Editorial note: This article was originally published in the Knutepunkt 2025 book Anatomy of Larp Thoughts, a breathing corpus. It has been reprinted from there with the editors’ and authors’ permission. It has not been edited by Nordiclarp.org.
In her book of essays Death By Landscape, Elvia Wilk (2022) describes why she decided to adapt the novel she was working on into a larp. She says she was driven by a desire to give the novel a life outside of herself, to “explode” it to see how its characters would change or stay the same (2022, 186), and to see whether there was a happy ending in the story after all, one that she herself had not been able to unravel. I recognize this desire as my own. When I create larps I am often curious to see how players will inhabit the roles that I have scripted, and more specifically, how they pick up or resist the genre conventions many of my larps experiment with. For example, in The Kids Are Not Alright (2023), I was interested to see what would happen when the creepy, horror-movie cliché of the haunted child met the underpaid and overworked social worker who has just stepped out of a Ken Loach film. For the child, monsters are real; for the social worker, evil is systemic. To explore the result of this genre-clash, the game needed to be played.
If larp is a co-creative practice, one that cannot exist without its players, what do we call larps that were never played? And what do we do with them? Can we still give them a life outside of ourselves, and enjoy their unpredictability? As will become apparent, this is a self-serving question that I nevertheless hope will chime with many readers. Who hasn’t had ideas or plans for larps that never came to fruition? Staging a larp is not easy. It requires time, money, access to suitable spaces, as well as a network of players and collaborators. In the Knutepunkt books you can find post-mortems of successful larps as well as practical how-to-guides for budding designers, but there is no discussion of designs that were never realized.
With this article I’d like to start such a discussion, and to do so I turn, again, to Wilk who concludes her essay with another metaphor for the creative process. She argues that rather than explode her novel, what she really did (and continues to do) with the story is compost it, recycling the material and using it “as soil for new seeds” (2022, 192). I like this metaphor. There is value in a good concept; dreaming and ideation are worthwhile. They are like nutrients that need to be kept in circulation, otherwise creative ecosystems get depleted. This is a call to start composting your ideas. I will try to lead by example by composting a solarpunk larp that never got off the ground: ‘The Antarcticans.’ In the block quotes below, you’ll find excerpts from an initial pitch, beyond which the idea was never developed. This is the raw material that I offer back to the soil in the hope that from it new ideas may grow.
Project description The Antarcticans is an imaginative excavation and worldbuilding experience. We will design a larp for 20-40 players to be played this summer, casting players as citizens of a solarpunk society living on a deglaciated West Antarctica. Over the course of play, we will generate customs, rituals, and artifacts, to be embedded in displays for future guests of the museum to find. These will reflect the values, politics, technologies, and lifestyles of the Antarcticans.
I have been walking around for years with the ambition to design a solarpunk larp. In the summer of 2023, I came pretty close when, together with a glaciologist colleague, I applied to an open call put out by an NGO currently overseeing the reopening of the massive, saucer-shaped museum of technology in Eindhoven. They were looking for creators to contribute to the museum’s exhibition. Long story short, we did not secure the funding.
The call to which we replied was named ‘Spaceship Earth,’ after a phrase coined by Buckminster Fuller: a futurist and innovator known for popularizing the geodesic dome and other icons of the techno-hippie counter-culture. Ironically, one of Fuller’s many projects was a kind of larp that was also never fully realized. The World Game provided instructions for a real-life, resource management simulation played on a massive map of Earth (Stott 2021). Players were charged to solve global problems by collaboratively itemizing and allocating resources. The game was supposed to be supported by a high tech knowledge infrastructure composed of screens that would display live data from around the world. Alas, the infrastructure was not developed in time and so the game was never played, though it did spawn several smaller-scale seminars and workshops.
This example shows that games that get stuck in phases of ideation or development can have interesting afterlives. In his book Buckminster Fuller’s World Game and its Legacy, Timothy Stott (2021) traces the transformation of the utopian, technocratic blueprint for the The World Game as it was delivered by Fuller, into the more delimited actualized versions that spun off from it, which, although different in format, were similar in spirit. The Antarcticans too might find its way into different forms and formats. It was conceived believing that if we gathered the right people in the right place, and gave them a context conducive to self-organization, we could engender more intimate and more sustainable ways of relating to energy, to technology, and to the changing environment of Antarctica. This assumption might still be tested using different exercises of the imagination.
Why do you consider this project to be a meaningful project for Spaceship Earth? This project combines science, the arts, and humanities to generate a lived experience of the future, contextualizing new technologies through their social and cultural use. West Antarctica’s extreme environment serves as an analogue for the post-Anthropocene, requiring its society to confront energy scarcity during polar nights, bio-hack their bodies for warmth, and explore new socio-political practices. Thus the project launches a method of participatory futuring, harnessing player creativity.
In scholarly terms, solarpunk is a “sociotechnical imaginary” (Jasanoff 2015, 4); these are science fictions that emerge within institutions or communities, detailing desirable visions of the future. In more familiar language, solarpunk is a kind of online “mood-board” of sustainable futures growing on Tumblr, Reddit, and Instagram (Williams 2019, 7). I come to solarpunk from the study of ‘petrocultures’—a body of work that investigates the way our reliance on fossil fuel impacts society by fostering certain kinds of narratives, aesthetics, politics, infrastructures, and social practices. By extension, ‘solarcultures,’ or societies powered sustainably, might look and operate very differently. Solarpunk fiction runs with this idea and imagines whole cities transformed by a more intimate relationship to energy production and collectively organized according to a postcapitalist ethos that is attentive to more-than-human interests.
Much of solarpunk fiction is unabashedly utopian. It often imagines the problem of energy scarcity solved by the sun’s natural abundance. While I believe literature that fosters hope is important, the more gratifying solarpunk stories for me are those that face issues of energy head-on; The Weight of Light for example illustrates the different social and political implications of urban, rural, big, and small solar architectures (Eschrich and Miller 2019).
In the Antarcticans, I was interested to explore the challenges of a very particular energy culture, one characterized by polar seasonality. Can you do solarpunk without the solar? When six months out of the year are claimed by darkness, what does that do to the utopian imagination? With batteries struggling in subzero temperatures, and maintenance jobs complicated by inclement weather, this vision of a solarpunk community is a far cry from the garden-cities imagined in most popular fiction. To simulate these polar nights I wanted to create spaces of total darkness, and use sunlight therapy lamps in the staging, as they make concrete the difference between light and warmth, and because they put in stark relief the importance of light for psychological wellbeing.
Beyond its reluctance to deal with the nitty gritty of energy infrastructure, there is another concern with solarpunk fiction. As Cindy Kohtala argues, “The emphasis on storytelling and either narrative, literary forms or visual illustration […] lends the impression that ‘solarpunk’ is a genre that is rarely actually practiced or used as a motif in eco-social making and prototyping” (2024, 4), even though the genre often imagines “a ‘maker-hero’ as counterpoint to the hacker-hero of cyberpunk: an archetype who embodies various ingenious maker, fixer and grower skills” (1). I too initially understood solarpunk as something to engage with narratively, but because the call for submissions spurred us to think of objects or experiences that could be installed as part of a wider exhibit, the design of The Antarcticans became much more centered around making things.
My collaborator and I geeked out over independent printing techniques as well as our shared appreciation of the garish color palette of Antarctic clothing and shelter design—chosen because it stands out against the snow. We talked about the need for customizing clothes so that people could be individuated in dark and stormy weather, and even planned for one of the larp workshops to involve (loom) knitting a high-vis beanie with reflectors. In this way, the Antarcticans re-centered for me the place of creative making-practices in larp. Already I can sense that in composting this project, I am nourishing other ideas, my own, as well as, hopefully, yours.
The first aim of this open call is to commission works that demonstrate a clear link to either the geosphere, the biosphere, the technosphere or the mindsphere. How does your proposal meet these requirements? The game and its artifacts will engage all four spheres. We involve the geosphere through artifacts related to geology and soil–fossilized plastics, nuclear legacies, and mineral deposits; the biosphere through animal domestication–records of selective breeding and biohacking; the technosphere through new methods of communication and sensing; and the mindsphere by involving Antarctican politics, kinship relations, and cosmologies, which will have to account for polar days and nights.
I sometimes feel like I read more games than I get the chance to play; I purchase interesting TTRPGs (tabletop role-playing games) that I never find the time to run; and because of my reluctance to travel by plane I also don’t get to play as many larps, though I read about them quite a bit. What brings me consolation is that there is experience to be gleaned from merely reading games, and that, in fact, not all games are meant to be played.
Lyric games, or game poems, are typically brief texts formatted like TTRPGs. They generally don’t require you to go through the motions of play, but instead ask you to engage with the game’s instructions hypothetically, as yourself and (often) by yourself. Writing about this nascent genre—big on itch.io—Lin Codega (2021) argues “Lyric games are not for playing but, rather, for recontextualizing common experiences in order to challenge the game-playing process… [they] are experiments in pushing the boundaries of guided, immersive experiences.”
With the power of retrospection, some Fluxus artworks of the sixties and seventies could be identified as lyrical games. Dick Higgins’ Piece For Meredith Monk’s Apartment (1968, see Figure) has struck me, since I first read it, as a lyrical game poem. At first glance it looks like a location-based larp script, of the dancerly, non-verbal kind that you might find programmed at Grenselandet or Blackbox CPH. But the hyper-specificity of the language evokes a context and a history that is not physically replicable. Blurring media borders in this way (between poetry and larp), creates new audiences for both artforms, and makes us appreciate aspects like brevity, and control of language.
Figure: Piece For Meredith Monk’s Apartment, by Dick Higgins
Larp designers have also experimented with extremely short, lyrical formats. Matthijs Holter (2017) calls his 15 minute games “role-playing poems.” I don’t believe they need to be played for them to generate wonderful insights. For example, in The Elf archaeologists are saying hurtful things about your skeleton (2017) you play yourself, dead on the floor, for at least 1000 years while the other players say hurtful things about you based on your remains. To me this is funny. I imagine that there is barely anything you could say about a person’s skeleton that would be seriously offensive. Our skeletons don’t reflect our personalities at all. And why should we mind the opinions of elves anyway?
Since lyric games are not scared to ask for the impossible, featuring instructions that may be vague or impractical, perhaps it’s an appropriate format for an idealistic solarpunk larp. Step 1: gather strangers. Step 2: create a better world. Step 3: keep at it. Or, as this article’s reviewer Markus Montola suggested, larps written specifically for communities out of (our) time, whether in the past or the future. I would welcome such thought-provoking hypothetical larps, or larp poems, in publications like the Knutepunkt books, offering a healthy counterbalance to the discourse’s otherwise pragmatic focus (with its emphasis on tips, toolkits, and nitty-gritty design talk).
The second aim of this open call is to commission unconventional ways, yet tangible experiences that invite the audience to discover, unfold and engage with the next stages of evolution; the project must include an interactive component in which the audience can discover, learn and grow in their own personal ways. How does your proposal meet these requirements? Museum visitors encounter artifacts through printed, audio, and AR prompts designed to feel like a paleo-anthropological study.
I would love to reframe The Antarcticans as a larp to be read, rather than one that needs to be played. I certainly feel that the strict character limit for the submission forced a condensation of the concept so that the result is ambiguous and evocative in the way that lyrical games often are. Unlike the detailed larp scripts I produce, The Antarcticans is mute on things like staging requirements, workshop exercises, rules and mechanics. I hope this muteness invites speculation. How would you simulate a deglaciated, future Antarctica in a museum space in the Netherlands? How would you involve participants in the hands-on processes of making and co-design called for by the larp?
More than a poem, of course, it reads like an academic abstract, which is why, rather than a poem, then, I should frame The Antarcticans as a piece of design fiction. Design ethnographer Mark Blythe (2014) describes design fictions as stories or semi-working prototypes that function a little like conceptual art, or speculative design. He writes, “Conceptual art or installation art is an art of ideas […] It is not of the utmost importance that critical designs actually function, neither, perhaps, is it necessary for them to exist” (2014). Design fictions may be provocative or ironic, or they may help tease out flaws or consequences in the design. For example, Blythe presents a series of imaginary abstracts for design journals that describe prototypes or media installations that were never actually developed. He finds that writing these abstracts “questions and explores a design space without committing too much resource. It allows for a number of possible outcomes to be generated and forces the imagined prototype into a research context” (2014).
Too few people get the chance to design larps. I think we can do more to onboard new designers. The formats that I have mentioned in this chapter: game poems and design fictions, provide templates for larp writing that are efficient and provocative. They also allow us to generate ideas and to share them with others more rapidly. Moreover, being more upfront with our failures (failures to get funding, failures to get games off the ground), and sharing unrealized concepts builds up the soil for other ideas to take root. It means being more transparent about the creative process of larp design, which does not always bear fruit, but which might, in talking about it, might scatter seeds of inspiration anyway.
Acknowledgements
Big thanks to Elizabeth Case with whom I co-wrote the application for The Antarticans. Thanks also to Jana Romanova and Sophie Allerding for co-signing the application. Thanks to the editors, reviewers, and proofreaders.
References
Blythe, Mark. 2014. “Research through Design Fiction: Narrative in Real and Imaginary Abstracts.” In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 703–12. CHI ’14. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/2556288.2557098.
Joey Eschrich and Clark A. Miller, eds. 2019. The Weight of Light: A Collection of Solar Futures. Center for Science and the Imagination. https://csi.asu.edu/books/weight/.
Jasanoff, Sheila. 2015. “Future Imperfect: Science, Technology, and the Imaginations of Modernity.” In Dreamscapes of Modernity: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and the Fabrication of Power, edited by Sang-Hyun Kim, 1–33. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/D/bo20836025.html.
Kohtala, Cindy. 2024. “Solarpunk as a Maker Imaginary.” In Fab 24 “Fabricating Equity.” Puebla, Mexico, 3-9 August 2024: Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/ZENODO.13221345.
Stott, Timothy. 2021. Buckminster Fuller’s World Game and Its Legacy. Routledge.
Wilk, Elvia. 2022. “A Book Explodes.” In Death by Landscape, 180–92. Soft Skull Press.
Williams, Rhys. 2019. “‘This Shining Confluence of Magic and Technology’: Solarpunk, Energy Imaginaries, and the Infrastructures of Solarity.” Open Library of Humanities 5 (1): np.
Editorial note: The following articles present an introductory overview of the history of larping, and of the present state of larp, in various countries around the world. They are based on the author’s own researches, and on information that he gained from larpers in those countries. It would be great to hear from other people who know about larp activity that isn’t mentioned here — please contact contribute@nordiclarp.org if you would like to write a supplementary article for this site, or contact andrzej.pi3rzchala@gmail.com to send updates and additions directly to the author to include in his country-by-country compilation.
Larp in Greece
Introduction
First of all, I wanted to thank Stavris Gianniaris, Joan Kim Moraiti, and especially Chris Panagiotopoulos for their help.
The Greek LARP scene has evolved, characterised by a unique, or at any rate unusual, combination of historical themes and fantasy. It has very strong links with the re-enactment movement, while most of their games draw from history or mythology. In general, larps in the Balkan region are much more often linked in campaigns, often spanning many years. Single and chamber games are much rarer, although they do of course happen. From the words of my interlocutors, it seems that the scene is torn by disputes between, as far as I understand, fans of fantasy and historical games. And disputes between groups of creators, somewhat reminding me of the situation in Poland from around 2010-14.
Their main larp group on Facebook, Larp Club of Greece, has 2200 members, albeit some no longer active. The activists themselves estimate the peak of active larpers at 450 people. This is not a very large community. There is also a fairly limited pool of larps per year. Sometimes there are months of intervals in between.
The community communicates mainly via Facebook and, to a much lesser extent, via Discord. This is interesting, because the Slovak or Swiss communities have mostly migrated to Discord. I am curious as to the reasons for these differences.
Aeonia Larp: Call of the Gods (2-day event) 1-2 March 2025, created by Cerebral Productions, photo by Leuteris Liou Photography
If you would like to start looking for something on the Greek scene, hit up the group: Κοινότητα LARP Ελλάδας ~ LARP Club of Greece. They are super helpful and have a group of responsive activists.
According to my interlocutors, Greece is at a rather early stage in the development of its community, if we understand it according to Polish, German, Nordic, etc. assumptions and standards. There is a lot of sad sarcasm and probably a certain regret about this state of affairs when talking about its ‘backwardness’. However, it is apparent that they are diligently trying to bounce back after the pandemic and are pushing forward intensely. A new generation is beginning to take an interest in larps and invest their commitment and time in it. The significant number of young creators, under the age of 25, who are committed to creating larps and their communities is highlighted. However, they still lack a proper ecosystem.
As for the reasons, they cite two decades of economic problems, meagre cultural spending and austerity, depleting Greeks’ purchasing power on the one hand and their willingness to engage in anything that requires extra mental effort on the other.
It was emphasised that the community continues to fight against toxic behaviour and attempts to educate participants about what larp is, beyond hitting each other with foam swords (most fantasy larps) and malicious intrigue (most vampire games — these are not now a large part of the Greek scene).
Aeonia Larp: Mystagogy (chamber larp) 12 November 2023, created by Cerebral Productions, photo by Leuteris Liou Photography
To quote Chris Panagiotopoulos:
“It’s a tough battle with ideological/social stakes, as sexists, homophobes, bigots and abusers continue to lurk on the scene, segmenting it into cults of personality. [ed. groups being led by charismatic ‘chiefs’, the cult of the individual, and other wonders we’ve managed to bury a lot of, but I still remember them in Polish larp as being massive once upon a time.] However, I am optimistic that sooner or later people will understand the message and start rejecting these bad actors to build a real community to run and play larps for fun.”
History
Since when has there been a larp scene in Greece? It started to form in the 1990s with the larps of Vampire: the Masquerade, but the modern history of the larp scene is set by those involved themselves to begin in 2015.
A brief history of larps in Greece, by Chris:
1990s – early 00s: The intersection of gaming, goth and metal subculture, larps were monthly events in boardgame shops and later in RPG clubs such as (ESPAIROS, founded in 1999). In the World of Darkness formula: most of them were Vampire: the Masquerade. There were also a few successful local common larp/ARG hybrids (unfortunately, the only surviving materials from these are physical books written in Greek). Vampire became synonymous with larp, with about 16 events a year, about 100 larps in total. Divided into 3 to 5 campaigns of 20-40 players each.
Late 00s – early 10s: the larp scene in Athens was absorbed by the role-playing game scene. Other cities (Heraklion, Thessaloniki, Patra) created and maintained separate vampire larp scenes with 10 to 30 players.
Early 2010s: Athens had practically no larp scene anymore. Heraklion and Thessaloniki were doing a bit better, but not much better. Conversations started in a Facebook group about fantasy larps, such as Mythodea and DrachenFest.
Late 10s: A new community formed in Athens — Aeonia — to play fantasy larps. Larps in Athens attracted a new generation of role-playing game players. Many more larps were created. Fantasy larps were mostly played in parks for free. Athens fantasy gamers started to visit Bulgaria for larps. The number of participants peaked in 2018, around 450 players (Greek games, plus Greeks at The Fog Larp in Bulgaria).
COVID: All larp events came to a halt throughout Greece. Most of the communities became dormant, as students went home for the lockdown. The only exception was Portal 2021, which took place in Athens
After Covid: New games appear, and some old games resume. With a reduced number of participants, but increasing plurality. The pandemic blocked the expected expansion of the scene, and destroyed many communities which disintegrated after more than two years without events. On the other hand, it drove away some of the toxic influences on the community and gave us, burnt out from trying to create games, a chance to reassess and consolidate our efforts. The result was the formation of Cerebral Productions. [Edited to include Chris].
Aeonia Larp: Journey to Quadath (5-day event) 1-5 May 2025, created by Cerebral Productions, photo by Leuteris Liou Photography
Currently, only Aeonia and Primal regularly organise outdoor games (about 30-50 participants each). Athens also hosts occasional chamber larps (10-30 participants) and some hybrids of board games and larps. Larissa has its own board game/larp scene and efforts are being made to create new communities in Thessaloniki, Serres, Janina, and Patra
Larps active at the end of the previous decade in Athens:
Important games, and what they recommend, what is the situation with foreign players
The only international game currently running is Aeonia, which is developed and run in English. Participation in The Fog Larp[there is more about this in my article about the Bulgarian scene] was still significant until last summer. Most players do not leave their city to participate in larps. Efforts are being made to attract more international players.
On the LARP Club Greece Facebook group there is a list of available larps, all declaring themselves to be foreigner-friendly, in the sense that all GMs and the vast majority of the player base are able to communicate in English to some extent.
Contemporary larps that interviewees highlight as being particularly accessible to foreigners:
Aeonia Larp (Cerebral Productions) (from June 2015 – the present)
Renaissance fantasy
Primal (Larponomicon) (2023 – present)
Post-Apocalyptic Drama
Larp in Romania
Introduction
This will be a rather short text about a small but interesting larp scene. Romania is not a country too close to us [ed. written from a Polish perspective], but with a rich culture. I hope their larp scene has its best years ahead of it. Let’s get started.
Mihaela Georgescu at the larp Synthocracy Conclave, photo by Flobo Studio
I collected the material thanks to Berna Okumus from Bucharest.
History
A few years ago, there was a Larp House team in Romania. Its Facebook group collected 1100 followers, albeit starting that at a time when Facebook reaches and likes were quite easy. Today, this attempt requires a lot of effort. Larp House appeared on the larp scene around 2015 and disappeared from communication channels with the end of 2017, according to some witnesses – although others place it in 2019, before the pandemic. It is inconclusive which of these versions is more likely. The team organised at least eight games over two years. Their prices hovered around €10-22. They probably numbered in the area of 10-20 participants.
After they disappeared there was a vacuum created. The current developers know little about them and in fact absolutely nothing about the times before them. I guess you could say that today’s Romanian creators survived their own dinosaur extinction or some other Jedi purge there.
Currently
At the moment, the scene is centred around a team called Ministry of Roleplay. They are made up of several creators. Berna Okumus, who answered my questions, started creating games two years ago, as Red Saga LARP | Bucharest. In her own words:
“[…] I started organising larps on my own, but it quickly became too difficult because it’s not a one-person job. Previously, we applied for Erasmus larp projects and organised several larps. […] We organise a larp once every few months and try to build a larp community in Romania. Our larps tend to be 10-20 players, but we have a group chat of about 60-70 people with people who have played one of our larps before or are very keen to join the next one.”
So there is no big larp scene in Romania, but there are similar communities to draw from. There are large airsoft groups that have an element of role-playing and narrative. There is also clearly a large community of improvisational theatre and rpg games.
My interviewees (Berna, and others who preferred to remain anonymous) are aware that re-enactment groups organise occasional events with elements of role-playing and storytelling, but have no contact with them and know little about them.
Larpers from Romania, actually from Bucharest, play mainly fantasy, but also other genres: comedy, thriller, competition, romance. Their games are usually 6 – 8 hours long.
Their sample projects:
La Bloc – meaning ‘in the block’. A parody of Romanian life in a typical post-communist block neighbourhood. The characters were clichés of all the character tropes that can be found in a typical Romanian neighbourhood; thugs, old ladies gossiping about youth, drug dealers, a budding rapper/DJ, the building’s president, a gigolo uncle, children playing, people eating sunflower seeds, etc. [ed. which proves we, in Poland, are not too different].
Veilbound – a larp Halloween fantasy event, with monsters in an abandoned Bucharest amphitheatre. It’s worth noting that they hit the front pages of the local newspapers at the time.
Leylines of Los Angeles – a meeting-style game, set in the council of magicians.
Circle of Shadows – an elimination larp, hosted as part of Larp Alchemy Nausika in Krakow. The game was about recruiting for the mafia.
Serban Pitic at the larp Synthocracy Conclave, photo by Flobo Studio
They are now starting to expand their collaboration with the rpg community. They organised a live streamed larp about artificial intelligence as part of a 16-hour rpg marathon broadcast on Twitch.
Anything else? They have enthusiasm and are competing bravely – let’s keep our fingers crossed for them, we were there once too!
Larp in Switzerland
Introduction
Let’s talk about the Swiss larp scene today. It dates back to around 1999, although some sources suggest that it may be ten years older. Their larp groups are strongly affiliated to the Italian, German, and French language communities (mainly the latter two), and maintain strong contact with other larp communities playing in those languages. Switzerland is, let us emphasise, quadrilingual. The Confederation’s constitution recognises four languages as national languages, and they are also official in federal institutions: German, spoken by 63.7% of the population, French, spoken by 20.4% of the population, Italian spoken by 6.5% of the population and Romansh, spoken by 0.5% of the population.
In French, in German
French larper Thomas B. has published a very cool video presentation on the Swiss larp scene, which was originally prepared for Knudepunkt 2011. It’s a bit out of date, but in English and describes how the Swiss scene communities differ: the German and the French. The video presentation focuses mainly on the French-speaking scene.
Most games are played in groups of 10 to around 80 players, with a few larger events. To quote one of the larpers interviewed, Stephan Kaufmann: “Most of the community shares stories and friendships far beyond our Swiss borders.” Their larp calendar shows about twenty-something larps (mostly from the German-speaking community) per year.
The pandemic has killed many projects — as everywhere, unfortunately. After the pandemic, the Swiss tried to open as many as they could of the killed projects. With some they succeeded, with others they did not. This is significant because the core of their larp scene is in the form of long larp campaigns.
The larp scene consists of a hard core of around 100 players who go to almost every Swiss larp and who attend meetings such as Stammtisch (irregular social gatherings). There are about 1,100 people in the Larp Schweiz Facebook group, and their very lively Discord counts 200.
Again quoting, “Players from abroad are often part of us if they speak German (Austrians and Germans). You can also participate if you at least understand German and speak German or English.”
Most games in Switzerland are ‘bring your own character’ larps instead of casting and writing characters in advance. Many of their fantasy games are set in one dedicated world, collectively developed.
The world, or rather the country they play in, is called Candara. It was founded around 2010, when a number of organisers with their own world and storyline decided to merge them, to make it easier to play the same character in multiple games and have more games with the same background.
The German-speaking scene, the largest, is just heavily campaign-based, loose and not very mechanical. They claim to draw from the German school, but this is only partly true. German larpers divide in terms of their approach to mechanics and rules — mainly, north and south. There will be a text about this in my article about German larp, but note that the north is less battle-larp-oriented and has more rules, while the south is more battle-larp-oriented and has less rules and mechanics and more DKWDDK (Du kannst, was du darstellen kannst — you can do what you can represent.) So the Swiss are closer to the southern part of German larp.
The French-speaking scene is more chambery and one-shot oriented, more mechanical, structuring its games more strongly.
Most Swiss games include a location with room and board, so a certain set of comforts and an appropriate level of comfort. Purely outdoor, camp-based games are very rare. Which, given their climate, is not surprising.
Again quoting a local larp player, Lorenz:
“The big difference between Swiss larps (the German-speaking part) and French or German larps is the language. We all speak Swiss German, a local dialect that is only understood by our closest German or Austrian neighbours. In the game, ordinary German is spoken (the same German in which we already read and write). So basically, we are playing in a language other than our everyday language all the time. Swiss German is usually used for conversation outside the game during larps. I’ve only been to one game played in Swiss-German and most of the feedback was that people didn’t like it. French and German influences are very evident in Switzerland, with the French-speaking part largely adopting their style and the German-speaking part adopting the German influence.”
The Nordic larp style emerged quite late in Switzerland and is still not very widespread. ‘Nordic’, in the sense that our Polish scene is also Nordic, from their perspective.
A few years ago there was a large Vampire: the Masquerade community in Switzerland, which, as far as I know, is now mainly active on games in Germany, while others have either stopped playing VtM altogether or only do small VtM games.
Curiosities
Swiss people generally tend to have a very laid-back approach to games and avoid difficult topics.
The probably oldest Swiss LARP campaign, Tikon, had around 90 games from 1986 to 2005, set in a fantasy caliphate and was very much in the style of Terry Pratchett.
The community organizes regular offline meetings: every two weeks in Zurich, and also bi-weekly online on Discord. There have also been or currently are meetings in other cities, for example, there was a long-standing Stammtisch in Baden for Vampire: the Masquerade players.
Editorial note: This article was originally published in the Knutepunkt 2025 book Anatomy of Larp Thoughts, a breathing corpus. It has been reprinted from there with the editors’ and authors’ permission. It has not been edited by Nordiclarp.org.
In my larp Hyvät museovieraat (Eng. Dear Museum Visitors), artworks came alive and possessed the bodies of the participants. I designed the larp for Amos Rex, one of the three big art museums in Helsinki, Finland. I ran it twice at their exhibition Musta tuntuu, toistaiseksi (I Feel, for Now), which presented artworks from their collections. It was a scalable larp that could accommodate at most 50 players, and tickets were sold online on a first-come-first-served basis. Players included both experienced larpers and newcomers. The larp was run when the museum was closed, so there were no spectators and players had privacy.
Amos Rex profiles as a “young” museum. For example, they have featured exhibitions by teamLab, Hans Op de Beeck, Ryoji Ikeda, and other artists who create immersive installations – sometimes like alternative visual realities that you experience from the inside. Amos Rex has also held Game Amos seminars about game art. No wonder, then, that they also wished to have a larp in their repertoire.
I could have used the exhibition as merely a venue where some events happened to play out, but I did not want that, I wanted my larp to be in dialogue with the exhibition. Neither did I want the larp to be just one art piece among others in the exhibition. I wanted the larp to be about the exhibition, and I wanted the participants to be in constant interaction with the artworks as they played.
The game scholar Jaakko Stenros pointed out to me that I was doing in reverse something that artists like Brody Condon and Adam James have been involved with. Whereas they make art objects (such as a film) out of a larp, I made a larp out of an exhibition of art objects. Each player used one artwork as a basis for creating a character that would then possess the player’s body during the larp. The idea was that the artworks were living creatures with personalities of their own. In the beginning of the larp, they would take over museumgoers’ bodies: Each player walked into the exhibition as themselves, stopped in front of their artwork, and let it take control of their body (or, in other words, began playing the artwork-character). Thus, there was a pervasive element, and the players became the artworks.
Design philosophy from the blackbox tradition
For the Amos Rex museum, the larp was a way to draw in new audiences that might revisit the museum on other occasions. At the same time, we were showcasing larp as a form of expression to people with no previous experience of it. When a larp is advertised on the social media channels of a large museum, it attracts people from outside the larp community.
I aimed for a beginner-friendly design and for a larp that would be easy to access: Participants needed to be able to walk in without preparing beforehand. Dropouts and no shows were common at museum events, so I went for a scalable larp. It could not be too long; it had to be something that could be played in one evening after work. As no preparations, short duration and scalability are common in Nordic blackbox larps, I applied several design innovations from that tradition.
I aimed to fit the larp in 4 hours (which is the typical length of a larp slot at blackbox festivals). We ended up with a 2-hour workshop and about 2 hours of play. As in many blackbox larps, most of the design effort went into the workshop. I began the workshop with a guided meditation that introduced players to the themes of the larp. Then, there was a warmup designed to help them play artworks physically, and finally, we created characters and relationships.
Newcomers can find it difficult to come up with things to do in a larp. It becomes easier if there are experienced larpers present, whose example the beginners can follow. This is called herd competence (Lundqvist 2015). To achieve herd competence, we aimed for half of our participants to have some previous larp experience. There were two ticket categories, one for beginners and another for experienced larpers.
In the fiction of the larp, Amos Rex was a museum where artworks came alive and possessed the bodies of visitors every now and then, and the guides knew about it. It was their job to advise paintings, sculptures and other pieces of art who were confused in their newly acquired human bodies. Most of the guides were played by actual museum guides, and we had a lot of fun together brainstorming “nighttime personalities” for them in preparation for the larp. Participants could always consult these museum guides – either in-game or off-game – if they felt at loss during the larp and did not know what to do.
Goals and Rituals
Clear (and perhaps even slightly gamist (see Edwards 2001, Bøckman 2003) goals are often helpful for first-time larpers. When players focus on a goal, it is easier to come up with things to do, and they don’t get bored. Goals generate action that helps structure playtime.
Another possibility to make a larp beginner-friendly is to have a lot of pre-planned events to which the players can react. Since Hyvät museovieraat involved exploring a large exhibition space, planned events didn’t feel practical, and I decided to go for goal-oriented play. Moreover, I wanted to give players who so wished the possibility to just freely delve in the museum space and concentrate on interactions, and in a larp it is easier to ignore goals than planned events.
The goal for some characters was to stay in the body of a visitor, leave the museum, and become a human (the players got to decide for themselves whether their characters wanted this). To achieve this, an artwork had to perform a ritual that attached it permanently to the body, and it needed help from two other artworks. However, these assistants would have to give up the possibility of performing the ritual for themselves and thus give up on their hope of becoming human!
Keiken (2023-2024): Spirit Systems of Soft Knowing ༊*·˚. Photo: Niclas Warius / Amos Rex.
Museum guides instructed characters on how to perform the rituals, which meant we did not need to use workshop time on practicing them. Experiential artworks were used as ritual sites. One of these was Spirit Systems of Soft Knowing ༊*·˚ (2023–2024), a science-fiction style installation by the artist collective Keiken (see photo above). It is a glowing, shell-like space curtained off from the rest of the exhibition, where visitors lie down on soft pods with a vibrating silicone womb on their abdomen, listening to the installation’s soundscape through headphones (see Amos Rex 2024). In the ritual, the group of three artworks – one who wished to stay in a human body and two helpers – would occupy one of the pods.
Characters could also have other objectives. Some of them wished to continue their existence as artworks somewhere else than in this particular museum. Others wanted to prevent another character from escaping the museum so as not to be separated from them. Players came up with these goals in guided workshop exercises. Sometimes the outcomes could be quite drastic: one painting hated its maker and wanted somebody else to escape the museum and kill the artist.
Characters who went for the ritual option faced the challenge of persuading two other artworks to assist. One way to do this was to offer deals. An artwork could promise to do a favor for another one once it was outside the museum. The characters could trust each other’s word on it since the ritual would bind them to it. Kalervo Palsa’s painting Itseriittoisuus (1978; Eng. Self-sufficiency, see cover photo) desired to be hung on display in a meeting room of the Confederation of Finnish Industries, a lobby group and major wielder of economic power. It helped another painting in the ritual on the condition that the escapee would convince the Confederation to purchase it from the museum.
Emotions and inter-character drama
Unlike many collection exhibitions, I Feel, For Now did not present artworks chronologically or arrange them based on art movements. Instead, the art pieces were organized thematically, with a focus on the emotions they expressed (in the curators’ opinion). Five major themes had emerged this way: Beneath the Surface, Memory Games, A Moment of Extasy, Emotional Language and Carried Away by the Senses.
Since the exhibition was about emotions, I hoped the larp could be about them too. Moreover, I wanted to incorporate the main themes of the exhibition in the larp. So I decided that the curators’ theme groups would determine who could help a given artwork in the ritual.
All the characters were artworks from either the Beneath the Surface part of the exhibition or the Memory Games part or A Moment of Extasy part. The emotional life of an artwork was more limited than that of a human. Thus, in the ritual, an artwork who wanted to stay in a human body had to absorb the whole spectrum of human emotions. This meant that an artwork who was labeled under Beneath the Surface (which usually meant that they had dark, hidden emotions) needed the playful childlike emotions embodied by the Memory Games artworks and the feelings of almost religious ecstasy from A Moment of Extasy. Each ritual group would contain artworks from three different theme groups, and in the ritual, the two helpers would donate part of their own emotional landscape to the character who was going to become human.
To create emotional drama, I wanted to make the decision to leave or stay in the museum hard. Either way, the character would have to make a sacrifice – to let go of something. One obvious design choice was to divide the characters into tight-knit groups that would split during the larp.
In the workshop, we divided the characters into groups of about five. These artworks had been displayed close to each other in the exhibition, and their group dynamics resembled that of a family. We workshopped the details with the players and instructed them to create both negative and positive relations within the group. These groups would eventually break apart when some members would stay in the museum and others leave.
Physicality
Physicality was another thing to be considered in the design process. There is a social script for a museum space: a mode of behavior to which you tend to instinctively fall back when you enter an exhibition. In an art museum, people are likely to slowly wander around looking at the objects and talk in low voices. One of the goals with Hyvät museovieraat was to break the script and encourage people to behave in ways you don’t usually see in a museum. For this to succeed, it was crucial that there were no outsiders in the museum during the larp.
The rules of the museum constrained the possibilities for physicality. For example, running is not allowed in the exhibition space, and there are other limitations in place to ensure the safety of the artworks. Moreover, intense physical touch was ruled out since the larp was in the official program of the museum and tickets were sold online on a first-come-first-served basis. Participants could touch each other on hands and arms and hug each other after asking for permission.
However, nothing stopped players from e.g. crawling on the floor or moving their bodies in unexpected, non-human ways. A museum representative mentioned this at the beginning of the workshop when explaining the museum rules. During the workshop, I encouraged participants to explore new ways of moving that could suit their characters. The players warmed up for the larp with an exercise where they looked at different artworks and then tried to move the way the artwork would move if it were a living being.
In the character creation exercise, participants chose an artwork from a given area in the exhibition, and we would then broadcast from the museum PA system a list of questions that helped them create the character. There were questions about the character’s personality and goals, as well as questions that inspired the participants to look at the artwork in new ways. Some questions guided them to think about movement, such as the following:
When you take over the human body, how do you move it? How does this movement convey your true essence? Take a few steps and try out this way to move.
The first run of the larp became surprisingly physical and emotional, given that it was such a short larp. One participant kept his hands behind his back all the time since a character in the artwork lacked arms. People crawled on the floor and screamed at each other. There was emotional drama, and players cried. I hadn’t expected it to be so intense and wondered where the emotions came from. Maybe it was the artworks that inspired people’s play.
On the other hand, the second run seemed much less physical and emotional. In the end, every player group makes a different larp.
Art pedagogy
Ultimately, Hyvät museovieraat was a way to experience art in a new fashion. The participants concentrated on one artwork and went quite deeply into it – often the way you immerse in a larp character. Thus, it was like looking at the artwork from inside.
Melanie Orenius, who works as a curator of education at Amos Rex, brought an art pedagogical angle to the larp. She formulated character creation questions that had to do with the size of the artwork or the technique used to create it. These questions guided the participants to pay attention to details they might have otherwise ignored. For example, one question was:
“Think about the colors in the artwork. Is there a tinge that dominates it, and is it tranquilizing or energizing? What do the colors tell you about the character?”
The questions also discussed how art is displayed and went into deeper inquiries about its worth. Part of the PA announcement went:
“Dear artworks. You are part of the collections of Amos Rex. But did anyone ask your permission for it?
Would you rather be in another museum, in a public space, or in somebody’s – maybe your own – home? How valuable do you feel you are, and what determines your value?”
When we were workshopping the small family-like groups, players looked at each other’s artworks when creating relationships. One group spontaneously came up with the idea of checking the years when the artworks were made and created a seniority hierarchy based on them: The older artworks would treat the younger ones like children or little siblings.
Curation and display became major topics during the larp. Many artworks wished to be moved to another place in the exhibition. In the second run, there was even a discussion about what would happen to the artworks who stayed in the museum once the exhibition ended. When I told them, in the role of a museum guide, that they would be moved into a storage space, it created an uproar.
Artworks who permanently took over a human body had to find a place to store the human spirit (that of the players) – a suitable artwork in the exhibition. At the end of the larp, everybody filled in details about their artwork (either the one they played, or the one they stored their human into) on a small form with questions like the name of the artwork, how it should be cared for, and how it should be displayed.
Many players left these little pieces of paper in the museum, and they were archived. It was fun to read them afterward. One participant renamed her artwork – a stylistic, acrylic neon sculpture of a pig – The Plexiglass Queen and wrote that champagne should always be served in front of it. Another one wrote that his artwork should not be displayed at all: curtains should be drawn in front of it.
Radical interpretations
During the larp each participant held the interpretative authority on what their artwork-character was truly about. There were no introductions to the exhibition or its artworks beforehand. It was the participants who decided how exactly to transform the artworks into characters.
This meant that there were some unorthodox and unusual interpretations. For example, one participant found their artwork ugly – a horrible sum of mistakes that just wanted to be destroyed and to destroy the artist who had made it. Based on the feedback, some participants found others’ ways of seeing the artwork shocking.
How a larp turns out always depends on the ensemble of players. A group of curators and critics would probably have played Hyvät museovieraat differently. Maybe their interpretations of the art would have carried more weight and been better justified. However, some motivations for the larp came from the field of audience development, where guides and curators who do interactive tours wish they could get visitors to be bolder about expressing their thoughts on the art.
The larp functioned as a platform for exactly this. Most people who look at art are not art professionals, and they always make their own readings and judgments on the art. They just don’t usually express them to people within the art world. The new and radical thing about the larp was that it served as a forum to voice those thoughts and play with them.
Other reflections
All in all, Hyvät museovieraat got good scores on the participant feedback forms. Originally, the larp was to be run only once, but a rerun was scheduled because of the positive feedback. However, the larp probably wasn’t as beginner-friendly as it looked on paper – even experienced larpers reported that it was not an easy larp.
In some sense, I knew this all along, deep down. Shortness and no preparation requirements lower the threshold for newcomers to participate in the larp, but they don’t make it easy to play. First-time larpers often need clear instructions and struggle when they have to come up with stuff themselves. They are not sure what is possible, and they wonder what they are supposed to do. It is often more difficult to make your own character than to play a pre-written one. Furthermore, it is definitely easier to throw yourself into something familiar than to start creating characters and relationships out of artworks that might not have obvious connections to each other. There are a myriad of ways to turn an artwork into a larp character, even with guiding questions, and that very freedom makes it difficult.
However, we got positive feedback also from newcomers who had great experiences. Many of them also created beautiful play. Creating content for Hyvät museovieraat lay heavily on the players, but I don’t see any other way in which we could have made this larp. If the goal is to engage participants with art, you have to do it on their own terms, with no readymade interpretations and easy-to-apply formulae.
Hyvät museovieraat (Eng. Dear Museum Visitors)
Location: Amos Rex art museum, Helsinki
Runs: May 21th and August 20th, 2024.
Duration: 4 hours
Number of participants: scalable, at most 50
Admission fee: 30 / 15 euros
Design: Kaisa Kangas (larp design) and Melanie Orenius (art education)
Producer: Sanja Kulomaa
Special thanks: Syksy Räsänen, Dare Talvitie, Bjarke Pedersen, Halden Pfearsen, Miles Lizak.
Bøckman, Petter. “The Three Way Model”. In As Larp Grows Up – Theory and Methods in Larp, eds. Morten Gade, Line Thorup and Mikkel Sander. Projektgruppen KP03. 2003.
Edwards, Ron. 2001. “GNS and Other Matters of Role-Playing Theory, Chapter 2” The Forge, October 14, 2001. http://www.indie-rpgs.com/articles/3/ (last accessed Jan 26, 2025)
This article is republished from the Knutepunkt 2025 book. Please cite it as:
Kangas, Kaisa. 2025. “Experiencing Art from Within.” In Anatomy of Larp Thoughts, a breathing corpus: Knutepunkt Conference 2025. Oslo. Fantasiforbundet.
Eclipse is a three-day sci-fi larp set in 2059. Earth has been wracked by environmental disasters, leading to widespread civil war. Humanity’s hopes lie in the Eclipse space programme, established to find a new home using wormhole technology.
When the larp begins, all 150 players are in a base on Gliese 628A, one of seven candidate planets for colonisation. The three days take place in real time as the base initiates first contact with aliens. Like Arrival and Interstellar, twin inspirations for Italian creators Chaos League, it’s less about space battles and more about the self-destructiveness of humans and the nature of existence. These themes aren’t unusual in Nordic larp, which I’ve covered recently, but Chaos League follows the New Italian larp tradition, which favours top-down storytelling over player-driven plot, like Odysseus, a recent Battlestar Galactica-inspired larp.
Photo by Chiara Cappiello
Both Eclipse and Odysseus are blockbuster or “international” larps, so big and ambitious they draw players from multiple countries. They also have spectacular settings, hiring entire castles for medieval or fantasy stories. Now that player are willing to spend more and production costs have dropped, it’s become possible to create convincing science fiction environments, too. In Eclipse, everyone gets their own 8” tablet loaded with fully customised software; everyone wears a jumpsuit that looks appropriately sci-fi; and 3D printed props and impeccably-designed banners and instruction manuals make you feel right at home in 2059. Something barely feasible just ten years ago can now be organised by volunteers.
Even better, Eclipse takes place at Alvernia Planet, a massive network of concrete and glass domes spanning 13,000m2. It looks like it’s ripped straight from the cover of Amazing Stories. Originally a film studio, it now hosts exhibitions and events, located just outside Krakow in Poland. Castles are plentiful, but Alvernia Planet is rare indeed.
Maybe this shouldn’t matter. Some long-time larpers are dismayed by the growth of expensive blockbusters, arguing they’re exclusionary distractions from the things that make larps distinctive: role play, relationships, dialogue, and gameplay, none of which require castles or domes.
Photo by Chiara Cappiello
In blockbusters’ defence, visual and physical verisimilitude can be a scaffold for our imagination, easing our way into immersion. At the very least, it can be aesthetically pleasing, and it does wonders for marketing. I met someone brand new to larp who signed up for Eclipse just because they saw a photo of Chaos League’s Sahara Expedition, which really does take place in the Sahara. But the best argument for blockbusters is that they can be a gateway toward more affordable chamber and blackbox larps, not least because even blockbusters need to use their lo-fi techniques for more abstract and emotional gameplay.
My journey has been in the opposite direction. The longest larps I’d played were a few hours at most, at The Smoke and Immersion festivals, in conference rooms and blackbox theatres. I enjoyed them a lot, but I was told you can get much more into character with longer larps. Eclipse would be my first multi-day “proper” larp, a test of how far the art form could go.
This is a detailed account of my time at Eclipse in May, on its first run in English and second overall.
Cost
A ticket to Eclipse starts at €680. Players are expected to dress suitably, and most opted for the official jumpsuits (€45 to rent, €95 to buy). Accommodation at a decent hotel was €165 for a double/triple room and €265 for a single room; players with subsidised tickets could sleep for free at Alvernia Planet with their own sleeping bag. All meals were included, all vegan. They were fine!
The total cost for most people – a standard ticket, jumpsuit rental, and accommodation – came to €890 ($1000 / £750). Not cheap, but you could easily spend the same on a nice European long weekend. Still, one experienced larper blanched when I told her the price.
Photo by Chiara Cappiello
All four remaining runs of Eclipse in 2025 are almost sold out and none have been announced for 2026.
SPOILER WARNING If you intend to play and don’t want to risk any spoilers, stop reading now and come back later. That said, the first part will only cover information from before the larp begins, meaning details from the public larp guide and the pre-larp workshops. I’ll make it very clear when I begin spoiling the larp itself.
This account is as complete as I can reasonably make it, but larp is an individual experience. I didn’t see everything in the main plot and barely a fraction of the interpersonal drama that surrounded it.
Pre-Larp
Eclipse provided a vast amount of writing and videos detailing the gameplay, characters, relationships, and three decades of fictional history. Players weren’t expected to memorise it, but they did need to choose some characters they’d be happy to play.
Rather than read 150 unique character sheets totalling over 1000 pages, I narrowed them down based on gameplay. Each character belonged to one of three Divisions:
Hard Science: “Mindlink” to aliens, carefully interviewing them about their biology and history. Heavier on deductive gameplay, lower on physical activity.
Soft Science: Learn an alien language’s glyphs, then communicate through highly controlled face-to-face encounters. Heavier on social “parlour” role play, lower on physical activity.
Exploration: Venture outside to alien sites to deploy sensors and gather information. Heavy on physical activity.
I was intimidated by the level of performance required by Soft Science and worried Hard Science would be constant puzzle solving, so it was easy to opt for Exploration, especially given my past experience in outdoor gameplay making Zombies, Run!
A hard science team performs a mindlink. Photo by Chiara Cappiello.
Then I had to choose one of six Academies. These are like school Houses, where members belong to different divisions but are trained with a common ethos. Each academy comes with its own secondary training (“sidespec”) used in emergency situations, covering co-ordination, security, psychology, communications, medicine, and engineering. Some people chose to learn into their academy’s ethos when role playing, while others ignored it. I filtered the list for security and engineering, and scanned through the one-line descriptions of a dozen characters.
There were a few happy-go-lucky individuals but most had darker histories reflecting the dire state of Earth, not to mention whatever would drive them to volunteer for a risky mission lightyears from their family or friends. I chose seven characters and a few weeks later was told I’d be Bex, “The eternal nomad who does not trust relationships”.
Bex had a nine page character sheet. There were three pages on their personal history, a three page diary of their first weeks on Gliese 628A, and the remainder covered their in-game relationships. Like all characters, Bex was ungendered and could be played however I liked (male, I decided).
As a piece of literature, Bex’s backstory felt dense, verging on overwritten, and hard to mine for ideas on how to role play. The same went for much of the writing about Earth, the Eclipse program, the six academies, and so on. I didn’t have to remember it all, but there were details I overlooked that became genuinely important during the game, if only because they were important to other players. Apparently a helpful player on the larp Discord made a cheatsheet, which I missed entirely.
While such detailed worldbuilding may seem self-indulgent, it’s crucial to Eclipse’s project to create a convincing and original fictional universe, even if it’s through dry factsheets rather than Harry Potter or Star Wars’ books and movies. Why bother? The obvious answer is that it’s basically impossible for larps to get the license for those kinds of IPs. The real answer, however, is that making your own fictional universe means you can tailor it for a specific kind of gameplay and politics and emotional experience.
The lounge, pre-larp. Usually it’d be full of people.
The problem with Harry Potter and Star Wars (Andor aside) is that they glorify very small groups of saviours, so everyone wants to be the main character and save the world. This just isn’t possible in larp traditions that prioritise everyone being able to contribute and feeling valued. Sure, you could base a story around the anonymous scientists in Arrival and Interstellar, but at that point you might as well start from scratch, which is what Chaos League did. Every single one of the character backstories I read described people who were decidedly unheroic but always intimately tied to and reliant on others, whether they realised it or not.
A few weeks before the larp, the organisers asked players to record a short Departure Log video, as if made before the departure to Gliese 628A. In-character, we were to explain our hopes for the Eclipse mission, how we’d like to be remembered if it failed, and so on.
I happened to be travelling at this time so I completely failed to record the video. I did manage to connect with some of Bex’s friends from their academy and the base via Discord in case we wanted to do anything special with our relationships (answer: no). Some players did a lot of pre-larp co-ordination, writing shared histories and chatting in multiple calls, while others told me they turned up at the larp knowing next to nothing.
Day 0
I arrived in Krakow the evening before the larp and went to a meetup at a bar in town. Amusingly, most of the players were Explorers, clearly the jocks of Gliese 628A. Several players were novices like me, but a lot went to multiple blockbuster larps each year. I guess it’s like people who are really into cruises or theme parks, except blockbusters are considerably cheaper.
Day 1
From central Krakow, it was an hour to Alvernia Planet via the official coaches.
The two largest domes were occupied by a Harry Potter exhibition, on the opposite side of the complex from us. We never noticed their guests except when embarking on expeditions, during which we were encouraged to view them as hallucinations of Earth.
I was instantly impressed by Eclipse’s graphic design. I am cursed with a preternatural ability to detect misaligned and poorly-spaced layouts but everything – banners, patches, branded water packs, even the custom door signs – was perfect. “Just look at that kerning and line spacing!” I marvelled to a friend.
We stowed our luggage and found our individual lockers in the basement, stocked with our jumpsuit, name tag, and tablet. But before putting them on, we had three workshops to attend.
Introductory Workshop
Larp workshops teach everyone how to play. By requiring attendance, they guarantee everyone’s on the same page, meaning you can role play knowing others will understand what you’re trying to do and support it. This first hour-long session largely covered the same ground as the 7000 word larp guide, correctly assuming some players skipped or forgotten it entirely. Here’s a brief run-down of what we were told:
There are three pillars to Eclipse: work, the planet, and social life. Work is organised by division, with a morning and afternoon shift each day. Work doesn’t need to be done perfectly, and we shouldn’t stress out if we mess up. “You can’t break the game” because it was designed with redundancy in mind, with multiple teams in each division tackling the same general problem.
There’s no winning. Don’t play to save your character from failure. Eclipse isn’t a campaign larp where your character returns across multiple games, so use them like a stolen car and try things you wouldn’t try in real life. “Make wrong choices!”
Improvise in your character’s personal life. Some people got married in the first run, with ten people attending.
Some story would be communicated extra-diegetically. For example, each day would begin with a voiceover to set the scene, but we shouldn’t mention the voiceover in-game.
At the end of each shift, we would report our professional opinion on Gliese 628A’s alien life to Yggdrasil, the base’s AI. Yggdrasil exists both in-game and out-of-game, aggregating opinions to steer the plot in lieu of open voting. There are different possible endings. If we disagree with the path of the game, we can be angry but we need to follow the decision rather than, say, attempting a coup.
There won’t be any massive twist removing players’ agency. “This is not a dream, you aren’t all dead, it’s not fake, the premise is real.”
Each day, we should record a two minute video diary. We can address it to people back on Earth, and they can be a memento of the game afterwards.
Twice during the game, we’ll have calls to our “affections” on Earth, affections being family members or close colleagues or friends rather than romantic relations. During calls, we’ll be paired up to take turns playing each others’ affections, with those “on Earth” receiving a sheet with our character backgrounds and prompts. We have the option of giving our affections a free ticket to Gliese 628A if the planet is deemed safe.
We can visit the lounge while off-duty for drinks and snacks. Real alcohol won’t be served, but we should role play as if fizzy drinks are alcoholic.
The upper deck of the lounge has an “Earth Wall” corkboard where we should put pictures of our loved ones. Players can visit it to talk about their relationships.
“I’m done here” is Eclipse’s safe word. If someone says it, don’t ask why they’ve left the room or mention it when they return. (I never saw it being used myself).
Escalate altercations slowly and de-escalate quickly. If you want to get into a fight, all parties should verbally invite it, e.g. “Oh yeah? Come over here and say that. What are you gonna do, punch me?” etc. A very convincing and effective demo was provided.
If you see someone crying in a corridor and aren’t sure if they’re role playing or in genuine distress, give them the OK hand sign. A thumbs-up means they’re fine, a wobble or a thumbs-down means you should fetch an organiser.
No phones may be used during the game, and absolutely no photos. You can use them in the toilets, if you want. I usually went outside and hid behind a pillar to take notes.
Eclipse deals with themes of colonisation. Your character can have colonialist intentions, but it’s only your character, not you. The purpose of larp is to experience different points of view, then reflect seriously and critically upon them afterwards.
This was a lot to pack into just one lecture, and I’ve missed out a bunch. Compared to some Nordic larp workshops I’ve been to, however, it was swift, and there weren’t any physical exercise on embodying our character through how we walked and talked. I’m told this is typical of Italian larp, which may have less emphasis on interiority and immersion into character. I don’t know if exercises about walking were necessary given the characters we were playing, but I wouldn’t have minded a bit more about talking. Some players constantly used idioms from 2025 or pop culture references from the 1980s and 1990s, which I found unconvincing, like how every Star Trek character only likes culture up until our present day.
The main auditorium, pre-larp
Novices are always shocked by the existence of larp workshops, which have next to no equivalent among commercial immersive experiences or immersive theatre. Lately I’ve seen designers, especially those newer to larp, try to “design away” workshops, arguing they reduce accessibility and hurt the commercial viability or financial sustainability because they take so long.
I understand the sentiment but it seems deeply mistaken. Workshops are a necessary part of Nordic-style larp because they guarantee a base level of understanding and safety required for substantive role play. Sure, you can skip the workshop if you’re absolutely sure every single player knows and remembers the rules and you aren’t introducing any new design elements. You can also skip it if your game doesn’t have any substantive role play, but then you aren’t making a larp any more, and you might as well accept that.
Academy Workshop
Next, we split up into our academies for an hour. Mine was Blackstone, with its sidespec of base security.
Blackstone is not military, the organisers stressed. We would not carry weapons and there is no brig on the base. If we noticed an altercation, we should use reason to de-escalate, not force.
As civil protection, our responsibility during a base emergency would be to search for cracks in the domes. In practice this meant turning off the lights in each dome and using torches to find fluorescent stickers on structural elements like walls and ceilings. If we found two or more cracks, the entire dome would be evacuated.
Blackstone used one of the Explorer domes as its headquarters
There was a slightly tedious Q&A about splitting up during emergencies to cover more ground, which was obviously something we as players would need to figure out (or not) during the game itself. I did appreciate how the organisers had come up with their own in-universe explanation for how the domes were shielded and why the central dome was immune from cracks, being repurposed from our starship’s reactor.
It was during this workshop that I realised I’d forgotten all of Blackstone Academy’s history. Someone suggested we split up the room along rival “white” and “green” lines. I had no idea where to go until I was reminded that Blackstone cadets were once instructed to fire upon protestors: the greens laid down their weapons and were later tried, while the white followed orders.
The next 15 minutes were spent in groups of three, representing friendships made in the academy. From a design perspective, this gives players a number of people they can justifiably hang out with during the larp; for the same purpose, I wouldlater sync up with the friends Bex made shortly after arriving at Gliese 628A. Bex’s friends at Blackstone were both white cadets and we brainstormed why we might have followed orders during the protest, though this didn’t end up being significant.
We then paired up with the person who’d play our “affection” during the two calls. This was about calibrating the kind of role play we were looking for: some might ask their partner to shout at them or manipulate them, while others might explicitly put those things off-limits.
Base map, taken from the tablet
Next, a quick tour of the base. All nine domes were connected by at least two tunnels each, with the central K2 dome leading to most. Each dome had two or three storeys, and some were enormous, with multiple rooms and entire cinemas and auditoriums. You could easily fit a thousand people in the space we had, and we were just 150. Nowhere was off-limits unless explicitly signed as such. It was big enough for every group to have their own private space but small enough for plenty of chance encounters.
After lunch, some couldn’t wait to get into their jumpsuits. There was plenty of customisation, like patches denoting blood type, 3D-printed magnetic nametags, utility toolbelts, tablet holsters, and sling bags. One player even had a smartphone in a high-tech forearm vambrace on which she wrote notes in-game, a reasonable exception to the “no phones” rule.
Explorer Workshop
My final hour-long workshop focused on Exploration. During our five work shifts, we would venture into the forest to investigate alien sites:
Shifts begin with a 15-30 minute briefing, then 45 minutes outside, then a debrief.
Outside, Explorers wear “spatial sonar” headphones delivering atmospheric sounds and music, half in-game and half out-of-game, a kind of emotional influence from the planet itself. In practice, they were silent disco headphones controlled by our team supervisor, meaning we all heard the same pre-recorded track and the sonar wasn’t actually location-based.
Explorers are forbidden from talking outside. Diegetically, this is for safety reasons (or something) but out-of-game, it was to make things more interesting. Simple hand gestures are used instead, like a fist held in the air for “stop”, and others for “gather”, “danger” etc.
Exploration mission procedures
There are three types of explorer mission involving deploying sensors or searching for specific objects. In practice, the sensors were LEDs and lasers housed in 3D-printed units. We might set up four lasers around the perimeter of a site to “scan” it, or place flashing LED devices in a grid. This process is designed to look “scientific”, and because the sensors weren’t smart, it’s up to players whether they play a deployment as successful or not. It turns out you can save a lot of time and money by trusting players to play along rather than making a genuinely functional sensor setup, though you do lose out on skill-based gameplay.
Any failure during a mission, such as only scanning two out of three sites, is treated as a partial success yielding incomplete information rather than something to feel really bad about.
There was a lot of chat about the science and rationale for processes, much of which boiled down to “it’s more fun if we do it this way.” Why not use little whiteboards rather than hand gestures? Hand gestures look cooler.
Emergencies may occur during when the “sonar” detects psychic threats. Players might have to hide, or drop to the ground, or inject an antidote.
One or two players are designated “hooks”. Hooks mask the “bio-imprint” of everyone else in their team, at the cost of being even more exposed to psychic threats. Before embarking on a mission, hooks are surreptitiously handed a note telling them what to do during an emergency, like sitting down and refusing to move, or running away.
Players are free to role play missions however they like: they can care more about completing a scan than saving a team member, and vice versa. They can also train in advance, create more hand gestures, etc.
The organisers put signs around the forest warning of a film shoot so the public wouldn’t bother us. I don’t think anyone took notice of rhem, and we never had a problem.
Afterwards, we suited up and headed to the main auditorium for the beginning of the game. The lights lowered, we closed our eyes, and music and extra-diegetic narration eased us into the fiction. The game would start the moment a video played.
MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD DO NOT READ IF YOU EVER INTEND TO PLAY!
Game
Above the music (from Interstellar), we heard an unnamed member of our crew describing the journey to Gliese 628A and the importance of our mission. It was a quick and effective way of saying “this is how you should be feeling right now.”
A video call from Earth appeared on the huge cinema screen, a pin-sharp, good-looking 4K image that made a great first impression. Our commander announced that phase 3 of our mission could begin: first contact with Gliese 628A’s non-human intelligent life (NHIL), along with outside exploration. Afterwards, a staff NPC told us to go to our division to begin work.
Photograph of a printed exploration map
There were five Exploration teams with around ten people each, mine designated “Romeo”. Our NPC team supervisor told us our first shift wouldn’t require a hook, which was met with much grumbling and set a fun tone of “us vs. the bosses”. We consulted a map, talked about how we’d use our sensors, practiced hand gestures, and divvied up the equipment.
Stepping outside the dome initially felt a bit awkward – we were, after all, walking out across part of Alvernia Planet’s car park, which didn’t look like an alien planet – but after a couple of minutes we were into a largely deserted forest. With the headphones playing muted musical tones and sonar pings, it felt eerie.
Exploration team with headsets. Photo by Chiara Cappiello.
We spotted a cluster of basketball sized eggs a few minutes out, hanging in webbing between trees. Should we be shocked or blasé? I wasn’t sure, which in itself was interesting. We awkwardly set up tripods and sensors on the uneven ground and “measured” the site. Not for the last time, I regretted that I hadn’t bought a utility belt.
Occasionally we heard faint dragging sounds and footsteps, but nothing happened. We returned silently, trooping back to Romeo’s headquarters and slumping down in a ring of chairs. Our team supervisor disappeared to deliver our data to her bosses and returned with an “analysis” printout explaining what we’d seen, apparently some kind of alien (NHIL) nursery.
Our goal during the debrief was to discuss what we’d seen, then individually report to Yggdrasil on our tablets whether we thought the NHIL were instinctive, emotional, or rational. We each gave our hot takes, our supervisor gently interjecting “last sentence” if someone went on too long.
Sending a report to Yggdrasil
But the discussion was inconclusive. One could see the arrangement of the eggs as any of the three options; whatever you chose was a reflection of your character’s biases and preconceptions more than anything else. Perhaps that was the point, a Rorschach test for humanity, but it felt doubly abstract because our personal observations of the eggs were essentially overridden by the objective analysis of the data we gathered.
This lack of direct correspondence between gameplay and plot-relevant discoveries may have been unique to Explorers, though. From what I understand, players in hard and soft science communicated with the NHIL more directly. That this was accompanied by ambiguity or confusion helped generate speculation.
To make matters worse, explorers couldn’t talk to each other about anything they saw. The five exploration teams rotated between the five sites, and while it made (in-game) sense that they shouldn’t prejudice each others’ observations and (out-of-game) not spoil the surprise, it meant we couldn’t speculate about the greater meaning of our discoveries like other divisions did. Still, explorers had their own unique pleasures; I found it much easier to role play as a Nostromo-style space trucker grunt than a know-it-all scientist.
During a lull in our debrief, I opened my tablet. These included manuals and procedures for each division, like instructions on how to deploy sensors outside; a daily news feed from Earth; a readout of the status of the six other Eclipse missions; a form to submit your reports to Yggdrasil; and Yggdrasil’s predictions of the overall outcome of the Gliese 628A mission (more on this later). But the tablets’ most important feature was the chat channels. Each player was automatically enrolled into channels for their team, division, and academy, and they could direct message any player.
Blackstone Academy’s chatroom from Day 2
As the game progressed, the channels became busy with rumours and gossip. Unfortunately, the tablets struggled with the traffic. People blamed the wifi, but this seemed unlikely; 150 devices isn’t a lot for corporate-level infrastructure, and the error messages (“too many connections”) suggested the chat server was overloaded. Everyone quickly got used to force-closing and reopening the Eclipse app, though this didn’t always work.
Shortly after the first shift, we gathered for our first call with our affections on Earth. I was imagining the Comms dome would be a series of phone booths, but instead it was a vast dark space with a cloudy plastic sheet hanging from the ceiling, arranged in a square. We lined up in pairs on either side of the sheet and atmospheric audio counted down. With the connection to Earth established, everyone stepped forward and started talking. You had to get quite close to hear each other above the babble, but you could still only see a blurry silhouette. It was much lower-fi than I expected, but perhaps the only way they could process every player’s call in a reasonable amount of time.
Photo by Chiara Cappiello
As mentioned, the “affection” side of the call had a cheatsheet with their background and conversation prompts. This made it straightforward for me to role play as a burgeoning eco-freedom fighter/terrorist on Earth who’d been left behind by their friend who’d run off to Gliese 628A. At seven minutes, calls were long enough to have a proper discussion and feel appropriately awkward, but short enough that you didn’t run out of things to say. Surrounded by dozens of calls, cajoling and joking and shouting and crying, I had a sense of what everyone else was going through. It felt more like performance art than anything else. Of course, as with everything else in larp, it requires everyone to buy into the premise.
Like the affection calls, dinner was split into two shifts so everyone could sit at the communal tables. A scientist joined my table and, on spotting my Blackstone Academy patch, asked whether I was a white or a green. Thankfully I knew the difference by this point and we had a thoughtful conversation about the ethics of following orders and his belief that humanity’s true foe was capitalism, not terrorism. But as others arrived, it devolved into a tedious rehashing of colonial tropes, one of those annoying situations when you can tell who’s completely closed to conversation and you already knew everything they’re going to say.
In the lounge, I chatted with teammates and groused (in-character) about the lack of snacks and drinks. I felt beat, so I collapsed into an armchair. It turned out the tablet was a great way to participate even when you needed a rest. Instead of mindlessly scrolling through apps, you knew everyone looking at their device was still inhabiting the same fictional media space. I got into a fight with a troll about the whole white vs. green issue, and later bumped into them and joked about it. If only more of this happened in real life!
Photo by Chiara Cappiello
Another great bit of design in the larp: every team was making momentous discoveries (e.g. finding a nest of alien eggs) but because they weren’t instantly and globally communicated meant players had to actually talk to each other, mostly in person, to learn what the hell was going on – like the discovery that one of the six other Eclipse missions had just failed. This didn’t make the conversations any smarter, but it did provide an excuse (an “alibi”, in larp parlance) to approach random strangers and say, “Hey, you’re in soft science, what did you find out today?” We all need practice in forming connections and persuading one another, and like so many good larps, Eclipse provided that where real life often doesn’t.
People followed threads wherever they could. Earlier that day, I idly mentioned on chat that I’d been bitten by an insect outside. When medics from Lighthouse Academy heard, they tracked me down and conducted an impromptu psychological evaluation which, in retrospect, I should’ve played into more. Next time!
Being an international larp, Eclipse attracted players from all over Europe and even some from the US. The different accents added to a feeling of an international mission, though I only saw one other Asian-looking person, an older woman. There weren’t any obvious player cliques – I got the sense a lot of people simply didn’t have the time to pre-plan individual storylines. The demands of work shifts and the social organisation of the larp forced people into new groupings anyway.
After I got bored of the lounge, I wandered through the vast empty Soft Science dome and looked at the circular Arrival-style glyphs players had pinned on whiteboards, surrounded by scribbles of best-guess translations:
“We escaped home, no sorrow (do not despair) / We got angry the natives threatened (our) beloved / We made a mistake, waged a war and are guilty of dead children.”
Soft science gathers around alien glyphs. Photo by Chiara Cappiello.
I got chatting with a lone soft scientist about the translation. A hard scientist joined us, asking about my team’s mission outside. It made me nostalgic for when I was a neuroscientist at Cambridge and Oxford, chatting to colleagues after-hours. We marvellled at what each of us had discovered. Apparently the NHIL had come from a great distance after their own planet had been destroyed by a supernova. On arriving at Gliese 628A, they somehow wiped out an indigenous intelligent species known as tænari or “farmers”, though now the NHIL themselves were dwindling, despite their highly advanced technology.
Around 10:30pm, right before the end of the game period, everyone’s tablets sounded an emergency notification to head to the enormous K1 “Containment Grid” dome. Inside was a large rectangular space curtained off with cloudy plastic sheeting. A large, spidery alien slowly walked in, and the same unnamed narrator from the beginning of the day described how they felt awed by the encounter.
Then, David Bowie outro music, and we were officially out-of-game. We left our tablets on the front desk to charge and boarded coaches to our hotel. I realised I’d barely used my phone all day.
Day 2
I loaded up on breakfast at the hotel, then boarded a coach back to Alvernia Planet at 9:45am. Most people I spoke to appreciated having a proper sleep but admitted that some “vibes” were lost from not being in-game 24/7. Getting just four hours of sleep is part of the attraction when you’re run from bloodthirsty aliens; less so in Eclipse, which is a much more sedate affair.
Back in the domes, some players were a bit too eager to get into character before the game officially started, which caused a couple of awkward moments. But soon enough, we assembled in the auditorium and closed our eyes…
Game
Sci-fi music (Arrival, this time), narration, then a briefing video. Everyone on Earth was excited about our progress and hopeful we’d declare Gliese 628A safe for mass colonisation. An NPC staff summarised each team’s findings from yesterday. Though I knew most of them from impromptu chats, it was a good way to catch up anyone completely left out.
Before we headed to our work shifts, the staffer said they believed an explorer was smuggling recreational drugs into the base. Despite investigating this on my tablet and in person, I never quite got to the bottom of this story; I wonder whether this was a product of player-driven behaviour or an organiser-led prod to role play in a particular way. In a similar vein, I tried to get Blackstone Academy interested in “New Era” cult pamphlets I discovered in Romeo’s headquarters, hyping them up as a potential security threat, but to no avail.
An explorer sets up a laser. Photo by Chiara Cappiello.
Romeo was much better organised during our mission to analyse a large monolith, practicing with our laser transmitters beforehand. While on mission, an emergency – poison gas, I think – required us to hit the deck and inject an antidote. Some teammates had to hold our “hook” down and find out where he’d stashed his syringe. Amid the confusion, we lost a sensor.
(I expect our NPC team supervisor triggered this emergency at an opportune moment, switching the audio track broadcast to our headphones when we reached a secluded spot).
Back home, our team complained about a malfunctioning laser. Despite the organiers’ ingenuity, players understood things would break, so rather than getting annoyed at them and demanding a refund as one might in a commercial immersive experience, we redirected our frustration in-game at our higher-ups on Gliese 628A. How could they expect us to do these missions properly if they don’t maintain the equipment properly?, and so on. That’s the social technology of larp, a collective pretence that everything is working even when it isn’t. Players aren’t alienated from the creation of larps – we know how the sausage is made because we’re making it too. And so, denied the camaraderie of the scientists, the explorers shared hacks. We measured and cut spare pieces of fabric so we could space out sensors faster and devised procedures to run multiple sensor sweeps at once. It was a lovely demonstration of people taking pride in their work, as good a simulation of a workplace I’ve ever seen.
News from Day 2
I was distracted from our surprisingly thoughtful debrief about the meaning of memorials and statues by news that Blackstone’s “white” cadets on Earth might be retried for shooting at protestors. This set our chat on fire, and naturally I got stuck into the ensuing flamewar. In larps, digital distractions are just another opportunity to role play.
Everyone was making discoveries and very eager to share: someone from soft science asked me whether we were the explorer team who’d found crystals that morning. Very normal, except I happened to be in the toilets. It was a little more fun to talk about that than the news that a second Eclipse mission had failed.
Ymir, the black hole near Gliese 628A, was due to make its closest approach later in the day, wreaking all kinds of mayhem on the base’s shields, psychology, and comms. Blackstone met in advance to co-ordinate an emergency response, but the meeting was fraught. There was no established hierarchy, tablet problems meant people arrived late, and everyone kept talking over each other about how we should divide into groups, who’d get the walkie talkies, what to do if they didn’t work, and so on. Eventually we muddled through it without concluding much at all: classic office politics.
As I watched, I reflected that it’s hard to know whether someone is just playing an asshole in a larp or they really are one. Maybe there’s less difference than it seems, especially when it comes to extreme duration role playing; no-one can wear a mask for a long time, as Seneca put it (a worrying thought given some characters’ colonialist leanings). Metatechniques are meant to help calibrate intensity, but I didn’t see any used in real time during Eclipse – perhaps everyone was OK with the rare bit of poor behaviour, as I was when confronted with rude players. When I brought this up to some experienced larpers, they suggested it might be due to misunderstandings caused by mixing different “larp cultures”. I found this to be a diplomatic rationalisation of behaviour I usually saw from the same few people – people whom I noticed other players eventually learned to avoid. I suppose the good and bad thing about international larp is that players don’t carry their reputations around with them quite as much.
Wild rumours abounded after lunch. The alien eggs had grown in size, an explorer team had stolen data crystals from a research site, the NHIL killed the tænari with a superweapon summoned from the planet itself. Some were exaggerations, others were jokes repeated as facts. A larp wouldn’t be a bad place to teach media literacy…
Note Yggdrasil’s predicted outcomes for our mission
Romeo’s afternoon shift took us out to a “cemetery”. Once again, our equipment malfunctioned and we had to cope with multiple emergencies. Still, I enjoyed the slower, more deliberate pace of our work outside.
Analysis of our sensor data revealed the NHIL killed the tænari, or something. Again, I wondered what use it was to report our opinions to Yggdrasil when the results of its analysis were far more pertinent to its questions (are the NHIL good/neutral/bad?) than anything we’d observed ourselves. Regardless, we had a good discussion about the ideas of existential threat.
The approach of Ymir triggered a base-wide emergency around 5pm. I rushed to Blackstone’s headquarters where walkie talkies were being handed out to roving teams inspecting domes. The role play was more military-themed than I liked – why ask people for their “callsign” when you mean their name, especially when the term has literally never been mentioned in the game before? – but unlike our earlier meeting, communication was surprisingly good-tempered and efficient. Who knew that when people are actually doing stuff rather than endlessly talking about it, they get along better?
I led a small team to help inspect a couple of domes, and I’ll admit that my leadership was quite poor because I ran around too fast for some people to keep up. In each dome, we fetched a supervisor to turn off all the lights so we could look for “cracks” (i.e. stickers). This was disruptive to everyone else who had their own vital work to deal with, like decoding messages or fixing energy systems or manufacturing medicine for Ymir-induced space madness (my term), so we negotiated with them on the best time to turn off lights and where to put displaced teams. More practice in logistics and communication, disguised as a game!
Manufacturing medicine. Photo by Chiara Cappiello.
An hour or so into the emergency, players were summoned to shelter in the K1 “Containment Grid” dome. There, a radio transmission indicated we’d jumped forward in time by seven years due to Ymir’s gravitational pull. Time travel is a classic sci-fi trope whenever black holes are around (e.g. Interstellar), but I genuinely hadn’t seen this coming, my thoughts being occupied by the NHIL and more prosaic concerns.
We trooped into the main auditorium for a very short video call from Earth, who thought our base had been lost entirely. As soon as the video ended, some players began shouting and others shouted to tell them to stop shouting, both in-character and out-of-character at once.
Our second affection calls went ahead as scheduled, more dramatic and emotional than expected. By unstapling the folded sheet we received at the start of the game, people playing the affections revealed new backstory and prompts – my eco-freedom fighter/terrorist had blown up an oil rig and been imprisoned for years. Beside me, I heard joyful calls where people reunited after being thought dead. Others were darker.
Photo by Chiara Cappiello
With the news that every other Eclipse mission had failed and Earth’s climate was worsening, there was even more pressure for us to secure Gliese 628A for human colonisation. I dreaded what that might mean given fears of the NHIL.
An impromptu rave in the hard science dome also went ahead at 9:30pm, powered by portable speakers and LED lights some players had brought along. This was very fun and had some great dancing. Because it was a larp, some players distributed space drugs (again, my term) and of course, one person overdosed and was administered to by medics. The party continued, another person fell over but then got up again because he was only playing as drunk.
Voight-Kampff style Hard Science Mindlink procedures
While chatting to a soft scientist at the rave, I realised I had no idea exactly what they were doing during their work shifts. When they said they were talking to the NHIL, did they literally stand in front of the alien? What did the alien do in response? My uncertainty felt peculiarly thrilling and realistic, aided by the larp’s lack of internal photo and video documentation; some philosophers might even call it a process of re-enchanting the world.
Day 2 also saw the opening of the larp’s focus rooms. These were partly in-game and out-of-game, a way for players to abstractly experience the process of travelling lightyears from Earth. You entered a dark room with moody lighting, sat in front of a mirror, and put on a headset. The looping audio had an ASMR quality to it and prompted you to breathe, open or close your eyes, while visualising a kind of Powers of Ten movie scene. It was a nice way to chill out while remaining in the game space.
Me in the empty focus room
The day ended with our being summoned to K1 again for an encounter with the NHIL. It looked ill, our unseen narrator explained, and it swore vengeance against us for the harms we’d done to its children.
Bowie outro music again, then coaches back to the hotel.
Day 3
Game
During our opening briefing, we discovered that the NHIL from the previous night had attacked our base’s environmental systems. It had failed to cause any damage, however. All humanity’s hopes lay with us.
Our morning exploration shift required two hooks this time, perhaps due to the elevated threat. One of the Romeo team members began planning out our mission so I asked, a little grumpily, who made them our supervisor. Someone said “she’s Argo” and expected me to understand. As I later read in the larp guide, members of Argo Academy are trained as leaders and co-ordinators, so they were actually role playing correctly – but I didn’t know this and so didn’t support her role play. Afterwards, a player suggested Academy “sidespecs” were under-theorised in that they had no substantive recognition by the game system or other characters outside of emergencies.
No matter – we had a mission to find artefacts in a tænari “village”. We assumed this would be easy because most of the sites we’d visited were pretty small, but the village turned out to be an entire collection of huts and barns. We fanned out, eventually encountering three statues of NHIL, surrounding an etched metal disc, which later caused memory loss from people who touched it (I’m still not sure whether it was secretly prompted by our supervisor or just a fun bit of improvisation). Analysis of the disc revealed the location of NHIL’s home planet, along with a special plant cultivated by the tænari that could kill the NHIL in minutes.
Photo by Chiara Cappiello
Because we’d seen the statues and village with our own eyes rather than just read about them in a report, this was by far the most interesting debrief of the game, one in which we, once again, were trying to determine whether co-existence with the NHIL was possible. What did the statues mean? Did the tænari hate the NHIL or respect them? I noted the status hadn’t been defaced, which is what you’d expect in a conflict, but others suggested they were placed at the edge of the village as a warning (out-of-game, I assumed this was for “level design” purposes, so we’d discover them last).
One team reported that when the NHIL arrived on Gliese 628A, they erected a monument declaring they came in peace; only later was there a misunderstanding that led to war. There were rumours a hard science team had talked to the planet itself; others claimed the NHIL had summoned a “sword of light” from the planet to attack the tænari, though exactly what that meant was anyone’s guess. I felt I’d been transported into a Stanislaw Lem novel. Hubristic colonisers, exhausting debates about the impossibility of communication, Soviet aesthetics, annihilation superweapons – it was a perfect hard sci-fi cocktail that benefitted from larps’ extreme duration.
Imagine the person in the centre of this explorer team debrief is me, all the time. Photo by Chiara Cappiello.
In the afternoon, Romeo team took a group photo, taking advantage of an official base photographer. They tried to find me for twenty minutes and pinged me via chat, but decided to go ahead without me. I was a little annoyed when someone asked why I hadn’t come; the bad network connection meant I didn’t bother checking my tablet regularly. Not coincidentally, I was troubled about how I was playing Bex. For an “eternal nomad who does not trust relationships” he was getting on far too well with his teammates. I couldn’t figure out how to play a loner in a game that’s fundamentally social in its nature but it felt wrong for him to suddenly become trusting.
Being left out from the group photo was the perfect opportunity to turn things around. At Romeo’s afternoon briefing, I upped my annoyance from a 3 to a 10 and lashed out. I fumed and swore at my teammates, saying I was going to request a transfer since I clearly wasn’t wanted. I even got to chew out the character who always had an answer for everything.
My eruption didn’t delay our final shift, in which we scanned an underground NHIL temple. One player was careless with handling their laser, leading to amusingly fussy disagreements on whether the measurements had been done “correctly”. Still, we covered a huge amount of ground, much to the delight of our Argo team member.
Analysis revealed temple inscriptions stating the NHIL had visited multiple planets on their way to Gliese 628A but had moved on because “genetic merger” wasn’t possible. The analysis also confirmed that human/NHIL merger was possible, with other teams revealing their aim to incorporate humanity’s “progressive traits” so that both species could survive.
Photo by Chiara Cappiello
Merger or annihilation? That was the subject of our final debrief. With Earth on the brink of environmental collapse and our base being their only hope, a few in Romeo wanted any excuse to kill the last remaining NHIL on Gliese 628A in an attempt to pave the way for “safe” human colonisation. The temple inscriptions could be lies, they argued. It was them or us. And didn’t they try to murder us last night?
It felt distasteful to hear players pushing for genocide even though I knew it was an act and the larp was fiction. I struggled, unsuccessfully, to not let it affect me personally. Abigail Nussbaum says novels lead us “outside of morality”, making us accomplices of jealousy and revenge, in order to illuminate their boundaries. Larps help us explore distressing boundaries more directly, even as players remain thoughtful and self-reflexive. It’s legitimate for Eclipse to tackle these issues given humanity’s dark history of colonisation. But as an experienced larper suggested, when there are actual genocidal people in the real world being more public about their aims, it’s harder to know whether a player is putting on an act or not. Someone can act evil in a game, but they should understand they’re the villain.
Our argument was repeated across the whole base. Yggdrasil’s final predictions of our mission’s fate only raised the temperature:
Put everyone into cryogenic suspension and wait for another way forward.
Make Gliese 628A safe for human colonisation by nuking the entire base and the last remaining NHIL along with it.
Genetically merge all humans on Gliese 628A with the NHIL, initiating a consciousness and memory reset.
As we awaited our fate to be announced by Earth, the final few hours of the game revealed everything the larp had become.
Deepwater Academy called an emergency meeting in the main auditorium. I was told it descended into a shouting match despite their “empathic, intuitive, analytical” values. Touchingly, some explorers organised knowledge sharing meetings; now that each team had seen all five sites, we could finally talk about them openly and record everything we’d seen in writing. Our writeups are probably still archived on Chaos League’s server somewhere.
But most people I saw had a sense of anticipation, or resignation – there would be no further work shifts, nothing left to solve or discover. Waiting in line for dinner, a member of Romeo who’d also played my affection on Earth had a toy duck on his shoulder. Someone asked what it would say if it could talk. He said Bex should know he had friends at the base. A broker roved the hall with a handwritten list: the seven year time jump meant some people had spare tickets to Gliese 628A and they aimed to be a matchmaker.
We were called into our final briefing from Earth after dinner. Cryogenic suspension was dismissed out of hand, and they didn’t think a nuclear explosion would destroy the NHIL. Therefore, we were ordered to merge with the NHIL. Earth was lost, but at least this way something of humanity might still survive.
Our NPC staffer quickly modelled the larp’s desired behaviour, saying he hated the decision but would abide by it, and asked us to meet in K1 for our merger with the NHIL in a couple of hours. Lots of people shouted that they’d never merge. Everyone gradually drifted away, meeting with their teams one final time.
I remained, mordantly chatting with a friend that this was the best outcome we could have hoped for. I wasn’t planning to seek out my Romeo teammates, thinking a Hollywood ending didn’t make sense for Bex, but as we got up to leave, we spotted them right at the top of the auditorium. I decided to join them, curious what they made of our orders.
Just a few hours earlier, Romeo were arguing vehemently about the merger, but the finality of Earth’s decision seemed to have crystallised something in the doubters. We were explorers, so why not continue exploring the stars? Better for humanity’s last mission to make something new rather than simply die, forgotten. I didn’t say it out loud, but I chose to reconcile with them. What more could I want than friends who could face the unknown without fear? For the last thirty hours I’d felt a bit distant from my character, but now, in an empty auditorium at the end of the world, Eclipse finally seemed astonishingly real.
We decided to record a group video diary on one of our tablets for our descendants. This time, I joked, we’d get everyone in. Just one person left afterwards, unwilling to merge. I later heard she committed suicide by overdose with a few other holdouts in the focus rooms. Other explorers walked out into the forest on a final expedition.
In K1, we assembled for the grand finale. Our unnamed narrator described the bodily feeling of merging. Inevitably, it was a little underwhelming because the moment had been built up so much, but it’s hard to know what could’ve worked here given Eclipse’s limited budget. What came after was the perfect capstone, though. A hidden projector flickered to life, displaying a montage of players’ departure logs recorded weeks earlier, describing their hopes for the mission. I couldn’t imagine a better transition back to reality.
Post-Game
The moment the outro music began, everyone started hugging each other. For practically the first time in three days, we could talk about what had happened to our characters.
The lounge was converted into a bar selling real alcohol to support future Chaos League larps. Payment was done on trust – I wrote down my drinks and got an invoice a few days later.
The afterparty is a beloved staple of larps. Organisers rarely make money so they need to find motivation elsewhere, and being thanked by grateful players isn’t bad at all. One member of Romeo asked me whether I was genuinely annoyed by being left out of the photo. Another praised how I made our final briefing more exciting (“they were getting a bit boring”), while the teammate I argued with enjoyed that I pushed back. Everyone joked about acting differently whenever they saw a photographer.
The coach arrived at 1:30am. I left for the airport the next morning, missing the two-hour debrief. I asked Alessandro Giovannucci, co-founder of Chaos League, how it went. Here’s my summary of his notes:
We started with some de-roleing activities to gradually get out of character: structured conversations to make sense of the experience and socialise what happened in the game; visualisation exercises (the character walking away, etc.); and writing down one’s experience on a piece of paper to make it “external” and thus understand it better.
Next, discussions in groups of three. Prompts included: “Who did you play with that touched you deeply? What was the most intense scene in the larp? Did you feel something you had never felt before? What was something you liked about your character you want to carry on with you?”
Finally, free time for unstructured discussions to progressively descend before leaving the venue.
Some Notes on Gameplay…
Larp is deeply personal. Not just in terms of taste, but in the simple fact that your experience will vary greatly depending on your character and relationships and what you put into the game. Some think a player reviewing a larp is as nonsensical as a violinist reviewing their orchestra – larpers aren’t consuming media but co-creating it as they watch it.
For that reason alone, I want to be careful in drawing broad conclusions about Eclipse, but also because Giovannucci has thoughts about critique in larp I fear I will not live up (PDF, p281). While I’ve read an awful lot about larp, this was my first multi-day experience, so I have little to compare it to. I had to lean on experienced larpers to get more context for these notes.
Eclipse’s gameplay is avowedly idiot-proof. Its team-based structure means that if one player doesn’t contribute, the game and plot as a whole can continue. Apparently this is very different to Odysseus, where individual players failing to do their jobs can cause real problems for others. Someone even suggested to me that Eclipse felt more like an immersive experience than a larp.
Photo by Chiara Cappiello
This is very much intended by Eclipse, whose larp guide cites redundancy as a key design principle, and yet is contradicted elsewhere by the suggestion that “every character will have one or more duties to carry out, all of which will have a meaningful impact on the mission’s survival and outcome.” I was so carried away by the story and setting and relationships that, outside of my problems with explorer gameplay, I didn’t notice this lack of agency, but when I compare it to other larps I’ve played, the contrast is clear. During Seaside Prison, a larp set in a fictional occupied Finland, I played a student. Nominally, I had very little agency, but depending on the letters I wrote and decisions I made, I affected everyone’s fate.
Arguably, the same was true in Eclipse, at least in terms of characters’ personal lives. I’m sure the wedding in the first run of the game was very significant for everyone involved. However, our personal lives in Eclipse were essentially firewalled from the wider plot, which didn’t care whether anyone got married. Reporting to Yggdrasil was the only way for players to affect the outcome, and because decisions were aggregated from 150 players, individual agency felt weak. Had the ending not required every player to have the same outcome, something that only makes sense in a quasi-military setting where characters can be ordered to do things, decisions made in character’s personal lives – like marriages – would have had a greater lasting significance.
Is this bad design? Not if you want a larp that prioritises forward narrative momentum and has a collective ending, nor if you place more value on the journey rather than the destination.
…and Story
Chaos League cites Arrival and Interstellar as key inspirations, but Eclipse reminded me most strongly of Stanislaw Lem’s science fiction, particularly Fiasco, The Invincible, and Solaris. Lem was Polish, and actually lived in Krakow for a while, not far from Alvernia Planet. According to Wikipedia:
Lem’s science fiction works explore philosophical themes through speculations on technology, the nature of intelligence, the impossibility of communication with and understanding of alien intelligence, despair about human limitations, and humanity’s place in the universe.
Eclipse’s spectacular setting, costumes, and technology got me in the right frame of mind for a science fiction experience, but it was the larp’s gameplay, social organisation and, most of all, storytelling that truly evoked Lem’s core themes. We could only guess what the NHIL really wanted and the constant arguments within the base certainly drove me to despair. The themes of nuclear annihilation and genocide are as depressingly topical today as it was in Lem’s main period during the mid-20th century, too. Interestingly, genocide was also the focus in Odysseus. It is a little disquieting that the two blockbuster sci-fi larps in recent years both essentially force players into a moral choice between survival and extermination.
Photo by Chiara Cappiello
But Eclipse is not Stanislaw Lem. There was a third outcome, one that presented transformation – a leap into the unknown – as a hopeful, beautiful act. It was not conservative or fearful or nostalgic, and for that, it’s something I will always treasure.
Epilogue
Eclipse’s players weren’t professional actors reading from a script, but weeks later I can still remember conversations vividly. It still amazes me that it works, yet, for seasoned players it’s just another larp.
Some larpers are waiting for the moment when the mainstream will take them seriously. In truth, there’s barely any mainstream left, just bigger and smaller influencers and interest groups that occasionally coalesce into moments of monoculture. Larp may be incompatible with traditional media and arts coverage that’s obsessed with scale and convenience and is terrified of participation, but it’s very compatible with the move away from massive algorithmically-driven online communities to smaller ones that value embodied interaction.
In many ways, larp isn’t accessible. You need to participate in hours of workshops. You have to commit to the premise earnestly. Big events are few and far between, and surprisingly hard to find. If you want them to exist, you have to help build them yourselves, and then co-create them in the moment. On paper, larps are the same kind of frictionless, transactional liminoid experience as immersive theatre or theme parks or escape rooms, but in practice they require and reward a level of commitment that looks much more like genuinely liminal rituals – a ritual of rituals, even.
At the afterparty, I remarked to Giovannucci that Eclipse’s production values rivalled those of multimillion dollar immersive experience. He didn’t seem at all surprised. Volunteers might not be as skilled as the very best professionals, but if they’re doing something they love they can give much more of their time than the latter, whom even well-funded companies can barely afford. And to think that fewer than a thousand people might ever see Eclipse.
Bex’s personalised New Era pendant
One of those players left a New Era pendant by every locker. I didn’t check mine until someone said that each had its own personalised message. Other players wrote and ran a three-part TTRPG epilogue on Discord. Nordic-style larp only survives if people have such a good time they come back with their friends and eventually become creators themselves, so there’s little room for gatekeeping. Never-ending “campaign” larps can reward players with character advancement across years and decades, but since each Nordic larp starts from scratch, players can feel more like equals – not to mention it opens the possibility for stories with actual endings.
The demands of larp raise fears that it’s impossible to write about them. Doesn’t reflecting on them in the moment, taking notes as I did, de-immerse you? Are you really participating if you’re observing what you’re doing all the time? It’s an odd argument. Movie and video game critics manage it just fine. Our lives are a constant act, it’s just that in larp the act is more transparent and reciprocal. If anything, larp trains us to observe ourselves better.
Lately, digital distractions have become society’s bête noire. Conservatives blame them for a drop in sociality, declining birth rates and, by implication, the end of “western civilisation”. Other than returning to religion or banning technology, they have no solution.
I know a fair bit about digital distractions myself. I spent 45 minutes a day solving crosswords and puzzles on Puzzmo for 556 days in a row. There are far worse things to do with one’s time, but I don’t mind saying it went beyond a habit to being an addiction. I maintained my streak despite travelling all over the world on holiday and for work. I played while I was jetlagged, while I was ill, while I was with friends and family.
Eclipse broke my streak. I easily could’ve stepped outside during the larp to play one or two puzzles at a time, but… I didn’t want to. There was something more meaningful to do.
Larp can be so consuming it ejects you from your normal relationship with reality. It looks scary from the outside but even at three days, it’s only a short moment in our lives. During that moment, we had the opportunity to shift angle. Eclipse was like a simulated near-death experience, an attempt to convince players they were on the brink of unimaginable transformation.
A month on, life is mostly back to normal. I’m doing the same work and exercise and reading I did before. But I still haven’t touched Puzzmo once.
Me in my Explorer jumpsuit
Thanks to Alex Macmillan, Alessandro Giovannucci, Chaos League, and the entire crew of Eclipse Run #2 for their contributions to this essay.
All photos by Chiara Cappiello are from Run #1, while all other uncredited photos are by me from Run #2.
Cover image: The Eclipse site, photo by Chaos League
Editorial note: This article was originally published in the Knutepunkt 2025 book Anatomy of Larp Thoughts, a breathing corpus. It has been reprinted from there with the editors’ and authors’ permission. It has not been edited by Nordiclarp.org.
The Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser, popularly known as the “Star Wars hotel”, was a live action experience in Walt Disney World, Florida. Over the course of 40 hours, hundreds of guests (Disney’s term for visitors or players) picked sides between the heroic Resistance and the evil First Order, taking on missions from spies, smugglers, and soldiers. Basically, it’s a romantic drama – Casablanca in space.
The Starcruiser opened to great fanfare in March 2022 as one of the most ambitious permanent “immersive” experiences ever made. Initial reviews were generally positive, but coverage was dominated by its price – as much as $6000 for a cabin holding up to four or five people, far more than traditional cruises or theme park stays. Many people couldn’t understand how it could justify such a high price. Eighteen months later, the Starcruiser closed for reasons that are still not fully known. In 2024, after the closure, YouTuber Jenny Nicholson described her poor experience in a four hour video((Jenny Nicholson, “The Spectacular Failure of the Star Wars Hotel,” May 19, 2024, Jenny Nicholson, YouTube, 4:05:38, https://youtu.be/T0CpOYZZZW4.)) that attracted over ten million views. The video and the closure established a widespread narrative of the Starcruiser as a cynical, unmitigated disaster.
When I learned of the Starcruiser’s impending closure, I rushed to book a ticket for one of the final “sailings” in the summer of 2023. As an augmented reality and alternate reality game designer, I was keen to see it with my own eyes. Based on that visit and my subsequent research, I believe the Starcruiser is more interesting than a simple folly. It has many parallels to larps – especially high price, deeply immersive 360º((Johanna Koljonen, “eye-witness to the illusion: an essay on the impossibility of 360° role-playing,” in Lifelike (Knudepunkt 2007), ed. Jesper Donnis, Morten Gade, Line Thorup (Knudepunkt 2007, 2007), 175.)) blockbuster larps such as Odysseus (inspired by Battlestar Galactica), Conscience (Westworld), and Eclipse (Arrival/Interstellar) – with many innovative and impressive aspects that are worth studying. At the same time, its confusing marketing raised unrealistic expectations and exacerbated flaws like poor onboarding.
This article explores the contrasts between the Starcruiser and larps, such as its lack of workshops and training; highly realistic player tasks; spaces for relaxation and guest-to-guest interaction; app-based NPC interactions; and its profit-based commercial nature. This will include observations of the experience, its technical achievements, and my encounters with other players. Finally, it will explore the Starcruiser’s financials, confusing marketing, and the circumstances surrounding its closure. The Starcruiser represents a harbinger of the future for all blockbuster larps, whether made by volunteers or billion dollar corporations.
Disney has long experimented with role playing. Early Disneyland rides were designed from the perspective of protagonists, meaning guests on the Snow White attraction or Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride saw neither Snow White nor Mr. Toad – they were the characters.((Leslie Iwerks, “Chapter 2: The Happiest Place on Earth,” in The Imagineering Story: The Official Biography of Walt Disney Imagineering (Disney Editions, 2022).)) This was later changed due to the confusion it caused, but the interest in role play remained. The cancelled Disney’s America theme park, intended to open in 1998, would have included Civil War battle re-enactments;((Iwerks, “Chapter 16: The Battle of Disney’s America,” The Imagineering Story.)) Bob Weis, Senior Vice President, said, “We want to make you a Civil War soldier. We want to make you feel what it was like to be a slave or what it was like to escape through the Underground Railroad,” arguing the park couldn’t present a rose-tinted view of America.
Less controversially, guests would later be chosen to play roles in a re-enactment of Beauty and the Beast, and new Star Wars and Marvel attractions in the parks have emphasised making guests “part of the stories being told, to give them a role other than passive view”, such as using web slingers to fight alongside Spider-Man. These examples afford comparatively little agency to guests, but the direction of travel is clear.
Along with researching escape rooms and immersive theatre, senior Disney Imagineers – the workers responsible for the company’s theme parks and attractions – have been playing Nordic Larp for years. A number of Imagineers were on the Monitor Celestra in 2013, and Sara Thacher, a senior Imagineer who worked on the Starcruiser, attended the College of Wizardry twice. “A big ‘Aha!’ moment for me there was just being in a castle, in a wizard robe, having a cup of tea, and having this alibi, this reason to be there,” she told The New Yorker.((Neima Jahromi, “LARPing Goes to Disney World,” New Yorker, May 23, 2022, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/05/30/larping-goes-to-disney-world.)) In the Starcruiser, guests have a full schedule of classes and activities and optional quests, but the Sublight Lounge bar also provides an alibi to relax with a card game of Sabacc.
Playing Sabacc in the Sublight lounge bar, photo by Adrian Hon
These explicit links make it possible to view the Starcruiser through the lens of larp. Given the Starcruiser’s use of schedules and NPCs and its lack of boffer-style combat, the best parallel may be Eastern European larp like the College of Wizardry. Scott Trowbridge, another senior Imagineer, noted that some larps “can be intense experiences, and that is probably not what we want to offer to our mainstream audience,” indicating a reluctance to give players the intense emotional experiences that often characterise Nordic larp.
The biggest argument against the Starcruiser being a larp, let alone a Nordic Larp, is that it provides precisely zero training or workshops for guests in how to role play. Guests are not given or suggested characters or character archetypes to play; instead, they arrive on the Starcruiser – a cruise ship for interstellar tourists – as naive passengers from Earth, playing themselves, with their own alibi to ask basic questions about the Star Wars universe. Some guests did create their own characters and backstory, and performers would play along, within reason: claiming to be Darth Vader wouldn’t work.
Rather than train guests how to participate, I’ve been told that the Starcruiser’s professional “NPC” performers were trained to “meet people where they are”, which is to say, interact with guests and encourage them to participate to the extent they appear comfortable to do so, whether simply through eye contact or by dialogue. No doubt there are financial and practical reasons behind this, too: workshops were not automatically welcomed in Nordic Larp and it’s safe to assume the Starcruiser’s guests would be similarly sceptical toward a multi-hour introductory workshop.
During my visit to the Starcruiser in July 2023, I noticed two problems with the zero-training philosophy. The first was that for some guests, “where they are” was in their cabin, away from any opportunity for anyone to engage them. The second was that despite the impressive number of performers, there were too few to engage every guest in the first few hours.
While loitering in the lobby shortly after boarding on the first day, I saw two young guests watching as others talked to a First Order performer. They were wearing impressive, custom-made costumes and were clearly keen to participate, but didn’t know how. Even a brief workshop might have given them the confidence, but their approach to the dark side would have to wait.
Given how its designers evidently steered away from Nordic Larp’s fundamental tenets, it’s wrong to view the Starcruiser as a literal larp. Rather, it’s better to view it as a hybrid form, at the far end of larp, not merely at the far (less involved) end of role playing, but also at the far end of physical scale and technological complexity. No imagination was necessary on the Starcruiser: the engineering bay was packed with ducts and pipes and cables to be fixed, the bridge bordered by a vast panoramic view of space, and the Sublight Lounge’s bar atmosphere was suffused in the perfect combination of luxury and intrigue. All views of outer space on the bridge and through cabin “portholes” were synchronised in real time. In formal terms, every effort was made to make appearances and tasks indexical((Jaakko Stenros, Eleanor Saitta, Markus Montola, “The General Problem of Indexicality in Larp Design,” in Liminal Encounters: Evolving Discourse in Nordic and Nordic Inspired Larp, ed. Kaisa Kangas, Jonne Arjoranta, Ruska Kevätkoski (Ropecon ry, 2024), 64.)) rather than iconic or symbolic.
The Starcruiser was presented to guests as an interstellar luxury cruise. The idea of a cruise felt discordant with how the Star Wars universe has been popularly depicted – we don’t see Luke Skywalker embark on a cruise, but we do see Harry Potter going to classes in Hogwarts – but it provided a reason to structure guests’ time like a real cruise; one hour might be dedicated to lightsaber training, and another to Sabacc lessons. This is not unusual amongst Nordic Larp; Odysseus has been described as a “clockwork larp”, running on a strict schedule of hyperspace jumps, and the College of Wizardry and various magic schools have scheduled classes. The Content Larp Manifesto((“Content larp manifesto”, accessed December 19, 2024, https://manifest.larpy.cz/en/)) also describes Czech larps (e.g. Legion)((“Legion: Siberian Story – LARP by Rolling,” accessed December 19, 2024, https://legion.rolling.cz.)) that use timed and pre-written scenes in the service of dramatic stories. Indeed, a planned and predictable experience is what some larpers desire,((Anni Tolvanen, “A Full House Trumps a Dance Card,” lecture, September 9, 2022, posted September 11, 2022, by Nordic Larp Talks, YouTube, 24:01, https://youtu.be/SPWCXf_LrSs.)) perhaps at the cost of openness and serendipity.
Performer movements were, if anything, even more tightly scheduled. Earpieces conveyed timing cues so they knew when to move on for an “accidental” confrontation in a hallway. In retrospect, performers’ ability to improvise dialogue with guests to fill the precise amount of time before their next move was remarkable.
Where the Starcruiser appears to depart from Nordic Larp is that guests were incapable of influencing the major beats and ultimate outcome of the story. No matter what guests did, there was always a confrontation between the ship’s captain and a First Order officer during dinner. Chewbacca always escaped from confinement, and Rey always made it on board – and yet guests felt crucial to the story because we were actively relaying secret messages and distracting Stormtroopers.
Caught up in the excitement, it was easy to forget our lack of agency to dramatically change events. This was not surprising given the source material’s spectacular nature. Odysseus’ play instructions also elevated discipline over agency: the larp was “designed to be a tunnel not a sandbox… this is not a game to be hacked, won or overachieved.” However, the absence of meaningful deliberation was most notable during the conclusion, which reminded everyone that in the final analysis, the Star Wars universe remains dominated by superpowered Force users – in this case, Rey and Kylo Ren battling on a balcony – rather than one where passengers gets a vote.
Talking to other guests wasn’t a necessary part of the Starcruiser experience. It was encouraged, but the endless scheduled activities and optional quests (see below) meant it was less of a priority in terms of creating entertainment and drama. I quickly abandoned my attempts at role playing a morally ambiguous scientist after a couple of conversations went nowhere. However, NPC performers worked hard to engage guests. A lovelorn musician who needed relationship advice would ask children for help writing songs, while a Han Solo-esque scoundrel NPC recounted his exploits to guests in the bar. Some guests played along, talking about their own exploits or poking holes in his stories. One guest demonstrated his homemade droid collection in the lobby. Many had become friends on previous voyages or via forums, which inevitably felt a touch exclusionary, but their costuming and role playing-adjacent attitude helped enrich the Starcruiser’s atmosphere.
None of these activities “mattered” in terms of changing the plot or ultimate fate of characters, but they were enjoyable and gave meaning to guests’ own stories. It was as if the sheer quantity of performers and length of the experience partly made up for the lack of workshops – most guests who didn’t know how to interact at the beginning could learn by watching, their initial discomfort long forgotten by the end. Since performers were trained to memorise guests’ names, it was common to be asked for an update on your activities by Resistance or First Order agents while on your way to dinner.
What many accounts fail to convey is how much of the Starcruiser experience was driven digitally. Every guest had access to a Datapad smartphone app with which they could talk to NPCs – the very same NPCs walking around the ship. In classic video game RPG fashion, guests could respond to messages with 1-3 prewritten options of varying levels of curiosity and enthusiasm. More unusually, not only could you lie to NPCs by giving them incorrect information, you could outright betray them.
Lt. Croy, flanked by stormtroopers, photo by Adrian Hon
On my first mission for Lt. Croy, a First Order officer, I was tasked with hacking into a physical console to find the ship’s logs. I discovered the Starcruiser had diverted its itinerary on previous cruises to supply Resistance bases with weapons; I was able to copy the logs to my Datapad, but I could have deleted or overwritten them. Because I am a boring role player, I sent the logs to Croy, but I don’t doubt that betraying him would’ve had lasting consequences through the branching story, perhaps introducing me to Resistance members.
As more NPCs introduced themselves on the Datapad, barely a moment passed between invitations to sabotage the ship’s systems, hack the computers, search for contraband, or smuggle on board an agent – all of which involved physically walking to the engineering bay or cargo hold to connecting wires and scan codes, with NPCs instantly “knowing” when I’d completed my task. It was deeply impressive technology that worked flawlessly for me, a gold-plated version of the busywork seen in other sci-fi blockbuster larps like Odysseus’ RFID-powered HANSCA((James Bloodworth, “Odysseus 2024 / A Retrospective,” Critical Path, September 2, 2024, https://criticalpathsite.wordpress.com/2024/09/02/odysseus-2024-a-retrospective/.)) smartphone app. Another digital experience was delivered by the video comm link in my cabin, where droids would periodically call asking for help to aid or stymie the resistance. This worked wholly via voice recognition and was surprisingly funny. It goes without saying that all of these tasks and experiences were fundamentally “single player”, in the sense that co-operating with other guests was unnecessary – a marked difference to Odysseus.
A highly indexical puzzle in the engineering bay, photo by Adrian Hon
The technical complexity of the Starcruiser is likely the reason why some guests suffered major issues around the launch period in early 2022 wherein their Datapad didn’t steer them toward interesting activities. Other accounts suggest these problems were largely fixed within weeks or months, but the damage had been done: critics((Charlie Hall, “Disney’s Star Wars hotel Galactic Starcruiser was torpedoed by bad app design,” Polygon, May 28, 2024, https://www.polygon.com/star-wars/24166456/disney-star-wars-hotel-video-galactic-starcruiser-jenny-nicholson-bad-app.)) then and now incorrectly believed the technical issues were permanent, like a rollercoaster whose tracks couldn’t be moved rather than a video game that could be updated over time.
The cost of tickets to the Starcruiser also fuelled the notion that it was a cynical ploy to rip off guests. Depending on the timing of a visit, it was possible to spend as much as $6000 (€5500) for single person staying in their own cabin – an astronomical amount compared to other attractions. However, if four people shared a cabin, as is common in larps and on cruises, each person might only $1200 (€1100). There is no way to make €1100 sound cheap, but it’s comparable to the cost of blockbuster larps; my ticket to Eclipse this year will cost €875 (including a shared room in a 3 star hotel). The fact that I met so many repeat visitors, most of whom were staying three or four to a cabin, indicated they felt it was good value. Caro Murphy, Immersive Experience Director for the Starcruiser, revealed((Caro Murphy, “Reacting to a reaction,” Caro Murphy, May 30, 2024, https://www.polygon.com/star-wars/24166456/disney-star-wars-hotel-video-galactic-starcruiser-jenny-nicholson-bad-app.)) it achieved a 91% guest satisfaction score, supposedly the highest rating in the history of any Disney attraction. Starcruiser fans have organised conventions,((“Halcy-Con | A 2-Day Galactic Starcruiser Superfans Event,” Halcy-Con, archived September 12, 2024, https://web.archive.org/web/20240912154545/https://halcy-con.com/.)) created podcasts, and made movies.
The closure of the Starcruiser may seem to contradict this argument, or at least suggest it was not popular or profitable enough. It’s too soon to know Disney’s real reasons, but Kathryn Yu has noted that most analyses fail to take into account wider corporate circumstances. In 2023, Disney faced an activist shareholder battle; in a bid to raise free cash, returning CEO Bob Iger promised to cut $5.5 billion in costs, quickly selling off TV shows and eliminating 7000 jobs.((“Disney Completes 7,000 Job Cuts,” Variety, May 31, 2023, https://variety.com/2023/tv/news/disney-layoffs-end-7000-1235629809/.)) Closing the Starcruiser effectively unlocked hundreds of millions of dollars via accelerated depreciation,((Suzanne Rowan Kelleher, “The High-Flying Death Of Disney’s Star Wars Hotel,” Forbes, May 28, 2023, https://www.forbes.com/sites/suzannerowankelleher/2023/05/28/why-disney-closed-star-wars-hotel-galactic-starcruiser/.)) a move that may have been hastened by the imminent phasing out of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act’s “bonus depreciation”.
Regardless, it’s undeniable that the Starcruiser had an uneven launch and was poorly understood. I can’t help but think the Starcruiser would have been more successful, or at least made more sense as an expensive multi-day attraction, had the setup been that guests were secret agents merely pretending to be guests on an interstellar cruise. As much as the conceit of being naive cruise passengers provided structure and alibi in the absence of a workshop, it also made the entire experience appear deeply boring from the outside – a sample “itinerary”((Shannen Ace, “Disney Releases Sample 3-Day Itinerary of Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser Hotel Experience,” WDW News Today, August 4, 2021, https://wdwnt.com/2021/08/disney-releases-sample-itinerary-for-star-wars-galactic-starcruiser-experience/.)) revealed in 2021 suggested that these opportunities to sabotage the ship would be few and far between, rather than the bulk of the experience. It’s tantamount to marketing malpractice that these more adventurous aspects were omitted in favour of a focus on “luxury” – misleading, since the Starcruiser’s cabins and amenities were not luxurious in a conventional sense.
Disney’s position at the top of the entertainment world comes with increased expectations and a lack of willingness for customers to accept problems. Larps, as largely co-created, volunteer-run, non-profit experiences with little to no marketing budgets, attract players who are more experienced and tolerant of problems, creating a reservoir of goodwill understandably absent for a multi-billion dollar corporation. Larp promotion also tends to be more transparent about the details of player experience, helping avoid problems. This is no doubt borne out of decades of experience throughout the larp community – something the Starcruiser’s marketers and customers lacked.
Goodwill is essential with larp-like experiences becoming as technically complex as video games – and growing the chances for things to go catastrophically wrong. Game developers have adapted by instituting lengthy beta testing and “early access” periods. A similar strategy may have helped the Starcruiser’s launch; failing that, proactively offering full refunds for major technical issues would have restored some goodwill. Other blockbuster larps could manage technical risk by pooling resources on open source projects, as Odysseus did with the open source EmptyEpsilon “bridge simulator” game engine. This was probably not an option for Disney given the highly specific needs of a Star Wars-based experience and their desire to maintain a technical advantage over competitors.
An undercover agent beside Chewbacca, photo by Adrian Hon
The Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser was an admirable foray into creating a larp-like experience for mass audiences on a gargantuan scale. It was not perfect, but it was far from a disaster.
One can imagine a different outcome. If the Starcruiser had been marketed better and had launched with more robust technology, it could have attracted more guests; if Disney hadn’t been subject to a shareholder battle, there would have been less incentive to close it. The Starcruiser might be expanding around the world, employing hundreds of people to entertain hundreds of thousands of guests per year. It almost got there. Regardless, the Starcruiser highlights a growing appetite for larp, and a growing willingness to pay for blockbuster experiences. Some of its fans have moved on to larping as a way to continue their hobby.
It’s impossible to say when Disney or other theme parks will create another blockbuster larp-like experience given the negative sentiment now surrounding the Starcruiser. But this demonstrates the strength of the decentralised, non-profit, volunteer-run international larp community – it can withstand failures and misunderstandings, learn from them, and keep going.
This article is republished from the Knutepunkt 2025 book. Please cite it as:
Hon, Adrian. 2025. “Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser – The Blockbuster to End All Blockbusters.” In Anatomy of Larp Thoughts, a breathing corpus: Knutepunkt Conference 2025. Oslo. Fantasiforbundet.
Cover image: The bridge of the Starcruiser, photo by Adrian Hon
How to initiate and coordinate a community publication on your own
Introduction
This chapter summarises the tools and lessons learned from working on the peer-edited Knutepunkt Conference Book ’25 Anatomy of Larp Thoughts: A Breathing Corpus. For this 500-page book, 33 chapters were edited, laid out and printed thanks to the combined efforts of 67 individual contributors. There was no harmonization process between editors, authors, and no rejection based on content or skills.
Most years, the Knutepunkt/Solmukohta Nordic larp event releases one or more books in connection to the conference. For the 2025 Knutepunkt book, we needed to rethink the publication process, as no one had enough availability or mana to fully carry out such a demanding project. In line with the wishes of the general Knutepunkt conference organising team, this experience forms the basis for displacing responsibility from a tight team of volunteers to the wider community. Although successful, this first iteration had its shortcomings, and this document is intended to help future teams set up and refine their community-edited publications.
By sharing our tools, I wish to advocate for balance, collaboration and transparency in that collective process, to prevent volunteer burnout but also to paint a less mediated picture of our community’s voice.
In this document, you will find the core tools needed to start a peer-editing process on your own: from recruitment and coordination to editorial expectations and means of communication. It is based on my own conclusions, but also on previous KP/SK book documentation and implicit knowledge, and on countless hours of discussion with the fantastically knowledgeable and skilled Anne Serup Grove, who has worked on five different KP/SK books and was graphics and print coordinator for the KP Book ’25.
An overview of the process
To print or not to print
If you want your publication to be printed and sent to an event (such as the Knutepunkt conference), your final file needs to be ready about 1.5 months in advance.((This can be adjusted according to cover type and delivery times.)) The rest of your deadlines should therefore be worked backwards from this final red line.
If you want to give your editorial contributors at least 6 months to write and edit, and your graphic contributors 1 month to layout, this means that a comfortable timeframe would be to start about 9 months in advance.(( Longer writing times can be particularly suited to volunteer publications, where most contributors juggle their chapter with unrelated full-time activities.))
Anatomy of Larp Thoughts: A Breathing Corpus — chapter illustration. Yanina Zaichanka (illustrations), Kirsten van Werven (edits), and Maren Wolf and Anne Serup Grove (layout design)
When the end goal is a digital publication, deadlines and editorial expectations can be much more flexible. Removing all tasks related to online payment, printing and postage also removes a lot of the extra work that piles up at the end of the process.
Here is a potential progression:
Send-out role descriptions and enrolling form / Get in touch with printers
This is the recruitment phase, where you get an overview of who is interested in getting involved and in what capacity. You will also receive pitches and get a first (raw and wrong) idea of the topics, tonality and length of the publication.
If someone volunteers to set up the printing during your recruitment phase, they should start immediately: contacting printers, comparing prices to find the best deals, and setting budgets based on number of pages, colour options, paper quality and postage.
Ideally, and this is something we did not achieve for the KP Book ’25, this recruitment phase should also clarify the general timeline so that volunteers are aware of the length and rhythm of their commitment.
Forming editorial groups and setting-up your work platform
Based on the answers to the enrolling form, the editorial coordinators create editorial groups for each chapter and set up a digital platform for the collective work. For the KP Book ’25, we used a Discord server. Star Hope Percival volunteered to be our Discord wizard and made it infinitely more readable and inviting, which is extremely important when such a large group needs to work with it.
Knutepunkt book teams often decide that authors and artists retain all copyrights to their contributions, with an informal exclusivity right for the KP publication until it is launched. If you wish to rethink copyrights/Creative Commons, this is probably the time to do it.
When you start, you should provide a style guide that goes beyond the reference style to include details such as line spacing and headline levels (and any other relevant formatting) – this will help the graphics team enormously, and informing them before the first draft is written will make it much easier for them to incorporate it from the outset.
Writing draft 1, starting graphic research, setting-up a tracking sheet
Unless you deliberately want contributors to write only short chapters, you will probably need to allow at least 2 months for this first phase. During this time you should send out editorial guidelines to your contributors, especially if you have less experienced writers. The graphics team can also have a meeting and start playing with ideas for the layout and setting up their own process.
Similarly, the book coordinators can meet and set up a tracking sheet. Here is a linked template for a tracking sheet.
Deadline draft 1 and graphic coordination
Authors send their first draft to their editorial group according to the expectations listed in the guidelines. The graphics team has an online meeting to discuss which tasks they would like to take on.
Deadline reviews on draft 1
The editors and reviewers send their comments back to the authors. At this point, authors should flag inactive members of the editorial group to the coordinators, who will then contact them to ensure that they are still on board, or alternatively, to find replacements.
Writing draft 2 and developing the layout
About a third of the way through the general timeline, the authors start working on a second draft. During this time, the graphics team works with the editorial coordinators to define a style that fits the emerging theme of the publication.
Deadline draft 2
Authors send a second draft to their editorial group. This should also be at least two months later, especially if there is a winter break in the middle. This is when most of the dropouts occur, and when you can start to crystallise the identity of the book and get an idea of its length. This is also a good time for authors and editors to seek additional help with reviewing or editing, if needed.
Deadline reviews on draft 2, recruiting more proofreaders
Editors send their final edits to the authors. This is a good time to check with the proofreaders who have responded to the call for contributors to see if they still have the time and energy to work on the articles, and in any case to send out an extra call to recruit more.
Setting-up pre-orders
If the book is to be printed, pre-ordering well in advance will help to ensure that copies are delivered to the event and that free copies are available to the contributors. Traditionally, Knutepunkt in Norway offers a copy to each contributor and also to the Nordic National Libraries.
Final draft deadline, table of contents and foreword deadline
Authors finalise their chapter and bibliography. The editorial coordinators write the preface and the table of contents.
Proofreading, layout, credits
Proofreaders review the chapters and send them to layout staff. Editorial and graphics coordinators work on the credits and any additional information (ISBN number, publisher’s address, acknowledgements, copyrights, etc.).
Final layout and graphic revisions
The graphics team compiles, refines and checks all the graphic elements and layout of the entire publication, including ensuring that the table of contents matches the actual page numbers.
Send to print and cross your fingers
Print responsibles follow up with printers, including shipping and invoicing. There may also be work involved in setting up print-on-demand, uploading PDFs, working with online platforms, etc.
Note: There are clear advantages to a digital-only publication. It reduces the workload for graphic designers, removes the need for a print manager, removes any budgeting or online sales work, is more environmentally friendly and allows for more flexible deadlines and more time for writing or creative content. If the organisation’s priority is to have a smooth process and focus on the quality of the content and the convenience of the schedule, I would recommend opting for a digital publication.
That being said, Anne Serup Grove writes in the foreword of the KP book ’25:
“Printing a book is important. It solidifies the huge amount of intellectual work they’ve put into it. You can feel it — its weight, its format. You can interact with it differently than you can with a digital publication.”
Anatomy of Larp Thoughts: A Breathing Corpus – the finished book. Yanina Zaichanka (illustrations) and Kirsten van Werven (edits)
In 2025, the physical copies of the book were again happily handed over, sniffed and perhaps even tasted, but I would recommend further digital-only explorations.
Recruiting for peer-editing: role descriptions & casting
The basis of this peer-editing process is that all authors are required to take on the role of editor or reviewer as a condition of publication in the book. This requirement ensures a basic share of the general load, although it has its own drawbacks: it requires more work from authors, it doesn’t ensure the willingness to engage with someone else’s work that one might expect from someone who has signed up directly as an editor or reviewer, and it potentially leads to very heterogeneous collaborations. However, when presented as a necessary part of producing our publication and ensuring its quality and existence, the idea and task can be normalised beyond being an extra chore.
This basic peer-editing structure is then complemented by the participation of other non-author contributors, who sign up directly as editors and reviewers, choosing any number of papers they are willing to work on.
Each chapter is thus the responsibility of a core “editorial group” consisting of: the author(s), 1 editor, and 1-3 reviewers. Coordinators may be called in to help find substitutes, extra help, or to mediate, but the responsibility for the content rests with the editorial group.
Larp organisers are no strangers to creating groups from a long list of people with different interests, skills and energy levels, and peer editing can work in the same way. This process therefore borrows the same tools as casting in larp: role descriptions and casting form/casting.
Role descriptions
Role descriptions should allow contributors to understand the expectations around each role: what they should do, at which time of the process they should be available, on which platforms they are expected to communicate, etc.
These are some basic role description suggestions. Role descriptions should allow contributors to understand the expectations of each role: what they are expected to do, at what point in the process they should be available, on what platforms they are expected to communicate, etc.
These are some basic suggestions for role descriptions:
Author: An author writes a chapter or creates other content for the publication. An author may also be asked to edit two chapters or review four chapters based on their areas of interest/comfort/experience. Co-authors may also share these other tasks. They report editorial difficulties to the editorial coordinators.
Editor: An editor looks closely at an author’s contribution and makes suggestions to help them achieve clarity and coherence, sometimes providing assistance with style. They help authors to meet deadlines and report editorial difficulties to the editorial coordinators.
Reviewer: A reviewer is a secondary editor who goes through several chapters, highlighting potential problems and encouraging the development of interesting ideas without going into detail. They usually only review the first draft of the chapter, but may be recruited later in the process to provide fresh insights.
Proofreader: A proofreader looks for typos, language errors that compromise the integrity of the text, and flags up formatting/layout issues. They are only involved with the final draft.
Graphic Designer and Layout Helper: A graphic designer designs the layout and layouts the finished articles. A layout helper ensures that each article uses the chosen font/layout/bibliography style. They don’t have to be the same people but some overlap is normal. (Suggestion: at least 3 per journal)
Graphic artist: A graphic artist creates illustrations, textures, or image editing (Suggestion: 2-3 per book)
Print responsible: A print responsible researches printers, negotiates printing and shipping on behalf of the team, and oversees the overall process. (Suggestion: 1-2 per book)
Editorial coordinator: An editorial coordinator sets up the editorial groups (author-editor-reviewer, and later proofreader), communicates the guidelines and the general editorial process, and supports the editorial groups – especially when making difficult decisions. They write the table of contents and the preface. (Suggestion: 3 coordinators per book or 1 per ~10 chapters)
Graphics coordinator: A graphics coordinator sets up the graphics research process with the other graphics contributors. They supervise the general progress, deciding on layout, cover, possible illustrations, possible harmonisation of diagrams, etc. In the case of printing, they work with the editorial coordinator to set editorial deadlines and with the printer to decide on paper quality, format and other graphic constraints. (Suggestion: 1-2 coordinators per book)
In 2025 we ended up with this distribution: 36 authors, 21 editors, 43 reviewers, 15 proofreaders, 1 editorial coordinator (not enough), 1 graphic coordinator (not enough), 2 illustrators, 3 graphic designers, 2 print coordinators, 1 Discord wizard.
Although a few people (the coordinators and a few editors) were still overworked, balance seemed within reach.
Casting form, and casting in groups
The call for contributors is a form designed to gather the information needed to create editorial groups (a team of authors, editors and reviewers working together on a chapter).
It is therefore important to ask contributors to situate themselves in the editorial landscape: are they comfortable engaging with academic, artistic or personal pieces? How experienced are they in writing or editing? If they are authors, do they want an editor with a particular background to support them?
It may not be possible (or desirable) to create perfect editorial groups, but these questions will allow coordinators to balance the desires of some contributors and limit potentially destructive group frictions. Our community is heterogeneous, and while bringing different affinities together may be the most valuable option here, exposure to other perspectives is unlikely to be well received unless it comes from the author’s initiative.
One way to balance editorial groups could be to assign an editor from the desired background (academia, arts, humour, ecology, etc.) and reviewers with different perspectives. In particular, aiming for different cultural backgrounds to meet in editorial groups allows for a higher international readability, as niche cultural concepts are more likely to be spotted and pointed out. We learned in the process of the KP Book ’25 that this should be communicated clearly and upfront.
As a community practice, the creation of editorial groups is subject to the same constraints as the creation of social groups in a larp, especially in terms of forced proximity.
Before setting up the editorial groups, the coordinators can therefore send out the list of all volunteers, allowing contributors to indicate whether there are people they do not want to work with.
Anatomy of Larp Thoughts: A Breathing Corpus — chapter illustration. Yanina Zaichanka (illustrations), Kirsten van Werven (edits), and Maren Wolf and Anne Serup Grove (layout design)
Editorial guidelines and expectations
Style & content expectations
A peer-edited publication, where the responsibility rests primarily with the judgement of independent editorial groups, will by its very nature be disparate.
There is, however, a way to ensure a degree of editorial harmony or quality by having pre-established guidelines to which reference can be made.
These guidelines are the main authority that allows editors to set boundaries, ask for more effort or even step out of the general process. Detailed and progressive guidelines can also be a reassuring beacon for authors to follow and an instructive landmark for newer editors.
Therefore, I recommend setting clear expectations for each draft, which editorial groups can then readjust if they have the need and capacity to do so. As an example, these are the expectations set for the KP book ’25, some of which are inspired by previous KP book guidelines.
Drafts expectations
Editorial expectations of the KP ’25 book were phrased as follows:
What is expected of a first draft
The chapter should be close to its final length.
The chapter should cover most of the points necessary to its argument.
The chapter’s argument should be roughly understandable.
What is NOT expected from a 1st Draft
Style: The chapter does not need to be fluid or well phrased.
Transitions: Vague and rough transitions are to be expected.
References: Although it’s encouraged to start referencing/quoting early on, you do not need to have all your references, or have them sorted and formatted.
Potential illustrations: This can also wait.
What is expected of a second draft
The chapter should be in its final form. Meaning:
The argument should be understandable.
The style should allow your group to have a fluid reading of your piece.
The author should have corrected their chapter to the best of their abilities (typos, grammar, etc.). We understand that this varies greatly from person to person.
The references, quotes and bibliography should be formatted using Chicago style.
Possible illustrations should be collected, named (e.g. fig 1, fig 2) and accompanied by a short description (e.g. “Diagram of the overlap between larp and a normal family dinner”).
The chapter should be available as a Google document.
What is NOT expected from a second draft
That your chapter is up to academic standards.
That your group agrees with your argument.
That your group likes your style.
That there are no language mistakes/typos.
If the paper does not meet the progress expectations, editorial groups can (and should) decide to:
Ask for more help by posting on the editors’ and reviewers’ communication channels, ideally before the deadlines have passed.
Withdraw from publication: In this case, editors and reviewers are also asked to post a call for editors/reviewers on the general communication channel to find potential replacements. If no help or replacement can be found, the chapter will not be published.
Expectations and cuts
If you read the KP book ’25, you will see that the chapters vary in style, genre, length, clarity, etc. Some of them would probably not make the cut if it had been a curated publication, but their compilation is true to a community-edited process. The process described above resulted in several authors withdrawing their publications and some editors leaving their editorial groups. In total, 14 chapters were shelved.
This general process, involving group discussions, transparency and collaboration on other pieces, is already a great filter. Conversely, facing the troubles of trying to lift a piece we wouldn’t have chosen ourselves, of having to reach out for more reviewers and help, can challenge our prejudices and make us take a second look at what we otherwise have discarded. In this way, a couple of chapters have been rescued and then championed by initially uncertain editors.
An open platform for communication and collaboration
This collaborative process depends on creating an open platform that allows the community of contributors to discuss, meet, question and help each other.
We used Discord. Each category of contributor (authors, editors, reviewers, etc.) and each chapter had its own private channel.
A public channel called “Ask for more eyes” allowed authors and editors alike to seek extra help on their chapters, which was probably one of the most successful experiments of the whole process.
The public channel “Questions” allowed all contributors to clarify the process, sometimes expressing dissatisfaction or confusion. This allowed everyone to potentially provide answers (rather than just relying on the coordinators), but also to have more difficult discussions publicly, which increased the transparency of our collaborative process.
Discord server setup for Anatomy of Larp Thoughts: A Breathing Corpus. Screenshot by Nadja Lipsyc
Discord is overwhelming for many people, which was a barrier for some contributors who weren’t able to be active on their channels. However, it allowed the coordinators to have a very clear overview of the editorial groups, and the progress of different chapters, it allowed for compartmentalised storage of images and documents, and contributors knew exactly where to reach their editorial groups and discuss their work.
Final thoughts
The process around KP 2025 was imperfect, but the bumps we have encountered are easy to avoid. They include:
Either starting early or renouncing printing the book
Involving more coordinators
Writing more detailed and appealing “role descriptions” and guidelines
It is possible that we were lucky with our contributors’ reactivity and in recruiting 5 volunteers for the graphic team, which may not be realistic to expect every year, or might not be robust enough to shifting life circumstances. This process still needs a lot more reflection and tools to encourage autonomy and responsibility, especially in meeting deadlines without prompting, in reading and researching the information available, and in communicating drop-outs.
I hope that future teams will iterate on similar systems, and keep sharing their notes afterwards, towards more balanced, autonomous, manageable and transparent collective work. By further experimenting on peer-edition, we are training individuals in our community to take more initiative and better share the burden of volunteering.
Cover image: Anatomy of Larp Thoughts: A Breathing Corpus – the cover. Yanina Zaichanka (illustrations) and Kirsten van Werven (edits)
“We won’t stop the larp if it’s just an air raid.”
— Anna Posetselska, Ukranian larp designer and organizer
When war erupts, larps come to a halt. The same holds true for various other cultural activities. Society is in a state of suspension. Individuals are fixated on their phones, doomscrolling through the news and social media. Larpers stay connected, checking in on each other – has someone we know died, have the bombs struck a town where our friends or relatives reside?
However, in the subsequent weeks, months, or even years, larp returns, even if the war persists. This occurred in both Ukraine, grappling with the Russian invasion since February 2022, and in Palestine, where the recent war in Gaza started in October 2023. Ukrainian larp designer and organizer Anna Posetselska, along with Palestinian larp professional and designer Tamara Nassar, provide insights into what it is like to organise a larp during times of war.
Larping during wartime in Ukraine
One of Anna Posetselska’s players was a real-life battle medic. She brought her enormous medical kit to the larp in case the venue, a holiday village about 30 kilometers from Kyiv, would be hit by Russian bombs.
“The small places around Kyiv are rarely targeted,” Posetselska says. “We were prepared to move the larp if the situation became too dangerous.”
During play, there were air raids, but the game was not paused.
“We won’t stop the larp if it’s just an air raid,” Posetselska says.
“We experience air raids in Kyiv all the time; just last night, there were explosions. They are part of our everyday life now; we have grown accustomed to them, at least to some extent. We don’t rush to a shelter every time we hear an air raid alert because if we do, we’ll sit there half a day many times a week. That way, you lose your sanity much faster than you lose your life. The chances of losing your life in an air raid while larping are rather low.”
Posetselska’s larp Nevermore: Family Issues, was played in May 2023. The 60-player larp was loosely based on the Netflix series Wednesday. The story about a high school for special kids who are taught how to live with ordinary people was both accessible and safe.
During war, people have many things on their minds, and just surviving from day to day can require a lot of mental energy and resources. That is why a larp should be easily accessible, Posetselska explains. She needed a ready, playable world that the players could grasp easily and without too much effort. Watching a couple of episodes of Wednesday was enough.
Another reason to choose the world of Wednesday was that Posetselska aimed to transport the participants as far away as possible from the war.
Nevermore: Family Issues (2023). Photo by Anna Posetselska. Photo has been cropped.
“There’s an ongoing discourse about larp as a form of escapism and the extent to which players engage in larp to distance themselves from reality. In our case, the answer was evident: participants genuinely sought an escape from their daily lives. We urgently needed to transport them to a different place and persona,” Posetselska says.
The setting had to incorporate dramatic elements and challenging questions and relationships, yet avoid overly sensitive themes.
“When designing a larp during a war, it’s crucial to ensure that people are not further traumatized or confronted with themes too close to home,” she emphasizes.
Could players detach from their everyday concerns and immerse themselves in the lives of high school students and personnel? Yes and no, Posetselska says.
“Players conveyed afterward that the sense of community was robust, and they experienced relaxation. Not everyone could fully immerse themselves in the game – it may not have necessarily been attributed to the larp or their fellow players, but rather to the exceptionally challenging situation they were in outside the larp. They expressed having a good time, but were unable to completely set aside the worries from the outside world.”
During breaks in the game, both players and organisers scrutinised their social media feeds – had any significant events occurred, had the rockets struck anyone they knew? However, unlike the previous year, individuals managed to stop constantly scrolling through distressing news and concentrate on the game.
Ethical questions
Before the onset of the war, Anna Posetselska made a larp every few years.
“Designing larps is a profoundly significant aspect of my life; I feel invigorated when channeling my mental energy into creating games. I wanted to create something for over a year, but it was impossible due to the war.”
Nevermore: Family Issues (2023). Photo by Anna Posetselska.
In 2022, the year of Russia’s major invasion, the larp community engaged in discussions regarding the ethical implications of playing larps during wartime. A pertinent question arose: do larpers possess the right to partake in leisure, enjoy and relax while their friends – many of whom are fellow larpers – are engaged in active combat and losing their lives? This ethical deliberation extended to various facets of life, questioning the appropriateness of social activities like dining out and attending plays or concerts when one’s compatriots are fighting.
“But soldiers fighting in the frontlines kept saying that they were fighting and dying so we could live. At some point you attempt to reinstate elements of your everyday life, otherwise you get mentally very unwell,” Posetselska says.
In February 2023, a modest larp involving approximately 20 players was organised in Kyiv. Evaluating the community’s response, Posetselska understood that it was something larpers desperately needed. Those fortunate to participate were elated, while those unable to partake experienced profound disappointment.
“Playing larps constituted a significant component of our lives, and the community ardently yearned for a return to normalcy.”
Posetselska notes that when she announced her larp, it encountered no opposition; rather, it was met with unanimous enthusiasm and support.
Narrow planning horizon
Nevermore: Family Issues (2023). Photo by Anna Posetselska. Photo has been cropped.
Before 2022, Posetselska typically started the planning process for a larp approximately a year before its scheduled date. Now, she conceived the idea for Nevermore in March 2023 and decided to execute it as swiftly as possible. The prevailing wartime conditions added to the urgency.
“In the initial months of the war, we couldn’t plan even a few days ahead. Then, the planning horizon would widen from days to weeks and eventually expand to a month. Presently, we operate on a planning cycle spanning a couple of months,” she says.
Who knows what will happen to you or your friends in half a year? During war, six months feels like an eternity.Posetselska calculated the shortest time the larp would take to design and prepare and decided to run it in May, just over two and a half months after getting the idea.
Prior to the war, Ukrainian larps were predominantly played in Russian. However, the linguistic landscape has since changed, as there is a growing trend towards making and playing larps in Ukrainian. Despite the fact that Russian is Posetselska’s mother tongue, she embraced the challenge of composing for the first time all game materials in Ukrainian. This linguistic shift, while demanding, was important because the Ukrainian language has become a more significant part of Ukrainian identity after the 2022 invasion. Participants, mostly from Kyiv but also from other Ukrainian cities, alongside a few international attendees returning to their homeland for the larp, predominantly engaged in gameplay in Ukrainian, irrespective of their native tongues.
Demand for a larp
Posetselska’s foresight proved accurate: there was a substantial demand for a weekend-long larp. Initially conceptualized for 40 players, the larp was expanded for 60 participants due to overwhelming interest and perceived necessity.
In Ukrainian larps, character creation often involves collaborative efforts between players and designers, and this held true for Nevermore. Typically, during times of peace, players engage in preparations for multiple larps simultaneously. This time they only concentrated on Nevermore. Posetselska notes that she has never encountered, and likely won’t encounter in the future, the level of engagement and dedication she observed among participants preparing for Nevermore.
“People exhibited an unprecedented level of creativity, contributing an incredible array of ideas, and demonstrating remarkable support,” she remarks.
Nevermore: Family Issues (2023). Photo by Anna Posetselska. Photo has been cropped.
The impact of Nevermore extended beyond its immediate context, inspiring other designers to initiate larp events.
“Many designers who had been awaiting a more opportune or secure moment came to realise that the time for larping is now,” Posetselska says.
She knows of several minilarps tailored for small circles of friends, as well as half a dozen larger games spanning 2-3 days. The common objective across these endeavors is to transport players as far away as possible from the grim realities of war.
Political awareness in Palestine
Two thousand kilometers south of Kyiv, in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, larpers have adopted a markedly different approach. Since the latest war in Gaza started in October 2023, all larps in the West Bank have centered around themes of war, occupation, stress relief and political awareness.
Tamara Nassar, a Palestinian larp designer and organiser working for the Palestinian larp organization Bait Byout, asserts, “It would feel disrespectful towards our friends and relatives who are dying in Gaza to play larps for fun.”
Bait Byout collaborates with various organizations, predominantly NGOs, introducing them to larp and aiding them in achieving their objectives by incorporating larp into their toolkit. They are currently running a project, together with the British-founded organization Oxfam International, that addresses women’s sexual and reproductive health education through larp.
With the Swiss charitable organization Drosos Foundation, Bait Byout runs Larp Factory, targeting participants aged 18-35 studying or working in the social sector. The program spans five weeks and involves 22 participants in an educational journey where they acquire skills in playing, designing, and organizing larps. Upon completion, participants are equipped to utilize larp as a tool in their professional settings.
Additionally, Bait Byout has in the past designed and run larps for both adults and children in Palestine and Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon.
As the war unfolded in Gaza in October 2023, Palestinians on the West Bank held their breath.
“We knew to expect bad things, but the level of destruction was unimaginable. Everything stopped, the whole society stopped,” Nassar describes. While Israel started bombing Gaza, violence in the West Bank also skyrocketed, Nassar says. Over 300 people have been killed in the West Bank, 80 kilometers from Gaza.
Nassar grimly acknowledges, “We know that Israel is not going to stop in Gaza; we are next.”
New challenges
Bait Byout was looking at opportunities to take larps to Gaza, but those projects are now on hold. The five-week Larp Factory course which was planned to start in October, faced complications due to the war.
The situation in the West Bank has become substantially more perilous. Bait Byout had planned workshops and minilarps across various locations in the West Bank, but had to revise the plans. Several challenges arose due to the war.
First, the Israeli military has closed most of the checkpoints the Palestinians have to cross to move between cities in the West Bank.
Second, Israeli settlers have become more violent. They patrol the backroads the Palestinians were sometimes able to use to move around, and are using firearms more often.
Additionally, since October 2023, daily raids on Palestinian homes and arbitrary detention of Palestinian civilians by Israeli soldiers have intensified. Palestinians can be detained without formal charges for extended periods, sometimes spanning months or even years. Violence and arrests had increased even before the war, but now such detentions are triggered by minor factors, such as discovering Gaza-related content on a Palestinian’s phone. Faced with these risks, Bait Byout could not expose their participants to potential harm.
Nassar explains that to mitigate these challenges, “We had to gather all participants in Ramallah, secure lodgings for a few days, and confine them to this safer environment to minimize movement.” Participants would visit home briefly and then return for another session. Moving around was dangerous and had to be reduced as much as possible.
At the time of the interview, participants of the Larp Factory had recently completed designing their first larps and were about to present them to the wider group in the coming days. The thematic focus of most larps centered on the social situation in Palestine. Furthermore, participants were about to play their first long larp, Tribes, a historical fiction exploring the tribes of Jericho.
Focus on war, occupation and politics
The war in Gaza has not only impacted the logistical aspects but has also influenced the thematic focus of the larps organized by Bait Byout. During the war, all of their larps are centered around the themes of war, occupation, stress relief and political awareness. Nassar believes there wouldn’t be a demand for larps played only for entertainment in such a dire situation.
“To have fun while they are dying over there? I don’t think people would accept that,” she says.
Bait Byout had originally planned to run a fairytale larp titled Keys to the Kingdom, designed by Nassar, for 50-100 children aged 6-12. In this larp, participants assume the roles of fairies on a quest to retrieve stolen keys, overcoming trials to restore magic to the kingdom.
However, due to the wartime context, they opted for a different children’s larp called The Evil Lions & The Hungry Animals. In this scenario, players represent various animals oppressed by evil lions symbolizing the Israeli military. Through unity and setting aside differences, characters learn to rise against oppression and defeat the lions.
The symbolism is evident to adults, but do the children understand that the larp is about the Israeli occupation over Palestinian territories, and the evil lions represent the Israeli military?
Most of them do, Nassar says. She explains that children experience the narrative as an opportunity to enjoy defeating the oppressor without delving too deeply into the political nuances. The larp serves as stress relief for kids, diverting their attention from the distressing news about the mass killing in Gaza. Chasing lions with water balloons is simply fun.
The larps run as part of the women’s reproductive health program, too, underwent changes.
After the war began, Nassar redesigned the game she was working on to include scenarios of women giving birth in Gaza during the conflict.
“One cannot talk about sexual and reproductive health without mentioning the dire situation women are facing in Gaza,” Nassar explains. One of the scenes in A Journey of Discovery depicts the challenges faced by women having C-sections without anaesthesia in a region where Israel has bombed hospitals and power plants, and air strikes can occur while women are in labour.
According to Nassar, Bait Byout goes against the tide by continuing to run larps. Many other activities such as sports, theatre, and music are currently on hold, and even festive celebrations during Christmas and Ramadan have been largely canceled or altered. The cultural institutions that do continue working have changed their program. It would not feel right to show comedies.
Bait Byout is now developing a series of larps about everyday life in Gaza during the war. They were supposed to reflect the Nakba of 1948, in which the Zionist movement and Israel violently displaced and killed Palestinians, damaging Palestinian society, culture, identity, political rights, and national aspirations.
“But another Nakba unfolding within the war on Gaza has changed the game to reflect the current situation,” Nassar says. The larps primarily target foreigners, especially employees of various international NGOs. At the time of writing, the Israeli military has killed over 30.000 Palestinians, overwhelmingly civilians.
Ludography
Nevermore: Family Issues (2023): Ukraine. Anna Posetselska.
The Tribes (2013): Palestine. Janan Adawi, Sari Abdo, Majd Hamouri, Mohamad Rabah, Shadi Sader & Shadi Zatara.
Keys to the Kingdom (2019):Palestine. Tamara Nassar.
The Evil Lions & The Hungry Animals (2017): Palestine. Zaher Bassioni, Majd Hamouri & Mohamad Rabah.
A Journey of Discovery (will be played in 2024): Palestine. Tamara Nassar, Fawzieh Shilbaya & Alaa Al Barghouthi.
This article has been reprinted with permission from the Solmukohta 2024 book. Please cite as:
Pettersson, Maria. 2024. “Organising Larps during War in Ukraine and Palestine.” 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 DangrafArt on Pixabay. Image has been cropped.
I’m back from waging guerrilla warfare from deep in the Swedish woods, desperately trying to keep Scania under the rightful Danish King and not the usurper Swedish crown at the larp Snapphaneland, by Rosalind Göthberg, Mimmi Lundkvist and Alma Elofsson Edgar.
Pew pew, yours truly and his trusty musket – Photo by Tindra Englund 2024
The scenario was based on a very dark period in Scandinavian history, building on actual events, but set in a fictional place. A small farming village in the woods, trying to survive being caught in the middle of a fight between armed “Snaphane” resistance fighters and occupying soldiers. Taking place in two acts of increasing paranoia and brutality as the fight becomes more desperate for both sides.
It took place at Berghem, a primitive village built by larpers, specifically for larping, out it in the gorgeous Swedish woods. It ran from thursday morning to saturday afternoon, plus cleanup and afterparty. Thursday was half workshopping and preparations before play itself started. Friday afternoon there was also an act break to calibrate and escalate. So two full days of ongoing play time, with planned start and end scenes, but otherwise open, autonomous structure.
Organizers Rosalind, Alma & Mimmi brief the players before play – Photo by Tindra Englund 2024
The style of play here, is one of ongoing calibration and a focus on making sure the other players are having a good time with where the story is going, by taking a moment to talk offgame if an inflection point needs it, plus a few classical tools for quicker signaling. Combined with everyone knowing how the overall story will turn out and some directions on how to handle things, in each of the two acts, it is a matter of individual stories being driven by both chance and intent.
It featured a cast of characters, that is divided between a dozen Swedish soldiers, two handfuls of rebels and the rest of the eighty or so participants being villagers caught in the middle. In a lot of ways it was three quite different larps in each of the groups, villagers playing out stories of powerlessness to proctect themselves and their loved ones; soldiers trying desperately to take control while outnumbered and out of their depth; and the rebels fighting a losing battle to retain the loyalty of the villagers and evict the occupiers. My personal story was with the rebels in the woods, I played as Klaus, an outcast drunkard from the village, who had no other choice but join with them.
Some light plundering of the starving families in town – Photo by Tindra Englund 2024
The game took place in Swedish and Danish languages, the soldiers all being Swedish players, the Snaphaner all Danes and the villagers were a mix of the two. There was minor troubles at times, with getting the details right across the language barrier. But as the languages are mostly the same and a lot of us Danes have picked up a good deal of Swedish, it worked rather well overall. I also know a bunch of players chose to take language lessons ahead of play, which is a lovely commitment. I personally love the additional nuance you get from people playing in their mother tongue and can heartily recommend it as a design choice for Scandinavian games.
The experience
It’s been nearly two decades since I last went on a multi-day action scenario in the woods and I must admit that I was in doubt if I was in fact too old for this shit. But I already had the perfect costume, from a previous larp, Den Utan Synd. And this felt like a once in a lifetime opportunity, so I had no choice but to go. I signed up for any kind of character, since all three of the groups had themes I would love to explore, but luckily I got cast as a Snaphane and was able to take part in the experience for which the larp was named.
Hard choices all around – Photo by Tindra Englund 2024
That meant a whole lot of time out in the woods. Most of the other rebels had opportunities to spend time in the village during the first act, but my character was a known drunkard and troublemaker. So I only had five minutes, before I had my ass literally kicked out of town by my brother in law. But then again, the woods were absolutely amazing to spend time in. We had a primitive camp hidden in a thicket, but also a walled off section of town that functioned as an undiscoverable hideout where we could go to warm up and sleep in doors if needed, but quite a few of us chose to sleep it rough (or in my case on a field bed under a modern tarp and mosquito netting, middle age does come with concessions).
Snaphaner out on patrol – Photo by Tindra Englund 2024
Besides some lovely camp play, our main activity was sneaking through the woods to harass the occupiers. We mostly had the woods to ourselves, as the soldiers tended to stay in town where it was safer and reinforcements were quick to arrive. They only came out to stomp about in large patrols or when we provoked a response. In the first act the villagers were mostly on our side, helping hide and feed us, but in the second act (after a timeskip of two months) the majority had turned against us and would call us out if seen and help the Swedes instead.
As the pressure went up, fractures grew everywhere, including among the partisans. Drama and desperation increased along with the realization that we could do nothing to help the villagers, except try to hurt the soldiers, which would in turn lead to retaliation against the civilians. But by then the rain was coming down constantly and our big attempt at a three pronged attack was partially defeated by confusion and wet powder in the guns. We scattered into the woods. A lucky few escaped, some died ugly deaths in the woods and others were captured. The last of us made it back to camp, only for it to be surrounded and all of us taken prisoner. The larp ended soon after with a set scene where we were mercifully lined up and shot (real history is a lot uglier to partisans), our collaborators in town strangled and a third of the men in town killed as punishment, because the village had “helped” us.
Moments before the end – Photo by Tindra Englund 2024
The game was capped by the organizers retelling how the historical resistance ended and the bigger political motions afterwards, followed by light structured debriefs in smaller groups and general socializing into the night. I was soaked, tired and the rest of my ride home also wanted to get a head start on going home, so we left early. Anyways, I’m no good with extended socializing in large groups right after larps, a long ride home and the smell of the sea is the best reset for me, once I’ve had a chance to look everyone in their real eyes.
A man of the woods
Trekking through the woods turned into the largest part of my fun. I wasn’t sure how well I’d handle it, being a chubby, middle-aged nerd. But I’ve worked as a landscape gardener these last few years and it turned out it has given med a wonderful range of skills to traverse rough terrain: Automatically ducking under branches, sure footing, spotting animal trails and even at one point tracking a group through the undergrowth by reading broken bracken and flattened grass. I was able to outpace my compatriots and outrun the soldiers. It’s been a long time since I felt physically awesome and it was in amazing surroundings. Most of the terrain around the village was wet and hilly pine forest. Some sections were rocky, some open woods, some swampy ground and a large hill had been cut clear recently. It was wonderfully varied and spacious enough to be able to actually hide our movements and our camp out there. I really enjoyed having uninterrupted time in nature without modern distractions and all my senses in play, I kind of want to find a way to larp like this again.
Tension among the Snaphane partisans – Photo by Tindra Englund 2024
Bearing arms
Another thing that impressed me, was how well the guns worked (and how well they didn’t!) They were all prop guns, made to work with various loud things from pop caps to starter pistol rounds. They were impractical to load and especially to keep loaded as you stumbled through the woods. Often they would stop working in the rain, just like guns would, back in the day. The loud bangs were such a thrill and truly scary at times. Everyone would stop and listen tensely as they went off somewhere out in the woods. And hearing them go off behind your back, as you ran for your life was terrifying. Having guns did wonders for how fighting worked. You’d most often engage at a distance from a couple to a dozen meters depending on terrain and surprise. Since you’d likely only get one shot off, or the other side could score a lucky hit, there was always a reason to try and end the fight before it began. This led to some very tense moments of shouting and intimidation. Game rules were that the person being shot at, decided if they got hit and how. Any injuries had to be played on at the very least until the end of the act, so there was a lot of surrendering or fleeing instead, but it didn’t reach unrealistic dimensions. I loved how this form of fighting replaces the offgame skill and athleticism of boffer fighting, with a much more roleplay and story based form. I knew that a fight would only be humiliating or heroic, if I chose to make it so myself, not because of offgame factors.
Soldiers ransacking a home – Photo by Tindra Englund 2024
On a song and a prayer
The players of the Danish soldiers who were part of our guerilla force added a little bit of ritual in camp, where we’d be read scripture, pray and sing a patriotic song, before we went out on our operations in the woods. It really elevated the feeling of fighting for something, of believing in the fight, God and our divinely appointed monarch. Without this, it would have been pretty much indistinguishable from just playing bandits or robbers. Which we probably ended up being, more or less, in act two. But there was something more to it for us. I normally zone out during rituals and have little skill at singing, but this wasn’t the drawn out thing that usually plagues larp. The same went for the big town scenes where the evil Swedish overlord, Gyllenstierna, could have monologued us all to death, but instead the scenes went on with brutal efficiency instead. It’s one of the many ways my co-players made great choices, that always had the enjoyment of everyone else as the ultimate goal.
They got me… – Photo by Tindra Englund 2024
As things escalated in act two, I caught myself growing a slow offgame anxiety attack. The woods had gone from a fun playground to a terrifying hunting ground and the consequences of getting caught were so much worse. I took a long solo hike circling far around the village to get my thought in order and the thing that really pulled me back down, was realizing that the players of my enemies would always want to steer any scene in a direction that I was part of choosing, as they had done all through act one. With this in mind, I tracked down my compatriots and got back in the game, fully confident in my co-players.
This war of ours
While all the running through woods and shooting muskets was very romantic and fun, it was also futile. We could do little to actually help our friends and family in the village. And so very much more to hurt them. Mostly we could just lay at the edge of the woods and impotently watch them be mistreated by the occupiers. I had a handful of interesting relationships in town, that I wanted to play on. But since my character was a well-known outcast, so I only managed three heart-pounding and heart-breaking stealthy forays, hiding under houses waiting and hoping for my sister or lover to be home alone. Others had better opportunities to play in town. And while my special situation made for some great scenes in other ways, I just wished I could’ve had that direct play too.
A flogging in the town square, for example – Photo by Tindra Englund 2024
But what really stuck with me, was the hopelessness and powerlessness of the situation. How there was no real way to stop the soldiers, someone who operates with overwhelming force and sees no value in you. How this was the exact same dehumanization, genocide and wanton cruelty that crushes the best of us, throughout all of history. And does so still, so many places in the world. How everything we played out, to reenact our history from 350 years ago, is happening right now, somewhere to someone, with just as little choice or reason. I don’t think I can ever really be black-and-white about those civilians, who end up supporting rebels, occupiers, or both, ever again.
Civilians always end up with the short end of the stick – Photo by Tindra Englund 2024
But I also take a hope with me, from having done this: These people were our direct ancestors, we came from both sides of the war we reenacted (from the two countries in the world, that have fought the most wars against each other). And we came to explore our shared past with sensitivity and gentleness. Together. To see the humanity of everyone involved. To grieve what innocence was lost in these dark days. But also to see, that through who we are now, there is a chance to end the cycles.
Civilians always end up with the short end of the stick – Photo by Tindra Englund 2024
FACT BOX:
Larp Name: Snapphaneland
Designer(s)/Studio: Bröd och Skådespel
Dates: 6th to 9th of june 2024
Location: Berghem Lajvby, Sweden
Price: 1200 SEK (800 subsidised)
Website: https://snapphaneland.org/
Credits: Rosalind Göthberg, Mimmi Lundkvist and Alma Elofsson Edgar
This was the second and most likely last run, according to the organizers. The premiere was supposed to be June of 2020, but was pushed to 2022 due to the pandemic.
The larp sits solidly in the “Swedish Misery” subgenre of Nordic Larp, it can be seen as a sequel to Den Utan Synd ([He] Who Is Without Sin) by the same organizers, set in the same period and place, but focused on the peculiar horrors of the Scandinavian witch trials. Swedish Misery larps tell tragic stories of people and communities under unreasonable pressures. Like this larp, they are often inspired by history. They are expressly feminist and often centre the experiences of women and other groups without power, but with a focus on playable verisimilitude, self-direction and collaboration between players of oppressors and oppressed.
Cover image: Soldiers and villagers – Photo by Tindra Englund 2024
Odysseus (Finland 2019) was an ambitious attempt to create a fully functioning spaceship in the spirit of the TV series Battlestar Galactica. The dream was to create a sense of a perfectly working spaceship, where every aspect of the ship would have a part to play in the collective success and failure of the crew. The Odysseus had 104 characters onboard, running the ship in shifts for 48 hours. The larp aimed for a high-fidelity illusion of being on a spaceship, full with interactivity, scenography, sound and light to create a plausible feel of being inside an episode of a space opera.
Played in the Torpparinmäki school in Helsinki, Odysseus was about making every aspect of a space opera into playable content: bridge crew fighting space battles, landing parties exploring planets, fighter pilots engaging enemies in combat, med bay patching up injured soldiers, science lab solving mysteries, and engineering crew keeping the bird in the air.
Odysseus pursued the dream of a clockwork larp. Clockwork larp is a larp where characters work on diverse and sequential interdependent tasks that feed into each other, forming loops that progress the story and the dynamics of the larp.
The beauty of a clockwork is in the immersive sensation that comes from dozens of players working together to overcome a challenge. Your job might be tedious in itself, but as your performance impacts everyone, it becomes imbued with meaning and significance. When an injured soldier comes to the medical station, she arrives with actual historical details on where, how, and why she got hit, and all those details are shared by all her comrades. As a medic, you are just patching up a soldier, but if you do your work badly, it might lead to dramatic repercussions further down the line.
A properly interdependent clockwork is a fragile device. For every task to matter, every task needs to matter. Every wheel and spring must be doing its job or the gears grind to a halt. The characters must be reasonably successful in their tasks. The players must be reasonably timely. The larp technology must work smoothly. The marines must be on board when the cruiser jumps. If something goes wrong, the entire larp might be in danger of falling apart.
While naval vessels and space stations are the obvious themes, any larp requiring coordinated success of diverse character groups can approach the aesthetics and face the challenges of a clockwork. To understand whether you should think about a larp as a clockwork is all about interdependence and fragility. If there are multiple player groups performing multiple tasks that could completely ruin the larp, it might be valuable to think about the larp in terms of clockwork design. In this paper I seek to describe how Odysseus approached the central clockwork-related design problems. This is not a review of Odysseus as a whole, but an attempt to distill the essential elements of its successful execution of the clockwork aesthetics.
The Odysseus Engine
The ESS Odysseus is a starship escaping a devastating attack on her home planet. As in the Battlestar Galactica TV-series that inspired the larp, the only hope is to find a safe haven by following an ancient path through the stars. In order to succeed, the crew must fend off relentless enemy attacks, deploy landing parties to collect long-lost artefacts, and decipher clues to discover the way to safety.
The Odysseus clockwork loop (Figure 1) starts with the ship escaping combat with a hyperspace jump, and landing in the relative safety of a new star system. After the jump, the medics and the engineers have to take care of injured crew members and damaged machinery. At the same time, the scientists and the bridge crew use scanners to figure out which planet to visit next.
Figure 1: The clockwork loop of Odysseus. Ground missions were only done during every other loop, giving scientists more time to figure out the artefacts while traveling. Each revolution took about 2 hours and 47 minutes to complete. Jump drive cooldown requirements prevented players from rushing the loop, and the pursuing enemies prevented players from slowing it down. The clockwork loop was sequential, not simultaneous, so there were always some character groups off-duty and others hard at work: the scientists, for instance, had no clockwork duties during the marine ground missions.
Then, the marines are deployed to the planet, with a mission to obtain ancient artefacts for the scientists. During the ground mission, they encounter enemies and other dangers (see Figure 2), and thus need to have their injuries treated by the medics. While this happens, the pursuing enemy fleet unerringly catches up with the Odysseus, prompting a space battle between the ship, its fighter craft, and the enemy fleet.
Figure 2: Marines and pilots often ended up in combat situations on their planetary missions. When they returned, the stories of their heroic deeds fueled play onboard. (Photo: Santtu Pajukanta)
The fight lasts until the scientists researching the artefacts figure out the next star system to visit, at which point the engineers prepare the jump engine and the bridge officers perform another hyperspace jump to safety. As the Odysseus escapes to a new star system, the loop starts over, and it is time to take care of injured crew members and damaged machinery.
Every other loop was a ground mission loop, where a landing party was deployed to recover artefacts, and every other loop was a more relaxed waypoint en route towards the next ground mission. While Odysseus was traveling, the scientists studied the artefacts further and determined where to land in the next star system to find more artefacts.
Odysseus was played, in shifts, for 48 hours straight. More than half of the players were awake at any time to run the ship (see below). During the larp, the Odysseus went through 16 clockwork loops, which included 6 larger and 3 smaller operations for the marines.
Odysseus Crew
Out of the 104 players, 60–70 were playing the characters directly involved in the clockwork operations of the larp. As the crew worked in two shifts, approximately the following amount of characters were on shift at any time:
6 bridge officers, who commanded the Odysseus in space battles
5 fighter pilots launched to space to defend the Odysseus
6 marines ready to be deployed to the Finnish woods on ground missions, plus the officers managing their equipment
4 engineers operating the jump engines and generators, as well as repairing the ship by physical actions such as replacing fuses
4 science lab personnel who studied alien artefacts recovered from planets
4 med bay staff to patch up sick and injured characters
The remaining 30–40 characters were not directly involved with the clockwork operation, and mostly slept at night and played during the day:
9 political leaders who engaged in political play with the accompanying civilian NPC fleet
14 Velian refugees, survivors of a mysterious colony, rescued early in the larp
27 other civilians, such as refugees, journalists and clergy
These numbers do not add up for many reasons. Primarily, the crew consisted of two shifts, supported by a reserve of “Ghost Shift” crew who joined the clockwork when needed. Some characters were always on shift. Some characters belonged in multiple groups. All in all, this is the author’s rough estimate informed by the organiser team.
All the while the clockwork was relentlessly grinding onwards, the Odysseus runtime gamemaster team was throwing spanners in the works: Enemy boarding parties attacking the Odysseus, marines getting mysterious parasite infections on planetside missions, critical resources running out, and so on and so on. As the escaping Odysseus was accompanied by a flotilla of civilian vessels, the politician players had to figure out political issues and conflicts relating to the entire fleet.
As the journey of the Odysseus progressed through the clockwork loops, the various plotlines of the larp advanced as well. Characters and groups brought an endless amount of plot twists to the mix, from small personal plots to grand revelations. Often it felt like none of the clockwork revolutions were played out cleanly, as there were always some twists to accompany them. Sometimes you picked up a group of refugee players, sometimes you hosted a group of NPC visitors from the civilian fleet for a political summit. Sometimes there were massive space battles, and sometimes the crew had to take various precautions to prevent disease from spreading onboard.
Small Cogs in the Large Machine
It is not a simple task to ensure that all players understand what is happening in a larp. However, in a clockwork design it is almost mandatory: when your ship gets shot, or performs a hyperspace jump, or receives visitors from another vessel, this needs to be obvious to everyone on board. This is not an easy task, even when a substantial amount of computers, lights, and loudspeakers can be used to do the job.
Some earlier larps going for clockwork aesthetics discovered magnificent pre-existing larp locations: The Monitor Celestra (Sweden, 2013; see Karlsson 2013) was played in the crammed steel corridors of the HMS Småland, and Lotka-Volterra (Sweden, 2018) took place in a large underground bomb shelter near Uppsala. These gorgeous locations came with fundamental downsides: they were labyrinthine, they were difficult for rigging all the cables and gear, they were impossible for wireless connectivity, and they heavily limited the time the organizing teams could spend on-site before and after the larp.
Odysseus rented a convenient modern building in Helsinki for six weeks. Before the first run, the team spent three weeks on site, transforming a school into a spaceship with sets, lights, audio, ICT systems and more. They laid down six kilometres of cable, installed 34 loudspeakers, and rigged dozens and dozens of lights. This was a very expensive solution in terms of workload, but it provided the team a controlled, dry, warm, safe environment where they could spend a lot of time before the larp to set things up. This was possible because Odysseus had a huge organiser team, with some 160 people credited on the game’s website.
All the main systems of the ship were connected to semi-automated light and sound systems, creating a powerful illusion of being actually on a spaceship. Klaxons screamed, jump engines boomed, fuses blew, screens blinked, all coordinated with sound, light, and smoke. The technological infrastructure created not only a convincing illusion, but also a critical communication medium that ensured that everyone understood the state of the Odysseus, and allowed the game masters to direct the larp. One clever design choice was that whenever the Odysseus performed a jump, all her computer systems went momentarily offline, with all monitors everywhere only displaying static. Together with all the other audiovisual cues, this ensured that even deeply engaged players had to take a pause and register that a new clockwork loop had begun.
Figure 3: The big main hall was the central communication medium of the larp. All essential crew functions had an easy visual access to the lobby, and as it also served as a bar and a restaurant, civilians spent a lot of time there. Consequently, as all visual and auditory information was clear in the lobby, it was clear everywhere in the larp. In this picture, an enemy boarding party has just penetrated the Odysseus and an indoors firefight is about to start – in the central lobby. (Photo: Santtu Pajukanta)
In a clear contrast to the maze-like corridors of the Celestra, the Odysseus team intentionally designed all the spaces to be inclusive, open, and accessible (Makkonen 2019). Almost all the facilities were placed around a large, open main lobby, which served as the primary channel of audio and light information: Even if your work area did not have lights or loudspeakers for a red alert, you could not miss it when it took over the main areas. Most rooms had windows to the main lobby, so everyone could see what was happening (see Figure 3). Areas like the bridge and the med bay were separated with a glass wall, allowing anyone to see all the action (see Figure 4). The brig was adjacent to the security room, and designed to allow prisoners to “incidentally” see the entire play area through surveillance cameras.
Figure 4: The Odysseus bridge and Empty Epsilon -driven command screens portrayed through a glass wall from an adjacent corridor. All important areas were positioned behind glass walls from the main hall, allowing the crew to focus on their tasks while still being easy to observe from the outside. At times crowds would gather outside the bridge during a space combat, or outside the medlab during a dangerous surgery. (Photo: Santtu Pajukanta)
The ship was not a backdrop in Odysseus: it was a relentless force controlling your play at all times. Depending on whether you were on shift or not, a red alert could be a startling backdrop to an intimate moment, or a rough shake-up pulling you back to combat. If you chose to sleep in the in-game berthing area, you probably noticed every single jump and red alert.
Running on Rails
Odysseus was a larp about a military vessel in a crisis situation. The majority of characters were members of a military hierarchy, and as the crisis was acute for the full duration of the larp, civilian characters did not have much say on the big picture. Thus, the larp’s themes would be better characterised by discipline than by agency, and the Odysseus team took a very negative stance on individual players choosing their own styles of play. This tight design was adopted as a perceived necessity for a clockwork larp: since the aesthetic was portraying interdependent characters working in unison, there was limited room for anyone getting out of line.
The larp is designed to be a tunnel not a sandbox, so although you have many decisions you can do completely independently there are [a] few elements we hope that you follow as it gives you most to play with. We have tried to also give your characters ingame reasons to do this. So if you get a distress signal, go and save those in need! … The game relies rather heavily on solving the puzzles and completing the following land mission in timely manner, so this should be supported from the top as well. … This is not a game to be hacked, won or overachieved (Odysseus play instructions, 2019).
It was important that every clockwork character did their part with a reasonable amount of success and in a timely manner. This was non-negotiable, as the organisers had scheduled the full larp with a 15-minute timetable.
The primary strategy for this was to make sure that all the key characters were suitable for keeping the train on the rails. As in many Finnish larps, character descriptions were long and detailed, containing the most important relationships, personality, agendas, personal history et cetera, and these character writeouts were written to create the everyday heroes the larp needed. I played the chief scientist, who was intentionally established to be a fair but demanding leader – precisely what was necessary to run the lab in a way that would get the artefact puzzles solved in time. According to the organisers, this micro-level design was used in other leader characters as well, in order to minimise the chances of, for example, the captain going rogue and rebelling against the fleet command.
As an additional strategy, players were given explicit responsibilities. For instance, the organisers provided the marine officers with specific instructions on which characters to send on particular ground missions. This allowed organisers to distribute planetary missions evenly, and ensured that particular characters would be on missions related to their personal plots.
The organisers actively sought to avoid player boredom, as bored players frequently make their own fun in ways that could be disastrous to the overall working of the clockwork. According to the main organiser Laura Kröger, one reason why the larp had tons of action, secrets, revelations and plotlines was to keep players busy, specifically in order to avoid emergence of disruptive plots such as unplanned mutinies or unwanted larp democracy.
The last line of defence was brutal old-school railroading. If the scientists failed to solve a puzzle in time, one of them would get a whisper in the ear from a game master. If a bridge officer plotted incorrect coordinates into the jump engine, the ship AI would double-check and reject them. If the ship was about to explode, the onboard AI would suggest heroic last-second shenanigans to engineers who could miraculously save the ship, often at the cost of ending up in the med bay. Railroading was necessary, because Odysseus had no contingency plans for players ending up exploring incorrect planets.
Although a lot of larpers shun this kind of railroading, this probably did not harm most players’ experiences of the larp. In terms of agency, the enforced hierarchy of a naval setting concentrates all decision-making power to very few characters in any case. For a player of a junior engineer it matters little whether the route of the Odysseus was planned by the admiral or by the game organisers, as the setting forces most characters to follow orders anyway. The organisers also worked hard to ensure that the players had reasonable in-character reasons to follow along their plots. Similarly, offering a miraculous feat to an engineer or a critical tip to a scientist might detract from one player’s experience, but at the same time allow the clockwork to keep on ticking for the hundred other players.
Ideally, of course, this kind of a larp would weave a story of natural successes and failures, incorporating important decisions made by the players. However, the workload of creating even a single path through the larp was massive, so it seems unfeasible to create all the redundant content that would be required for a branching narrative – let alone one where players could freely explore the galaxy.
In comparison, The Monitor Celestra team also realised the fragility of a clockwork machine when faced with diverse playstyles. Just like Odysseus, the Celestra organisers explicitly gave the players of key characters various responsibilities to keep the game running. While the Odysseus key playstyle message was play along – check the distress signals, solve the puzzles – the Celestra key message was play to lose against other players, play to win against outside enemies.
The Celestra still allowed a lot more freedom to players. The main thing that was explicitly forbidden was covert sabotage: clockwork play is challenging even on a good day, and it is practically impossible to keep an eye on everyone working in various duties. I remember trying to command a space battle while the engine room was staging a strike, preventing us from maneuvering or shooting. Although such a scenario might work perfectly on the silver screen, no larp space battle is long enough to accommodate negotiations over working conditions. The Celestra was also hijacked by a lone gunman at some point, creating an experience where all agency was transferred from everyone onboard to one player for a moment, until the crisis was resolved.
This genre of larp is not resilient against larphacking, sabotage, popular uprisings, or larp democracy. All clockwork larps have to make their peace with some amounts of railroading. They have to clearly specify supported styles of play, and to figure out how to restrain player agency in order to keep flying. I believe there is no other way.
Turning the Gears
Clockwork design depends on in-game work, and designing a labour-intense larp has its own challenges (see Jones, Koulu & Torner 2016). The work needs to be interesting, there needs to be enough of it, and there must not be too much work. Finally, the labour should support character play, instead of taking attention away from it.
The Odysseus clockwork was designed to be sequential, rather than simultaneous. None of the clockwork functions required more than half-a-dozen players contributing simultaneously, which made it easier to get the crew in stations and to focus on the tasks. The characters were split into two main shifts, with a third shift consisting of reserve characters that could relieve characters that were on shift, or jump into action if crew members were missing. As the larp lasted for 48 intense hours, exhaustion became a part of the play: some jobs needed to be done, regardless of whether the players fancied doing them at the moment. Although working in character was a central pleasure of the larp, there were definitely some occasions where tired players genuinely wanted to avoid their shifts. Personally, for me it is hard to stay in character when exhausted, so there is always a danger of robotically doing my job without really larping while doing so.
Designing diegetic work is a difficult multidisciplinary design task that connects larp design, digital game design, scenography, engineering and other hard skills. If you want to create a handheld HANSCA scanner (see Figure 5) that relays information between engineers, medics, scientists and game masters, you have to interface with the tech systems to get it working, with plot design to add content, with props to make sure they can be properly scanned, and so forth. As this kind of task requires many people to accomplish, it becomes complex and time-consuming.
Figure 5: HANSCA handheld scanners combined off-the-shelf Android phones with custom software. In the initial plans, they would have been used a lot by scientists, engineers, and medics to read RFID tags and provide information for the game mastering systems. In the actual runs they were primarily used by engineers. (Photo: Santtu Pajukanta)
Bridge officers, fighter pilots, engineers and marines had close-to-indexical((See e.g. Stenros & al. (2024) in this volume for more on symbols, icons and indices.)) jobs, meaning that the player tasks were very closely aligned with the character tasks. For example the bridge officers and pilots were actually fighting the enemies with Empty Epsilon combat simulator, the engineers were mechanically changing fuses (see Figure 6) and fiddling with the jump drives, and the marines were physically shooting aliens with nerf guns.
Figure 6: Engineer changing a fuse. The game masters could blow fuses around the ship to represent damage to the Odysseus. Blown fuses could have further physical consequences, such as screens going black until they were fixed. (Photo: Santtu Pajukanta)
The medical staff sometimes reverted to iconic work, where you pretend to do something in a way that looks and sounds right, but you are not actually doing the work itself. For instance, they acted out performing surgeries. Often the injuries and ailments were well-propped to improve the experience of medical treatment.
The scientist work often felt symbolic. Deciphering the ancient artefacts to figure out the path of the Odysseus was done through puzzles which resembled escape room puzzles. Although they were fairly well designed, it was at times hard to explain why some ancient folks used a geometry puzzle to encrypt stellar coordinates.
Designing the difficulty level of diegetic teamwork is not easy. You might end up with players who have no idea of what they should be doing on a spaceship bridge, or – like I did in one run of Celestra – you may end up with a professional naval officer who can both run the show and teach others at the same time. In Odysseus, at least some bridge crews mitigated the risk of incompetence by practicing space combat with Empty Epsilon before the larp. This is of course possible only if you can play the simulator online in advance.
The gold standard of labour in clockwork larp is work that consists of tasks that uphold the 360° illusion (see Koljonen 2007) perfectly, while having a difficulty level easy enough to allow players to role-play while barely succeeding. Ideally, the tasks should enable narrative granularity: binary success/failure tasks do not produce the most interesting narrative inputs down the line in the clockwork. Similarly, symbolic tasks can be hard to turn into social content – if Odysseus would have literally expected scientists to solve sudokus, it would have been very hard to narrativise success and failure in that task to create social play.
As Celestra before, Odysseus included a lot of characters without clockwork tasks, such as refugees, civilian administration, religious leaders, and politicians. The risk is that regardless of the quality of the game content created for those characters, they may feel left out from an experience centered around the clockwork. This risk is connected to player expectations, for instance if players sign up to experience a clockwork, but end up cast as civilians.
Odysseus sought to alleviate this by creating tons of important plot content for civilian characters. Based on the quantitative evaluation in a post-larp player survey, this was a mixed success. In general, the players of civilian characters did state that they had a great larp, but the players of military characters were still quite a bit happier with their experiences.
The Invisible Machine
Behind the scenes, another fragile and interdependent machine was ticking away: The organiser team was busy at work. They were setting up space battles with Empty Epsilon, answering characters’ messages to the civilian fleet, prepping antagonists for the land missions, deploying artefacts in the woods to be soon retrieved by the marines, shuttling marine players from the main location to the planetside play areas, answering endless queries from medics, scientists and engineers on behalf of the ship’s AI… and much more. At any time there were a couple of dozen organisers at work.
The runtime game mastering was based on a pre-planned schedule, where everything was broken down to 15 minute slots. This allowed the game masters to adapt their plans based on the status of the larp. For instance, if the Odysseus was planned to suffer an unexpected glitch during a jump that would damage the ship, but the ship was already heavily damaged by the enemy fire, the event could be skipped or postponed. Or if the Odysseus had enjoyed smooth sailing for a while, the game masters could trigger a larger and more dangerous space battle. According to Laura Kröger, the team had many backup plans for various scenarios in which the larp would have been derailed.
Although much of the technology was automated, the light, audio and code had to be manually operated whenever the Odysseus performed a jump – every 2 hours 47 minutes, around the clock. As the organiser team had no capacity to train substitute game masters to run the larp, there was very little redundancy available. For example, Kröger herself had to be woken up to orchestrate every jump, and she was also the person directing all runtime game mastering, meaning that team members had to consult her on details constantly.
There were numerous indispensable organisers who would have been very hard to replace on a quick schedule. While the in-game machine only had to run for 48 hours, the organiser side also had to operate smoothly through all the phases leading into the larp and taking place after it.
Where possible, the Odysseus team mitigated technology risk by using off-the-shelf hardware and software. Lights and audio are relatively easy to operate frictionlessly if organisers are professionals who can use the same tools they use in their daily work, and Empty Epsilon is a reasonably stable piece of space combat software. With the more ambitious custom tools, like the HANSCA hand scanners, custom-programmed Android phones that were intended to relay scan data to game masters, minor glitches and problems were frequent – but they were still more robust than any custom wireless hardware I have ever seen in larp. Half a dozen professional programmers spent more than six months on building and integrating the various systems used in the larp. The larp had some 20 different IT systems running, including a custom backend, engineer repair system, the datahub used for ingame emails, the warp engines, airlock doors, surveillance cameras, info screens, and so on (see Hautala 2020 and Santala & Juustila 2019 for details).
It is a small miracle that everything worked out pretty well in all three runs, and it is trivial to imagine incidents that would have been extremely detrimental to the play experience: main organiser falling ill, or a key piece of technology breaking down, as simplest examples. It is far from certain that the larp could have recovered from such an incident at all.
Although the Odysseus team successfully pulled it off, anyone planning a clockwork larp should consider whether the dangerous and difficult aesthetic is truly worth the effort and the risk. Unless the point is to deliberately create the sensation of a fragile and interdependent system, there are easier ways to provide players with intense experiences of challenging labour. Succeeding and failing together does not require interdependence, and working in parallel can also be an equally great generator of social play.
A Fragile Contraption
The art of running a clockwork larp is largely an art of not failing. In principle, you only have to design meaningful interdependent jobs, build the architecture and the IT systems to allow proper communication, and fuel the system with events and plots to keep it running. But in practice the operation of the clockwork machine is fraught with existential risks: players can fail in their tasks, technology can break, bored larpers can start a mutiny, or someone can simply walk to the bridge with a gun and hijack the entire ship.
The Odysseus team successfully mitigated these risks. They established a railroading playstyle before the sign-up to eliminate larp democracy and to stop random rebels and saboteurs. They ensured that players succeeded in diegetic tasks by creating necessary fallbacks to sustain the clockwork. They spent a lot of time building the larp on-site, to ensure that all the IT systems running the game worked. They designed a space that facilitated communication, and augmented it with light and audio, to create a shared understanding of what was going on in the larp. They avoided dangerous player boredom by firehosing the characters with action and plots day and night. And they had a lot of luck in that none of the critical personnel or technology risks actualised.
Running a clockwork larp is a fool’s errand, because the very point of a clockwork is interdependence, and the very point of a larp is agency. The Odysseus team invested a massive amount of skilled labour to take this paradox head-on. While they had to accept some design tradeoffs to make it work, they ultimately prevailed, and crafted a beautiful 360° illusion of a spaceship ticking with clockwork magic.
Odysseus info
Credits: Laura Kröger, Sanna Hautala, Antti Kumpulainen, and a team of over 160 volunteers. Illusia ry. Full credits
Date: 27-30 June, 4-7 July & 9-12 July, 2019
Location: Torpparinmäki Comprehensive School, Helsinki
Playtime: 48 hours
Players: 104
Budget: € 85,000 (three runs total)
Participation fee: €200; sponsor tickets €300
Katherine Castiello Jones, Sanna Koulu and Evan Torner (2016): Playing at Work. In Larp Politics, edited by Kaisa Kangas, Mika Loponen and Jukka Särkijärvi. Solmukohta.
Johanna Koljonen (2007): Eye-Witness to the Illusion. An Essay on the Impossibility of 360° Role-Playing. In Lifelike, edited by Jesper Donnis, Morten Gade and Line Thorup. Knudepunkt.
Jaakko Stenros, Eleanor Saitta and Markus Montola (2024): The General Problem of Indexicality in Larp Design. In Liminal Encounters: Evolving Discourse in Nordic and Nordic Inspired Larp, edited by Kaisa Kangas, Jonne Arjoranta, and Ruska Kevätkoski. Helsinki, Finland: Ropecon ry.
Ludography
Lotka-Volterra (2018): Sweden. Olle Nyman, Simon Svensson, Andreas Amsvartner and Sebastian Utbult. Berättelsefrämjandet, Ariadnes Red Thread & Atropos. Full credits ref. December 26th 2023
The Monitor Celestra (2013): Sweden. Alternatliv, Bardo and Berättelsefrämjandet. Full credits ref. December 26th 2023
Odysseus (2019): Finland.
This article has been reprinted with permission from the Solmukohta 2024 book. Please cite as:
Montola, Markus. 2024. “Odysseus: In Search of a Clockwork Larp.” 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:The hangar bay and the smaller ships were built with less fidelity for a 360° illusion, as the smaller vessels were built from fabrics. The 3 fighter craft, on left, were used in the space battles during the larp. The diplomat vessel ESS Starcaller, in the middle, could only be repaired in time to participate in the final mission. (Photo: Santtu Pajukanta)
The first time I participated in Krigslive in 2011, I was 16 years old, and despite the mud, the bruises, and the bad sleep, it was one of the best and most immersive larp experiences of my life. I was enraptured by the thrill of the battlefield. The adrenaline and bloodlust made me fearless to storm players twice the size of my short, skinny teenage self alongside my likewise skinny, teenage brothers and sisters in arms. At that larp, in those moments, I forgot the real world, and I was at one with the experience of a warrior in battle.
The author (centre) at Krigslive 7 in 2011, unknown photographer
Today I am 28 (which in the Danish larp community is ancient). I have organised one Krigslive by myself and co-organised the most recent (in 2023) with my 19-year-old co-organiser, Tobias Ritzau, for a record-breaking number of participants. My favourite larp of all time is older than ever, and alive and kicking.
What is Krigslive?
Krigslive is a Danish battlelarp, that was first organised in 2006 by Thomas Aagaard (but there were other similar smaller events preceding and inspiring this event). Since then, it has been organised approximately yearly, and Krigslive XVIII took place in 2023.
A battlelarp is a larp where battles and fighting with boffer weapons takes center stage and is the main source of entertainment and action. Other examples of battlelarps are DrachenFest and Conquest of Mythodea in Germany, Krigshjärta (Eng. War Heart) in Sweden and Sotahuuto (Eng. War Cry) in Finland.
A number of things make Krigslive unique as a battlelarp. It is inspired by the Warhammer Fantasy tabletop miniature games, and the rules of Krigslive reflect that. The rules are revised each year by the new organisers, effectively making it a collective creation in its 18th iteration. The rules are the core of the Krigslive formula, as the setting of the larp can change (although it is most often Warhammer Fantasy). They were contained in a few pages in the beginning and have by now developed into a text of 16+ pages. They centre the principle of “fighting in formation”; that all members of a unit must stay within an arm’s reach of each other during battle. If you are separated from your unit and cannot immediately rejoin, you are demoralised and destroyed. If a unit is split in two, the part that stands with the banner survives and the other is destroyed. If a unit falls below five people (including bannerman) they are demoralised and destroyed. Everyone in a unit must carry the same weapons and armour, be visually distinguishable as a unit, and they have the same hit points from the onset of the battle. Everyone is individually responsible for counting their own hit points as they diminish. These rules structure the battles and promote cooperation within the groups.
The rules are published on the website prior to the game, and also sent out in participants’ letters. At the last Krigslive a simplified one-page version of the rules was made and posted on the inside of the bathroom stalls. Many veteran players have developed a strong memory of the rules. Krigslive organisers have less agency to design their event because players have such a strong sense of ownership over the concept. A common disagreement (and source of organiser stress) between organisers and players is the introduction of new rules or alteration of old ones. Likewise, a common disagreement between players is when old rules from old iterations are thought to still be in use.
General von Liebwitz, played by Carl Munch (22), Krigslive 18 in 2023, photo by Rekografia
The larp focuses on portraying soldiers at war; usually there are two enemy camps at the location, and there has thus far never been an in-game town. Krigslive is organised as a relay within the Danish larp community; different larp organisers from different Danish larp organisations take turns organising Krigslive. Newer organisers are prioritised over ones that have organised Krigslive before. To date there are more than 20 former Krigslive organisers (sadly, two have passed away). I love this relay structure because it gives everyone the opportunity to organise Krigslive, and it gives the whole community ownership. However, it has been difficult at times to recruit new organisers, or any organisers at all, and it is sometimes a very stressful experience to be a Krigslive organiser. Although the organiser(s) do not need to spend a lot of time on recruitment, they do have to navigate a community that has very strong and sometimes conflicting expectations of what Krigslive and its rules should be.
Krigslive has no individual characters. Everyone participates as part of a group, and groups organise all their tents, costumes, transport, weapons, armour, background story, and usually also their food.
What Krigslive has meant to the Danish larp community and what the community has meant to Krigslive
Krigslive has been a sizeable part of the Danish larp community for so long that it has shaped the community itself. The most obvious way is that by knowing that Krigslive will be around every year, always, Krigslive has made it easier for people to invest in more expensive larp gear. At least two different larp organisations, one a feminist larp organisation, Piger i panser (Eng. Girls in Armour) and its sequel-in-spirit Feminister i rustning (Eng. Feminists in Armour) (see Eriksen 2015), and another organisation from southern Denmark, also started out as player groups at Krigslive. Less obvious probably is that Krigslive has provided a way for players all across Denmark, from many different larp organisations, to meet and connect. In that way it has fostered a sense of national community for the Danish larp scene.
Picture from Krigslive 1 in 2006, unknown photographer
The community has also shaped Krigslive. The first Krigslives strived for a high level of realism. Battle plans were made on location in-game, and there was little to no off-game communication or coordination between the opposing sides. In time, this was changed to pre-planned battle plans and set schedules to cut down on waiting time and time lost searching for the enemy, as well as allowing players more rest and downtime. At the latest Krigslive, battle plans were shown to the generals beforehand, so the only task at the larp was to decide which units would do which tasks. A schedule for the larp with times for battles, meals, setup, and game ending etc. was published beforehand, sent out to all players, and printed and hung on the inside of bathroom stalls.
Krigslive is unique among Danish larps. It is the longest running larp in Denmark. It averages 300 players every time, with some Krigslives reaching 350 or 400 players, and hitting 530 players in 2023.
Estimates for number of signed up players Krigslive 1–18
Setting of that Krigslive
Krigslive 1
200
Warhammer Fantasy
Krigslive 2
250
Warhammer Fantasy
Krigslive 3
180
Warhammer Fantasy
Krigslive 4
400
Warhammer Fantasy
Krigslive 5
460
Warhammer Fantasy
Krigslive 6
400
Warhammer Fantasy
Krigslive 7
400
Warhammer Fantasy
Krigslive 8
400
Crusaders vs. Vikings
Krigslive 9
300
Warhammer Fantasy
Krigslive 10
440
Warhammer Fantasy
Krigslive 11
300
Vikings
Krigslive 12
350
Warhammer Fantasy
Krigslive 13
300
Warhammer Fantasy
Krigslive 14
290
Game of Thrones
Krigslive 15
No data – but probably 300
Warhammer Fantasy
Krigslive 16
300
Warhammer Fantasy
Krigslive 17
277
Age of Sigmar
Krigslive 18
530
Warhammer Fantasy
The biggest Krigslive ever
Krigslive XVIII in 2023 was absolutely record-breaking in terms of number of participants, and that was not anticipated by anyone, not even the organisers. The larp was to be in mid-May, and in April, we realised that we would reach at least 400 players, and that sent us into a weekend-long crisis about the weight of expectations, joy over success, and worry about our logistics. Two weeks later, the signup sprinted past 450 (another crisis), and one week after that we closed the sign-up with 530 (yes, another crisis). Why did this happen?
Krigslive 18, photo by Rekografia
My first instinct is to credit my co-organiser, Tobias Ritzau, for it and refer to what I call the Ritzau effect. I feel that Tobias Ritzau is a wunderkind, and everything he touches overperforms. This is an irrational idea but I want to believe it is true because I support my friends. For a more rational explanation, my theory is that three things happened.
First, we made a number of lucky decisions. We reduced ticket prices for a number of groups, including one travelling from Poland. Completely by chance, we scheduled the event so it did not coincide with events in Denmark or Poland. Krigslive usually does not have an age limit, only a restriction on how old you must be to participate on the battlefield. We lowered this age by two years from 16 to 14. We managed (again mostly by luck) to have good teamwork with the group leaders who organise the participating groups. We had a popular choice of setting and set-up. For the setting we chose Empire vs. Empire in the Warhammer Fantasy world. Most potential players have the landsknecht-inspired costumes that characterise Empire soldiers, which lowers their cost of participation. Also, most Krigslives have been set in the Empire in Warhammer Fantasy, so it is a familiar setting, and a lot of Krigslive traditions have been built in that setting. For a setup we chose a training camp, instead of war between two enemy armies. This allowed everyone to camp in the same location, so that all players could easily interact with each other. We made an open call for two players to portray the generals for each side, and the players we chose, Nikoline Gilså and Carl Munch, were popular choices and good at building hype.
General Eisenfaust, played by Nikoline Gilså (29), Krigslive 18 in 2023, photo by Rekografia
Secondly, we were generally lucky. We had players who did most of the hype for us by making videos and memes. We had some great group leaders, who recruited people in unprecedented numbers. This luck was not limited to just getting signups. Many situations made me think that the universe seriously conspired in our favour (Ritzau effect again).
Finally, Krigslive is an evergreen, robust concept, and we are getting ever better at showing the game to the world by having some seriously awesome photographers at the event.
Conquest of Mythodea (2004 -): Live Adventure Event GmbH, Germany.
DrachenFest (2001 -): Drachenfest UG. Germany.
Krigslive (2006-): Denmark. Organisation changes every year.
Sotahuuto (2005-): Finland.
Warhammer Fantasy (1983): United Kingdom. Games Workshop.
This article has been reprinted with permission from the Solmukohta 2024 book. Please cite as:
Budolfsen, Astrid. 2024. “17 Years, 18 Runs, Broken Records – Why Krigslive Just Won’t Quit.” 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: Krigslive 18 in 2023, photo by Rekografia
![Tablet screen displaying a "SEND A REPORT" interface. On the left, several "PROFILE" sections are visible with labels like "DAY #1 [AFTERNOON] // INSTINCTIVE // EMOTIONAL // RATIONAL //." On the right, instructions for sending a report are given, with dropdown menus for "SHIFT" and "REPORT."Sending a report to Yggdrasil](https://i0.wp.com/www2.nordiclarp.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/send-a-report-tablet.webp?resize=1024%2C640&ssl=1)
Anatomy of Larp Thoughts: A Breathing Corpus — chapter illustration. Yanina Zaichanka (illustrations), Kirsten van Werven (edits), and Maren Wolf and Anne Serup Grove (layout design)
Anatomy of Larp Thoughts: A Breathing Corpus – the finished book. Yanina Zaichanka (illustrations) and Kirsten van Werven (edits)
Anatomy of Larp Thoughts: A Breathing Corpus — chapter illustration. Yanina Zaichanka (illustrations), Kirsten van Werven (edits), and Maren Wolf and Anne Serup Grove (layout design)
Nevermore: Family Issues (2023). Photo by Anna Posetselska.
