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.
As the larp community grows more and more international, it is inevitable that we start to invite each other into larp experiences deeply rooted in local culture and history. How do we as organisers translate the cultural context in which a larp was made to an international participant group? How do we as designers make ourselves aware of the intrinsic cultural knowledge that shapes the larp experience and how can we make this accessible to someone lacking this knowledge?
In this article, I have gathered my own thoughts as well as those of three seasoned larp designers that all have, in one way or another, worked to make their larps accessible to a wider international audience. Through comparing thoughts and reflections as well as analysing the experiences as an organiser and as a participant, I aim to start the creation of a toolbox for future designers. My hope is to make their larps accessible for players that might lack the cultural context that is intrinsic to a local larper.
Background
It all started in 2019, when I ran two runs of the larp 1912. One in Swedish, Norwegian, and Finnish, one in English and Swedish.
The larp was set during a Christmas weekend during 1912 in the Stockholm Archipelago. It was a larp about the bourgeois family and its friends celebrating Christmas and, maybe more importantly, the staff working hard to make the Christmas as magical as possible for the gentry.
With 1912, I wanted to create a window into a past moment in time, and dissect the intricate power dynamics between man and woman, Swede and immigrant, upper class and lower class. As I was designing the larp, I realized quickly that it would be a challenge to make the international run (where English symbolised Swedish and Swedish Finnish) “feel” right. When I look back at the international run, I often say it wasn’t a bad larp, just a different larp, much more influenced by British culture through the common reference frame of tv series like Downton Abbey rather than Swedish media such as Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny & Alexander. This difference between the two runs interested me, and made me reflect upon what challenges we as larp designers face in trying to make a culture, or just a mood, accessible to someone from a different cultural context, when we hardly know ourselves what it is that makes it different.
This interest of mine was reawoken in 2024 as I started the work of adapting 1912 into 1913 – Midsummer pleasantries (Denmark, 2025).
The decision to change the setting from Christmas to Midsummer came at a cost. I just could not see a way to make it international. Midsummer is too strange, too specific. Too Swedish. It felt like a hopeless task and I abandoned it before I even tried. But still the question had been posed.
How can we translate the most intrinsic parts of a specific cultural context to a wider international audience?
When I interviewed him, Tim Wießner expressed a similar experience when his larp, first run for local German players, was remade into an international iteration. The players behaved differently, and interacted with the themes of the larp in a very different manner.
I had my challenge clear to me. Could we make a toolbox of good practices to make this process of making larps culturally accessible? In order to explore it, I decided to interview three larp designers that all have experience in different ways when it comes to running larps with a local cultural context for international crowds.
Iva Vávrová is part of the Czech team that made Czech larp accessible for an international audience through larps such as Legion (Czech Republic, 2014).
Katrine Wind has a lot of experience running her fantasy game Daemon (Denmark, 2022) in several different countries.
Tim Wießner ran a larp about Germany during the Second World War, first in German but later in two English-speaking runs together with larpwriter Alessa Münch.
By interviewing them about their personal experiences as larp designers and larp runners, I hoped to be able to pinpoint best practices when it came to translating intrinsic cultural understanding to an international audience.
These were the three main areas we could pinpoint together:
- Cultural expression as a way to feel con-nected to the larp’s subject matter
- Common vocabulary and clear com-munication
- Preparation and the role of workshops in preparing the player
Cultural expression and sense of belonging
The air raid had dragged us all out of our beds and into a dark cellar in the headquarters of a Nazi research institute. We were huddled in shocked silence.
“Won’t anyone sing a song?”
Yes, I thought off-game in my head. This is the perfect scene for a song. And several songs came to mind. The problem was that they were all in Swedish or English. And the English songs from the 40s were all… not very Nazi. The only one I could think of to sing was ‘Tomorrow belongs to me’, from Cabaret. Something that immediately would break several people’s immersion too. The question was met with silence. And I was in an instant extremely out of game.
This is an example from an international run of a larp I attended in 2025. It illustrates the difficulty that comes with playing in a cultural context with which you have no personal relationship. I wanted to be able to sing a song to boost the morale of the soldiers around me, but I was unable to since I lacked the necessary cultural knowledge to know a song that would be appropriate.
Music is an extremely strong bearer of culture for many of us. The difference between the folk music of Ireland and the folk music of Greece immediately brings different associations, feelings, and moods. As such, music can be an amazing way of bringing a feeling of a culture to the players, but also an extremely strong way of pulling them out of the context.
At the larp Wise Women (UK, 2025), set in the Outer Hebrides during the 1950s, music and singing were very much a core theme of the larp. To make this possible, an extensive part (2–3 hours) of the workshop was put into teaching us to sing a choice of four songs. We were also given the sheet music in advance as well as the lyrics printed to sneak a peek discreetly during the larp.
At that larp, the question “Won’t anyone sing a song?” would never have pulled me out of immersion, because we already had a fallback of the supplied songs that also in different ways highlighted the cultural context we were trying to portray.
At Legion, a Czech larp about the last legion to walk through the Siberian tundra on their way home after the First World War, music was also an integrated part of the design. Larpers are given a specific song that they then get to practise to sing in Czech ahead of the larp. As a larp originally designed for a Czech player base but now having been run internationally 34 times, (39 at the time of this publication), it seemed like the perfect project to look closer at when it came to how they have worked with translating a complex and personal part of Czech history for an international player base. In conversations with Iva Vávrová, the main organiser of the larp, we delved into the tricky balance of making this very pivotal period of Czech culture accessible to international players with limited understanding of the historical and cultural context of the larp’s setting.
“It is important to analyse what in the design it is that makes the players feel a certain way,” Iva says. An example she brings up is the names. In Legion, there are both Czech, Slovakian, and Russian characters. In the Czech players, the very different name cultures immediately creates a sense of familiarity and alienation. For international players, this isn’t true at all. Instead, all names feel foreign and strange to the majority of international players coming to the larp. In the translation of the setting, some of the meanings are lost.
However, the function of the different name cultures when it comes to creating different groups within the larp still works since the names are different enough. In the translation of the setting some of the meanings are lost and some remain.
The meaning of words – a common vocabulary?
According to Rob Boddice, a historian who has focused his research around the human experience through time, we are unable to fully understand the experience and emotions of people in a different historical context. He uses modern neuroscience research into our brain’s plasticity to explain how lived experience influences our understanding of emotions and sensations. How we experience the world is then literally shaped by our frame of references according to this theory – and when applied to larp, this of course becomes a problem. Our instinctive understanding of a term is influenced by our own culture and so in our conversations of freshly created terms for larp design, this means we sometimes might be blind to differences in understanding, as well as the cultural expressions in the larp experience we try to create.
Katrine Wind is a Danish organiser who has had some of her larps, such as Daemon, produced in several different countries. She brings up an interesting part of the issue of translating larp to foreign contexts: the lack of a common vocabulary. For herself, someone deeply rooted in the Nordic larp tradition, she points out that the only coherent larp academia in English is the Nordic one. This means that even organisers outside of the Nordic countries, and therefore the Nordic tradition, often fall back on using toolboxes and vocabularies minted in the Nordic larp culture, through for example the KP conferences. However, sometimes these terms or tools are not as functional outside of the Nordic contexts, or they take on a life of their own. With Nordic culture come several concepts of collaborative play, volunteer-based work, Jante Law, and cultural taboos that gives us a somewhat shared understanding of words and concepts that might get a different meaning in another cultural context. How a term is applied might change the whole meaning and lead to misunderstandings of playing style and themes.
For example, the term “pressure cooker larp” as applied to the personal playing style is a very different thing than as applied to the whole larp. If one player believes pressure cooker design means feel all the feelings internally but show nothing outwards (the traditional meaning in most Nordic countries) and another player interprets pressure cooker larping as pressing down feelings up until the big explosions when the lid blows off, this will naturally lead to two very different kinds of playing styles, and if you as an organiser wanted one version but got another, this can lead to disappointment.
Iva Vávrová mentions this as well. She puts a lot of emphasis on the necessity of clarity in communicating your vision of the larp beforehand. You cannot rely on a shared cultural understanding, and thereby a shared vocabulary. You need to explain the themes, the playstyle and aesthetics in a way that is so detailed that it leaves as little room for misunderstanding as possible. We as organisers must try and find what words and terms we use that will not be commonly understood by a person from a different larp culture, as well as what words and terms will not be commonly understood within the larp setting. We need to translate all of these into a shared vocabulary and world of association that the international players are able to internalise and understand. Many international larps are run by organisers in their second language. Material written in one language loses depth and nuance when translated to English. Since the overall English skill is high in the international larp community, we sometimes become blind to our own weaknesses, and the richness of character and fictional texts might become simplified in translation, not only because the receiver lacks the cultural context to understand them, but also because the designer might lack the language skill to fully translate the depths of the material to an international crowd.
Preparing the player
In order to succeed in the translation of cultural context for international players, clarity is key. Clarity of vision and tools for the participant to actually help to embody it.
As an organiser, having an international player lacking the cultural context in question look through the material as it is being translated will help you, not only with language but with finding the context clues that players might not understand.
Katrine Wind mentions an example from when she was running Daemon in the US, and realized that American players lacked the cultural understanding of feudalism that is important in the world-building of the larp’s universe. She had to add a specific part of the workshop to clarify what that meant in the European context.
She also specifically addresses common things in the local larp culture when running a larp abroad during the workshop, and clarifies how to do or not do similar things in the larp in question as a part of the workshop. This can for example be common ways of signifying going off-game, calibration mechanics and so on that are the norm in the local scene but not a part of her game design.
Another important part of the preparation of the players is, as always, to communicate a clear vision of what this larp is supposed to be.
Before the larp
This starts with the web page where information, pictures, and writing style all together communicate a feel for the larp in question. Every surface is a designable surface (Koljonen, 2019) and the web page is a very underestimated one in my opinion. Especially in larps where the fiction might be alien to the player, it is an important way of communicating the style and mood of the experience. It is also here we can add lists of books, movies and other media that might give a greater understanding of the style and subject matter of the larp, as well as historical and cultural context clues to help players from different contexts start to familiarize themselves with the themes. Tim Wießner mentions sharing movies and other kinds of media before the larp to the players as a way to try and convey the cultural context within which the larp takes place.
Avalon Larp Studios goes further in some of their larps and organises optional remote movie nights. This naturally leads to unofficial discussions about the movie and the cultural setting. It could also perhaps be done with a more facilitated conversation about cultural differences.
Other tools that can be given to the players well in advance, in addition to fictional texts about setting and culture, are tools to express the culture during play.
For larps like Wise Women, a song list and a music sheet was provided in advance, together with recordings of how to correctly pronounce the Gaelic names of the characters.
This helped the larpers to prepare and practice cultural expressions that would be the framework of the larp.
You can also do like Legion and use the signup as a tool to gather information of preconceptions and know-ledge level in the player base around the cultural contexts of the larp. For Legion, they for example send out an image of the Czar’s emblem and the Communist symbol and ask the prospective players to explain how the symbols make them feel.
This will give important context clues around:
- Whether the players know these symbols at all, and
- Whether their views of the two political systems they represent are strongly negative or positive
The organisers can then use this information in casting. I believe you could also take this one step further. If you know the preconceptions and basic values of your players, you can use this to modify the workshops in order to balance these potential differences in views.
During workshops
During the workshops, it is important to give time and space not only to the historical setting but the cultural setting to players.
Whether by informing the players about what specific behaviours and expressions will be used and giving the cultural meaning for them, or by practicing them, it is extremely important to give the players the tools to try and embody the cultural expressions chosen.
This is really no different from the way we prepare to enter into a fantastical setting, or a historical setting. We need to try and simplify the complex cultural context and make it playable by choosing what to highlight.
During the workshops, we need to be mindful of what terms we are using, and that we have a common understanding of what this means.
To say “17th century Sweden was very Christian” is true, but also very non-descriptive. Instead we need to explain what made the church in Sweden stand out. How it will be playable during the larp, for example:
“In 17th century Sweden, everyone went to church twice every Sunday. The priest was not only the religious leader but also the news anchor who communicated decrees from the crown and other important more local news. The Swedes were Lutheran, which means they preached in Swedish, and there was an overall belief that if you worked hard and dutifully in this life you would be rewarded in the next.”
This means that information will have to be more detailed and nuanced. It means that it will take more time and be harder for the players to memorize and embody.
Therefore, it is helpful to know the playerbase a little. Either through using a local producer, like Katrine Wind: or by having an extensive casting document where you get to answer questions of your pre-knowledge of the cultural context, like Iva Vávrová.
If you want specific cultural expressions to be a part of the experience, you also need to workshop them. Whether it is how to dance around a midsummer pole in 1913 or how to sing Gaelic working songs in Wise Women, it is important that the players get to do it several times before the actual game time if it is meant to feel familiar to them in-game. Otherwise the experience of not knowing what to do will bring them off-game in their heads and lead to insecurity in how to play out the cultural contexts.
Conclusions
When you want to translate something, it is inevitable that things get lost in translation.
When we do not know instinctively how something works or feels, we will draw from our closest frame of reference, just like I argued in my article “Use of History in a Larp Context”. This means that what is unknown will leave a vacuum that will be filled with our closest frame of reference, either in our own culture or in popular media based in a similar context.
However, it is still a worthy pursuit to make larp settings in specific cultural contexts available for an international audience – if you are willing to simplify some things.
As a designer and organiser, look at the setting and the content of your larp and ask yourself: what is in it that would be hard to understand for a foreigner? Ask for help in this process.
If a larp is run in another country where there is another dominating larp style, having producers from that country present, helping you to translate context clues in both setting and larp style is very helpful. But even if you run an international version of a local larp, having someone from a different cultural background look over the material and ask questions will be helpful for you to be able to see where your blind spots are.
Make sure to choose what expressions of culture you deem necessary, because just as in historical larps, if you do not tell people how to play something, they will revert back to the closest context clue they can find, often from popular media set in other cultural contexts.
When you have decided on what cultural denominators you want to give your players in order to perform the chosen culture, give them the tools to learn and practice these denominators before the larp starts, so they can feel at least a little bit more familiar. Be prepared that a player without intrinsic knowledge of a cultural context won’t be able to understand every single nuance. Instead there is a value in itself to rediscovering a cultural context through the eyes of someone seeing it from the outside. Things you would not have reflected over as culturally significant might suddenly become glaringly obvious when the cultural context is being embodied by someone lacking the intuitive understanding that you have.
In the same way, as a player, there is a joy in getting to experience things that are alien to us, whether it is a medieval feudal society, a space base in the future or a Swedish midsummer celebration.
Something worthy of noting here is that there is a danger in declaring one way to be the only right one of performing a cultural expression. It can easily translate to saying that only our own view of what is culturally significant in a certain context is the right way of “doing” that cultural expression. A cultural context is way too complex to be completely nailed down. And in any cultural context, there are individuals who, in different ways, have other cultural contexts influencing their norms and behaviors. The herd mentality is what becomes interesting here: the things we understand without necessarily knowing why can be exposed when interacted with by people from outside of the context something was created in. Something as simple as how long a pause you leave after one sentence is uttered before the next speaker starts can be the difference between someone coming off as rude or polite in different cultural contexts. We might not realise that these are the things grating at us when seeing someone larping a setting “in the wrong way”. Or even in everyday life where unspoken patterns of behaviour and norms are grated against by people from a different cultural understanding than us.
Something interesting happens when we see the unwritten rules we were not even aware of ourselves getting exposed by this kind of embodying by the other. We see our own cultural biases, but we also get to experience our own culture from the eyes of someone else. This rings true no matter if we are talking about the setting of the larp or just the unwritten rules around larp style. If we can see this as a strength, and learn how to distill what we deem important in order to fully engage with the message of the larp we are designing, we can make larps more accessible in our growing international larp scene. The important part being that we do this purposefully, and with an understanding of the necessity of making the cultural expressions accessible to people who do not have an intrinsic understanding of them. That way we will broaden both our own understanding and the playability of our larps in a growing international community.
Bibliography
Boddice, Rob. (2021). ‘Historical Experience and the Biocultural Brain’, lecture given at the Culture, Mind and Brain seminar. https://youtu.be/1Nja6Uq89WA?si=hbjnEXVP_gd3iKOo
Koljonen, Johanna. (2019). ‘An Introduction to Bespoke Larp Design’ in Koljonen, J., et al. (eds) (2019). Larp Design. Bifrost, Denmark.
Ludography
Furs Vaterland (2025), Wießner, T., Münch, A., Bailley, S. Germany.
Legion (2014), Vávrová, I., Czech Republic, Rolling.
Wise Women (2025), UK, Clarion larp.
1912 (2019), Sandquist, S., Stockholm, Sweden, Atropos Studios.
1913 – Midsummer Pleasantries (2025), Sandquist, S., Sjælland, Denmark
This article is republished from the Knutpunkt 2026 book. Please cite it as:
Sandquist, Siri. 2026. ‘Translating Culture.’ In Seasons of Larp eds. Erlandsson, A., Svanevik, M., Holkar, M., and Brind, S. Gothenburg. Knutpunkt.
