Editorial note: This article was originally published in the Knutpunkt 2026 book Seasons of Larp. It has been reprinted from there with the editors’ and authors’ permission. It has not been edited by Nordiclarp.org.
It’s a cold spring day in 2023. We were three friends that talked about the black box larp communities we knew of in the Scandinavian countries. One of us pointed out: “How weird that there doesn’t exist one in Jutland!”
“There was one, years ago”, I replied, “It was called Black Box Horsens.”
“What would it take to create a new local black-box community? I mean, how would it be formed well?” the last of us asked.
An application was sent. Money was granted. And the rest is the story and beginning of Project Liminal (2023 – funded to 2026).
An invitation
Our talks from that cold spring day in 2023 became a project that aims to build a value-based and co-creative community across larp organisations. It’s located in Jutland, with the goal to create a regional community with several local communities interwoven in which members can collaborate, play and jointly use the larp medium black-box together.
This article is two things at once: it is an exploration of usable design choices in local community building, examined through the lens of Project Liminal. Secondly, it is a love letter to all of our local larp communities and the differences they make. It invites you to look at your own local larp communities, care for and help strengthen them.
What local larp communities are
A local community can be understood as a group of individuals that share activities, perspectives and goals within a geographic or cultural area. Due to their lower barrier and connection to the local praxis, local larp communities often become an accessible first entry-point for newcomers to larp. As social anchors and knowledge repositories, they have the capacity to strengthen both individuals and the societies they are a part of. At the same time, they differ in style, aesthetics, and methods due to their specific cultural context and their playerbase needs. Strong local larp communities make both national and international larp communities grow steadily. The question is: how do we build and maintain them?
Building the foundation
When starting Project Liminal, we began our process by reflecting upon what kind of community we wanted to build:
- Which values should it be influenced by?
- Why had a community not emerged yet and which barriers/ issues needed to be addressed?
- Which activities should the community create?
- Whom would we like to invite to take part in forming the foundation of this specific community?
Deciding values and finding barriers
Answering the questions created the following framework: we wanted to create a safe, curious and playful environment across larp experience and age, inspired by Larp Writer Summer School and Black Box Horsens. We noticed that barriers for newcomers involved accessibility to, visibility of, and knowledge about black-box together with a language issue: many of our potential newcomers didn’t feel comfortable larping in English and many black-box conventions were based around English. We didn’t know the exact format of the community’s activities, but we did know that it would potentially involve a black-box convention, scenarios, and workshops in designing and running black-box larps.
Being aware of these factors formed a strong foundation for the rest of the process from which we could choose a name, build a vision and invite co-organisers into our project.
Forming activities, a name, and a vision
A local community comes into being through the activities it creates for those who belong to it. Every time a member participates in an activity that is experienced as meaningful, they become more entangled in both the activity and the community facilitating it.
For Liminal, finding the right activities became important. We wanted to set up black-box larps and train people in designing them; we also wanted our community to be inclusive of young people in its core principles. That’s why we wanted to create spaces that dismantled the barriers otherwise preventing young people from attending activities on equal measure with adults, such as alcohol. Instead, we implemented social alibis through play and other social activities, and reduced economical limitations by keeping the activities as affordable as possible, sometimes even free.
A name influences people’s understanding of a given community as well as becoming a potential part of the participants’ identities. Therefore, a name must stem from and somehow relate to what the community does together.
Using Liminal in the name was inspired by the concept of the liminal phase in a rite of passage, wherein an individual crosses from one state to another, wherein they neither belong to the old nor the new role. Project Liminal wanted to build up an exploring community which could encourage design-ers and players to explore, seeking out the transformative in both oneself as well as the created community. Fostering a flourishing, creative environment for black-box larp in the area became our vision and goal.
Daring to invite and creating co-ownership
Finding the right team takes time, energy, and consideration. More organisers can make the project more viable and sustain-able, but, to some degree, involves losing control over the project. Delegation requires trust. For collaboration to work optimally, your co-organisers have to experience agency, motivation and influence on the shared project. So the question is: how to find the right team?
With Project Liminal, we knew from the start that we wanted to include co-organisers from other organisations. We needed to invite more organisers who also had ideas, energy, and who could become bridgebuilders to their own local com-munities; doing everything alone would, at some point, wear us down.
One way to navigate this is to make a list of which qualities, experiences, and skills an organiser needs to have. Do they need to be an expert in their field or is it enough that they bring time and willingness? Afterwards, go through who you know who meets or almost meets your criteria. Contact those you want to organise with; as a general rule, people genuinely appreciate being thought of and included.
We imagined a regional network of smaller local black-box communities across Jutland, connected through larp organisations. We reached out to our friends and network in the following organisations: Østerskov Alicorns, Einherjerne, Prisma, TRoA, and The Larp School, Østerskov Efterskole. The final team met up physically to talk through how to organise ourselves across organisations, and the barriers they experienced. The biggest barrier was accessibility: we needed to find a way to make it easier, cheaper, and non-binding to participate. We asked the members of our local communities how they experienced inequality and took concrete steps to remedy where we could; for example we ensured free transportation and accommodation for our poorest com-munity members.
Maintaining and growing a community
After the foundation, we started to explore how to maintain and let our community grow by nurturing our current members as well as inviting new members in. To do so, we asked ourselves:
- What communication would be bene-ficial for our local community, both digitally and physically?
- What knowledge and which skills do our community members and organisations need?
- What herd competence is needed in order to let the community grow healthy?
Communication becomes the key
In community building, communication is a core tool. When it is planned and coordinated, communication makes it transparent how to understand and be involved in the community and its activities. Where your community communicates shows who are included and not due to accessibility, economy, social background, etc.
One of Project Liminal’s issues is how to connect all of our community, since they are spread across different media and prefer different communication styles. Therefore, we created both a Discord server and a Facebook group to start communication within the community. This, together with having to translate different communication styles across members, ended up using more time and energy than we expected. In the end, too few hands working with communication resulted in having to cancel one of our activities, not due to lack of interest or ambition, but due to lack of connection caused by lack of early and steady communication.
Knowledge sharing and skill building
Lack of knowledge, skills, tools, and shared language are obstacles for community maintenance, since it stops potential members in supporting and contributing to the community themselves. Creating an alibi for our participants to explore, to take initiative and to build up their own knowledge and skill set is essential. Figuring out which knowledge and skills were needed, establishing knowledge material accessible for receivers and then distributing it among those who need it depends on one’s understanding of the chosen target group and the resources one has available. Training can potentially result in more people gaining the skills to support the community but is often costly in time and resources. It is therefore an investment in the community’s future.
Knowledge sharing and skill building was as important as running larps in order to create sustainable local larp communities; people needed to feel empowered to act. To do so, we started planning an organiser weekend wherein we trained new organisers and let them connect across organisations. We asked them what material they needed and most of them answered a place to find usable knowledge about the black-box as well as technical material, such as light and sound equipment, distributed among the organisations, so a local praxis of black-box could be established.
This process gave us an important insight. If our newcomers don’t know the language, online libraries, mentors and so on, it can be hard to achieve and find the necessary skill set. So we realised that we needed material in Danish about black-box larp. This insight resulted in the decision for us at Project Liminal to write a book. The goal is that it can function as a knowledge bank, including three larp scripts. The book is expected to be finished when this article is published in 2026. These different parts are equally important in order to create local laboratories and communities that grow.
Where to go from here?
Local communities offer both an easily accessible starting-point, physical spaces for activities, potential relationships, as well as having potential experiments, methods, and culture that can create a more diverse use of larp as a medium. Local communities are therefore a part of the foundation for the development of larp that we should nurture and support. Especially since strong, accessible local larp communities are not separate nor opposite to international larp communities; they are intertwined. Some support initiatives already exist. The Nordic Larp wiki or the larp database Alexandria provide knowledge to newcomers and new communities for example. Hopefully, more will arise as issues and needs are brought up. If there is one thing we learned through Project Liminal: A local community is never final or finished; it is an ongoing process of new beginnings.
This article is republished from the Knutpunkt 2026 book. Please cite it as:
Høyer, Frederikke S. B. 2026. ‘The Importance of Local Larp Communities Through the Lens of Project Liminal.’ In Seasons of Larp eds. Erlandsson, A., Svanevik, M., Holkar, M., and Brind, S. Gothenburg. Knutpunkt.
