Category: Documentation

Published on

2015-02-20

in

Documentation

KoiKoi – Drums! Rituals! Inaction!

By
Eirik Fatland

In July of 2014 we invited 75 players from around the Nordic countries to a wilderness camp in Finnskogen, Norway, in order to give life to a fictive hunter-gatherer society. For four days and three nights they sang, slept, woke, wept, ate, drank, drummed, flirted, chanted, and performed the ceremonies as men, women and nuk of the Ankoi. They each have their own stories to tell – some contradictory, but all true. This is a designer’s story – a story about the why and the how of the larp “KoiKoi”.

The Ankoi

The Ankoi are a band society. Each band, (called a “Fam”) consists of 10-20 people, who move from camp to camp through a vast northern forest. Their life is nothing like ours. Their “fathers” are the brothers of their “mothers”, who in turn are the women who nursed them as children. They are surrounded by gods/spirits/presences called kwath, living in the stones and the forest and the winds. Their children have no gender, while their adults have three: women, men and nuknuk. A woman always gives birth alone in the wild, and a man cannot light fires, lest they draw the ire of angry kwath. They have no laws, no judges, and no prisons, regularly fighting each other over perceived insults. They kill strangers on sight.

Every two years, the whole people gather in the valley of Koi, center of their cultural life, to celebrate the feast of KoiKoi. The central rituals of the culture are performed here: rites of passage where children are accepted into a gender and adulthood, FamRit, where a person becomes a member of a different band, the rite of passing into old age, the rites that keep the sun shining and the winds blowing.

The Human Condition

This was not a fantasy larp. Neither was it historical. It was an attempt, for our part, to deal with the central events of human life: Cradle and grave. Relationship and separation. Growing old. Growing young. Being and belonging.

To provide a vantage point on these themes we constructed the Ankoi as a mashup of traditions and ideas as alien from our own culture as possible, but still “authentic”: documented in history and anthropology. The result was a society far more complex than can be described here, but not one representative of any real hunter-gatherer society. These are quite diverse – the Inuit of the Arctic have less in common with the Umanikaina of New Guinea than Denmark has with North Korea.

A hunter-gatherer society opened aesthetic possibilities – facial painting, masks, rituals, storytelling, drums – that had been prominent in some Norwegian larps in the 90s, and that we wanted to bring back for a new generation of players to enjoy. When asked what K oiK oi would be about, our one-word answer was “Rituals!”.

Low Conflict, Slow Play

Our modern culture is steeped in a sense of urgency that infests even historical and fantasy larps with a relentless focus on Action! Conflict! Now! With K oiK oi our aim was different: Serenity. Reflection. Rythm. The joy of being alive.

Player feedback – generally ranging from the moderately positive to the euphoric – was not without critical points. But despite the lack of major conflicts and goals to drive the larp, none of the players seem to have been bored. As one player commented on the forum:

As no-one wore watches, and we were encouraged to play slowly, our experience of time changed. It felt like we had an ocean of time available. When was the last time I felt that way? Time was no longer fragmented into small chunks, but became a steady flow of change.

Another concluded: “The calm I found at KoiKoi will be with me for a long time.”

A Systemic Design

KoiKoi was a systemic larp design: we neither wrote individual characters and plots, nor did we spend time negotiating with players. A character was defined by two standard types, e.g. “The Best Lover” and “Afraid of the Dark”. In the sign-up form, players were asked which of the 40 types they were interested in playing. No two characters had the same combination of types.

We encouraged players to sign up together, as fams. These groups, and the enthusiasts who initiated them, did a lot of work to coordinate practical and creative preparations, filling in the gaps between our types and real humans.

The culture served as the dramaturgical engine, designed to offer up meaningful play opportunities – transitions, relationships and choices – for every character. For young adults to find one or more lovers, and be accepted as members of the same fam. For older adults: to consider whether it was time to settle down at Koi as an Ald, an elder. For the elders: to consider whether your path was near its end. And for the children: to seek adulthood as a woman, a man, or a nuk.

Teaching through Language

We communicated all this by defining how the Ankoi talked about their world, hoping that players would internalize the culture that spoke this language and told these stories. We, obviously, could not make up and teach an entirely new language. Instead, we modified Norwegian (and Swedish and Danish) to create Språk, the Ankoi Language.

In Norwegian a woman is called a “Kvinne”. In Språk she is called “Kvinn”. In Norwegian, the plural – women – is “Kvinner”. In Språk, it is “KvinnKvinn”. Common words were reduced to their first syllable, and repeated to make a plural or an emphasis.

We thereby provided an easy-to-learn illusion of speaking a different language. It also meant that non-larpers overhearing statements like “meeting the nuknuk for some foodfood” thought the players had lost their marbles.

Here is a sample chapter of the main text – the Kulturkompendium – titled “Murder”:

Humans do not kill humans. Only beasts, and strangers.

I have heard that long ago,
a man killed a man in his own fam.
Then all understood that he was not a man. The man was dead.
And he who killed
was a wroth and jealous kwath.
This was difficult.
For the kwath continued to live with the fam
as if it was a man.
And fam asked an aldnuk for advice.
And the advice they were given, they followed. They shared no food with kwath
and told no stories to kwath.
And when kwath-that-pretended-to-be-a-man wanted to tell stories
no-one listened.
And so it walked away
over the river to the land of the strangers
and since then, no-one has heard of it.

These texts were also distributed an audiobook, earning us accolades from busy, text-weary and reading-impaired larpers. Every larp should have an audiobook.

No KoiKoi text has a single author – we wrote collaboratively, online, constantly revising and adding to each others work. We also wrote some 30 myths and stories, and gave each player one, encouraging them to tell it at the larp. That wish was granted: not only did the players tell stories, they also invented new ones. By the end of K oiK oi, the Ankoi Literary Canon contained some 100-150 stories.

Our language-based approach worked very well for most things: The characters spoke Språk. They believed, intuitively, in signs and portents and taboos and kwath. Their social structure followed the intended “primal anarchism”, though with perhaps a bit too much attention given to the symbolic roles of Great Man and Great Woman in each fam, and the future-telling rites of the nuknuk.

Gender was tougher. Players easily picked up the notion of gender as (mostly) divorced from biological sex. One female-bodied character went from being a child to being a man at the larp, and was unambiguously accepted as such. But pairings tended towards monogamy and jokes were told based on the premise of “man who always hunts for the beautiful woman”, in direct contradiction of the cultur compendium. While the nuk’s social role (caretakers and shamans) was clear, their gender identity – their sense of self – was not. If you want to tinker with gender, we conclude, you’ll need plenty of workshop time.

A Ritual Dramaturgy

But this was a larp about rituals, right? Yes. Yes, it was. We had pre-scripted it to contain 1-2 major rituals (“Rit) each day, as well as innumerable smaller ones. Each rit was described through a minimalistic ritual “recipe”. Had the Christian Mass been described the same way, it would have been : “The priest distributes bread and wine, saying ‘this is the body of Christ, this is the blood of Christ’”. All the singing, prayers and cermons would have been left to improvisation.

We used the workshops to practice such improvisation. The main element of ritual improv – a set of practices that have evolved over the years in the Oslo larp scene – is to cultivate an awareness of the people around you : to listen, sense, feel, and then to act in harmony. Rhythm, movement and chanting all contribute to synchronising people. On top of this, we introduced a system of hand-signs that would allow people to take, use and distribute leadership in the rituals.

The ritual improv approach was also used when improvising music, of which there was plenty, and in our sex simulation technique.

Ankoi storytelling was both ritual-like and larp-like: the “audience” would chant along with the storyteller, and the storyteller could use hand-signs to call others to act as the characters of the story. This, we feel, was one of the most successful aspects of the larp design: storytelling became a constant activity, the thing you did when you had nothing else to do, and something some players wanted to continue doing after the larp had ended. Some of the pivotal moments of the larp occurred in the midst of improvised storytelling, as the stories told resonated with the lives of multiple characters and players.

Practical Production

One does not simply walk into Finnskogen. It is a vast wilderness – cold and wet, populated by swarms of meat-eating insects, far removed from the nearest hospital. Our pre-larp planning included contingency plans for bear attacks and the purchase of a defibrillator. Neither bear nor heart attacks occurred, but we waged constant war against the meat- eating insects. The location did not have enough buildings for all the fams, so a gang of heroic larpers volunteered to build additional buildings before the larp.

The main hall, Koi, was transformed into a tribal gathering space by 20 meters of rough tapestry. The three ritual places posed a bigger challenge. We were helped by the large boulders giant kwath had thrown around the area. By decorating them in a mixture of clay and paint, and clearing the bush around, random forest locations were turned into sacred spaces. Each fam was responsible for outfitting their own camp and for most of the food they would need during the game. Observing players in their great costumes, their scenic campsites, preparing elaborate meals, singing, drumming and chanting, being Ankoi – this was our reward as organizers.

Altogether, KoiKoi was – by the standards of Norwegian larp – a major production, nearly perfectly executed. Had it not been, these other stories could not have been told.

A Night of Death and Laughter

We close this organizers’ story by sharing a moment from another, a player’s story. Latter was an aldnuk, an elder nuk and shaman. In the ceremony of Dødrit, Latter was responsible for killing those deemed useless to society and ready to become forkwath, ancestor spirits:

Dødrit had finally come to an end.As always it had been a night filled with one feeling after another. Ebbe and Dugg had stopped being. Latter had strangled them. They were now forkwath. Walking with the other aldnuk towards Koi, Latter was still holding on to the two white ribbons. They heard singing from Koi. When they arrived Bris threw open the doors and they entered. As others danced around the bonfire in the centre of Koi, Latter sat down on the knees.

Sometimes bursting into sorrowful moans.The song in the room continued, but changed character.After a while the circle (on its own?) began chanting the names of the deceased: Ebbe, Dugg, Ebbe, Dugg, Ebbe, Dugg… The names of the two aldmen became a melody. Latter, the only ankoi who takes human lives, crept towards the fire on all fours. Screamed, and left.

Later that night, they sat by the fire at Boarfam. Told lighter stories. Were comforted by their old friend and lover, Wave. Joked. Laughed. Their face still painted with the death mask…

The three previous days had seen meditation, song, dance, love and birth. By this ritual murder, this final act of loss and cruelty, our tableau of the human condition was complete.

KoiKoi

Credits: Margrete Raaum (main organizer + producer), Eirik Fatland and Tor Kjetil Edland (main organizers). Trine Lise Lindahl (writing/concept), Martin Knutsen (production/scenography), Elin Nilsen and Jørn Slemdal (writers). Extended team: Fabe Dalen (costume), Ståle Johansen and Anders Ohlsson (practical), Gaffa Express, (building and derigging), Frode Pettersen and Ørnefam (building), Li Xin (props & photography).
Date: July 1-5, 2014
Location: Finnskogen, Norway
Length: 5 days (4 in-character)
Players: 75
Budget: €10,000
Participation Fee: €90 (€70 under 26)
Game Mechanics: Minimalist.
Website: http://koikoilaiv.org/

This article was initially published in The Nordic Larp Yearbook 2014 which was edited by Charles Bo Nielsen & Claus Raasted, published by Rollespilsakademiet and released as part of documentation for the Knudepunkt 2015 conference.

Cover photo: Forkwath (ancestral spirits) gathered around one of the sacred boulders. Each clay mask weighed 5kg. (Play, Li Xin). All other photos by Li Xin.
Published on

2015-02-18

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Documentation

Infinite Firing Squads: The Evolution of The Tribunal

By
J. Tuomas Harviainen

I accidentally created a hit, and have ever since been wondering why. I have had success with several mini-larps over the years, such as A Serpent of Ash (2006) and Prayers on a Porcelain Altar (2007), both of which keep getting the occasional rerun here and there. The Tribunal, however, is something else. It has become a viral work that seems to evolve by itself, far beyond my grasp.

Yet, nevertheless, each iteration adds something new. The little game has achieved a Pinocchio effect of its own, and lives a life about which I only hear fragments, in the form of G+ discussions, blog posts, emails and the occasional blog post.

So what exactly happened? It was originally a contest game, part of the first LarpWriter challenge, back in 2010. A game meant for educational purposes: A group of soldiers, waiting for an unjust trial, intended to possibly spark a few key reflections about the mechanics of oppression.

Then, through a couple of convention runs, it started to spread, while still also being run in Belarus, for which it was originally designed. I had received feedback with certain changes to how the game was run being suggested, but due to the educational intent, I was loath to make the recommended changes. I experimented with a few (e.g., an extra character; post- game confessions), but did not add them to the script.

In the mean time, however, others did. As the game script spread, Tribunal was suddenly run by other people much more often than by myself. In some places, it became a tool for symbolic resistance, with characters reaching a uniform goal to do the right thing (and probably die as a result), because the players thought they could not do the same in real life.

In the United States, thanks to the simultaneous contributions of many famous role-playing activists, runs appeared, during which the characters were taken to testify and then returned to the room, with filmed, emotional interrogations, and so forth. Jason Morningstar even made a better-looking version of the game material, which I had kept as a simple text document, for localization.

So what made The Tribunal so popular that I have lost both count and track of its runs after #30 or so? Personally, I believe it to be a combination of factors. Part of the success obviously comes from the success itself: the reputation it has as a good larp brings in more players, as do recommendations from well-known larpers. The design structure, too, has a significant impact.

First and foremost, it is a short one-trick pony, easy to organize and play in a convention setting, or a small apartment. The topic is strong enough to (most of the time) carry the interaction and interest of the participants, and the injustice palpable enough. I nevertheless think that the key factor was my sudden idea to create a fable, to name each character after an animal and give them personalities accordingly.

That is a particularly effective way for players to not only create a strong personality from of the short amount of text, but also to remember those of others. For Finnish players, I could have said “This character is Lehto”, but for everyone else – and the Finn – saying he is Wolf carries the point much better.

The topic and the character templates together create something that is neither transparent nor secret in design((Andresen, M. E. (2012). Bringing fiction alive: An introduction for education and recreation. In M. E. Andresen (ed.) Playing the learning game (pp. 10-17). Oslo: Fantasiforbundet.)). Everyone knows that Cat will be selfish, as Rat probably will too, but no one knows how they will testify.

This produces emergent plot, in which there is no need for steering, just the freedom to talk and to act((Harviainen, J. T. (2012). Experiences with emergent plot. In Truhlář, S. M. (ed.). Odraž se dokud můžeš (pp. 133-145). Praha: Odraz.)). The same way, game masters do not have to intervene in any way, unless they want to run interrogations during the game.

No scene breaks, no inner monologues – it could be run on a stage as an improvisational theatre piece, with very little instructions needed (and actually has). It has its flaws, I know, which are especially visible if certain roles are played in a passive manner. Strangely, when they occasionally manifest, those flaws seem to inspire people to improve on the work, rather than abandon it,

Finally, I think The Tribunal evolves because I did not follow my own advice on writing repeatable larps((Harviainen, J. T. (2009). Notes on designing repeatable larps. In M. Holter, E. Fatland & E. Tømte (Eds.) Larp, the universe, and everything (pp. 97-110). Oslo: Knutepunkt.)): I left the running instructions vague – and thus flexible. So people inspired by the libretto are inspired to experiment with it, rather than to run it by the book. Lucky for me, they are also willing to share the results of those experiments. Tribunal, like any healthy child, may have been influenced by its parent, but it is obvious that it has matured into something with a unique life of its own.

The Tribunal and other free games by the author can be downloaded from:
http://leavingmundania.com/2014/08/17/j-tuomas-harviainen-larp-collection/

This article was initially published in The Knudepunkt 2015 Companion Book which was edited by Charles Bo Nielsen & Claus Raasted, published by Rollespilsakademiet and released as part of documentation for the Knudepunkt 2015 conference.

Cover photo: Stockholm Scenario Festival 2014 by Johannes Axner is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
Published on

2015-02-13

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Documentation

Exit 3: The Bunker – Claustro-drama

By
Karijn van der Heij

In July 2014, 30 players in the Netherlands split into two groups of 15 and allowed themselves to be all but locked up during two of the hottest days of the week. They were playing a larp game called Exit, the third installment in a series exploring interpersonal tension in enclosed spaces. This game was situated in the early sixties, in a cold war bomb shelter.

Like in the previous installments there were no game masters present at all during the run time: all communications to influence the game direction and pacing were given per phone, speaker and a period-like machine made out of a receipt printer. The organizers kept track of the game through cameras and microphones. This way the illusion of being disconnected from the outside world was preserved.

We were lucky to have two large, separate rooms with facilities. The first Exit was only playable for about 15 participants, with many more regretting not being there. In the second game we tried to fix this by doing two runs back-to-back in one weekend, but that significantly reduced the playtime of each run. This time we decided to do a parallel run of two games, which was challenging, but worked out really well.

Characters

The story started when the players awoke on Saturday morning and lasted until late in the afternoon on Sunday, after which there was some time for debriefing. Friday evening was spent socializing and doing some workshops, both for fleshing out character quirks and relationships and for communicating out of game fears and limits, since we know from experience these games can get pretty heated.

In the previous games we had players send in three one-line concepts, and we would pick the ones that we thought best contributed to the overall drama and let them flesh those out.

This time the characters would not meet for the first time when the game started; they were already part of a close-knit community. That called for a somewhat different approach.

We did again not have pre-written characters, but we did have pre-written roles in the cast: there was an upper class family, a working class family, a childless couple, an outsider couple (players could choose why those two did not fit in), a lone weirdo in the house on the corner and three coincidental passers-by, who were the most unrestricted in making their concept.

We cast everybody in one of these roles while allowing for their preferences, and then had them make online connections with the players of their families and neighbors on their own. To make sure that people had intersecting secrets we gave all the players two Dread-style questions, like „what are you hiding in the attic?“, thus establishing the existence of secrets without deciding on the nature of those secrets.

Setting

The comparison with the Nordic larp Ground Zero is pretty easy to make, but apart from the setting the games are probably pretty different in intention and feel.

In Exit, it was pretty clear from the beginning that there was no massive nuclear attack going on outside. Instead of that we opted for an apparent virus outbreak: the players could just wait for it to be over. The reason is that we did not want to explore the narrative of coming to terms with one’s imminent death and the loss of civilization. Instead, the Exit series has so far always been pretty Sartrian: the overarching theme is how the dynamics of a group of people are affected by a stressful situation. The answer, it turns out, is that those groups become pretty dysfunctional after a while.

Mind you, we would of course never dare claim that the Exit series provides actual insights in that regard. There are not many full-weekend one-shot events in the Netherlands, so most people take their chance to try the concepts they always wanted to try but think unworkable for an ongoing series.

That means the cast usually consists of an over-average amount of characters in extreme situations or with extreme opinions in terms of status, religion, sexuality etc. This is in no way discouraged by us, and it does contribute to a more volatile situation and thus, more drama. On top of that people of course aim to escalate instead of subdue their conflicts. They know that a secret that is still a secret at the end of the game is a missed chance.

This time the players really went all out in including typical Sixties themes like the communist scare, emerging feminism and the American Dream. But there was also a lot of emphasis on more personal stories of addiction, betrayal, missed chances and shattered dreams. Some people had secrets as a family, others had deliberately kept things from their loved ones, like the mother in an upper class family who dabbled in witchcraft, or the young woman who had an affair with the man next door.

Sometimes small props and gestures add a lot to the atmosphere: propaganda posters, flags, and food that added to the feeling of being in a shelter: boxes of canned food (including the rather dreaded canned bread) that the players of course had to prepare themselves. We played the Star Spangled Banner multiple times over the radio, and put the text on the wall of the bunker so everyone could sing along. The players couldn’t get it out of their heads for days afterwards.

Player Input

The few points for improvement that were mentioned by player reviews were mainly about the fact that we had no planned moments for escalation, no specific moments for the players to take the spotlight. Some of them would have liked something to encourage them to find the right moment.

We deliberately chose not to do that. The reason is that we like to keep Exit easy to organize so we can create an episode every year alongside our other organizational duties, and writing a plot instead of just inciting incidents would increase this workload. But also because of the fact, that for every one of the three Exits we have decreased the amount of organizer input and have exchanged it with encouraging players to create conflict and play through their characters. We are curious to see what happens as we do that.

The first Exit actually had a plot of sorts, the second one had challenges for the players, and both worked with a system where they had to collect, or fight over, tokens that seemed essential to their characters’ success. This Exit had none of that, there were only some radio fragments and a protocol for the bunker with things like physical exercises and other drills that the characters could perform.

The content that we provided was very well received, especially the radio speeches by the president (some nice amalgams of actual Kennedy quotes), but there was not much of it and most of the time the players were left to their own devices.We were happy to notice that it still worked.

We are still looking for the perfect way to challenge players towards making great secrets and connections, and to make sure they do not leave this step until the last few days.

Maybe more and better workshops are the answer, or those workshops might even provide an alternative character creation process.

We did workshopping for the first time for this Exit. This is another possible point of improvement. The organizers were not very familiar with workshops outside of the usual improv exercises to get warmed up for playing. Something that didn’t help is that one of the organizers who dug into the workshopping aspect has the most unfortunate habit of not writing stuff down, and got sick so she could not be there for the game.

Overall the players were positive about workshops on Friday, but the nature of the workshops could use some improvements.

Reflections

The previous two installments of Exit took place in a medical research centre and a Big Brother style camera house, respectively. In each one we tweaked different aspects of the game. We plan to keep doing this for a long time to come, after all there are many more interesting closed settings, from prisons to space stations.

Exit 3 was the first (but possibly not the last) installment exploring an actual historical period. The fact that Exit attracts mature players who expect drama makes it an easy try-out space for new ideas.

Another thing that was different this time, as mentioned before, is the fact that most characters already knew each other. This worked really well to immediately create tension. On the other hand there is something to say for being in a tough situation with strangers as well. We may have to alternate in the future.

A few weeks after the game I was discussing it with a player. I expressed my surprise at the fact that there are not more people in the Netherlands who run concepts like Exit, since it can create good, original games without too much organizing hassle. He said he could imagine that other people wouldn’t want to do all the hard work of matching and tweaking all those characters together so that the drama would maximize. He found it hard to imagine we didn’t.

And it made me proud to have inspired such a talented cast of players to create such an intense experience amongst themselves. We told them to create their own backgrounds, their own secrets to be exposed and just go nuts. And nuts they went.

Exit 3: The Bunker

Credits: Evolution Events, René van den Berg, Karijn van der Heij, Brenda Hellenthal, Matthijs Kooijman, Cora Korsman (shared responsibility for game design, character creation assistance and game logistics)
Date: July 25 – 27, 2014
Location: Hunsel, The Netherlands
Length: 3 days
Players: 30 in total (two groups of 15 playing simultaneously)
Budget: €1,800
Participation Fee: €55
Game Mechanics: Freeform larp with almost no game mechanics
Website: http://evolution-events.nl/algemeen

This article was initially published in The Nordic Larp Yearbook 2015 published by Rollespilsakademiet and edited by Charles Bo Nielsen, Erik Sonne Georg, et al.

Cover photo: Sometimes a room needs little more dressing than a flag and player costumes will do the rest (Play, Ork de Rooij)

Other photos by Evolution Events and Eline S.
Published on

2015-02-11

in

Documentation

Four Backstory Building Games You Can Play Anywhere!

By
Peter Woodworth

One of the most difficult – but also most rewarding – parts of larp is coming up with a good character backstory. A sense of a character’s past gives great insights into how to play them in the present, for one thing; not to mention, it shines some light on where you may take them in the future. For some people developing a history comes easily, but for many others it’s a bit more of a chore, especially if you’re new to a particular game. Or maybe it’s a one- shot game and you want to develop your characters just a bit more before playing, but don’t have time to write out long backstories.

Fortunately, coming up with a fun, interesting backstory (and accompanying character depth) doesn’t ha ve to mean nights of staring at a blank sheet of paper, waiting for inspiration to strike. Which is exactly where these games come in. Most of them require little or no preparation, and can be played equally well with friends or strangers.

In fact, they also make excellent “ice breaker” exercises to help players warm up, get in character, and become comfortable with each other before play begins. These games generally presuppose the presence of other players; while most can be reconfigured to be played solitary, I believe all of them are enhanced by group participation.

As far as game runners are concerned, these backstory games also make good pre-game workshop tools. They do not normally require any form of staff supervision; though if you want to cultivate particular elements, or avoid certain topics, you can offer guidelines, or even sit in and moderate play. This can be useful if you’re using these as quick exercises before a single-shot game, as you can guide players to creating fairly detailed and well-realized personas very quickly with these games.

1 –The Hell of a Hat Game

What You Need: Costumes and props.

How You Play: Going around in a circle, have each player pick one of their costume or prop pieces. It doesn’t have to be a flashy one they might already have stories for, like signature weapons or prominent jewellery – in fact, it’s usually better if it’s not. Ordinary objects like coats and boots tend to work best, because they’re the pieces you might not think about otherwise, but can say very interesting things about a character’s day-to-day life.

Once they pick an item, that player must talk about it. The player can say anything she likes, but here are some questions to provoke thought if they get stuck: Where did it come from? How did they get it – buy it, make it, steal it, receive it as a gift? What does it mean to them? What do they like about it? If they don’t like it, why do they still keep it? If it was lost or stolen, what would they do to get it back?

If you don’t have any particular costume or props – say, because you just came into a game as a walk-on at a convention and didn’t prepare anything – you can still play! Simply describe what your character would be wearing, or is wearing in your imagination, as opposed to what you have on in reality. It might be a little tougher to remember all of it, but the point of the game remains the same.

Variation – Eye for Style: If you want to have a different but equally interesting kind of fun, on each player’s turn have that player pick a piece from someone else’s costuming and props. Tell a story about where the item came from, what that character did to get it, etc. Naturally this doesn’t mean the story is automatically “true” – that’s for the player in question to decide – but it can certainly reveal a lot about how the other players feel about your character!

Variation – Solo Play: If you want to play the game solitary, take a picture of the costume piece and write a short paragraph or two about it. Post the results to game forums or social media if you want feedback!

2 – The Polaroid Game

What You Need: Nothing except 2+ players.

How to Play: Going around in a circle, each player asks the others to describe a snapshot image of his character, something they imagine might have happened at some point before the character entered play or that happened during downtime. It can be a funny image, a serious image, a mysterious image; any kind of moment at all.

It doesn’t have to start off being terribly specific – “I picture your character, bloody, standing over a body while a woman cries out, ‘What have you done?’” is in many ways just as useful for this game as something like “I see your character, bloody, standing over Mary’s body behind the Northpoint Tavern.”

Once the basic image is established, go around to all other player in the group, with each player adding another detail to the picture – “You’re bloody, but not wearing your armor or holding a weapon” – until it comes back around to the original player. Hence the name The Polaroid Game, because the details slowly come into focus as the picture develops. The details added don’t have to be strictly visual, though, despite the name of the game.

When everyone has had a turn adding to the picture, the player being described makes a final comment and play passes to the next person. Naturally what is described isn’t necessarily “true” unless the original player approves it, but it can serve as a good inspiration.

Variation – Topic: Have the person whose turn it is to be described provide a topic or moment she wants the others to imagine. “Tell me about my character’s first kill,” for instance, or “What did it look like when my heart got broken for the first time?” This is good for helping players who have difficulty coming up with appropriate moments for other people’s characters, or for soliciting help with a particular background element with which the player is having trouble.

3 –The Card Game (Larper’s Poker)

What You Need: A regular deck of playing cards.

How to Play: Deal one card at random to each player, before moving around to each player in turn. When it is their turn, players must tell a vignette from their character’s past.

The kind of story being told depends on the suit of the card selected. Hearts centers on mental health or an emotional relationship of some kind (not necessarily a loving one); Diamonds refers to stories focused on wealth, equipment and other material goods (or lack thereof); Clubs requires a story about a physical challenge, battle, illness or ordeal of some kind; and Spades refers to encounters focused around interaction with setting-specific supernatural or science-fiction elements such as zombies, magic, cyberware, superpowers, monsters, etc.

If your game does not have elements of this kind, Spades becomes a “wild card” category where the player can tell any kind of story they like. You may want to at least roughly define what Spades involves before playing, if it could be unclear in your setting.

Stories should be no longer than five minutes or so, and can be much shorter – a snapshot or moment is fine, as long as it says something interesting about the character. Players are encouraged to stick close to the subject matter of their card’s suit, but the categories are pretty broad, so it’s OK if there’s a little bit of crossover. It’s about telling an interesting story, after all.

Variation – Five Card Draw: Each player draws a hand of five cards, and picks a card each round, returning it to the deck when it’s played. This gives players more control over the kind of story they feel like telling each round (and time to think about what they’ll be telling next), making it easier for new or nervous players.

Variation – Face Value: As normal, except that the stories reflect the values on the cards – lower numbers mean it was more of a minor incident, while higher numbers mean it was more important, and a face card means a player must talk about a particular person who came into their life (or left it) as a result of the story.

Variation – Pass Left: Players draw fivecards,butoneachplayer’sturn,the person to their left passes them a card to determine what kind of story should be told. After one full round, pass right instead, shuffle seats, or otherwise change the order so that people have new partners for their cards.

Variation – Take Me to the River: Deal each player five cards and go around in a circle, with each player taking a turn. Each round, players play cards from their own hand, but the player must somehow continue the story they’ve been telling in the previous rounds, even if it is a different suit. So by the end of the game, they will have told one story in five installments, with elements dictated by the cards in hand.

4 – The Mixtape Game

What You Need: A mix CD or music playlist and some way to play it.

How to Play: This game requires a little more preparation than most of the others, but the end result is worth it. Each player contributes several musical tracks to the collective mix or playlist, which is then placed on shuffle (if possible, disable repeated playing of the same track). This game is a good one for long trips to a game or breaks during play, so simply adjust the number of tracks that fits the time.

Play itself is simple – start playing the music, and as each song plays, everyone listens to it and declares either “Play,” “Theme,” or “Pass.” “Play” means that you enjoy the song, but don’t necessarily feel it would be a song for your character in particular. “Theme” means that you could see that song as a theme for your character, something you’d put on a personal playlist dedicated to your character. (You can have more than one Theme, and more than one character can call Theme on the same song. It’s non-competitive that way.)

“Pass” means that you’re just not connecting to the song in relation to the game; it doesn’t necessarily mean you think the song is bad, but you’re just not feeling it in this context.

If you say “Play” or “Theme,” try to add what about it that got your attention – connect it to your backstory, to your impression of your character. Does the beat remind you of the thrill of a battle in your past? Does a line in the lyrics jump out as totally true to your character? Is the tone of the song putting you in the mood for game? Did the music capture a moment in your character’s history so perfectly it makes you jump up and down in your seat?

If two players pick Theme, maybe it’s because they shared that moment in their past? You don’t need to have to be a long, detailed anecdote, just a quick image or moment or impression that it brings up as you think of your character.

Play continues until all tracks have been played. It is perfectly acceptable to ask that a track be repeated, or to return to a track after all tracks have been heard, if players are responding to it strongly and have more stories to tell.

Variation – No Preparations: If you don’t have time to put together a playlist or make a CD, or you want to put together a spontaneous session, you can still play! All you need is access to the internet on a device capable of playing music. Simply have each player look up a song online, and when it comes to their turn, they simply play it for the group on their phone or other device. Giving players a few minutes to find the song they want, making sure their device can play it and otherwise prepare is recommended before starting a round; otherwise, players may be distracted looking up songs instead of really listening on other players’ turns.

Variation – The Score: Another variation is to treat the music like the score of a film or a television program, the music that is playing in the background to provide atmosphere and emotion. When each song comes on, have each player describe what their character would be doing “onscreen” while that song played, as if they were watching a movie and that was the music for the scene.

5 – Post Game

As players, you are encouraged to take some time after a game is complete to think about the material that was generated during play, perhaps even talk about it with the other players. It’s important to remember that while these games are intended to stimulate backstory creation and help flesh out characters, that doesn’t mean you must use it, or that you can’t alter, edit, or otherwise use what’s created as you see fit.

Do not feel bound to keep something as “canon” for your character just because it came up in game, even if the other players really liked it and thought it fit. Even if you wind up using none of it, and take your inspiration in a totally different direction from what came up during play, then great! As long as you have fun making stories, that’s what it’s all about.
Published on

2015-02-06

in

Documentation

De la Bête – An Expensive Beast

By
David František Wagner
The beast I saw resembled a leopard, but had feet like those of a bear and a mouth like that of a lion. The dragon gave the beast his power and his throne and great authority.
Revelations, 13:2, the Bible (New International Version)

De la Bête (About the Beast) was a larp for 95 players, running over 48 hours, with 12 hours workshops before and some extra three hours post-larp workshops.

It was probably the most expensive game in the history of Czech larps. We will go more into detail about size and realizations about using gender specific characters in the end. But first: What was the larp all about?

Background and Theme

For a Czech person, old France, the ‘Ancien Régime’, is always a place of great books and great stories. Dumas ́s brave Three musketeers, de La Fontaine ́s social critique and wisdom transformed into fables, and Balzac ́s fervent drive to describe all aspects of life in his novels, intrigue and romance of de Laclos ́s Dangerous liaisons. And of course Moliére ́s drama and the great works of Rousseau and Voltaire.

Our imagination is maybe even more fired up by real-life events: the legend of Joan of Arc, countless stories of endless rivalry between France and Britain and the horrifying difference between the splendor of Versailles and the poverty of the common man.

We feel that all those stories describe the human condition from really interesting angles – and we found the one story that enabled us to pull all that together in one story.

The story of the Beast.

Setting

The game is not set in a specific year, but rather it attempts to depict the height of the French Ancien Régime in the second half of the 18th century as a historical phenomenon.

That means that the absolutist and infallible King of France is Louis, without a given number. Technical innovations progress only very slowly, the Church plays a very important role in matters of the world, and volunteers are returning from the war in America.

The key theme of the game is a conflict between different ways of thought. We see the collision between rationality and sensitivity, scientific and superstitious views, Catholics and Huguenots.

These and other lines reflect one of the game’s features – it has several layers of interpretation, which are, from a strictly positivist point of view, mutually exclusive.

Most events in the game can therefore be viewed from several different angles – and all of them can be right. After adding the element of character themes to the game, this feature proved to be very valuable, and the varying interpretations stimulated the game, rather than killing it.

The setting also clearly showed how the advantage of having weapons which the characters could use in conflicts that turned bloody; these being blank firing pistols and steel weapons – mostly different kinds of knives, swords and rapiers, provided by us.

Story

The game does not have one story that unifies all the players. It takes place in a region suffering under the attacks of the Beast, and although many plots are linked to the hunt for the Beast, many others, based on religious conflicts, witchcraft or schemes at the court, are just as important to the game.

The game begins and ends with symbolic moments (return of the veterans from the war, a speech by the baron de Morsange, followed by individual epilogues, which we will discuss later in more detail). It is divided into acts which outline the game’s framework, both from the point of view of rules (increasing use of violence) and the story. The game works not only with natural escalation of the stories and their setting by us, but also with explicit meta-game information – some of the conflicts, decisions etc. are limited by “You have to solve this before XY”.

This timing allows for quite sophisticated work with the game’s dramaturgy, and very accurate use of plot twists, fakes, double climaxes, etc. In the third run, we also solved the dramaturgic problem of many dramatic games: too many plots reaching their peak in the same time almost leads to comedy, where a tragic love story reaches its climax right next to a young scientist turning mad, while only a few meters away, an unjustly sentenced convict decides to take his revenge.

To players who do not know their plots this naturally seems like random groups of people who are suddenly making dramatic gestures and dying in various ways, without any reason. Our solution used more significant stratification of the content, which caused some plots to reach their climax sooner than others.

The fact that one character always had a role in more than one plot meant that even after the end of one plot the players still had enough content to keep their game going, because they could engage in another plot. We have also changed our approach to scenography and attempted to use the space as effectively as possible, offering various spaces for various uses to the players.

We actively promoted suitable locations for different types of scenes, and from the beginning the players were informed of that: “This romantic pond can be used for a rendezvous, this courtyard for a duel and this table for an argument.” We also tried to support the story’s progress using musical intermezzos between acts, which moved from period tunes (introductory cheerful military march, deliberately used to create contrast with the destitute unit) to unsettling modern ambient.

The lack of a central story served to untie our hands in many aspects, and we were able to work with three levels of plots (according to the number of characters involved):
1. Mass plots, concerning tens of characters, based on a specific feature – for example a problem concerning all local Huguenots. These plots provided more of a framework and points of reference: in reality, the players did not spend that much time with them, and the emphasis was on the other two categories.
2. Group plots, which were meant for groups of 4 to 8 players, from obvious and official (families, hunting groups), to unofficial ones (gambling societies, collectives of veterans) and secret ones (conspiratorial organizations). The goal was to have every character involved in at least 3 – 5 such plots (depending on their intensity – being a member of the Freemasons generated a lot of content in itself). Various private groups were meant to provide sufficient interconnection between character groups and create a believable, and above all interesting network of relationships, which allowed the player to see different parts of the game and play out scenes in different contexts.
3. Personal plots, which included a small number of characters. This category included personal goals and motivations of the characters, which correspond to the characters’ themes if possible, and support them. The theme of a character was the most significant game design element of De la Bête.
The Character As a Novel

Each character has its theme, problem, and main question that is usually phrased in a rather general way: “What boundaries does scientific knowledge have?”, “What does it mean to become an adult?”. These are reflected in concrete situations in the game: “Is it morally tolerable to carry out an autopsy, though the relatives are against it?”, “Can I steal to provide for my siblings?”.

The theme also provides the main interpretative angle of the game: everything the players encounter in the game can be integrated in their theme, or overlooked because it does not support their story.

An important creative shift for us was to explicitly acknowledge the theme on a meta-level, right in the character text. The text of the role, which the player received, contained a brief summary of the character’s life story, clearly stated goals, relationships, and values, and an explicitly described theme of the character.

Apart from that we also added a song to each character, which served as an inspiration and which we thought depicted some aspect of the role (we used a great variety of songs and tunes, from classical music, to Stairway to Heaven, to Polish and French mutations of Still Alive from Portal).

This approach to the characters also significantly influenced the ways the game was played. Inclusion of individual scenes into one’s own story led to a situation when emotional scenes are not perceived as the pinnacle of the game, but rather the scene submits to the general storyline, which conforms to a general message and meaning.

The game style, which presented individual scenes as means to piece together the story and let the whole game be interpreted through the prism of a character theme, was completely new in the Czech Republic. We will later present a more detailed explanation of how it was created in a specialized article, The cure for the stuffed Beast. But for now, the key factor for the game was that this style of gameplay did not require any kind of sophisticated training – only an outline of the general direction for the players during the workshops.

During the game itself, there was a specially designated room in the pub in which the players had the possibility to consult with organizers. The organizers were trained for this purpose, had a complex overview of the game, and also performed basic evaluations of the players’ mental state and problems (we assign great importance to mental hygiene).

The players were openly instructed to visit them at least once every act, to talk about their plans and options, or at least to reflect on how they had progressed in the game using the available information, additional texts and such. The idea was to get detached from the role for a short time, in order to come back to the game with a better idea how to advance and perhaps even a new perspective.

The epilogues, which concluded the game, have the form of one clearly phrased question which the player answers not from the point of view of their character, but rather the author of a novel. These questions were not necessarily the same as in the original text of the theme in the character sheet, but they could address the theme from an unexpected angle.

It is answering these questions that really ends the game. A secondary goal of this system of game conclusion is to support an important design plan: we tried to write the characters without using classical archetypes or dramatically functional division to good and bad, or one-dimensional. We used the system of varying groups and plots to show different sides of the characters’ personalities, and a void one-sided archetypes, such as “mother”, “mistress”, “murderer”, etc.

Realization

We spent quite a long time deciding whether it would be reasonable to write a game from a period, where costumes would create a challenge for most players. In the end we decided to avoid the problem by providing all costumes, weapons and other props for the game.

Despite the non-simulationist nature of the game, we decided to invest as much effort as possible into the setting, props and scenery. The logical result was to create three organizer teams, connected by two main organizers and other links.

The PR team was involved in communicating with the players, promotion, photographers, managing payments and so on.

The realization team had four permanent members, who worked together with the creative team throughout the whole year. Their responsibilities included creating props, coordinating volunteers, logistics and production. At times, there were over fifty volunteers participating on the production of the event.

For maximal optimization, we had ten people dedicated to scene setting, cooking and packing up the game throughout the whole weekend, and a number of others, who were involved only for some time (players, working before and after the game for a discount on the fee, stagehands, who went off to play a short-term role for a while, and vice versa).

From the point of view of total costs, it was probably the most expensive game in the history of Czech larps, with the total costs slightly exceeding one million crowns. The only game with higher costs is the forthcoming larp The Legion: A Siberian Story. But it was well received, though costly, and we plan to run the game again in 2015.

We are considering translating it into English, and if there are enough players interested in participating, we would start working on it in March.

The game uses a vast amount of texts, and requires high-quality literary translation.

Size

The time for the game itself is 48 hours, adding approximately 12 hours for pre-game workshops and half an hour for the compulsory after-game workshops, and potentially also 2 hours for facultative after-game workshops.

The game is for 95 players, with 57 male characters and 38 female ones. Our choice to use strictly set gender of roles was quite instinctive: it is completely traditional in the Czech Republic, and during the first phases of creating the game, the thought of the possibility of using gender unspecified or cross-gender roles didn’t even occur to us.

Reasons for gender specification of roles:

We still believe that dividing the characters into clearly male and female ones and lack of cross-gender playing is important for the game and for us, for reasons concerning not only the historical setting and costumes that we provide for the game.

There are many multigenerational family plots in the game, and we aim to present stories of people who go beyond the place traditionally assigned to them by society.

These themes are especially strong with women, who for instance take a strong stance against their family and the demands that it places on them (e.g. an illegitimate daughter de Portefaix, hardly tolerated at the court), become significant moral authorities (e.g. Claire Gravois, a saint), or disturb the order of the society in general (e.g. the galley prisoners – it should be mentioned here, that the inner social order of the galleys includes two male prisoners, who are, however, at the bottom of the prison hierarchy).

We see these kinds of stories as substantially more interesting and natural in the game when the roles are clearly identified as male or female. We have dismissed the option of casting female players for roles of men and vice versa for the above mentioned reasons, and in order to maintain the visual illusion of a historical world.

Conclusion

De la Bête is a game, which tries to connect classic larp elements (including action, shooting, fencing and running around) with novels (including romance, mystery stories and huge family sagas) and philosophy (attempting to depict a great number of contemporary schools of thought, which we see as interesting and topical even in the present).

And we think that when the Beast howls in the forest, even we, the authors, will shiver for a long time to come…

De la Bête

Credits: Adam Pešta (chief of production); David František Wagner (chief of game design and writing); Kamil Buchtík, Ondřej Hartvich, Lucie Chlumská, Mikuláš Pešta, Petr Turoň (game design and writing); Alice Ďurčatová, Slaven Elčić, Iva Vávrová (PR); Tomáš Bazala, Eva Mlejnková (costumes); Vít Filipovský (website); Alena Kučerová (accounting); Michal Olbert (pre-game photos); Rosenthal o.s., Rolling and another 30 people.
Location: Valeč castle, Czech republic
Length: 2 days + 1 day of pre-larp
Players: 95 per game
Budget: €12,000 per run
Participation Fee: €65 – €95
Game Mechanics: Pre-scripted characters, pre game workshops, rules for combat, act structure
Website: http://delabete.cz/

This article was initially published in The Nordic Larp Yearbook 2014 which was edited by Charles Bo Nielsen & Claus Raasted, published by Rollespilsakademiet and released as part of documentation for the Knudepunkt 2015 conference.

Cover photo: Philosopher stands trial (Play, Ondra Pěnička).
Published on

2015-02-04

in

Documentation

Behind the Larp Census

By
Aaron Vanek
29.751 larpers can’t (all) be wrong

On January 10, 2015, 101 days after launching, the first global Larp Census closed to replies. 29,751 responses were logged from 123 different territories in 17 different languages. The data from this survey is freely available via a Creative Commons license at LarpCensus.org.

Barring death, dismemberment, or debilitating drunkenness, the total results from each question will be revealed in a presentation at Knudepunkt 2015. This article goes under the covers to expose the motivations, methods, and madness of the squishy humans behind the hard numbers.

The Beginning

At Wyrd Con II (a Southern California interactive storytelling convention) in 2011, I was out at a late dinner with some friends. Mark Mensch, a longtime boffer larper, asked me what I thought was needed to unify live action role players.

Without missing a beat, I laid out my

Three Big Ideas
1. A user-customizable larp map-calendar where people can search for any kind of larp anywhere in the world up to a year in advance.
2. A digital archival repository of larp events—what was run, by whom, when, where, using what system, and any notes or links to further documentation.
3. A larp census to track all larpers around the world.
I actually mentioned #3 first, but it’s more dramatic to bury the lead.

I don’t know why I said those three things, and I probably had the ideas before I said them, but that was the first time I voiced them aloud.

Regardless, the conversation turned to other matters and never went anywhere. I kept the ideas in the back of my head, however. I repeated them at a workshop session at Solmukohta 2012, where Claus Raasted and a few others offered help in making the map-calendar: which has since been created, roughly, by Larping.org and Larpcore.com.

In mid-February, 2013, New Zealander Ryan Paddy and I started communicating via email after he asked the Larp Academia (or International Larp Academia) mailing list for demographic statistics on larpers. He wanted to know if live action role- playing was “popular” and in which countries.

No one on the list had figures beyond their own larp group’s roster or a few isolated surveys from years past, e.g., Joe Valenti of NERO offered a range from “fifty-thousand to two million.” I again floated my census idea and Ryan took the bait. According to Elizabeth Kolbert((Kolbert, Elizabeth,“The Big Kill: New Zealand’s crusade to rid itself of mammals,”The New Yorker, Dec. 22, 2014)) it is not unusual to find Kiwis with “a cheerful, let’s-get-on-with-it manner” that she claims she “eventually came to see as very New Zealand.” This is good, because without Ryan, I would still be whining about kooky concepts that nobody builds for me.

We get along well and communication between us, while spotty, has been robust. Ryan edits the English language entry on “LARP” for Wikipedia and has a background in psychology and programming, skills I lacked to get the Census done.

Both of us wanted to know the answers to basic questions about larping worldwide: how big is the community, what are its demographics, how long have people played, what are they playing, and why?

We set out to make the Larp Census a reality.

The Grind

The first choice we faced fell between using a prepared polling system, such as Google’s, or develop our own. Ryan said “Google Forms can only receive a limited amount of data (400,000 answers to individual questions); we wanted more. Also, there were several things we wanted to do it that it couldn’t have achieved. If it was up to the job I would have been happy to use Google Forms.” Thus Ryan did the programming for the Larp Census site.

Next we looked for a website host. We hoped to deliver this baby in an academic institution, but they either didn’t reply or replied in the negative, e.g., University of Tampere. We then sought other entities, leading to one of the Big Mistakes (possibly the biggest).

One of the sites I asked to host was Larping.org. They immediately agreed, as they were already considering doing a similar project, but during the negotiation process I withdrew. I worried about protecting the privacy of the respondents and the data.

A massive email list like what the census would generate is gold to larp businesses; but neither Ryan nor I wanted anyone, including us, to make any money off of it. While discussing things with Larping.org, I sent over a first draft of the questions. This boomeranged back, and badly. We cut off talks in mid-April and eventually bought the domain larpcensus.org with money out of our own pockets.

Most of Ryan’s and my time was spent designing the questions, which proved surprisingly difficult. First we had to decide what we wanted to know. I felt that a self- identifying larper’s location, age, gender, and how long they have been larping gave enough information.

Ryan wanted more info (much more), which I quickly agreed with. We split the census into two parts: the first page of questions asked for only the required info. Everything else was optional. Tough decisions and some generalizations had to be made for each inquiry. Plus, each question was weighed for informational necessity against the time it would take to answer it, as we wanted to avoid a too-long questionnaire.

One thing was asked of us a few times, “What is your hypothesis?” But we had no thesis going in, nothing we hoped to prove. We merely strived to gather as much data as possible and turn it over to others to see if it confirmed or refuted their hypotheses. My analogy is that we are farmers harvesting data. It is up to chefs—larp scholars, business folk, and independent researchers—to use what we gather and turn it into dissertations and Power Point presentations.

We sent out two iterations of the motivation questions to a few hundred larpers for comments. The first batch had over 50 questions that we edited to below 30. We also asked as many larp scholars as we could manage (herd like cats) to look over the census and provide feedback. One of the comments we received was that it appeared “too American,” something we aggressively trying to avoid. We remained cognizant of the American spelling of words as well as terminology and larp style emphasis. Our goal was to be as broad as possible, to capture something about every kind of larper, straight boffer action to Nordic arthouse and all in between. But this goal, plus the fact that we were talking to larp scholars who stereotypically ha ve a pedantic viewpoint (not anyone at Knudepunkt, of course!), led to some complaints, which I will discuss later.

Remarkably, Ryan was also setting up the website at the same time. Suddenly in the middle of August 2013, we were blindsided: Larping.org released their own Larp Census.

The Larping.org census, in my extremely biased opinion, seemed to be heavily based on the first draft of questions we sent earlier. They used a Google poll form, required respondents’ emails, and skewed it to American larpers, e.g., using the U.S. dollar as the only type of currency, and asking a lot of questions that only made sense to campaign players.

I was livid, and immediately began chewing out the new census, until Jordan Gwyther of Larping.org proved to me in a private mail conversation that I had given them permission to create their own and even promised support:

Jordan: On the census/survey, I think we should go our own directions. We’ll be launching our own here shortly and will have no problem briefly promoting yours when it is ready. We hope that you will do the same for ours. 🙂

Aaron: Yes, of course!

D’oh!

They received just under 4,000 replies, and, according to their own admission, over 17,000 complaints((Larp Census FAQ (English version)))—I do believe that is an exaggeration, though. Two weeks after their launch, Ryan and I bought our own domain.

Ultimately, seeing the mistakes they made inspired us to tweak and revise our project and make it as good as we possibly could. We dove back into reiterating questions, testing, revising, etc. We were totally on our own, without any group or organization helping, sponsoring, or overseeing us.

Besides the very generous and dedicated handful of reviewers and translators who worked on the Larp Census, everything else was the work of Ryan and sometimes myself. If you’re going to credit anyone, credit Ryan or the other names acknowledged on our FAQ page5. If you are going to blame anyone, blame me.

Securing translations was also partially prompted from the Larping.org census. In order to avoid making ours “too American,” we introduced alternate currencies and continued that thought into offering the census in different languages. We really wanted to emphasize the global nature of larping. This was irksome because some words ha ve diff erent meanings in diff erent countries. Ryan and I spent at least fifteen Skype minutes debating the definition of “park,” which isn’t quite the same in New Zealand as it is in America.

After weeks and weeks of iterations— although really it was days of nothing followed by bursts of work and conversation—Ryan finally decided to pull the trigger after most of the translations had arrived.

The Larp Census went live on October 1, 2014, but the big launch occurred October 2, nearly 20 months after we began. What we had wasn’t flawless, but it was as good as we were going to get and still have it out in 2014. By the time translations started, the original questions in English were locked— we couldn’t change a word without asking all translators to change their versions, an odious task.

Here’s a secret: from the beginning I knew we were doomed to fail. There was no way we were going to get every larper on Earth to answer the census or even close to it. But we wanted to get as many as possible. I hoped for 100,000 replies; Ryan, one million.

The Run

Once we publicly announced the census, it almost went viral. Here are the numbers of responses that came in per day for the first week, which made up more than half the total((Initial week’s totals provided by private email correspondence from Ryan Paddy)):

Date Responses
10/2/2014 5520
10/3/2014 6564
10/4/2014 1492
10/5/2014 1044
10/6/2014 1637
10/7/2014 1176
10/8/2014 828

I was smugly pleased to know that in two days we got triple the responses the other census garnered after running more than a year. Great numbers for us, but we never came close to these initial daily figures again. The server even crashed for a brief time in those first hours: but it was up and running again soon, thanks to Ryan and, probably, because we never returned to that level of activity.

We didn’t have much of a marketing plan, if any. Social media such as Facebook worked best, while the ability to email your friends (once) was hardly used. Ryan and I are both old, so the new-fangled youth methods of communication are lost on us. Plus, we had no budget to do any ad buys—remember, this was just the two of us.

Some translations required minor corrections in the first two weeks, which Ryan repaired with aplomb. We accepted offers to translate the census into Danish, Swedish, Japanese, and Hebrew, though we only completed the first three.

We did give a few interviews on larp sites, and our push was always to larpers and larp groups. I sent press releases to mainstream geek sites like io9, Boing Boing, and Kotaku, but they didn’t reply. If only we had associated with College of Wizardry.

All things considered the run went well even though we didn’t get the amount of responses we hoped for.

The Lessons and Casualties

Irrespective of the data, I learned a few things just from the census existing.

First, there is no way to ever make everyone happy, ever. This should be obvious, but the point was nailed home after we received specific complaints from four people. Two said the census skewed tow ards boff er combat, and two said it favored theater-style.

It even prompted one newcomer to write, “I’m a little turned off to larping as a consequence of filling out this survey.” By making sure every larp style was represented, we shrunk the spotlight on one person’s particular larp preference, which, to them, seemed like a slight.

Second, race and racism are not the same in America as other countries. On the first page of the census we asked respondents to self-describe their race or ethnicity. I don’t know how it translated out of English, but the question upset a few people. Even asking about race offended them.

On the other hand, for many Americans, to not ask the question would be seen as racially insensitive. Although it appears to be a Catch-22 situation, I hope to repair the issue in subsequent censuses with the phrasing “Please describe your racial and/or ethnic heritage. We understand this question may be offensive to some, and it is not our intention to do so. You can refuse to answer.” Or something equivalent.

Third, and more positively, the census is provoking exactly the kind of discussions and issues we hoped it would. A long thread on LARP Haven spun out of Christopher Amherst’s analysis of the preliminary American statistics((Amherst, Christopher Preliminary Analysis of American Larp Census data)). The original poster noticed the male-female ratio in the U.S. is roughly 60% – 36% (with about 3% genderfluid or not answering) and wanted to know why more women weren’t participating in larps. A boisterous conversation ensued.

Although I am aware of the dangers of relying too much on statistics, especially ones pseudo-scientifically generated, having nearly 30,000 larpers respond to the Larp Census will at least plant a few guideposts toward a deeper understanding about this art, hobby, or sport we enjoy. I am proud to know that our Census will finally provide some factual basis to confirm or refute a few Internet arguments while spawning hundreds more. This, I feel, is a Good Thing.

By the way, we’re going to ask if you consider larp to be a sport, hobby, or art in the next version, coming up in about five years.

For more information and to receive the data from the Larp Census, go to LarpCensus.org or find us on Facebook.

No one on the list had figures beyond their own larp group’s roster or a few isolated surveys from years past, e.g., Joe Valenti of NERO offered a range from “ fifty-thousand to two million.”

Ludography
- College of Wizardry
This article was initially published in The Knudepunkt 2015 Companion Book which was edited by Charles Bo Nielsen & Claus Raasted, published by Rollespilsakademiet and released as part of documentation for the Knudepunkt 2015 conference.

Cover photo: “Hollerith Census Machine pantograph” by Marcin Wichary is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
Published on

2015-01-23

in

Documentation

Brudpris

By
Anna-Karin Linder Krauklis

Honor. Love. Patriarchy

The Game

Brudpris (Bridal Price) is set in Berge, a rural village in the fictional Mo culture. The culture of Mo is inspired by Nordic rural 19th century aesthetics. They live isolated from the outside world according to their strict patriarchal honor culture.

The culture of Mo requires every adult person to show control and restriction. Mo believe women carry a potentially dangerous force inside them – the Force of Life. If harnessed, this power will grant them children and allow the Mo people to live on. However, if women are not controlled by the men of Mo, the Mo people believe this power will destroy their land in a blaze of fire and chaos. The chaos within every woman can be stronger or weaker, but it is always there. Therefore, every woman must be the responsibility of an adult man, who will make sure her behaviour doesn’t endanger Mo.

The story in Brudpris revolves around the young boys and girls who are ready to leave the relative freedom of childhood behind and step into their respective roles as adults. Their fathers will find suitable partners for them, and every young woman will be married to a man who, from then onwards will be responsible for her. For the girls, this means an end to freedom; for the boys, the beginning of a crushing responsibility.

Design Note

The original idea for Brudpris was to ‘turn up the volume’ on real world gender roles to make visible social norms and cultural practices we rarely notice in our real lives or would attribute to our own culture.

We chose the Nordic historical inspired setting to avoid creating an ‘otherfication’ effect. Had we, for example, chosen to set the larp in a setting close to what we as westerners consider to be ‘typical honor culture’ countries, we would not only have had severe problems navigating some cultural appropriation dilemmas, but also risked making it look like “these people are not like us” – which was the opposite of what we wanted.

Katrin is shaking after the forgiving-ritual. Hilda leads her beloved little sister into their tent where Katrin breaks down and starts crying. Hilda holds her and feels her own tears burning behind her eyelids, but she does not cry, just comforts her sister and dries her tears.

You did so well says Hilda, You did not cry out there where others could have seen! She corrects her sister’s head scarf and gives her a smile before they exit the tent again. Hilda walks with a straight back. She is a woman of Mo.
Siri Sandqvist, player

The meal is finished. The wife, Runa, says: Tonight is the last night we dine together as a family. The sky, the moon and the heavens fall on Lars. But instead of showing this, he asks: Does anybody want some more water? Each member of his family replies with a nod. No words. No tears. It simply isn’t done in public in this family. They seek each other’s eyes, giving hints of their true feelings behind the facade. Still, the time they have left together isn’t enough. Not even close. Lars remembers he must get more water: Empty glasses look bad. He rises and imagines how his heart is left on the floor when he walks away. To feel and not allow yourself to show it. To love and not be allowed to say it.
Anders Ohlson, player

For the people of Mo, living a respectable and good life is about control and order. The patriarchs of the families are the carriers of both their own and their family’s honor. Everything their family members do will reflect on them. Most families have a little more leeway in private, away from the eyes of others. Internal struggles are common, but no family would willingly expose these problems to others.

Design Note

Another design challenge was explaining and using honor as a design feature. Although most are familiar with the term honor culture, we knew that the full meaning of honor, and the impact it has, would be hard to communicate to the players. For this reason we chose to create a religious explanation as to why women had to be controlled and why men had to take responsibility for them. This was the Force of Life. It gave a reason why it was important to control women’s behaviour. As a natural consequence, women in this culture had the sexual initiative, since men were expected to control both their own and their wife’s sexual drive.

We also wanted to make clear that the honor culture of Mo was not a matter of personal choice or preference for the characters. It was integrated in every aspect of life, and going against the cultural norm would ha ve severe social consequences. Brudpris is chamber drama where the family unit is the focus of everyone’s play. Every family has secrets that can cause a public scandal if they are revealed. The feeling of constant pressure is kept by making public outbursts costly for everyone involved. Public scandals always have severe consequences. And if it is a woman who shames her husband, father or brother, she might be beaten publicly. Or in the worst case even killed.

The men watched each other, or they believed the other men watched them. At no point could a man show his true feelings or show any sign of weakness without losing face in front of his peers. For me, this was one of the hardest parts: To be forced to do terrible things, while not being allowed to share it with anyone in Mo. In the game setting, this was normal and part of the responsibility of being a man.
Mads Dehlholm Holst, player

The Keips are the third gender of the Mo culture, recruited from boys who either fails the manhood test, or who don’t want to become men. The Keips are the only ones who can talk freely to anyone they wish; they play a key part in making the Mo culture function as a whole, crossing the social and cultural firewalls between men and women.

This culture makes for a slow and quiet gameplay. Players rarely show ‘big’ emotions; the drama is played out with discreet gestures instead of obvious ones. Things are said with gazes, a discreet touch, a mumbled word of comfort, a quiet tear that is quickly wiped away.

It was a terrible experience on many levels, this was really the quintessential nordic larp self-traumatizing emotional masochism that we all love and celebrate. But not a gratuitous one, like many strong games it had a basis in reality, that crept up on you afterwards and made you realize new things about people in the world.
Oliver Nøglebæk, player: excerpt from Play report

Forgive us. You had no way of changing your life. For your sake – and mine – I will make my own life different.
You are just 34 years old and have many more years to live. I’m also 34, but my life is vastly different from yours and I will not let it go to waste.

The only thing I want to keep with me from your life, is how your lust was so simple and powerful. It was probably the only positive thing about Mo. I will not be ashamed or let the culture – my culture, in the real world – turn me into a sexual object.
Sofia Stenler, player: excerpt from Letter to Dina

Some larp experiences you carry with you as not just a memory, but physically in your body. For me that is what happened after Brudpris. My character Hilda was a young woman. She was mature for her age and perfectly adapted to the violent honor culture she had grown up in.

It was easy, comfortable even, to slip into her subdued body language and thought patterns. It was like an amplified version of my own teenage insecurities. And after the larp I felt that it was hard to move quickly and act out; my mind had also been partly absorbed by her. I still can’t feel hatred towards the men who mistreated her, I just feel love.

Love because the violence was proof that she was loved and cared for. A Stockholm Syndrome so strong, it still lingers long after the larp is over.
Siri Sandqvist, player

And yet, that alluring lack of responsibility for my choices, that wish to be carried, that fear of talking and laughing too much, all resurfaced in you and moved you to give up everything.

I wish it all had come from you (Beatrice) – because I certainly didn’t want to find that in me. I’m sorry.
Annika Waern, player: excerpt from Letter to Beatrice

Design Note

We can’t be sure if this is the first game designed with honor as its main design feature, but we can tell that we sure didn’t have many examples to look at. We wondered at several instances if this larp was playable at all, or if the extreme imbalance in player agency would make it entirely dysfunctional. Regardless, we knew the game would put pressure on both the male and female cast.

We wanted the (players who played) men to be powerful, and the (players who played) women to be close to powerless. Still, one must not believe we designed this game only for misery. We wanted to balance the horror and injustice by adding love, desire, affection, music and dancing. We wanted characters and families to feel relatable, like real people.

Brudpris is a game that will stay with us a long time. Seen from our eyes as organizers, it was both gut-wrenchingly sorrowful and soberly beautiful, horribly cruel and heartwarmingly human. And although we put as much dedication as we could into the game design and preparations, it is the players who made the vision come to life.Their dedication to this game, their characters and each other have been complete. It is by far the best reward a larp organizer can get.
Anna-Karin Linder Krauklis and Carolina Dahlberg, organizers and writers

Brudpris

Credits: Anna-Karin, Carolina Dahl- berg, Tor Kjetil Edland (producer) and Trine Lise Lindahl (producer)
Date: September 17 – 21, 2014
Location: Vestmarka, Norway
Length: 3 days
Players: 50
Budget: €6,000
Participation Fee: €110 (normal) €75 (youth)
Game Mechanics: Minimal. In-game cultural rules.
Website: http://brudpris.wordpress.com

This article was initially published in The Nordic Larp Yearbook 2014 which was edited by Charles Bo Nielsen & Claus Raasted, published by Rollespilsakademiet and released as part of documentation for the Knudepunkt 2015 conference.

Cover photo: Jan and Eskil in a conversation (Play, Simon Svensson). Other photos by Simon Svensson and Anna-Karin Linder Krauklis.
Published on

2015-01-16

in

Documentation

Baltic Warriors: Helsinki

By
Juhana Pettersson

Saving the Environment with Zombies

Tourists are standing in the queue for the Ferris wheel. Some are eating ice cream. Suddenly two viking zombies, covered in seaweed, shamble from behind the ticket booth. They stumble and crawl to reach the higher platform of the popup cafe. The zombies ignore the tourists and other bystanders, because they’re not players.

There’s a public discussion of the state of the Baltic Sea going on in the cafe. There are politicians, activists and lobbyists arguing what should be done to save the Baltic Sea from an imminent ecological catastrophe, and who should do it. This is the larp.

At first, the characters look at the zombies in confusion, but after the first couple are infected, panic ensues. As one of the organizers, I scramble around picking up purses, shoes and other items the players drop during their impressive zombification scenes. The zombie victims are rushed into makeup so they too can join the undead horde, and I take personal items to the back room of the cafe for safekeeping.

Baltic Warriors: Helsinki was the first in a hopefully longer series of political larps about environmental issues related to the Baltic Sea, and especially to the way oxygen depletion in the water can lead to “dead zones” in which nothing lives. These are caused by many different things, but one culprit is industrial agriculture.

This and future larps are part of the wider Baltic Warriors transmedia project. The creative outline of the project is by Mike Pohjola. He was also the principal designer for this larp, with some help from me. The Baltic Warriors project is a complicated international co-production, steered by the German film company Kinomaton.

Baltic Warriors: Helsinki was played at the Allas popup cafe on the Helsinki waterfront on the 30th of August, 2014.

Zombies

In 2011, I published an article called The Necessary Zombie in one of that year’s Knudepunkt books, Talk Larp. I argued that even an experimental larp must have some elements that are familiar to the participants, and that they are comfortable with. It’s hard to be creative if all the elements of the game feel foreign and opaque. I called this familiar element the Necessary Zombie because zombies are one example of an element familiar to most. We all know what to do in a zombie game.

I never really expected to end up actually making a game with zombies, necessary or otherwise, but in the spring of 2014, I was asked to join the organizing team of Baltic Warriors. My job was to act as a larp producer in the context of the wider transmedia work.

The Necessary Zombie has more to do with Baltic Warriors than just the zombies. Baltic Warriors is a political creative project, and that means it’s supposed to reach people. As transmedia projects tend to do, it consists of many different kinds of media operating on different levels. Some are national or international, and others, such as larp, are local.

In Pohjola’s larp design, the zombie is meant to liven up an otherwise dry subject, and to make the game easier to approach for the participants. It also acts as a blunt metaphor. In our fiction, the Dead Zones forming and growing in the Baltic Sea would make long-dead viking warriors rise from their watery graves as terrifying undead monsters seeking to attack the living. In the game, the political debate was cut short by the attack of the viking zombies.

This went into the heart of the political analysis underlying our game: Everyone agrees that something should be done to help the Baltic Sea.

Yet very little is happening. If this continues, soon it will be too late. Too much talk, too little action, and the viking zombies will get you. Or the damage to the sea will be so severe, it can’t be fixed.

Risks

In its first game, the Baltic Warriors project was following ideas about rapid prototyping and iterative game design championed by Eirik Fatland and Bjarke Pedersen, as well as following my own experiences in the use of a test game to help with the design of the larp Halat hisar. The basic idea is pretty simple: Since larp is relatively cheap and easy to produce, why not try out ideas in smaller games before committing resources and time?

This attitude also encourages taking creative risks. Will it work? We’ll see! It’s a test game. We also had a reason to run a test game that went beyond the demands of the game itself. The transmedia nature of the wider Baltic Warriors project demands that we document the larps thoroughly. In the test game, our documentary crew would get valuable experience with how to shoot larp.

The location was provided by one of the partners, the Korjaamo cultural center. As a larp space, the open-air cafe was pretty much the opposite of private: In addition to our documentation team and reporters and photographers from various media, there were tourists and random passersby. Indeed, this was part of the design. You could jump into the game after a brief talk with an organizer.

It was supposed to work so that you’d get a short instant-character, a couple of pointers about what you could do, and you’d be ready to start playing. You were a citizen, a version of yourself, who had come to the meeting to air some of your own concerns about the state of the Baltic Sea.

Unfortunately, this was one of the parts of the game that didn’t really work. We only had two people who did this. One of them managed to become part of the game, the other didn’t until the zombie attack, which had a democratizing effect.

Baltic Warriors is the second political larp project I’ve been involved in, after Halat hisar. In both cases, using the game to get media attention for the issues has been a part of the overall strategy of the project. Getting media interest for a game is really about how good a story it makes. Halat hisar was easy to publicize: Palestinian larp in Finland is a good story. Baltic Warriors was not especially difficult, but definitely harder than Halat hisar had been. It didn’t have an exceptional hook, which meant it had to compete with all other newsworthy events and cultural happenings going on at the same time.

We got a few mentions on radio and local news, and one really nice article and video in Helsingin Sanomat, the biggest newspaper in Helsinki. I only later found out how this had come to be: through relentless badgering of the paper, by many different people in our organizing group.

The Participants

During the production we joked that we had more partner organizations than we had players. The punchline was that this was literally true. Of course, this was because our small game was the pilot for a big project. It had the support structure of a much more ambitious production.

Our system for who played in the game was somewhat chaotic. We had a public sign up, we invited players, we had people just show up, and at the very last minute, many of the people from the organizations we worked with decided to play. This proved to be a very good thing: Larp is hard to grasp if you don’t try, but when you do try, its power becomes manifest. In complicated transmedia projects, it’s good that the people who are involved understand and appreciate the form.

As a result, we had a strange player base: Some were larpers who knew how to make game but didn’t have a lot of personal experience with environmental politics. Others were professional activists who were new to larp but knew the subject of the game very well.

At least in my estimation, this combination worked well, with larpers helping to make the game work and the newcomers giving it some authenticity.

In practice, we tried to cast characters so that there would be mixed groups. For example, a larper could play a politician and an activist could play her assistant. We planned the characters so that the politician in this scenario would be more of a “face” character, and the assistant more of an “action” character.

Some of the participants were given characters who were the opposite of who they were in real life. For example, one activist player had a business lobbyist character. A participant who was a real business lobbyist got a character who was an environmental activist.

I believe that most people can larp pretty well on their first try, especially in a game with experienced players. That’s how it went this time too. It was fun especially because some of the players from the partner organizations were of an older generation. It gave the game verisimilitude. After the game, we held a public discussion about the issues raised in the game. The idea was that it would be good to show how things were in the real world: What was fiction, and what was true. In the panel discussion, one of the participants was the Finnish Minister of the Environment at that time, Ville Niinistö.

Unfortunately, we couldn’t get him to play in the larp itself.

The Attack

The political debates of the game ended in a pre-designed non sequitur: The zombie attack. We had briefed players about this beforehand. Practicing the rules had doubled as a warm-up exercise before the game started. What had until that point been a very social, discussion-oriented game suddenly turned into everyone running around the place trying to complete the ritual to banish the zombies.

If the players managed to carry enough clean water in their hands to the ritual location, they would win. If not, the zombies would win.

Trying to care for clean water was a game mechanic, and according to player feedback, it worked on a conceptual level.

The zombies were a structural choice I had been a little worried about, because on a story level, it was kind of random. It proved to work in practice, though, probably because it gave the game an action- oriented, fun ending. The characters could only survive by working together to achieve a common goal. That was a good thing to finish with.

Baltic Warriors: Helsinki

Credits: Mike Pohjola (Design), Juhana Pettersson (Additional design and production), Sarita Sharma (Production), Harmke Heezen & Miia Laine (Production Assistance), Julius Sepponen & Make Up For Ever Academy Finland (Zombie Effects), (Film documentation), Kinomaton Berlin & Made Partners: Goethe Institute, Baltic Sea Action Group, Korjaamo, Helsingin kaupunki, Finnland-istitut in Deutschland, AVEK, Medienboard, Berlin-Brandenburg, Media, Filmförderung Hamburg Schleswig- Holstein, Nipkow Programm, EsoDoc (Production)
Date: August 30, 2014
Location: Helsinki, Finland
Length: 3 hours
Players: 20
Budget: €1,000
Participation Fee: none
Game Mechanics: First minimal, then light zombie mechanics
Website: http://balticwarriors.net

This article was initially published in The Nordic Larp Yearbook 2014 which was edited by Charles Bo Nielsen & Claus Raasted, published by Rollespilsakademiet and released as part of documentation for the Knudepunkt 2015 conference.

Cover photo: Participants discuss the game while a member of our film crew records sound (Pre-game, Juhana Pettersson). Other photos by Miia Laiene and Juhana Pettersson.
Published on

2014-12-09

in

Documentation

College of Wizardry 2014 Round-up

By
Johannes Axner

College of Wizardry is a Harry Potter themed larp made by the organizations Rollespilsfabrikken (Denmark) and Liveform (Poland). You can read more about the individual team members at the College of Wizardry Team page.

The larp is set in the beautiful Polish Czocha Castle and the first run was helt in November 2014 with follow-ups planned for April 2015.

Cosmic Joke, known for their larp documentary Treasure Trapped, was on location for the Harry Potter themed larp to film a documentary at the event. The film has now been released and can be viewed in it’s entirety on their Youtube channel:

Besides the documentary, there was great photo documentation by John Paul Bichard, Christina Molbech, Nadina Wiórkiewicz and Maciek Nitka.

The larp has garnered a lot of media attention with outlets like The Verge, Vice, io9, USA Today and many more.

Here is a more complete list of news outlets writing about the larp, to get a sense of the massive impact:
9gag, Anap Holik, A.V. Club, allgeektome, Angloberry, Big News Network, Blastr, Blog di cultura, Breaking News (int newsportal), BUSTLE, Buzzfeed, Buzzfeed, carbonated.tv, Christian Science Monitor, CINEMABLEND, cinque colonne, cnet.com, Coffee & Geeks, CTVNews.ca, Daily Mail, Daily Telegraph, Destination femme, Die Welt, DNA India, Don’t Hate the Geek, DR Kultur, Durnesque-Esque, dzika banda, E! Online UK, E-fantastyka, eBuzznews, eluban.pl, Entertainment Weekly, entertainment.ie, Epic Stream, Examiner, Fansided, Fashion & Style, Foch.pl, Forces of Geek, Fox News, FRPnet, Future of Storytelling, Geek Kingdom, Geek Native, Geeks are Sexy, Geektyrant, Geeky Kool, Geeky News, Hatak, HLN.be, HNGN, Hollywood Life, Hospodářské Noviny, Huffington Post, I hate it here, IBT Video, iHotelsclub, IMDB, Imgur, The Independent, INQUISITR, International Business Times, Inventor Spot, Kawaiian Punch, kawerna, Kwejk.pl , La real noticia online, Larping.org, livros só mudam pessoas, Lundagård, Mail Online (Daily Mail), Mashable, Mental_Floss, Metro UK, Mic, Minds Delight (German), Mirror, Moje Miastro, Movie News Guide, Movie pilot, MSN, MTV, Nerdist, newsmonkey, Newsweek Poland, ONET FIlm, Pennsylvania Conservative Review, PEOPLE, People’s Choice, Philly, PoeTV, Popsugar, Refinery29, Roadtrippers, Roleplay Domain, RTE.ie, Says.com, Seventeen, SheKnows, SourceFed (Discovery), Star Pittsburgh, stopklatka, Synced, Teen Vogue, Telegraph, tgcom24, That Crazy Earth, The Express Tribune, The Mary Sue, The News (poland), Time.com, trendhunter, TVN 24, TVP Info, UpRoxx, USA Today, Vanity Fair, Vi Unge, Yahoo! News Canada and ZIMBIO.

There has also been some things written by participants at the larp. Petter Karlsson (Sweden) has written a lengthy report covering many aspects and media reports:
http://petterkarlsson.se/2014/12/07/college-of-wizardry-a-magical-larp-in-a-polish-castle/

Shoshanna Kessock (US) has written a piece about her experience at the larp for Kill Screen:
http://killscreendaily.com/articles/i-spent-weekend-castle-poland-doing-harry-potter-larp-and-it-was-awesome/

There are blog posts from Kim Tomas Laivindil Klevengen (Norway), Mike Pohjola (Finland), Juan Ignacio Ros (Spain), J-Mac MacDonald (Canada/Finland), Pavle Pelikan (Croatia) and Nicolas Hornyak (US).

Sign up for the next installment of the larp opens on 11 December 2014 at their website:
http://www.cowlarp.com/

Update 2014-12-10 11:21 CET. Added some more links.

Update 2014-12-11 11:09 CET. Added some more links.
Published on

2014-12-03

in

Documentation

Photo Report: Mare Incognitum

By
Johannes Axner

Mare Incognitum was a Swedish Lovecraftian horror larp set on a ship (familiar to visitors to Monitor Celestra) in the 1950s. It was organized by Berättelsefrämjandet and had 78 players, spread over three runs, from Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, Estonia, Spain, UK and the US. All three runs were held during the weekend of 28-30 November, 2014.

Photographer Jonas Aronsson took some great photos during and before the larp and we got his permission to publish a few of them here:

Photo by Jonas Aronsson.

Photo by Jonas Aronsson.

Photo by Jonas Aronsson.

Photo by Jonas Aronsson.

Photo by Jonas Aronsson.

Photo by Jonas Aronsson.

Photo by Jonas Aronsson.

Photo by Jonas Aronsson.

Photo by Jonas Aronsson.

Photo by Jonas Aronsson.

Photo by Jonas Aronsson.

Photo by Jonas Aronsson.

Photo by Jonas Aronsson.

Photo by Jonas Aronsson.

Photo by Jonas Aronsson.

Photo by Jonas Aronsson.

Photo by Jonas Aronsson.

Photo by Jonas Aronsson.

Photo by Jonas Aronsson.

Photo by Jonas Aronsson.

Photo by Jonas Aronsson.

You can see the rest of the photos in Jonas Facebook gallery:
https://www.facebook.com/yonazarith/media_set?set=a.10152576129364506.1073741862.590469505&type=1

You can read more about Mare Incognitum at the larps website:
http://iäiä.se/