Proteus: Sotakarjujen synty

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{{Infobox larp design |first_run=Template:Oct 12-14, 2018 in Kauhava, Finland |name=Proteus: Sotakarjujen synty |image= |tagline= |participants=75 |duration=12 hours |website={{}} |designers={{}Markus Montola, Simo Järvelä} |techniques={{}} }}

Proteus: Sotakarjujen synty (Eng. Proteus: Origin of the Warhogs) was a larp based on Miska Fredman's tabletop roleplaying game Sotakarjut (Eng. Warhogs, Ironspine 2017). The tabletop game is set in year 2310, in a world where ultracapitalist hypercorporations control most of the resources, and humanity is in war against aliens. The player characters are warhogs, human pig hybrids created for the purpose of warfare in order to spare human soldiers. The warhogs have been trained by transferring human memories to their brains. The idea is that during the game, these memories start haunting the warhogs and affecting their behaviour. For example, an implanted memory could be a "Trojan" that makes the warhog act in the interests of an anti-government terrorist group. On the other hand, the warhog could just suddenly remember how it was to be a little girl and eat ice cream at the beach, and such a memory could create massive body dysphoria.

In the larp, players didn't play the warhogs. Instead, they portrayed various people who were involved in the Proteus project that created the human-pig hybrids, and the hybrids themselves were NPCs. Thus, the larp was set in the recent past of the tabletop role-playing game. The larp materials instructed players to play it as political satire. The larp featured one important day at a top-secret research base. A military-political delegation arrived to the base to decide whether the government should buy the warhogs for military purposes. However, the project was behind in schedules, and the scientists were still working on various aspects of the hybrids: trying to adjust their hormonal balance and making them behave in right ways.

In addition to the politicians and high-ranking officers of the delegation, the characters included bioengineers and brain scientists working on the warhogs, PR consultants who tried to come up with ways to market them to the voting population, and soldiers who were stationed at the base. The larp focused on in-game work. Various committees held meetings, the PR consultants did brainstorming sessions and created memes, bioengineers tried to adjust the hormonal balance of the warhogs, brain scientists implanted memories on them, and so on. The play experiences could vary from satirical to serious. The Minister of Defence could order the warhogs to serve whiskey, whereas a low level soldier working at the complex could build a personal relationship to a warhog that she was assigned to guard.

According to the designers, the larp aimed to be a political satire of the military-industrial complex. It treated questions such as should the warhogs' lifespans be genetically shortened, and what kind of rights the warhogs should have compared to human soldiers. The main themes included ethics of warfare, ethics of science, dehumanisation, and drawing a line between animal and human.

The location was LSK Business Park, a former training facility for Finnish air forces. The larp had high production values, and lots of effort was put into technological solutions, building laboratories, etc. A former airplane hangar was used as a huge meta room, where all the players had a chance to play a meta scene where they became warhogs sent on a mission to a hostile planet. The meta scene was run again and again throughout the larp, and played in teams of 4-5 players. According to the organisers, the idea behind these flashes to future was to give the players a glimpse of the project's consequences. After playing the meta scene, the players were instructed that their characters would now start having moral concerns about the project.

The people behind the original idea for the larp were Vera Schneider and Miska Fredman. It was organised in collaboration with the Finnish larp association Illusia ry.