not controlled by any one entity, but instead owned collectively.
White would have been the obvious choice for me but I decided late in the larp that I needed a bit of character development to keep things interesting. I felt that my character was a born lackey so in a situation where the old order was crumbling, the green option was the most promising one. It still suggested that there would be power to serve.
The way it would work was that the central visual motif of the larp, the grand Christmas tree, would be lit one of the three colors, depending on which way the larp went. The moment when the song O Christmas Tree played, only to suddenly switch to The Red Flag as the tree was bathed in red light was very powerful. The musical switch was rather elegant because the songs shared the same tune. And of course, the red Christmas was familiar to me from my childhood already.
As a player, it was the ending I wished for, despite my character’s royalist hopes. A Christmas we can all believe in!
Midwinter Revisited is a redesigned and extended edition of the larp Midwinter, originally run by by Avalon Larp Studio in Birmingham, UK, in January 2020. The original design was envisioned and directed by Martine Svanevik.
Midwinter Revisited is an independent piece based on the original work.
The Workshop, Inc. Helsinki Division
Production and design lead, sound design: Anni Tolvanen
Narrative and character design: Simon Brind
Narrative and runtime design: Johana Koljonen
Character design, production coordination: Irrette Melakoski
Scenography: Katie Ballinger, Mikko Asunta, Tina Aspiala
Lighting: Eleanor Saitta
Kitchen: Paula Susitaival, Kristiina Prauda
Player support: Juha Hurme
Photography: Tuomas Puikkonen
Writing and runtime facilitation: Kol Ford, William Hagstedt, Char Holdway, Torgrim Husvik, Jamie MacDonald, Maria Pettersson, Rebel Rehbinder, Jørn Slemdal, Kaya Toft Thejls
Cover photo: Tuomas Puikkonen on Flickr. Photo has been cropped.
The larp Allegiance ended at a statue in a small park commemorating the end of the Second World War. We played diplomats and their support staff from different countries in 1970, listening to the Norwegian Foreign Minister’s speech about war and peace.
The minister talked about her own experiences in the aftermath of the Nazi occupation of Norway. She quoted the Norwegian king Håkon the Seventh: “Higher even than peace, we place the right of self-determination.”
The reactions in the crowd to the speech came from all the different histories and emotions our characters had. But they also sprang from the reality we live in as players. The themes of war and peace feel immediate in the context of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which had impacted the lives of many players concretely and all players at least indirectly.
At the end of the speech, the minister’s words were not of the glory of victory but the necessity of rebuilding all that was lost.
Diplomats socializing at the American Party. Photo by Martin Østlie Lindelien (cropped).
Allegiance was a pervasive larp (Montola, Stenros, and Waern 2009) about the Cold War and the diplomacy needed to stave off nuclear Armageddon. Spies, betrayals, defections, and diplomats trying to carve space for themselves and maybe even for their countries. It was played in the streets of Skien in Norway and included over a dozen locations open to play over the weekend.
I played the military attaché at the Finnish embassy, a war veteran scarred for life in the Winter War and the Continuation War. Much of my larp was about old friends, relationships, and meeting people I used to know in new circumstances.
The larp’s core question was made plain in its name: Allegiance. During play, our characters had to interrogate who or what they were really loyal to. Country, ideology, personal self-interest? In the beginning of the larp my character seemed quite straightforward: He was a patriot loyal to his country, trying his best to keep it out of another war.
As play progressed, I found myself with other loyalties too. Helping old friends even when they were technically on the side of the enemy. Concocting secret plans to extend Project Gladio to Finland in direct contravention to Finnish government policy.
Community
The production model for Allegiance placed a heavy emphasis on community. Each country represented in the larp had a designer of its own recruited from that country’s larp community. This country designer created the characters and play design for their embassy. The country designers worked together on connections and events that happened between the embassies and in the wider fiction of the larp.
Thus, my character had close connections to people from the Swedish and East German embassies and the Norwegian foreign ministry. My main social context was the Finnish embassy, designed by Maria Pettersson.
Ida Foss and Martin Nielsen were the project leads of the larp but their role was more that of a producer, facilitator, shepherd who guides the collective efforts of the country designers and makes it possible for their work to be realized in the larp.
This design approach was very much in tune with the larp’s wider political and social vision, which emphasized coming together across national boundaries to forge a path towards a better world. The players whose characters staffed the Soviet embassy came from Belarus, Ukraine, and in a few cases, Russia. Some of them experienced significant difficulties in making their way to Norway for the larp due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the increasingly repressive regimes in power in some of these countries, as well as the stringent travel bans and border closures enacted by almost all of the European countries sharing a border with Russia.
Much of the simple pleasures of the larp had to do with cultural exchange and discovery. In a pervasive larp spread across a number of venues it’s always fun to discover new places. The first night, there was a party hosted by the American embassy, with hot dogs. The venue was a real bar, a place you might have used in real life for a party for diplomats.
One of the larp’s design ideas was the use of Moments. They were pre-planned scenes between characters reminiscent of fateplay (Fatland 2000). The important difference here is that the Moment is defined as a scene with a starting point. It was up to us as players to take it somewhere interesting. One of my Moments was with an East German embassy official who I’d recognized from the war. We met at the Finnish sauna boat and talked about the war and how different our lives had become.
The second night, we took an antique, 70’s era bus to a mansion outside town where the East German embassy was holding a reception. In the pacing of the larp, this was the time when we resolved dangling plotlines and extended earlier prompts into something with more depth and meaning. We also discovered an actual secret door in the mansion’s library, not part of the larp’s design at all.
The larp featured an antique, period-appropriate bus. Photo by Kai Simon Fredriksen.
Language
I’m from Finland. Finnish is my native language. I’m writing this in English, a language I learned in school and from the media. Almost all international larp in Europe happens in English and because of this, the majority of my larp experience in the international context has been in a foreign language.
International larps and related events such as the Knutpunkt conference have a social convention where everything should be in English so that the events are accessible to all. This of course assumes that everyone can speak English.
Allegiance made the extremely unusual choice of having a different design around language and nationality. The larp was made so that as a player, if you wanted to play in the embassy of a specific country, you needed to speak the language and have relevant cultural experience and understanding. To play in the Finnish embassy, you needed to speak Finnish and grasp Finnish cultural references.
This meant that the larp was primarily accessible to Norwegians, Swedes, Finns, Danes and Germans as well as larpers from the U.S., the U.K., the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus. Players from these countries had an embassy they could easily play in. The U.S. and U.K. embassies ended up having more relaxed policies, especially because player drop outs led to new participants having to come in at short notice. In their case, language skills and some understanding of the culture was deemed enough.
Maria Pettersson designed the Finnish embassy and played the secretary, a supporting role designed to facilitate the running of the larp. Photo by Juhana Pettersson.
All larps feature design choices that make the event more accessible to some players and less accessible to others. This was the case with Allegiance as well. It was obviously less accessible to the Spanish or the Greeks because they didn’t have a place in it. It was more accessible to players from its represented countries who didn’t speak perfect English because the design was much more forgiving in that sense than typical international larp.
During the larp, you played in the language that made most sense in the moment. At the Finnish embassy I spoke Finnish and at international meetings I spoke English. At an important meeting concerning the multilateral reduction and limitation of nuclear weapons, the Soviet ambassador spoke through a translator in a beautifully awkward and authentic way, obviously choreographed by the players involved to create a very specific cultural expression.
Personally, when I played in the Finnish embassy, I realized how rare and unusual it was for me to be able to play my own language and culture in an international larp. The fidelity of cultural representation was very high because everyone at the embassy was able to play with shared background and references.
A culturally specific reference from the Finnish embassy. Photo by Juhana Pettersson.
We had jokes about Ahti Karjalainen and a bottle of Puolustuslaitos-branded booze. We had period comic strips by Kari. I played a former politician from the Keskusta party whose family came from Savo and who was personal friends with Kekkonen. When we got a diplomatic note from the Soviet Union, all players had the deep cultural background needed to grasp the enormity of such an event.
My character was involved with the grassroots project of hiding weapons in farms and barns in case of a future Soviet invasion after Finland lost the Continuation War. They were to be used in guerrilla warfare. In real life, my family also has a connection to this same phenomenon.
Historically, Finland is famous for sauna diplomacy. To make it happen in the larp, we had a sauna boat where we could host meetings. It demonstrated the difference between two aspects of playing on your own culture. The internal play at the embassy ran on deeper cultural nuances while the internationally facing sauna diplomacy was simpler, made legible for foreign consumption but also fun because of the cultural exchange involved.
The use of English and the focus on cultural elements that can be shared between people from different countries are necessary elements of international larp and will remain so in the future. Still, I deeply appreciated the chance Allegiance gave me to play on my own background for once, and see the Czechs, the Swedes, the Danes and others doing the same.
As an international larp, Allegiance attempted to build bridges between player communities to an unusual degree. A typical international larp operates on a policy where anyone can join in as long as they speak fluent English. The doors are open. In Allegiance, the backgrounds of players were more limited. It was open to people from the former Czechoslovakia, Soviet Union, Scandinavia, Finland, Germany, U.K. and the U.S. However, from many of those larp communities, the project actively sought to involve participants and designers to a much greater degree than international larps usually do
In this sense, Allegiance swapped a passive open doors policy for proactive bridge building.
The designer of the Czechoslovakian embassy Dominika Kovacova. The embassy designers played supporting roles as secretaries who could be relied on to transfer information reliably. Photo by Kai Simon Fredriksen.
Manufacturing Reality
Physical reality consists of the material world around us, the tables and walls, air and water. Our bodies and their biological function. Social reality encompasses all the fictions we’ve built for ourselves to organize our existence: money, government, corporations, titles, countries, borders.
When we organize a larp, we create a temporary alternative social reality and then live within it for a set period of time, with tools to take a break from it when needed.
Allegiance featured two parallel sets of meetings about important international agreements, NORDEK and MALART. The latter concerned reductions and limitations for nuclear weapons programs and I was involved in it in my capacity as a military attaché.
Sitting in the meetings, I felt like I was engaging with the construction of social reality on a double level. Playing a larp means I’m constantly manufacturing social reality with my co-players to keep the fiction consistent and playable. My character, as a diplomat, is participating in a painstaking process of creating social reality by the way of treaty negotiations which decide where nuclear weapons can be placed, who can have them and how the materials of their manufacture can be sold.
The social reality of larp is temporary and ceases to exist once the larp is over. The social reality of diplomatic negotiations has much broader consequences because we as a society have decided that the results of such negotiations are “real.” Nevertheless, they’re also made up and diplomats are the people who hammer out the specifics.
The way we ordinarily understand things, larp is fake and diplomacy is real. Yet there is something similar in the minutiae of how the processes are negotiated that emphasizes how our social reality is constructed. The social reality of diplomacy eventually becomes physical reality as nuclear missiles are dismantled or new bases capable of firing atomic warheads constructed.
The Finnish Ambassador visiting the Danish embassy. Photo by Martin Østlie Lindelien.
From this viewpoint, politics is the process through which we decide the rules of the social reality in which we live. On a national and global level, the process of politics can lead to extremes such as war. Allegiance examined the international political processes created to produce the opposite result, peace.
Allegiance is a political larp beyond its subject matter. It happens in a specific political context, that of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. On the level of community, the vision behind Allegiance is that of transnational work towards peace and against authoritarianism. As borders are closed, refugees turned away, and visas rescinded, it seeks to present a vision of coming together against the dark forces of nationalism, hate, and war.
At the afterparty, I talked with a Belarusian player I’d shared a scene with. She said that all of her friends back home in Minsk had either emigrated or were in jail.
The Ghost of History
In 1970, the Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to the Soviet writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. His The Gulag Archipelago is a powerful indictment of the Soviet prison system. The first major event I participated in during the larp was a reception held in honor of Solzhenitsyn’s award. The diplomats came together at an art gallery and there was tension in the air because the representatives from the East Bloc countries obviously didn’t much care for the Nobel Committee’s choice.
In real life, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded while the larp was running. The 2022 award went to the human rights advocate Ales Bialiatski from Belarus, the Russian human rights organization Memorial, and the Ukrainian human rights organization Center for Civil Liberties. The choice of recipients from each of these countries symbolically emphasizes the necessity of civil society to come together across borders to fight against war and repression. When I saw the news during the larp, it felt like the reasoning of the real life Peace Prize and the larp’s creative agenda were perfectly aligned.
The author of this article contemplating a speech in honor of the Nobel Prize for Literature of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Photo by Martin Østlie Lindelien.
For my character, the larp Allegiance ended in a classic scene from Cold War spy stories. I tried to help my East German friend defect to the West but in the last few minutes of the larp, during the speech, he got arrested. We’d made plans to meet in Tromsö but my character would wait alone for a friend who would never come.
The ending was appropriate. As the larp went on, I became worried things were going too well for me but this injected a necessary element of melancholy.
Just before we took a taxi to the airport the day before the larp, I was helping to print some of the papers and documents needed for the play at the Finnish embassy. I had printer trouble with no time to resolve it so I left the mess as it was and finished printing with a laptop.
On Sunday night after the larp when we came home, I turned on my computer. My printer came alive, spontaneously printing out a diplomatic note from the Soviet Union.
Period cars used by the East German embassy in an in-game photo. Photo by David Pusch.
Credits
Project Leads
Ida Foss and Martin Nielsen
Country Designers
Czechoslovakia: Dominika Kovacova
Denmark: Jesper Heebøll Arbjørn
East-Germany: Christian WS
Finland: Maria Pettersson Norway: Grethe Sofie Bulterud Strand Soviet Union: Masha Karachun Soviet Union: Alexander Karalevich Soviet Union: Zhenja Karachun Sweden: Anders Hultman Sweden: Susanne Gräslund U.K.: Mo Holkar U.S.A.: Julia Woods
Other Designers
Martine Svanevik Kari KD Sanne Harder
Kitchen
Tor Kjetil Edland Jørn Slemdal Frida Sofie Thomas Frederick Hozman Tollefsen
Backstage
Jahn Hermansen Frida Lines Salme Vanhanen Ronja Lofstad
Red House And Retro House, Runtime and Designing Embassies
Ravn Nordisk kulturfond – Globus Fantasiforbundet Norsk Kulturråd
References
Fatland, Eirik. 2000. “The Play of Fates (or: How to Make Rail-roading Legal).” Amor Fati.
Montola, Markus, Jaakko Stenros, and Annika Waern. 2009. Pervasive Games: Theory and Design. Routledge.
Cover photo: During the day, diplomats attend meetings and craft policy. At night, the work continues at parties, such as the one hosted by the East German embassy. Photo by Kai Simon Fredriksen. Image has been cropped.
How to use vocalization to create a sense of shared ritual?
Redemption was a larp about the last days of the Romanovs before the revolution changed everything, at a retreat organized by a breakaway Orthodox sect who believed that to achieve redemption one must sin. The larp’s sound design was created by Anni Tolvanen who also came up with the larp’s signature ritual technique, participatory ritual vocalization.
The core team for the larp consisted of Maria Pettersson, Massi Hannula, and myself. I was particularly happy with the vocalization technique Tolvanen created because it was accessible even to somebody like myself with no singing ability. As long as I was able to hum O or A, I was able to participate.
Here, Tolvanen answers a few questions about how this technique works.
Anni, what are the design reasons behind this technique? What’s the effect it’s intended to have?
The main goal of the technique was to create an inclusive and intuitive way for all participants to join in on or run their own rituals during runtime. The technique aims to give everyone the feeling of “doing it for real,” without requiring time-consuming pre-runtime practice, or previous experience in ritualistic singing or chanting. The technique is designed to blend into the general soundscape of the larp; to become part of it and add to it in a diegetic manner.
Each participant has equal agency to impact the ritual’s mood and content through their personal contribution to the shared soundscape. One is not merely allowed to accompany an appointed ritual leader, but to improvise their own content within the parameters of the technique.
The technique forms an intuitively understandable frame around a ritual scene. By joining the technique you are joining the ritual.
Can you explain how participatory ritual vocalization works? What do people do?
All participants are free to start using the technique at any time. When someone starts praying or chanting, other participants taking part in the scene find a shared note to hum. This hum provides the anchor – the drone – to the ritual recital. The drone is collectively carried on throughout the ritual, and does not stop until the ritual ends.
The drone acts as a musical base for the ritual leader or leaders. They can recite and improvise text either by sticking to the same note, or by freely chanting or speaking on top of it. In the workshop for the technique participants practiced a simple musical scale of 2-4 notes while acting as ritual leaders – but sticking to the scale is obviously not mandatory.
Ritual leaders are not meant to be solo performers: Participants doing the drone are also invited to improvise content, for example by repeating particular words or sentences of the leaders, shouting inspired remarks, or making the drone change in intensity, volume, and tone color.
When the ritual leader wants to end the ritual, they end their recital with an emphasized end phrase (in Redemption, “Amen”). This phrase or word is then repeated by everyone in the scene, after which the drone stops, and the ritual is over.
What’s the deeper musical thinking and history behind the technique?
Using one’s voice to contribute to a soundscape is an ancient and deeply human activity to take part of. While singing or chanting with others, we do not merely join into making music. We also sync our expression, our internal pacing, and even our breath with others around us. It is a powerful experience, which forms its own temporary magic circle: You join the circle by adding your voice to the soundscape.
Musically speaking, the core benchmarks for the technique are the use of drone notes, improvised recital on top of the drone, and (optionally) the simplistic scale used by ritual leaders. At Redemption, the latter was modeled after the medieval theme “Dies Irae” – a particular four note scale which is nowadays used by composers all around the world to communicate tension, ardor, and fatality. (In other words, it’s a musical meme.)
How does the technique work if people have wildly varying levels of musical skills? Some have none, others are great singers.
For practical purposes, singing skill does not have a meaningful impact on the technique. It is in fact advisable to instruct more experienced singers to stick to the basic drone and recital, and avoid more complex musical improvisation.
The power of the technique comes from its simplicity. Most people can find and stick to a drone note, and even if they can’t, doing things “correctly” is not nearly as relevant as following the collective ebb and flow of the ritual. Everyone’s voice contributes to the soundscape, and the soundscape creates the magic circle for the ritual.
How does the technique interact with the broader soundscape of a larp?
The auditory streams from the ritual (the drone and the recital) communicate to participants in different spaces that a ritual is taking place. The ritual becomes part of the larp’s soundscape and impacts the mood of the larp as a whole. At the same time, any pre-existing soundscape (for example, background music, other participants’ activities, other rituals) impacts the soundscape of the ritual.
When implementing background music in particular, some sound design ahead of time is needed. Background noise and ambient music may lower the threshold for using the technique, as participants can lean onto other sounds to find a coherent, shared drone, and get the ritual going. On the other hand, too dominant background music may make it harder for participants to use the technique freely, as music will set boundaries to what kind of sounds make sense during the ritual.
Cover photo: Anni Tolvanen at the larp Redemption (2021). Photo by Kai Simon Fredriksen. Photo has been cropped.
This article is published in the Knutpunkt 2022 magazine Distance of Touch and is published here with permission. Please cite this text as:
Pettersson, Juhana. 2022. “Participatory Ritual Vocalization.” In Distance of Touch: The Knutpunkt 2022Magazine, edited by Juhana Pettersson, 51-54. Knutpunkt 2022 and Pohjoismaisen roolipelaamisen seura.
When I started organizing larps, there was only one way to run a production. For the purposes of this essay, I’ll call it the Infinite Hours model. Under this model, a fairly large team of volunteers puts in a massive amount of work to realize a labor of love. Leadership is focused on making the larp as amazing as possible through the brute expedient of work, work, and more work. People are motivated by the desire to make as much cool stuff as humanly possible.
In productions like these, ambition rules. Some of the greatest larps of the Nordic tradition have been made like this. If you count work hours and calculate what they would have cost if anybody got paid, you get incredibly high figures. Because of this, larps made under the Infinite Hours models often punch far above their weight in production quality.
Infinite Hours can lead to great work but they also have a cost. Under this model, people burn out. Organizers don’t sleep. Stress accumulates and makes people leave the scene entirely rather than subject themselves to another round of self-sacrifice.
I’ve made larp like this too. Almost every veteran organizer in the Nordic larp scene has.
The goal of this article is to lay out an alternate mode of production. I call it efficient larp production; and it’s important to ask, efficient in terms of what?
This is not about saving money. Rather, I’ll lay out a production method by which organizer stress is minimized and the effectiveness of a single work hour is maximized. The purpose of making the work more efficient is to allow for more rest, sleep, and leisure. The goal is that by the time the larp is over, organizers feel energized and happy, not worn out.
You can make great larps using the Infinite Hours model and terrible larps using the efficient model, or vice versa. How good a larp you create depends on your creative vision and design, not the choice of production model. This is about the wellbeing of the people who make larp, not the quality of the work. That’s a separate discussion.
A detail from Death By a Thousand Cuts, created using the guidelines in this article. Photo by Tuomas Puikkonen on Flickr. CC BY-NC 2.0.
Labor
There are three principal ways to structure the labor of a larp production. Counterintuitively, if nobody gets paid you can demand much more from them. Often they also demand much more from themselves. If people are paid, either all or some, questions of fairness and distribution of workload tend to arise because the project takes on the character of professional, paid work.
The all-volunteer model is the most traditional way to make Nordic larp. Full volunteer teams are often large, as people excited by the project join in. Project leads often work extremely hard for long periods of time, taking on hands-on work on top of coordination. It’s not uncommon for people to drop out during production because of stress so new volunteers come in to replace them. This can happen at all levels of the production.
Under the semi-volunteer model some organizers get paid while others work as volunteers. At the professional end of larp organizing this is quite common. Participation Design Agency, the makers of larps such as Baphomet and Inside Hamlet, has made productions like this. I’ve also used this model in larps like Enlightenment in Blood and Tuhannen viilon kuolema (Death By a Thousand Cuts).
Typically, in a semi-volunteer model organizers who work on the larp over a long period of time get paid, as well as those with specialized skills not available on a volunteer basis. Unpaid volunteers are used especially during the actual runtime of the larp event. The model is similar to that used at film and music festivals in many countries.
The challenge of running a semi-volunteer production is to ensure that everyone feels fairly treated. The people who get paid should carry the responsibility and the stress while the volunteers should get to participate in an interesting, meaningful way. This means that it’s harder to justify having volunteers shoulder the kind of extreme workloads you encounter in all-volunteer productions.
Finally, in a professional model everyone gets paid. The realities of bespoke Nordic larp design are such that this is very hard to do, because even big productions have small budgets. Perhaps this will change if subsidizing larp production by the state or cultural foundations becomes more common.
In a fully professional work model, the available resource pool in terms of people and work hours is the smallest. Since people are paid for their work, and work must be fairly compensated, the amount of work everyone does must remain reasonable. An increase in workload must come out of the budget, and the budget is always limited.
A wealthy character at an art gallery in Death By a Thousand Cuts. Photo by Tuomas Puikkonen on Flickr. CC BY-NC 2.0.
Bang For Buck
A design choice is efficient if it produces the maximum amount of meaningful larp action with the minimum amount of organizer work. This can be understood quite broadly: A beautiful prop that everyone in the larp sees which energizes their commitment to the setting is equally as good as a great innovation in character design that makes them motivate players to new heights of spontaneity at half the pagecount. What matters is that most choices made in the production follow the basic calculation of bang for buck. Or if not buck, then work hours and stress.
You need to start each larp production by doing an analysis of the idea from the perspective of efficiency. Does the overall larp idea seem like it’s possible to realize within the model presented in this article? It’s important to note that the answer may well be no. Some larp ideas are possible to organize efficiently, others are not. Some larps can only be made with Infinite Hours. For example, if the concept involves a large number of individual, distinctly different, custom-tailored player experiences, it’s probably impossible to make under the aegis of efficiency.
Maximizing the efficiency of an organizer work hour makes it possible to organize big larps with small teams. This is especially helpful for those organizers who are trying to make larps professionally and aspire to a sensible hourly wage. There are two ways to be paid properly for the work you do as a professional organizer: Higher pay and less work. Since the economics of larp organizing often mean that money is tight, it makes sense to see if hours can come down instead.
Specialization
“In our production, everyone does a little bit of everything.”
This is the absolute worst way to organize larp production.
Each individual organizer has resources that are spent at varying rates. Time, mental capacity, stress. Time is the easiest of these to measure and allocate but running out of mental capacity and accruing too much stress leads to burnout and long-term mental health problems.
The reason I strongly prefer larp organizations where everyone has a clear job title is that it makes it much easier to manage stress. If everyone does a little bit of everything, everyone is also responsible for everything. Everyone must stress about everything.
In contrast, in a team composed of specialized organizers, everyone is only responsible for their own sector. If everyone has food, the cook can sigh in relief and doesn’t have to think about whether the workshops are running properly. This way, an individual only has to stress about the work they control and understand.
A team of specialized organizers is only possible with the help of coordinators whose job is to make sure everything gets done by someone. These roles are typically those of producer, creative lead, or similar. Ideally, the coordinator delegates instead of doing practical work themselves.
In ideal circumstances, a larp organizer has wide autonomy to take care of their own responsibility while trusting others in the organizing team to do their part. Coordinators take care of problems and deficiencies in work allocation. This results in an efficient management of stress, since the number of things you have to stress about is minimized.
Death By a Thousand Cuts was a simulation of Finnish class society in the shadow of climate catastrophe. Photo by Tuomas Puikkonen on Flickr. CC BY-NC 2.0.
System Thinking
Efficient larp organizing requires systems thinking. Ideally, you don’t engage with the larp at all on the level of an individual playable character. Rather, you design interaction systems that provide the desired types of experiences for as many characters as possible. If an idea benefits only several characters, it should be discarded.
There are several tactics that can be employed to keep your thinking on the system level:
Always think of characters in terms of groups, not individuals
You can set a minimum group size, such as six for a smaller larp or ten for a bigger larp, to make sure you don’t accidentally start fiddling with individualized content.
Recycle
You can use the same idea over and over again as long as it’s not experienced repeatedly by the same players. For example, the larp has three secret societies. In the fiction they are different but no player will be in more than one of them. This means you can use the same rituals for all three. It might make the fiction incoherent from a top-level vantage point, but that’s not where the players are experiencing the larp from. The chaos and co-creation of larp will give each society a different texture even if they’re the same on paper.
Design interaction engines instead of plots
A plot is a handcrafted sequence of events. It’s very labor-intensive and thus bad for efficient larp design. An interaction engine is a mechanism in the larp that creates action. A single well-designed engine can create massive amounts of playable content in the larp thus freeing the organizers from writing bespoke content.
I learned this framework from working with Bjarke Pedersen. In the larp Baphomet, there’s a necklace. If you wear it, you are the god Baphomet and people will react to you according to specific interaction rules. The necklace roams the larp, worn by different people, generating action. It’s very simple but results in a vast variety of action.
Empower players
This is not the same as outsourcing elements of organizing to players. Rather, you want to give the players as much creative agency as possible so that they engage with your design in a robust, active way. This means that all content that you create naturally reaches more people who use it more thoroughly. Typical design choices that encourage this are transparency and a robust fiction that won’t break if the players start improvising.
Once you see the entire larp as a system, it’s easier to grasp which parts can be junked, which copied and repeated, and which must be handcrafted. Systems thinking has the additional advantage of helping you recognize blind spots in the larp’s design. For example, let’s say that you’re making a larp about love. If you design character experiences individually, it’s easy to get sidetracked and accidentally make a character who’s not connected to the theme of love. Designing on a system level helps avoid this because love is present as a systemic element.
We built a live radio station for Death By a Thousand Cuts, called Murder Radio. Photo by Tuomas Puikkonen on Flickr. CC BY-NC 2.0.
Personal Touch
All design that requires one-on-one consultation between an organizer and a player must be cut if at all possible. Ideally, an organizer relates to players and characters as groups, not individuals, during the preparatory stages of a larp production. This changes during runtime when taking care of individual needs becomes important for each player to have a good experience.
For example, a character creation process where a player makes their character together with an organizer is unacceptable because it requires the organizer to custom-tailor content for an individual player. This is extremely work-intensive and thus inefficient. In contrast, a process where the players create characters in organizer-run workshops is fine because a single organizer can handle a large group of participants.
The time between signup and runtime is when players have the largest amount of individual demands on the organizers. In my experience, 5% of players are responsible for 95% of questions and other requests for organizer time. To discourage this, I’ve found it best to try to cultivate a strong understanding of the larp’s vision and fiction among the participants, so that they feel comfortable making their own choices without having to consult an organizer.
Note that as with all the guidelines presented in this article, there are always special cases. In my own experience, working with participants with disabilities to help them have a good experience is a sensible use of organizer time even if it’s only for one person.
Writing
The number of words that have been written for a larp is never, ever an indicator of quality. More text doesn’t make a larp better.
Indeed, the opposite is true. Players are human beings and because of this they have limited cognitive capacity. Their ability to retain information from text is bound by their human nature. This means that the goal with larp writing must be to communicate as much as possible with as few words as possible. Information must be clear, concise, and immediately understandable. This way, players grasp it quickly, and organizers avoid the work of producing unnecessary textual mass.
Personally, using the character software tool Larpweaver revolutionized my larpwriting because it makes it possible to have complex characters with much less text than before. It automatizes a lot of tedious labor. However, Larpweaver also requires an unorthodox approach to how characters are designed so it may not suit everyone.
Other methods for reducing writing labor are character-building workshops where the labor of character-making is transferred to the players, and larp design that’s not very character based and thus doesn’t require long character texts.
In my experience, transparent design often makes it possible to eliminate labor that’s not strictly writing but adjacent to it. An example is character sendout, a truly tedious task that can be removed if you can dump the character texts into a Google Drive folder and allow players access to all of them.
A portable venue used for Death By a Thousand Cuts. Photo by Tuomas Puikkonen on Flickr. CC BY-NC 2.0.
Physical Production
When considering efficiency in a larp’s physical production, it’s important to note that this doesn’t mean compromising quality and comfort. Rather, it’s a question of how to allocate resources effectively so that the maximum number of players get to enjoy each feature.
Using existing locations, props, and infrastructure is probably the greatest single trick to efficient physical production. If you find the right castle for your magic school, you don’t have to spend so much time decorating it. What you need is already there. This is one of the areas where consideration of the larp’s concept and the realities of production most overlap. It’s a recurring topic among larp organizers: “I’ve found this great location. Now I only need to come up with a larp that works there.” That’s efficient larp production!
Efficiency favors relatively homogenized design where all participants either have similar experiences or one of a very small set of different experiences. In terms of physical design this means favoring props and scenography for big scenes and large groups of people. Beautifully decorated meeting halls, big showy props, and dramatic lighting are all examples of efficiency.
In the Finnish larp Proteus, the production team built a combat simulation in an airplane hangar, a spectacular set piece with smoke, lights, cars, and guns. The story of the game was built so that all characters got to experience it in small groups. The simulation was a repeating instance. This way a labor-intensive showpiece benefited the maximum number of participants.
Note that there are circumstances where it does make sense to put effort into physical production even if it only benefits a small number of players. Efficiency is not an absolute. One example is the dietary restrictions of individual players. Catering to them may be time-consuming, but it’s also necessary for the purposes of making the larp accessible.
Airbnb is a great place to find interestingly furnished venues for urban larp. Photo by Tuomas Puikkonen on Flickr. CC BY-NC 2.0.
Kill Your Darlings
Imagine this scenario: The night before the larp, the creative lead sleeps only an hour because they’ve stayed awake sculpting a cool prop by hand.
Never do this. Unless the task at hand is literally a matter of success or failure for the larp, you should cut features that require giving up sleep immediately before the larp’s runtime. Rested organizers are better organizers.
Killing your darlings is important at all stages of larp development, but especially so in the late stage of the production when it becomes clear how far your resources stretch. And remember, sleep and stress are resources. You should aim to have an efficient, rested crew during runtime; and sometimes that requires cutting away cool things at the last minute.
In my experience, the cool thing is often a custom-built technological solution that would be so awesome if it worked. At some point, you have to decide that you will live without it instead of wasting resources on troubleshooting that will lead to nowhere. Indeed, existing off-the-shelf technological solutions are nearly always better than unique prototypes, because of their reliability.
Here it’s important to remember that the players won’t miss features they never knew about. If you didn’t tell them there would be a scale model of a spaceship in the main atrium, they won’t be disappointed that it was never finished.
Casualties
There are some things you lose in the search for efficiency. A lot of larpmaking is driven by a love for detail, cool props, and interesting individual characters. If you want to go to the extremes of efficiency, there’s no place for those things. You only design what you need, nothing more.
Personally, I’ve never gone quite that far. Once the production machine is running efficiently, sometimes you’ll find the time to add a few little details, fun easter eggs that only benefit a few players. The important thing is to do these with your surplus energy, not by cutting from your own wellbeing.
When talking about efficient larp production, a common protest to the ideas presented here is that efficiency removes all the things that make it fun to make larp. If you’re running a larp production with volunteers, this is something to keep in mind: Why are these people helping you? Ideally, you can organize the work so that they can create the features that make it all worthwhile for them while cutting elements they’re less passionate about.
Happily, if you do this right, the larp benefits, as people are often at their creative best when making something they believe in. As a coordinator, you may sometimes have to cut one of your own favorite features so that a volunteer can have theirs.
Death By a Thousand Cuts ended in murder. Photo by Tuomas Puikkonen on Flickr. CC BY-NC 2.0.
Sustainability
My hope is that over the long term, efficient larp organizing makes it possible to sustain a larp community where people don’t get permanently burned out. Instead, they’ll hopefully be able to continue organizing for years to come. Similarly, for some of us this model makes it possible to make larp professionally, thus leading to more larps that people can play.
Another word for efficiency might be sustainability. The goal is that after a larp production is over, the organizers feel good, perhaps a bit tired, but still basically ready to do it again. This way, experience accrues in the community, great projects get made and people feel good about working on larps.
Perhaps even so good that at the afterparty of one project they’ll already start thinking about the next one!
Cover photo: We invited our funder Finnish Cultural Foundation to participate in the larp by providing a venue and one of their staff for a scene. Photo by Tuomas Puikkonen. Image has been cropped. CC BY-NC 2.0.
We step into the ritual chamber wearing our ceremonial robes, the hoods on our heads. We’re at a beautiful estate in the Danish countryside, secluded enough to feel the outside world only as a distant concern. The larp is Baphomet (2015-) and I participated in it in 2019. It details the fall of a vintage era Hermetic cult as they connect with the dark gods Pan and Baphomet.
As the ritual goes on, we huddle in the middle of the room, backs to each other, facing the walls. A High Templar circles us and intones the ritual while we hum a low, collective sound that feels bigger and deeper than any individual.
The experience goes beyond the typical boundaries between fiction and reality that superficially define larp. The outwards-facing huddle is a simple formation but it means that my back is physically against other players. I feel the sound vibrate in their bodies. Someone shorter than me is in front and their voice is indistinguishable from mine.
Our collective hum changes. There are vibrations, emotions, dissonances and shrieks. It feels like an auditory summation of the larp’s emotional state at that point. There are moments of terror and warmth. It’s a profoundly positive experience of togetherness but the larp’s horror themes shine through and fear makes itself manifest.
The seemingly contradictory experiences of human connection and inner darkness are present at the same time, not as a contradiction but as complementary elements. This is a common theme in a family of larps of which Baphomet is one.
Others in the same genre are Pan, House of Craving, Inside Hamlet, Libertines, Conscience, and End of the Line. They are defined by an aesthetic of sordid indulgence, dark emotional content, and playground-style design creating opportunities for participants to sin creatively.
Baphomet Run 2. Photo by Bjarke Pedersen.
Communities of Sin
As is typical of larp, these games create small temporary communities, microcosms in which the participants enable each other to experience the thrills and terrors that draw them in. In my personal experience, the communities of play especially in the smaller larps such as Baphomet and House of Craving (2019) are unusually warm, supportive and positive.
Indeed, so much so that participants joke about not wanting to go back to the real world and its hierarchies, anxieties and daily oppressions. While the larp’s fictional landscape is full of degradation and injustice, the off-game community is humble, constructive, and ready to listen.
Of course, no larp experience is homogenous across its player space. There are surely other player experiences as well, especially in the bigger of the larps mentioned. Still, when I’ve left for the airport after the larp, the positivity of the play community has been a topic of conversation with other players in a way that differs from most of my other larp experiences.
After one of these larps, I lamented with another male player the fact that the easy physical closeness between men would slowly fade in the outside world. It would become more awkward to hug as the repressions of society wore away at us.
This experience of closeness and community doesn’t happen by accident. Larps all about characters doing terrible things to each other function best when the workshops are geared to build trust and intimacy. When the players feel safe and comfortable they can go to emotional extremes that would otherwise be inaccessible to them.
House of Craving (2019). Photo by Bjarke Pedersen.
When I think about other types of larps that have featured a similarly close, warm community experience, they’ve tended to be small games which have workshops with similar goals. One such is the Brody Condon larp The Zeigarnik Effect (2015) in Norway. We played characters undergoing gestalt therapy and the workshops were needed to get us accustomed to the game’s unusual mode of communication and interaction.
Because of the positive nature of the overall emotional experience of these larps I’ve started to wonder whether they’re horror larps at all. The one I worked on, the Vampire: the Masquerade larp End of the Line (2016-), was explicitly conceived as a horror-themed playground designed to enable each participant in a dynamic, personal way. The aesthetic was from horror but the actual experience was made so you’d get to do fun things you can’t do otherwise.
Designed for Transgression
There are a few design choices that make this sort of larp possible. They tend to be typical of Nordic larp design in general but are often implemented in specific ways to enable the players to transgress in a fun and safe way.
Workshopping together to build intimacy, trust and a shared sense of the social space is crucial. The players have to feel that the play community of the larp supports them and is open to their ideas. They have to feel free to express themselves and take creative risks. This is achieved with workshop exercises that build trust and intimacy. In some larps, player selection also plays a part.
Safety or calibration mechanics that allow the player to stop or adjust play on the fly also play an important part. The presence of such mechanics makes it possible for participants to feel like they can trust their fellow players and the play situation.
These mechanics can be used for many different reasons, not all of them dramatic. When they work well, they allow the player to navigate around issues that make transgressive content difficult for them to access, whatever those issues might be.
House of Craving (2019). Photo by Bjarke Pedersen.
While not present in all the larps mentioned in this article, transparency is great for enabling the players. In Inside Hamlet, Pan, Baphomet, and House of Craving, every player can read all characters if they so choose in the preparation for the larp. For some players this makes it easier for them to instigate transgressive game content with other players. They know from their reading that the other player’s character is just as fucked up as their own.
All together, these design choices work best when they give the player the tools to take responsibility for their own larp experience. A player who feels enabled and in control can more easily engage in play where the character is in the opposite situation.
Cruelty is Fun
There’s an overlap in themes, techniques and player base between these larps and BDSM culture. They allow us to enjoy feelings, sensations and emotions that are taboo in normal conversation and polite society. Things that are ordinarily considered wrong, debased, or evil become playful, fulfilling, and fun when enacted within a consensual, supportive context.
BDSM often features role-play and I don’t think that’s categorically different from larp with erotic or sexual themes. Rather, there’s a sliding scale of different designed experiences from an abstracted larp experience to a fuck session with a light sheen of fiction.
One example of a thing that’s bad in real life but often fun in play is cruelty. In the right context and with the right people, cruelty can be tremendously sexy.
Everyday life has limited opportunities to enjoy cruelty in an ethical way because it tends to require a victim. In larp and BDSM the victims are there consensually and they can enjoy the thrill of being subjected to cruelty, safe in the knowledge that they control their own play and can exit it as needed. In this way, being the victim of cruelty can become a fulfilling, profound experience. For a player of a masochistic or submissive bent, all the more so.
The design of these larps supports the playing of cruelty in much the same way the culture around BDSM scenes supports it. Safety mechanisms and workshopping provide a framework in which taboo impulses can be explored. Character writing and other design elements provides alibi for being cruel. However, personal experience suggests that the most dynamic scenes of cruelty in a larp are expressions of player creativity and energy enabled by the design but not necessarily originating in it.
Members of the Voltemand noble family at Inside Hamlet. Photo by Marie Herløvsen.
In Baphomet, there was a scene where another character threw me to the ground and kicked me in the balls. Following the rules of the game, the hits and kicks connected only lightly and I play acted to make them seem real. I fell to the ground, groaned, moaned, whimpered. I remember the scene very well because there was a release of energy, a spontaneous burst of power animating those present. Even for someone like me, who’s not masochistic by nature, it was a fun larp scene to be in because of the intensity and release of emotion.
The over the top spectacle and transgressiveness of cruelty makes it interesting and dynamic even when it doesn’t satisfy a personal kink.
Sex
Did I ever tell you about that time I was fucking my dead wife’s sister while moaning my wife’s name in her ear? It was funny because my son was there too. I remember him drawling: “Go Dad!”
There was also a ghost who was touching his crotch through his pants but that was normal in House of Craving.
Sex is a huge component of these larps. Sometimes there’s so much fucking that players complain of it becoming boring. It’s larp sex of course but the playstyle is physical. You might not actually engage in genital penetration but you’ll probably end up kissing people, groping them, getting groped, caressing, touching.
It’s amazing how quickly this sort of sexual interaction becomes normalized. Once everyone has collectively adjusted their perception of what’s normal you find yourself casually grinding with people as easily as you ordinarily shake hands. The way we’re socialized, sexual and flirtatious contact always matters. It always means something. Except after a morning’s larp workshop, it suddenly doesn’t.
Although this has the effect of banalizing sexual interactions, it also makes it possible to reach new types of sexually inflected play that would otherwise be out of reach. It also feels liberating: It’s fun to be part of a community that has temporarily decided to let go of standards of sexual behavior.
A courtier at Inside Hamlet. Photo by Marie Herløvsen.
Of course, the role of sex in your experience depends on the specific larp and how you choose to play it. In Inside Hamlet (2015-), about the last days of the degenerate court of King Claudius, I played a judgmental priest. I participated in many sex scenes but my role was to denounce the sinners for their moral turpitude. Other times, like in House of Craving, sex becomes such a basic element of the larp’s landscape that you won’t even remember all the fucks you participated in.
House of Craving is about a family who gets together to remember the dead mother and wife. The malevolent house starts to affect them, ghosts guide them, and finally they fall into an everlasting state of mutually destructive degeneration. As the characters’ sense of reality collapses, so does the need for the larp’s fiction to be coherent. The higher truths of the emotional journey take precedence.
I have never participated in so many debased larp scenes as I did in that game but it felt quite straightforward when it was happening. The workshops had glued us into a cohesive social unit and we could brutalize each other with casual ease. The play was intense, so much that I took frequent breaks in the off-game area to gather my wits. Often someone else was there too and we enthused together about how great the experience was.
The approach to sex in the design of these larps is coy despite the graphic nature of the stories they generate. It’s all about the tease, not the actual act of fucking for real. You don’t have sex, you dryhump. From the purpose of larp dynamics this works much better as sexual flirtation drives action but sexual fulfillment doesn’t. The character may be sexually satisfied but the player isn’t and that keeps the player in motion.
House of Craving (2019). Photo by Bjarke Pedersen.
Prey
Baphomet and Pan (2013, 2014, 2020) feature a signature piece of larp design: the necklace mechanic. The way it works is that a player who wears either the Pan or Baphomet necklace is that god. Other characters will worship their god, falling on their knees in manic adoration. They do everything the god says.
You can wear a necklace for a maximum of half an hour after which you should pass it onto another player. This way, the necklaces travel the larp, organically causing chaos.
Wearing the necklace is a power trip. It’s fun to be worshiped. There’s more to the experience, however. As a larper, you’re very well aware that the god has to provide content for their followers. It’s fun to tell people what to do but it uses up material pretty fast. There was a moment when I was standing in the middle of a room with perhaps ten people kneeling all around me, waiting expectantly. I drew a complete blank. Couldn’t think of a single thing for them to do.
Suddenly I heard one of the players vocalizing like you do in that situation, just speaking whatever seems kind of appropriate. They said: “We want to eat you.”
Blessed inspiration! Feeling great relief, I proclaimed: “Eat my flesh!”
The others thronged at my feet and started biting my flesh, especially my arms since they were exposed. Not very hard, but hard enough to leave a mark. Still, it was a small price to pay for being spared the terror of failing to provide playable larp material for the expectant crowd.
House of Craving (2019). Photo by Bjarke Pedersen.
Most players pass on the necklace much faster than the 30 minute limit. I don’t think I ever had it for longer than fifteen minutes. That’s just enough time to do one scene.
The necklace is a wonderful symbol for how these larps work because it shows the fun of both sides of the power equation: the experience of wielding power and of being subjected to power. When players play these scenes, they support each other’s experiences. Neither the god nor the worshippers can experience that role without the other.
There’s a distinct difference in the power equation in terms of how many people there are in a scene. When I have the necklace and I’m surrounded by ten other people, ostensibly I have the power. However, their expectations as players place great demands on me, effectively constraining how much I can use my game-granted authority. In contrast, when the scene is small, it’s much easier to start choreographing other people. In a smaller scene, I can safely assume that there’s enough to do for the other players, giving me freedom to think about what’s fun for me. Perhaps because of this, my best necklace scenes were small.
When we made End of the Line, we focused on the basic vampire theme of predator and prey. In the design, we strove to make as many of the characters as possible into both. Depending on the circumstances you could hunt other characters and be hunted in turn.
End of the Line (Finland, 2016). Photo by Tuomas Puikkonen.
The thrill of being hunted is an essential part of the experience, indeed possibly even more integral as that of being the hunter. You can zoom out from this assertion to a wider characteristic of larp design: Often in larp, villains, enemies, and oppressors are used as supporting characters to generate play. The player characters are the victimized whose experience is subject to a lot of design thought. Against this background, the design in End of the Line was an attempt to systematize this dynamic while also giving the hunter an autonomous play experience that didn’t feel like playing a supporting character.
After the larp, one player compared the design to primal play found in BDSM culture, where predator and prey-dynamics similarly provide a foundation for the fun.
Pure Experience
In many of these larps, especially in Baphomet and House of Craving, the design foregrounds immediate emotional experience and interaction to an extreme degree. As Baphomet comes to a close, the lights are dimmed. This makes it harder to see who has the necklace and who doesn’t. The social dynamics of the game have been running for two days and the participants have fused into a collective madness where elements like character or story become increasingly meaningless compared to the immediacy of the interactive moment.
In these last moments, we don’t need the game design crutches of the necklace or the fictional frame. We are free floating active agents with full agency to let the impulses created by the larp’s social dynamics dribble out. We don’t play as individuals but as a collective.
House of Craving (2019). Photo by Bjarke Pedersen.
As the larp ends, we gather in the ritual room. The atmosphere is hysterical, people falling to pieces all over the place. Yet as a player it doesn’t feel dangerous at all. Quite the opposite: It feels like a place where you can safely allow the expressions of the experience to flow through you.
Huddling together, making the ritual hum, feeling it in our bodies, feeling our breath, voice, collective spirit start to tear as the gods Baphomet and Pan manifest. As players we know how this moment goes. We know the meaning of these choices on a game design level. We are mentally prepared to deal with the chaos even as it pulls at us from every direction.
The larp has two endings, the Pan ending and the Baphomet ending. As a player you can choose which god to follow depending on the themes of your game experience. I followed Pan in a horde of people running to the mansion’s spa area, tearing our clothes off as we went, plunging into the pool.
We’d had instructions that we should submerge ourselves in silence, without speaking or making a sound, and as we rose from the water we would be out of the game.
This didn’t happen. Instead as all the followers of Pan were standing in the water we started screaming. I have no idea who started it but suddenly the sound was swelling from inside us in an impersonal collective furor, a meaningless, inhuman wall of noise echoing from the walls of the pool chamber. As we became exhausted by the sound we went underwater and out of the fiction.
Inside Hamlet. Photo by Marie Herløvsen.
War Stories
The larp Inside Hamlet had a rule that after the game you were allowed to talk about your own experience but you shouldn’t talk about what other people were doing. It was okay to say: “I crawled and licked another player’s boots,” but not: “Gustav crawled and licked Annie’s boots.”
The purpose of this rule is to enable people to play freely with kinky, dark, and extreme subjects without getting outed with non-players who might not understand the context. It’s a community safety mechanism making it easier for players to relax.
This rule and other similar ones has left us with the result that these larps are often talked about in an euphemistic manner, eliding many of the more outré things that happen in them. Players talk about them face-to-face or in small, closed online groups.
When it’s only one larp, it doesn’t matter too much, but it’s become a hallmark of the genre. From the outside they’re decidedly opaque, which is especially obvious if you’ve gone to them and witnessed the discrepancy between the reality and the discourse. This is why I chose to write this essay: I wanted to make an attempt at mapping the emotional landscape of these experiences in an open manner without undue coyness.
Some of the larps mentioned in this essay, especially the bigger ones, feature complex, nuanced narrative elements. Conscience (2018-) modeled its storyworld on that of the TV series Westworld, and our End of the Line used a well-known role-playing game as its basis. Inside Hamlet is based on a famous play.
Ophelia’s Funeral at Inside Hamlet. Photo by Bret Lehne.
You can play each of those larps without engaging with the kind of sordid activities celebrated in this essay. Because of the breadth of their design, they can support many different kinds of playstyles.
This is why I think that while the tendencies of this genre are present in each of those games, they reach their fulfillment in Baphomet and House of Craving. In a sense, these two are not larps of the mind at all. They function on a more primitive, submerged emotional level where the nuances of the fiction don’t matter nearly as much as the emotional landscape of a beautiful larp scene.
Those moments of emotion are why I’ve played so many of these larps. Those and the warmth of their temporary, fleeting communities.
Cover photo: A Stormguard and a Companion at Inside Hamlet. Photo by Bret Lehne.
This article will be published in the upcoming companion book Book of Magic and is published here with permission. Please cite this text as:
Pettersson, Juhana. “Terror and Warmth.” In Book of Magic, edited by Kari Kvittingen Djukastein, Marcus Irgens, Nadja Lipsyc, and Lars Kristian Løveng Sunde. Oslo, Norway: Knutepunkt, 2021.
As a player, I build my larp characters using the tools of sketch comedy. The style may be different, but the toolbox is the same. The crude basics offered by sketch comedy provide a functional basis on which to build more nuanced play during the larp.
The sketch comedy character building method is a hack. It means breaking down the character into repetitive concrete actions that make the character recognizable in the eyes of others and give you something to do when you’re uncertain and confused. How do you build a character for sketch comedy? Here are some of the basics:
A visual hook. This is not the same as a good costume. Rather, it means that your costume has a few distinctive, memorable elements and the rest is unobtrusive. The goal is for people to remember the hook and forget everything else. (I’m not a costume oriented player and this is my cheat method.)
Patter. What kind of things does the character say? Catchphrases, standard reactions, repeating subject matter, stories, anecdotes.
Distinctive reactions. This is even more basic than what the character says. A good reaction or two can be milked endlessly through the larp. They can be things like surprise, excitement, or fear.
Irrational opinions. One or two extremely strong irrational opinions about something peripheral are great for creating quick drama and making the character distinctive.
I played a teacher in one of the early College of Wizardry (2015) larps. My subject was combat magic. I was also secretly a vampire.
Creating the character based on the text provided by the organizers, I decided that my irrational opinion would be about how to properly hold a wand. I came up with a bunch of ways to hold it that I approved and one that I detested. I called it the “Farmer’s Fist” (the same grip you’d use with a hammer) and every time I saw someone do it, I would start an overblown lecture.
The distinctive visual element was easy: Sunglasses. Because of the vampire thing. No points for originality, but it worked.
In 2019, I played in the larp Grums By Night in Stockholm. It was a comedic larp based on Vampire: the Masquerade and my character was a violent idiot. For him, I created a distinctive reaction: Every time something he liked happened, he punched the air with both hands and yelled: ”Yes!”
It worked wonderfully, although it proved embarrassing after the larp was over when I found it hard to shake.
That character had a simple default shtick: He wanted to punch people, or for people to punch him. Both were okay. Thus when I didn’t have anything else to do, I started on that.
In a 2019 run of the Danish larp Baphomet, I played a travel writer. To get the character going, I developed a line of comedic patter about a trip to the Amazon. Then in the early parts of the larp I’d talk about that to keep social situations going. Later I discarded the Amazon line because the larp had provided other, more interesting subjects for conversation.
In another Danish 2019 larp, House of Craving, I had an even simpler catchphrase, describing everything as ”A beautiful, beautiful thing”.
The key to successfully building a character using the sketch comedy method is endless repetition. You have a limited number of reactions, phrases, and other elements and just use those all the time. In some larps where I’ve done this I’ve felt like I played for two days using a vocabulary of 200 words, but it doesn’t come across like that from the outside. It looks like consistency.
My personal measure of success for the sketch comedy method is when other characters start to make fun of me by imitating the defining elements of the character. This signals that the character has been drawn clearly and distinctly in their minds.
You’ll note that the sketch comedy method says nothing about the personality, motivation, relationships or any of the other elements we usually think of when we consider what a character is. Indeed, it resembles the experimental character building methods of larps like White Death where the character consists of repetitive physical action.
When I use this method it connects strongly to the larp’s pacing. Early in the larp I’m all about the repetitive character tics. This is because I haven’t internalized the character or the larp, and the tics give me something to do. As the larp progresses my internal play becomes more nuanced and I’m caught up in the events of the game. At this point, I don’t pay so much attention to sketch comedy characterization but usually I do it anyway because I’ve internalized it during the early game.
The best type of larp for the sketch comedy character is a sandbox-style, loose design where you have the space to play around with the character’s tropes. It doesn’t matter whether the larp is serious or lighthearted. Once you’ve internalized the tics, you can use the bandwidth this frees for other aspects of the larp, whatever that is in each specific design.
The method works less well in larps where you have to produce concrete in-game results, do work or solve plot. In such cases, there is less social space for the kind of social freestyling required.
When I started larping in the 90’s, I remember we had an ideal for a good player: the one who was able to play any character, take on any role. A king or a beggar, the good larper was able to stretch themselves into any shape and the player behind the character faded into invisibility.
As I’ve grown older and played more, I’ve come to understand the limits of this ideal. Sure, it’s probably good for any larper to try new things and play characters they have never tried before. However, personal aptitude, taste and desire play an important part in what works in a larp and what doesn’t.
This way, self-knowledge becomes part of the skill of being a larper. Once you understand what you can and can’t do, want and don’t want to do, it becomes easier to have good larp experiences and to co-create them with others.
Some realizations are extremely obvious, yet also hard to do anything about. I have severe dietary restrictions caused by illness. I know them very well but that knowledge only helps me if the organizers of the larp are willing to accommodate my issues. If not, no amount of self-knowledge will help me play that larp.
Personally, the greatest insights for me have been subtle: There are themes and relationships, types of scenes and modes of interaction, that work well and less well for me.
I interviewed other larpers to get different perspectives on self-understanding for this article. Most of them are from the Nordics. Some are my friends while others are larp acquaintances.
Positive Self-Knowledge
Let’s start with the positives: What works? What do I want to do? What kind of things do I want to enjoy and explore? Self-knowledge of this type allows us to direct our larp towards good, interesting and new experiences.
One interviewee said: ”My upbringing, education and current job involve a lot of controlling my own presentation. I fulfill my need for acting impulsively and thoughtlessly through larp characters.”
Larp offers a safe environment for acting out many characteristics that are not desirable in a person’s everyday or work life. The fictional framework of a larp can provide alibi for personal emotional fulfillment of a subtle kind that is not necessarily obvious to other players.
Another respondent said that they’d unexpectedly learned to enjoy: ”…wrestling, falling and fighting that isn’t with latex weapons or nerfs. I am not a fighter, I don’t do martial arts, but the physicality of brawling, being dragged on the floor or getting hit by hard projectiles is quite enjoyable.”
It’s not always obvious what proves to be enjoyable until you try it out. Larp presents an environment for us to try out all kinds of things to see what works for us. These lessons can then be taken into future larps, and sometimes to real life.
Self-knowledge also helps to understand what you’re good at. It’s fun to do something very well, to show off. We see it in particular in how players find a creative outlet in larp. Then again, sometimes you specifically don’t want to do things you’re good at in a larp. Many people have professional skills they use constantly in their day-to-day lives, and thus don’t want to take into a larp for fear of making it feel too much like work.
One interviewee said that they once unintentionally created a character with all the characteristics both of themselves and their ADHD, while coincidentally also going through the medical diagnostic process. ”It has been very therapeutic for me. The change is that I got a lot more compassion for myself, and also this character is being loved and cared for, even though it is full of all the faults I hate in myself.”
Developing Self-Knowledge
It’s easy! The only thing you have to do is to larp for a decade or two and reflect on your experiences. That’s what I did.
Fortunately, most can learn a little faster than that. Still, practical experimentation and trying out new things are great methods for acquiring self-understanding. In my experience, one of the most common things you hear from first-time larpers is: ”I didn’t expect it to feel like that!”
For the purposes of developing understanding, experience needs to be paired with reflection and analysis. One respondent said: ”In larps where my character experiences disappointment, failure, being set aside or being put down my first reaction is often withdrawal, cynicism and blaming myself. After reflecting on this, I realized it was because when I was young, this kind of behaviour got me sympathy, but it has also contributed to my depression. Realizing how this worked made it easier for me to develop my larping in another direction.”
The same interviewee continued: ”Often when I larp, my first impulses feel immersive but later I realize they are very much about myself and what I need at that point in my life. Sometimes that leads to repeating my own stereotypes. Nowadays, I consciously avoid certain themes and plan my character’s reactions in advance to avoid accidentally falling back into an old, unsuitable role. Sometimes I also do this during the larp, for example going to the bathroom to be by myself for a few minutes and consider the emotional impact of various choices.”
Taking time in the middle of larp to consider what you’re doing and how you’re playing is particularly useful. I recognize the experience: when I improvise in the heat of the moment, I make choices that feel spontaneous but are actually just repeating old patterns. Taking a bit of time helps to move beyond those.
Failures
What happens when self-knowledge fails? I’ve had a few experiences in my larp career where I’ve thought a type of game content was okay for me, and it wasn’t. I’ve gone to larps that didn’t work for me, which I could have seen in advance if I had applied my hard-won understanding of myself.
In larping, we want to push our boundaries and learn to enjoy new things. Very often we also do learn, but sometimes it’s through failure.
Failures from lack of self-understanding can happen when you purposely do something you’re not sure will work for you. These are the honorable failures. We want to expand what we’re capable of. Sometimes that works and sometimes it doesn’t. Either way we learned something about ourselves.
For myself, the really dumb failures are when I should know something will not work for me, but I do it anyway, and it doesn’t work. The cases where I think: ”Maybe this time the sleep deprivation will be okay!”
It will never be okay.
These types of failure modes are very personal. We each have our own things that just don’t work for us, no matter what.
Understanding only helps if it leads to active, good choices.
Boundaries
A lot of the discussion about safety and calibration in larp is about the setting of personal boundaries. However, for a player to be able to set boundaries, they have to know what those boundaries are. This often requires experience and understanding of the self. This is why self-knowledge goes so well with consent and calibration mechanics that allow for realigning boundaries on the fly.
An example of a calibration tool that worked very well for this purpose was the ribbon system in use in the Spanish larp Conscience. Based on the TV series Westworld, the larp featured heavy themes of violence and abuse. To allow players to direct their play in a desired direction, everyone had two ribbons, a white and red one. The white ribbon denoted physical violence, the red one sexual violence.
If you had the white ribbon on, it meant you could be shoved, grabbed and otherwise subjected to light use of force. If you had the red ribbon on, you could be approached for the purposes of scenes involving sexual violence. These scenes would then be negotiated further with other calibration tools.
I started the larp with both ribbons on. I ended up removing the white one for a very banal reason: I jinxed my back during the first night. I was okay standing and walking but anything more complicated hurt like hell. I remember agonizing over the situation and then suddenly realizing that I had just the right calibration tool for the occasion. Taking off the white ribbon meant I wouldn’t be subjected to force and could play without the danger of pain.
Other players used the ribbons for more complex reasons. A player took off the red ribbon after playing one or two scenes involving sexual violence. Not because those scenes had gone wrong, but because the player was exhausted with the subject matter and wanted to explore other aspects of the larp.
To me, this was a great example of self-knowledge in action. The players who took off the red ribbon correctly assessed where their limits were and acted preemptively to direct their experience in a desirable direction.
I’ve found new boundaries during larp, and conversely, realized that my limits were more rigid than I thought they were. In these situations, it pays to be able to make these kinds of judgments in the heat of the moment. This type of situational consent requires taking responsibility for your own experience, and seeking to actively steer it in a desired direction.
Unfortunately, pushing your limits in the heat of the moment doesn’t always work. For me, the worst failures have been related to sex scenes when I thought that I could ignore my original limits. Once I’ve done so, I’ve realized that my original intuition had been correct.
Setting boundaries is thus a player skill that is strongly related to self-knowledge. Once you know where your limits are, you can figure out how to make sure they are not crossed.
One respondent offered an example of a nuanced handling of boundaries: ”After being offered a pre-negotiated scene in a campaign I realized I would be so uncomfortable playing it that I declined, and the scene was modified to become more suitable for me. My character would have been solely responsible for our small post-apocalyptic community being revealed to a group of possible enemies, due to her negligence and selfishness with a radio transmitter.
While mentally preparing for the scene before the game I started to get very nervous about my character getting all the blame, up to my heart hammering and my hands shaking. I realized that my personal fear of failure (and being forced to admit it to everyone) was really messing me up, and I wouldn’t enjoy the ensuing events in the game. Bringing this up with the group, we agreed that the blame would be shared and my character’s involvement toned down. In the end all turned out well and I was glad I’d spoken up about my preferences.”
Often when we talk about personal boundaries, it’s about sex and violence. However, it’s important to remember that there’s a wide variety of different subjects that can prove so difcult they make the larp unplayable for a participant. In this case, the issue is the emotional landscape around failure and blame.
Stress
I’ve had two burnouts. While truly miserable experiences that caused lasting damage, they did provide the benefit of teaching me something about my own limits when it comes to stress. This relates to all aspects of life, including larp as a hobby. From the perspective of stress management, it’s good to have a very wide view of larp. Instead of focusing on the event itself, we can look at larp as part of everyday life. Signing up for larps. Getting rejected. Costume panic. Uncertainty over what will happen at the larp. Post-game weirdness stemming from handling difcult emotions. Together, they create a tapestry of stress that can affect how you interact with larp.
If I think about what larp-related things I’ve learned cause stress for myself, they include uncertainty about what I’ll be doing at the larp, uncertainty about sleeping arrangements, and peer pressure to start preparing and communicating with other players too early. To deal with these issues, I sign up to larps that work for me and have instituted rules for myself about only starting to prepare once the larp is relatively close.
Other people have other issues that cause them stress. Once such factors are identified, they can be managed and avoided, leading to a more positive relationship with larp as a hobby.
One respondent said: ”I’ve gotten more selective about the larps I attend. I’m a pretty high-energy player, and as I’ve gotten older, I’ve been more explicit about the cost-benefit calculus of expending that much energy. It’s not that I only attend expensive larps or blockbusters now — it’s more the system and the people playing it I select for. Some systems just aren’t my cup of tea (even if my friends are playing them), and some people take my energy without giving much back.”
This also leads to a wider discussion about how larps can be run and designed so as to avoid common causes of player stress, but that’s beyond the scope of this article.
The Right Larp
Probably the most obvious use for understanding yourself as a larper is to choose the right larp. There are plenty of larps that are cool, wonderful and very well made yet I would have a bad time if I participated in them. Not every larp is for everyone and it requires self-knowledge to understand what works and what doesn’t.
We are blessed with a large variety of different larps. Small and big, local and international, Nordic and non-Nordic, plot-based and sandboxy, serious and silly. Even the most versatile larper in the world won’t be equally comfortable in all of them. Like with all self-knowledge, understanding what works accumulates with experience.
One interviewee said: ”I really, really hate larp mornings. I hate roleplaying on an empty stomach, I hate putting on a costume in an in-character environment, or in cramped and crowded areas. If a larp description includes waking up in character, now I just don’t sign up.”
Antipathy to in-character mornings in larp is a pretty specific attitude. It demonstrates the kind of specific understanding of one’s own preferences that allows for selection of larps where play goes smoothly.
The same respondent continued: ”I like short, scripted larps better than long, sandbox larps. Even if a longer game looks super cool, I will probably lose steam at some point, get bored or discouraged, and it will make the whole experience, the trip and the time investment not really worth it. It’s a challenge to find larps that match my requirements because I like kickass sites and 360° aesthetics, but I’ll take short and intense any time over long and diluted.”
This preference is also rooted in experience and understanding of how the larper functions in a larp. They know how their energy lasts and tailor their preferences to that reality.
Personally, I’ve learned that I can’t deal with sleep deprivation. I need energy to larp effectively and I don’t have it if I haven’t slept. Because of this, I avoid larps featuring such elements. That doesn’t mean that they wouldn’t be great experiences for other players with sturdier constitutions than what I have, or who enjoy pushing their physical limits.
When the Finnish scifi larp Odysseus was announced, I decided that I wouldn’t sign up because I understood the larp would run around the clock. Then later the hype got so strong, I put my name on the waiting list. I didn’t get in and in retrospect that was good. When people came out of the larp I heard stories of many great experiences but it was clear it wouldn’t have been for me despite my momentary wavering.
Hype is the enemy of admitting to yourself that the larp is not for you. If everyone is going to the larp, maybe you should sign up too? Even if your instincts are telling you that it’s not the right choice. That’s why the right moment for self-reflection is often when the hype is at its strongest.
Implementing Self-Knowledge
You have achieved a perfect understanding of yourself as a larper. What’s next?
In ideal circumstances, you’d be able to leverage this knowledge to find the right larps for yourself and play them in a way that works for you. Sometimes this is possible.
Often the circumstances are not ideal. Maybe the perfect larp experience that has been revealed through a process of introspection simply doesn’t exist, or is out of your price range. Perhaps it’s not available where you live. Sometimes the larp is worth compromising for, and other times it’s better to stay home.
In a recent larp I played, there was an offgame break in the middle with the players given the opportunity to each say what they needed to make their game better. In this way, asking for help from others was baked into the design of the larp. Larp is a collaborative endeavor and it makes sense to work together to make it work for each of us.
The issues that prevent you from having good larp experiences might not be personal but systemic. A classic example is the lack of interesting female characters. Self-knowledge can tell you that the reason larp doesn’t work for you is a lack of characters you want to play, but getting those characters is not a matter of personal choice. It requires systemic change.
In this way, the navel-gazing of self-knowledge becomes something that can have a positive effect not only on your own larp experience, but the whole community.
Playing Any Character
Personally, my understanding of myself as a larper has changed and kept changing. The community ideals I shared when I started out proved to be unrealistic. I couldn’t play every character and I didn’t enjoy the attempt.
At the same time, the process of self-discovery has also led me to new subject matter. I’ve tried new experiences and found that they work for me. In this way, self-discovery has both defined and expanded my horizons as a larper.
For me, the most educational moments have often been failures. I thought something would work out a certain way and it didn’t. While this has been painful and sometimes embarrassing, it’s also helped me further triangulate on what works.
Only you can truly know what works for you and acquiring that knowledge can be a lifelong process.
Death By a Thousand Cuts was a simulation of Finnish class society in the shadow of climate catastrophe. Photo by 
Death By a Thousand Cuts ended in murder. Photo by 
Baphomet Run 2. Photo by Bjarke Pedersen.
House of Craving (2019). Photo by Bjarke Pedersen.
House of Craving (2019). Photo by Bjarke Pedersen.
House of Craving (2019). Photo by Bjarke Pedersen.
House of Craving (2019). Photo by Bjarke Pedersen.
End of the Line (Finland, 2016). Photo by Tuomas Puikkonen.
House of Craving (2019). Photo by Bjarke Pedersen.
Inside Hamlet. Photo by Marie Herløvsen.
