Second Year (Toinen vuosi) was a 4-part larp campaign about building a community of survivors immediately following an apocalyptic pandemic. The larp focused on community building and practical aspects of survival – how a group of strangers coordinates their interests, how norms and institutions develop over time, and how consultants build a chicken coop. The presentation discusses pros and cons of this setting for a larp and what aspects should be given special attention in larp design.
Mikko Heimola, Nino Hynninen, Jukka Seppänen
[CW] pandemic
Q&A from the original viewing at Solmukohta 2020 Online event
Jukka Seppänen We had sheep, a goat and chickens.
Jukka Seppänen We wanted the community to kinda be the main, shared character of all players.
Anon 1: How fast would anyone be ready to run a campaign like this again because of the pandemic topic?
Anon 2: I think there will probably be hoards of pandemia larps once the corona epidemic is over. People will use larps to process it.
Anon 8: One constantly ESCAPING goat
Mikko Heimola Well, pandemic and apocalypse has been a stable of literature, games, movies etc. for past few years, it will be interesting to see whether the current pandemic will boost or smother it
Anon 9: I can’t imagine apocalypse as a theme will ever go completely away, but I guess it will change.
Anon 7: I see a large potential for using the current crisis for larps both creatively and as a way to deal with it. For a long time most if not al post apocalypse larps will be heavily affected by the corona crisis, so i think it will affect it allot but not diminish it.
Anon 5: I’m the one in the red t-shirt. This is one of the many many votes my character lost. 😀
Anon 2: Many people don’t like playing situations that are common for them in real life, but close to home has its upsides, too! 😉 #vasemmistoliitto
Anon 3: Anon 5:, sorry about that 😀
Anon 6: I came on as an additional character from the second game onward and the feeling of an existing community with its own norms and social structures was very strong <3
Anon 1: Realized I had never larped in a sauna before :O
Anon 2: Did I hear correctly that two characters were shot during the game? Would like to hear more about that, like why and how it happened in-game.
Anon 7: Same!
Anon 1: GM Characters but it was unplanned and interesting.
Anon 2: But why, what was the motivation and social process behind it (in the in-game community)?
Anon 6: If I remember correctly, the characters wanted to leave the community in a way some people felt would endanger everyone.
Jukka Seppänen Anon 2: That happened, unplanned, to two gm characters. That became a large element of the following games as their friends remained and mourned, demanding for justice, whatever it may be. Also not everyone agreed to that decision.
Anon 4: The characters were apparently wanting to join the regional robbery gang and some felt they would betray or seriously endanger the community by doing so
Jukka Seppänen Even more interestingly the players had somewhat clouded memories of the situation and who shot first etc. Highlighting stress reaction in a simulated threat.
Anon 8: There were also big questions: did they mean what they said they were going to do? Was it a just a “running execution” as in who shot first? Who actually was present and who could comment on the situation?
Anon 1: Super interesting experience and really happy how it turned out (I was one of three player characters at the groove when the shooting happened, more arrived at the aftermath). Could have felt like trivializing violence but this time it was taken seriously by all.
Anon 1: This is the first photo of the aftermath. Photographer didn’t get there on time for the action https://www.flickr.com/…/in/album-72157697231608902/
Anon 10: I think the post apocalypse genre became popular especially during the cold war, when a nuclear apocalypse was a very real possibility. Based on that, chances are the current situation will give the genre a boost
Anon 3: Their death became one of the most important disagreements imho
Anon 2: I’d love to hear more about the dynamics in this!
Mikko Heimola The gm characters had announced their intention to leave the community with their resources and hinted they might join a pirate group. A group of players decided to stop them, and it turned violent.
Anon 2: So they were more or less spontaneously killed? Like no communal decision or verdict about it?
Anon 3: Things escalated quickly and there was no consensus
Mikko Heimola That’s a prime example of players creating unexpected outcomes that create lots of play. I don’t think we would ever have planned such an event. It was in a sense a very dumb death for them.
Mikko Heimola Which probably made it feel more genuine in the game. It was stupid. It just happened. You cannot rewind it.
Anon 2: Sounds like super interesting content!
Anon 3: That was me! Never chopped wood before.
Anon 4: Same 😀
Jukka Seppänen Key learning: consultants cant build chicken coops without help.
Anon 4: And shearing sheep is hard work!
Mikko Heimola Nino has escaped to the community site to make it ready for the rest of us, and cannot participate currently!
Anon 2: Jukka is promoting team building exercises: shearing sheep & gardening!
Anon 1: There were also “really useful” tasks, like building the watch tower xD
Mikko Heimola Depends on sheep… in the next larp we had different sheep. They didn’t just stand and let you cut the wool 😛
Anon 4: And the method we used for shearing the sheep in that game was way too meticulous! Later I (and lots of other players) watched heaps of sheep shearing videos, and a more relaxed shear would have been much faster and good enough 😀
Anon 3: I was really stressed over not having covered carrot seeds carefully enough while planting (but they did sprout)
Anon 6: With practical tasks, sometimes player skills and character skills can be at odds, when skillfull players play unskilled characters and cannot help the unskilled players without breaking immersion. Detailed instructions from the GMs help with this.
Anon 2: What kind of instructions were there?
Anon 1: I have deep dislike for skiing but did that anyway because the watch duty kinda expected it.
Anon 2: Okay, so you meant detailed instructions on how to do the task! 😀
I thought you were talking about some sort of mechanics on how to play more skilled than you are.
Anon 6: Exactly, instructions on how to actually do the tasks.
Anon 8: Slacking from tasks? Who would do that?
Mikko Heimola This covers the other game I mentioned and also discusses ingame work, but onlyin Finnish: https://roolipeliloki.com/…/ennen-vedenpaisumusta-ei…/
Jukka Seppänen All pics available here: https://www.flickr.com/…/albums/with/72157696573152925
In the recent years, we have witnessed a definitive growth of the larp community and a growth in recognition of larp in wider culture as a legitimised activity. As larp begins to be more present in society, the wider culture also penetrates the social structures of larp as a community and an activity, one of the central outcomes of which is the commodification of larp. In this talk, I discuss how larp is becoming commodified, what that means, and what the repercussions of this development are for specific events as well as the community at large.
Usva Seregina
Q&A from the original viewing at Solmukohta 2020 Online event
Anon1 Can’t we also say that professionalization of larp practices makes it harder for new organizers to step in?
Anon2 Probably very much this! Ironically probably lessening the available larps and making the ones acessible even more scares 😮
Usva Seregina: yep, definitely agree with you on this
Anon3 also socioeconomic class starts playing even a bigger role within professionalized
Usva Seregina yes! exactly!! i talk about this a bit later :
Anon4 It’s interesting how that does not affect at all TTRPG? Or does it? Being much more “intimate” people just dare to play whatever, or what is it?
Anon5 I feel TTRPGs are commodified in different terms? the commodity is the physical product, the miniatures, the swag?
Anon6 There are professional DMs in a TTRPG context. Fewer, though, because the profit structure is tough
Usva Seregina: I’m not very familiar with TTRPG unfortunately, but I would agree with Sanna that there are potentially other ways it emerges?
Anon3 I feel the Nordic NGO organizational culture, based on a lot of grassroots volunteer work, is a model of organizing that has traditionally resisted commodification with some success
Anon3 Question: what models of engagement and organization do we have that are not based on consumption? Art, kinda maybe? Are there ways for larp to be legible and credible without being commodified?
Anon7 Isn’t a lot of art (mainstream theatre, movies, books, etc) quite commodified?
Anon5 Different kinds of community based practices that are mostly present in anarchist circles etc?
Anon8 Art outside the “established art world”
Usva Seregina: I have no direct answer to this, but my main aim was to ask this question 😀 For me, I think it is mainly in the form that we continue to be reflexive about how we do things, continue to include and engage people, and do not fall into normative consumption-based patterns.
Anon9 I’m surprised not to have heard the word ” Disney” yet (unless i missed it) The new star wars attraction essentially is a commercial commoditized LARP.
Anon10 Not just essentially, actually. We’ve seen Disney Imageneers on VP levels and up at Nordic events for years. And a bunch of us have worked or interacted with them in different ways. Sometimes, I now believe, rather naively,
Usva Seregina: I steered away from examples intentionally in the talk, but I do mention Disney in the paper that I wrote for Nordic Larp 😀
Anon11 As a view from the Balkans, LARPS never really get the chance to cover their costs, and even rarer can afford to pay the organizers anything that comes close to the time, experience and effort they placed in the table.
Really interesting subject but just keep in mind that there are areas that just don’t have the base to run any actual pay-to-enter serious larp, and thus work as a balancing factor with community models and free games/for some volunteer work.
Usva Seregina: Absolutely, I think this a very contextual issue. Costs are very different in different parts of the world.
To reiterate from the talk, I don’t think that money is the biggest issue here, but rather how we approach larp.
Anon13 Have we ever see artificial scarcity in larp?
Usva Seregina: Artificial scarcity easily comes with hype and marketing
Anon14 This is a hard one. We need to have more people making larps, and if the new people come in through the big easily approachable blockbuster larps, then it is very hard to tell them that they, too, can make a larp from scratch.
We need more coverage and appreciaton inside our scene of small larps, unprofessional larps, larps that invent the wheel again, larps that anyone could make. This is not easy, as I recognize the tendency to look down on those because I’ve been through that myself a long time ago. And also, because I am ambitious with this art form.
There are no easy answers.
Usva Seregina: That’s true that the larp scene has mainly operated on a sort of word-of-mouth type of communication before. And I do agree that this has major issues in terms of being able to get into larp (which I also remember experiencing when I first started larping). And hence commodification and marketing are actually extremely good for allowing larp to be more accessible.
Perhaps it is about thinking how to communicate without falling into the traps of marketing?
And I agree with NAME that looking into and appreciating different forms larping is extremely important. We need to make room for all levels of skill and engagement.
Sarah Lynne Bowman, Ph.D. is a professor. scholar, game designer, and event organizer. In this keynote, Dr. Sarah Lynne Bowman will discuss the importance of integration practices for concretizing and completing transformative processes after larps end and daily life resumes. She will present different techniques for integrating transformative experiences into our off-game lives, including creative expression, intellectual analysis, emotional processing, interpersonal processing, and community building.
Hello, I am Sarah Lynne Bowman. I am a professor, scholar, game designer, and event organizer. Today I am going to discuss the concept of Integration with you as an important part of the process of personal transformation.
As role-players, it’s no surprise to many of us that we are deeply fragmented in our identities. There are parts of us that are only able to be seen by certain people in specific contexts. Some parts get left behind, discarded, or buried when we are out in the world.
When we role-play, we are allowed to bring these aspects from the shadows into the light. Now, some of these parts are undesirable; we might want to disavow them completely and pretend they don’t exist. Often, though, role-playing reveals parts of ourselves that we wish were more in the light, more seen by others. Sometimes we discover parts of ourselves that surprise us, that we didn’t even know were there: aptitudes that we might have, courage that we didn’t know existed, or abilities to connect with others in ways we had not before experienced.
In many cases, we have powerful experiences within larping communities that are not replicable in other frames of reality. We may have extremely altering experiences, ones that change us and transform us, whether in dramatic ways or in more subtle ways. Regardless of the degree of change that we undergo, after a powerful larp experience, we are never quite the same. And we have to find ways to make sense of these experiences after they conclude.
Unfortunately, it can be difficult to talk about these experiences with people who have not taken part in them, especially people who don’t regularly shift their identity and inhabit fictional worlds in their spare time. Often, we might feel even more fragmented than we did before, as pieces of ourselves feel trapped or lost or ephemeral in this fictional reality that technically no longer exists after the larp is over.
But, what I have come to understand is that, for many of us, those bits of fiction, those pieces of self, still exist and they still may need to be integrated into the daily self in some way and into our understanding of reality. This integration may mean acknowledging, but further distancing ourselves from those parts It may mean finding ways to bring those parts into the light in our daily lives. Integration may even mean fundamentally changing our self-concept.
Through role-playing, I have discovered some of my deepest spiritual understandings. I have discovered my deepest fears, my deepest desires for love and connection. I have discovered what community can actually feel like when it’s supportive, nurturing, and permissive of different ways of being. I have discovered what creativity and play can do in terms of understanding who we are and who we deeply desire to be.
For us to really maximize the potential of role-playing, I think that we need to remove the stigma around personal identification with the character. Around playing parts of ourselves that were perhaps quite vulnerable and we are afraid others will see out here. We need to step into our desires. We need to step into our dreams and our hopes. Not hide them away solely in play as things that are frivolous or that can only exist in leisure or in some bounded reality that is not this one.
Now, this all may seem obvious to some of you, but the truth is, a lot of us still hold shame around our play experiences. We are taught at a very young age that play is for children and that what we experience when we role-play isn’t real. And therefore, we shouldn’t take it seriously as something that transfers to this world. And as artists, academics, journalists, many of us have been working very hard to dispel that shame. To validate that this artform is useful. That it has educational purposes. That it can change lives. But I would argue that even in our communities, we still carry that shame at times.
A common example is the larp crush, as Sanne Harder discusses in Nordiclarp.org. The larp crush is the experience of falling in love or becoming infatuated with a co-player after sharing a powerfully intimate larp experience with them. And this is an area that is still extremely taboo for a lot of people, especially people who have very clear, bounded relationship agreements outside of the frame of the larp. Because it’s play, we have alibi to explore our fantasies, our romantic needs. We may touch into parts of ourselves that were dormant before or maybe we didn’t know existed. And then all of a sudden, the larp is over, and we don’t know what to do with these emotions. Those places that still need to be seen and loved. And we think maybe that other person is the answer. And sometimes they are. But often, the larp has merely revealed to us our deeper needs for intimacy.
Another example is larp drop, sometimes called post-larp depression, when a peak experience that was so intense and so powerful is over. Players may wonder if the sense of community they felt at the larp still exists, where those parts of themselves they explored in the larp still exist, where those stories exist. It may feel like these things have evaporated or dissipated, which may feel intensely painful.
In transformational language, this is what we call a contraction, meaning that after a period of expansion — of stretching ourselves past our normal comfort zones — it’s natural that we will also then contract. That we will need time to come back into ourselves, to perhaps grieve, to perhaps rest, to process, to think, to feel.
Integration processes help validate that need for contraction. We can validate that it is understandable and also perhaps necessary to come back into ourselves and make sense of these experiences, so that we don’t continue to feel even more fragmented and incoherent. We have a tremendous opportunity here to alchemize: to take lead and make it into gold. To find within ourselves the things that are perhaps unfinished, are not in the form that we would like. To learn how to transmute and transform ourselves.
Integration processes can take many forms. They can be artistic in nature; we can create new works. We can create pieces of art. We can create stories. We can create new larps. Often, creativity begets creativity, so it makes sense that some of us would process in this way. Usva Seregina has centered their academic work on the creation of art as a means of making sense of larp experiences. Jonaya Kemper’s beautiful post-game autoethnographies help her articulate the ways in which larp experiences have felt emancipatory for her, how she has grown as the result of embodying her characters.
We can also emotionally process. We can debrief. We can write journals. We can write letters to our characters and vice versa, which is a beautiful way to integrate and dialogue with these parts of ourselves.
We can intellectually process. We can write theories and research. We can document experiences in larps for others, making them comprehensible to the outside world. We can discuss our experiences in groups, innovating our field of design, improving our implementation strategies, and expanding our consideration of the diverse perspectives of members of our communities.
We can engage in group processes where people tell stories about their experiences. We can create new communities after larps so those feelings of connectedness and shared imagination can move forward. We can envision and build the future that we would like to see together rather than feeling so overwhelmed by the way the world is as we see it now. Through our shared imagination, we can envision new ways to move through the challenges that we face. We can transform conflict through play by envisioning new futures, new ways of being, and new selves.
Each player has their own needs with regard to preferred integration practices. Larp designers such as Martin Nielsen and Johanna Koljonen have worked hard to establish methods where, after a larp, there are multiple areas of the space where people can get their various needs met, such as a place for hugs, a place for game design discussions, a place to debrief, a place to talk about life moving forward. Regardless of our individual needs, it is clear that creating means to more easily transition from the fictional frame to everyday life is beneficial, and may even strengthen the potential for personal transformation.
In order to concretize these shifts, I am advocating for a greater awareness and more deliberate practices around integration. As players, as designers, as organizers, we see the world from the meta perspective due to our experiences with larp. We inhabit characters, we experience, we feel. But we also analyze and we can see the systems that underlie social reality. We can learn the lessons that came out of these group experiences and we can use them to shape the world that we’re in on a daily basis. Larp allows us to create new realities with new frames of reference, with new rules for reality. And it allows us to experiment with new ways of being, with new ways of interacting and organizing. It allows us to explore existing ways of interacting with others and figure out what aspects of those patterns we want to keep and what aspects we want to leave behind.
So my questions to you are: how do we move forward with these understandings? How do we move forward with helping this transfer between this world and those worlds? How do we value and honor those lessons that we learn inside of these larps and help each other to make them more concrete in this life, in this world? It may be more important now than it ever was as the world becomes more and more bifurcated, fragmented, and polarized. How can we find alignment with one another and with ourselves? And how can we build the future that we want to see?
Kjell Hedgard Hugaas is a game designer, activist, politician, event organizer, and trained actor. In this keynote, Kjell Hedgard Hugaas will make the case for why we should design larps that invite the potential for transformative impacts on players. He will discuss the importance of transparency and intentionality when designing for impacts in domains such as emotional processing, social cohesion, educational goals, and political aims.
I am a game designer, activist, politician, event organizer, and trained actor, and I am here to make the case for why we should design larps that invite the potential for transformative impacts on players.
In doing so, I will discuss the importance of transparency and intentionality when designing for impacts in domains such as emotional processing, social cohesion, educational goals, and political aims.
(The Why)
In a world that seems to turn ever more difficult to make sense of by every passing day, where do we, the role-players, fit in? What is our mission? Our task? Are we artists? Are we entertainers? Coaches maybe? Or trainers? Maybe we are just passing time and using role-playing as another way to socialize and connect with our friends?
In short: Why do we do the things we do?
Before I give my answer to that, I want to make it clear that people participate in play for a variety of reasons, and most any reason is valid. The following is merely my opinion on what role-playing could be used for and what we could benefit if we followed this particular path.
I believe that almost everything we do in life can be done in ways that can add value to our own lives, the lives of others in our communities and the world in general. Role-playing is in no way an exception to this and it is my own hope that we as a collection of communities can rise to the challenge and help a world that needs healing now more than ever.
I believe that we as skilled and curious role-players are in the possession of a powerful tool, that if used with intention can, and indeed almost certainly will, change the world for the better. On the other side of the coin, if we choose to not address or comment on important issues, facilitate for expansion and understanding, lay down frameworks for growth, or help participants make sense of the world that exists outside of the magic circle, we are letting important and potentially very powerful opportunities pass us by.
My vision for the future of larp is that we explore the limits of our craft, learn to use it to the extent of it’s potential, and then wield it to enact the change we want to see in the world.
I know that it is a tall order. Maybe even painfully naive to believe in. But are we not people who are used to dreaming big and making the seemingly fantastical come true? Are we not inventors and designers of our own worlds? Is it too much to think that at least some of the things we create within the magic circle might seep out into the world in general?
Some might say that this is all just a dream.. But am I the only dreamer out there? Maybe one of a happy few? Or maybe, just maybe is the future of role-playing more potently world changing than any of us can even dare to imagine?
(The Potential)
The potential for role-playing to have profound transformative impacts on participants should be quite obvious by now. It can facilitate dramatic expansion in their worldview, their understanding of others, and their ability to affect change in the world around them. As Sarah Lynne Bowman noted in 2014; The sheer number of people interested in implementing role-playing and simulation as tools for education, empathy-building, and skill training attests to the methods’ potential potency.
In my own years of playing I can certainly point to several role-playing experiences that have been transformative to a point where they have altered the course of my life, and judging by the hundreds of stories I and others have gathered over the years, I am far from alone in this experience. For many players, these transformative effects might occur—and certainly do occur—by chance or as a result of intuitive choices that designers and participants make. But, imagine for a moment if you will, what our communities might look like if we actively sought to maximize the potential of such impacts through intentional design, implementation, and post-event integration.
Well, In my opinion, there is only one way to find out. And I invite you all to join in on this adventure.
(The How)
Before we proceed, we should note that even the most skilled and careful consideration and implementation of these ideas and thoughts will not ensure that transformative impacts undoubtedly will take place. Experiences will always vary from person to person and from event to event. To put it bluntly; we are not dealing with an exact science here.
When seeking to design for transformation, the first step should be establishing a clear vision carefully detailing the desired impacts we want to experience. Sarah Lynne Bowman and I have previously proposed four broad groups of impacts, in order to establish a system. These lists are not exhaustive and in the future we expect that the need for further categorization might also present itself. But for now, we have the following groups: Emotional Processing, Social Cohesion, Educational Goals, and Political Aims.
A disclaimer here: Designing for certain types of impacts—such as therapeutic aims—may require advanced training, consultation with experts, or increased safety measures.
As you can see; on these two slides I have listed the groups that we proposed. As you can see, there is a lot of different concepts and themes here and I will not go into them in any detail in this short talk. For those of you who are interested in a deeper dive, there is an article on nordiclarp.org with more details. It also contains a reference list with suggestions for further reading. I will link it in the comments.
Be it through virtual play, tabletop, or larp, role-playing can arguably change people’s lives for the better. But, in order to maximize this potential, we as participants need to be open to it. In order to be as open as possibly to transformative impacts, we need to feel safe and held. For this reason, I cannot stress enough how principles of informed consent and safety need to be at the forefront of this design philosophy.
We need to create a container that is strong enough for players to feel that they have the freedom to judge or themselves the extent to which they feel comfortable leaning into certain types of content or experiences based on their own emotional, psychological, and physical thresholds. The freedom of choice is important, since although growth often involves facing our own resistance to change, pushing participants beyond their limits can have the exact opposite effect to what they are seeking for themselves.
Therefore, while it is my strong belief that transformative impacts should always be at the forefront of design and implementation choices, concerns about safety and consent are inextricably linked to creating a secure-enough container for such experiences to take place.
So.. why should we design for transformative impacts?
If 25 years of activism and political engagement have taught me anything, it is that change is not something that is handed to us. Women were not given the right to vote.. it was won by the many that fought for it. Workers were not given the 5 day work-week because the factory owners decided to be kind. It was made into law because they fought for it. Apartheid was not ended out of the good hearts of the oppressors. It was ended because the people of the world made it so.
In other words.. we cannot allow ourselves to sit and wait for the change we want to see in the world. We need to make it so.
We need more compassion and empathy.
We need more peaceful solutions to conflict.
We need progressive social change.
We need to raise the voices the disenfranchised and oppressed.
We need to heal our own wounds.
We need to heal the wounds of the many.
And so on and so on…
The needs are many and the time is now.
Let us add our skills and knowledge to the efforts and help make it so.
Seaside Prison is a blackbox larp financially supported by Finnish Cultural Foundation, about life in Gaza. Lately, art and entertainment in general have been going towards interactive and immersive dimensions, and there has been interest towards the larp toolbox among, for example, performance artists. However, wider cultural audiences often find traditional larps hard to approach since they take a lot of time and require preparation. One of the ideas behind Seaside Prison is to create a package that is easier to approach. The larp is run in a theatre environment and employs sound, light, and video projection. Could this be a joint future for larp and theatre? In this talk we discuss how the larp was created, its aims, and the possible futures for larp in the culture establishment.
Q&A from the Original Viewing at Solmukohta 2020 Online Event
Anon 1: Theater as a familiar environment: So true! But does it involves expectations of stage-acting?
Kaisa Kangas No, we do not advertise it in that way, and we have workshop where we go into what larp is 🙂
Anon 2: Though the building itself carries its own expectations – some people will go to a theatre simply expecting to sit and watch, and even if they know it’s a larp, they have to be onboarded in a way that takes into account the theatre environment’s expectations.
Kaisa Kangas Sure!
Kaisa Kangas But we don’t really have a stage or seats for audience, we start the workshop with people walking around. And advertise it as larp. 🙂
Anon 1: I’m just wondering if you know any kind of (public?) space which is more neutral in expectations than theater but still a familiar (playful?) environment?
Kaisa Kangas I’m sure there are spaces that are more neutral. We use the theatre environment also because it is practical for us: theatres have the light and sound technique that we need, so we don’t have to install everything separately.
Anon 3: We’ve got our own black box room in Zagreb, if it helps.
Anon 2: I found the careful mapping of “alternate Finland” with “similar to real-world Gaza experience” really successful in Halat hisar; especially while people are very wary about appropriation or misusing suffering for “games”, I find this work to be really deeply rooted in an understanding of its source and of its limitations
Anon 4: The parallels to The Quota are really interesting – re setting it “at home” rather than appropriating.
Anon 5: The advantages of the setting being in your country also make is a lot easier for larp newbies for whom it can be daunting to prepare a lot in advance and on the other hand hard to get into character with too little context. 😉
Anon 6: If anyone wants to do these kind of things in Gothenburg I most often have free of charge venue, but if you are selling tickets I need money for the venue (the money will go back to gaming culture) We have sound systems, but only old school lighting,
Anon 6: We also have several projectors and movable screens
Kaisa Kangas We sell tickets for two reasons:
– They cover part of the costs (tech and the spaces can be expensive);
– People feel more committed to come when they have paid (even a nominal) fee.
Anon 6: Kaisa Agree on the committed thing.
Anon 7: You don’t see it in the video, but we were literally blinded by bright light.
Anon 7: As in, couldn’t keep eyes open bright.
Anon 7: No need to cry out of emotion when your eyes well up from the photons. 🙂
Anon 6: Crying now.
Anon 4: Welling up too. Wow.
Anon 1: There is a similar participatory theater in Hungary which is called the Escape and you play blindly as a refugee childen from a fictional country trying to get into Europe. Very chilling!
Anon 6: I’ve played something like that when I was a teen.
Anon 1: Can you elaborate? I’m interested!
Anon 3: Damn! I want to play this!
Anon 10: The lamps also produce a heatwave, which I think was a powerful and unusual addition to the visual effects.
Anon 8: I was in that test run and hearing the music and sounds again made me unexpectedly emotional <3
Anon 3: Anon 8: Haven’t been there but it got me too.
Anon 4: Inviting politicians would be a great idea too
Anon 7: Yes, the heat was real!
Anon 9: I have one tangential question – I’ve heard about a larp on similar theme (fleeing a war zone) which gave people this fake sense that now they know exactly how it is to be a refugee and they equate the larp experience with real, lived experiences. How to communicate with players to avoid this kind of… emotional appropriation, for the lack of better phrase?
Anon 6: I wouldn’t. They feel what they feel. They might be factually wrong, but experience over time will inform them. 🙂
Anon 6: I mean, larp is something that does happen to your physical body and larping it will increase you emotional understanding of something much more than many other cultural forms.
Saying its the same experience will be a overstatement, but that is the way some people speak. I don’t think they will belittle people who have had the real experience after going to such a larp, instead they will have more empathy, which is a good thing.
Anon 9: I’m worried that it may lead to belittling though – and for some it might. While as a designer I’m not responsible for how people interpret my larps, I want to make sure I don’t encourage responses that are harmful or dismissive towards other people’s lived experiences.
Kaisa Kangas I think that when you have someone present who actually has that experience and whom they can discuss with at the debrief/ contextualisation, it usually puts things into perspective. At least I felt that was the effect in Halat hisar, when players could ask Palestinians questions about their lives. You kind of realise that you had your own experience but this other person is living it in real life and there’s a difference.
Anon 6: Anon 9: I’m thinking if I tell they “feel wrong” then I am guilty of belitteling the right there and then.
I don’t know Everything about my players, and why their inner World works that way or why they use language that way.
Anon 10: I think you get quite far as an organizer by just avoiding equating the larp with a real life experience when you introduce the larp. I would say the risk is quite insignificant when doing a larp in a black box theater with an adult player group.
But I do think the risk is real if doing a 360 degree simulation with say, teenagers, and organizers who want to exaggerate the impact of what they do.
Anon 9: Anon 6: that is a very good point and I need to let it sink in for me. Thank you!
Anon 6: Anon 9: I Always tro to make like a risk assesment and Think that the person in front of me also Counts. I know I’m super sensitive if someone tells me my feeling is wrong or my language (English isnt my mother tongue) is wrong.
And my level of what is “harm” is quite high. I see a difference between offence and harm.
Anon 11: Thank you <3 This is a great and important project, I’m looking forward to maybe getting to play it. I would loveto continue the discussion about larps for a wider audience, also in connection to yesterday’s talk about the commodification of larp and how we navigate all this.
Kaisa Kangas It’s a super-interesting topic!
I have to yet watch the commodification talk (yesterday, I was still busy editing video…)
Anon 8: My big question with this project is, how does it change the larp as an experience if/when a large part of the participants come with no or little background information on larping, and when the setting guides their perceptions and expectations towards theatre?
Kaisa Kangas That’s a good question! Our aim is to have some people with larp experience in all the runs so there would be some herd competence. And we spend a lot of time workshopping things. Originally, I planned to talk a bit more about stuff like this, but that was before the Tuesday run got cancelled, and it’s hard to talk about it when you don’t have the experience on how it worked.
Anon 8: I’m looking forward to your future talk about the things you learned from Seaside Prison <3
Anon 2: This was something [X] and I started with in 2009 – we came from theatre and knew we were advertising to a theatre audience, and we also designed very much with theatricality in mind. But there were so, so many things to be learned about a) getting your audience to actually buy a ticket in the first place, b) getting them all on the same page before the piece, c) getting them all on the same page once they’re in the room, d) hand-holding and making sure that they feel confident enough to keep playing until the end. A turn-key larp is an interesting product but does require massive amounts of excellent PR.
Anon 1: I’m quite interested in your best practices and tips in a) and b)!!!
Anon 8: Is “turn-key larp” the term for a larp where you just buy the ticket and show up, no preparations needed?
Kaisa Kangas We use a really long time for the workshop in our time slot. And we hope to have a right mix of people with larp experience and people with no larp experience in the run, so there is some herd competence. Also, having a clear structure helps.
Kaisa Kangas Also, was originally hoping to talk more about these aspects at SK, but can’t really talk about them without the experience of running the larp.
Anon 12: Anon 1: Maybe we should write a summary of out experiences some time, but maybe the most important thing (I think) was that the process of getting ready to take part in the piece was the piece itself – that it’s built in that in the beginning the engagement level is different and then it’s deepened through the process.
Anon 5:Low threshold larping is something I think is currently an underused medium of larp. Here, the Seaside Prison team has taken into account and removed or shrunk many obstacles that prevent new people from larping even in super interesting projects like this. I especially appreciate the fact that no preparation is needed yet you get a proper, sufficient background for the larp (due to a familiar setting and the extensive workshop.) It is also a significant advantage that the game can be played in the course of one evening, even after work. The fact that it is cheap is really important, too.
Kaisa Kangas Here’s a link to our webpage in case you want more information on future runs, etc! (Will be updated when we know that it will be possible to run the larp.)
A talk about the future and self-definition of larps for those who are interested in overlapping activities and/or multidisciplinary cooperations. As the meaning and praxis of Nordic larps evolved and expanded during the last two decades, some of its larps became nearly indistinguishable from other established forms of role-playing (e.g. process drama or socio drama). Is this a bug or a feature? What type of relations can enrich larp? And (how) should we react to these changes? Larp has the potential to become a new, inclusive, and all-encompassing umbrella movement, but inbred ignorance in its circles might also limit its recognition in favor of more established forms. How can the larp movement stay geniune yet be open to change? And what kind of role should larping take in the eyes of outsiders?
Bibliodrama, called Bibliolog in much of Europe, is a form of role playing or improvisational theatre using Bible stories.
Mátyás Harpgándi To my best knowledge there are at least 2 different lineages of Bibliodrama/log. One is more of a version of sociodrama (structured activities which includes a lot of improv and role-play) and the other is more of an interactive meditation on holy texts.
Mátyás Harpgándi Also something important: Bibliodrama is mostly about the Bible but not only! That is actually a subgroup called Bibledrama. Bibliodrama means drama of texts and could use any kind of (holy) script for comtemplation. Beside Christian sources I regularly use ancient Chinese and Indian text.
Anon 2: Hard disagree that thin roles are not role-play… sorry Jiituomas <3
Mátyás Harpgándi I think he says its role-play but not strictly ‘larping’
Anon 2: How do we determine what makes a role deep?
Anon 2: Not weird… super cool!
Anon 3: Interesting – something I have also wondered about i edularps
Anon 1: Playing “the drunk” or “the elf” is enough of a role to make it larping, imho.
Anon 4: Super interesting, need to look at Leveleki
Anon 5: Not sure if there’s anything about Eszter Leveleki in English. It might be a good idea to change that.
Anon 1: Hungarians always mention these fantasy camps. I want to know more!
Anon 7: While I stayed in Hungary I met some people who run one of them. They described it as a larp game where they use three days to represent each year and encouraged the children there to roleplay while structuring the events in such a way that they tought them social, political and management skills.
Anon 7: Their typical event runs for about two weeks over the summer holidays and they use the ‘three days makes the year’ structure to look at a much longer period of time than most larps manage.
Anon 8: So many shortforms rely on characters based on one word, if that. I would still call it larping.
Mátyás Harpgándi You can, but then larp becomes nearly synonymous with any kind of embodied role-playing. Do you agree?
Anon 2: I think a lot of these distinctions are silos honestly where independent groups think they invented something and have their own term for it. It’s more useful to compare individual larps and their content with these other exercises, as well as their go…See More
Anon 9: While I encountered this less in larp, tabletop rpgs have a whole category of games where you’re playing yourself in some imaginary situation. (There’s a zombie apocalypse, but you are literally yourself)
Anon 4: For a long time I tried to design larps where there wasn’t really a “character” as much as a “social role” and a “situation” – if you get it and design it really well, it totally works, but it’s really hard to get people around “what do you mean there’s no character”
Anon 2: There’s still alibi of fiction, so you are still technically a character. Just a character nearly identical to the self.
Anon 9: Anon 2: You’re absolutely right, of course. But it is the “thinnest” role I can think of, and it is also harder to justify actions with an alibi in such circumstances. Sure, you would only kill your friend in a zombie apocalypse, but… do you mean you would actually kill your friend in a zombie apocalypse?
Anon 10: I think it would be impossible to be play your authentic self because there is a wide gap between an actual crisis situation and a larp/rpg context in terms of real-world consequences. This is, I think, what makes it “a character based on you” rather than “you as a character”
Anon 9: By the way, probably the most popular incarnation of this idea is this line of games: https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/…/the-end-of-the-world/
Anon 2: I play a lot of extremely close to home roleplaying where basically we are versions of ourselves. The narratives and actions often can diverge wildly from everyday life due to fiction and people have alibi due to the setting to speak about things they normally wouldn’t in polite conversation. It adds new affordances that daily life does not.
Anon 11: It might sound like a very silly question, but can someone please clarify to me what does the term “authentic self” mean? Isn’t there some saying that identity is a taking of roles? And if so, and I am highly speculating here, can’t we strive towards the goal of making the players identify more with their characters than with their “real” selves?
Mátyás Harpgándi ‘Role-shaming’ 😀
Anon 1: Mátyás Harpgándi Great stuff!
Anon 10: I’ve been using the definition of larp by Tuomas Harviainen from the 2011 book where he says that the characters should be more than social roles 🙂
Mátyás Harpgándi This is a serious misconception in Hungary. Harviainen talked about the key criteria of larping (the activity), not about the definition of larps (the events). His whole writing is about this separation.
Anon 10: Thanks for the clarification!
I’m looking forward to having your article to quote from too in the future 🙂
Anon 1: There are no set definitions of larp and larping, it’s an ongoing discussion. That you are now a part of! 🙂
Anon 2: I usually just simplify as “playing a character in a fictional environment and some degree of physical enactment of character.” Pretty close, without the “deep role” specification.
Anon 12: I think that as long as it doesn’t result in flat characters (because playing a trope is just boring) any form of characterization should be valid
Anon 12: …although there are, of course, even interesting ways to play a trope 😉
Anon 8: But how do we determine what a “flat” character is? That’s the part I’m struggling with, what’s the bar here? When is it a deep character?
Anon 12: I’m going with the definition of flat character I was taught as a lit studies student at uni — a character that consists of nothing but stereotypical definitions, with only a single point of view and no form of development or insight.
Anon 2: ^^ this. I also worry that it stigmatizes less skilled or experienced role-players. (“How do we determine a flat character?”)
Anon 1: A character description may be super short and flat, but the character interpretation can still be deep and nuanced. There’s really no way to know except for the player.
Anon 12: I respectfully disagree with that, Anon 2, as I don’t think a less experienced or skilled player would necessarily gravitate towards playing a flat character — to me, it seems more likely that they would play an aspect of themselves as a character (‘me as the king’), which by definition wouldn’t be a flat character.
Anon 8: Anon 12: That still feels really vague to me. Like Anon 2, I worry it will stigmatize people.
I think there’s already a high barrier of entry for larp, and newer players often talk about not being good enough for various roles or responsibilities. How do we work with this definition without telling people their characters are too flat?
Anon 2: Me as the king would fall under “just a social role” in Harviainen’s definition.
Mátyás Harpgándi Anon 2: they might start as social roles but these kings & queens can organically became nuanced and unique personalities during the long process… thus larping? 🙂
Anon 12: Which is why I said that I believe any form of characterization should be valid — that we should not be using too narrow a definition. Perhaps the ‘flat character’ caveat is just my own preference, though, I do admit that. I would never tell anyone that their character is too flat or that they can’t play a certain way.
Anon 2: Mátyás Harpgándi social roles are still larping to me 🙂
Mátyás Harpgándi Anon 2: But then larp becomes nearly synonymous with any kind of embodied role-playing. Is that good? Why do we need a second, hobbist jargon (larp) for a general phenomenon? Because we are larpers who like their hobby? 👿
Anon 2: Mátyás Harpgándi I discussed this in my comment to your paper, but one of the things I think that makes edu-larp unique is it arises from leisure play. So some of the techniques and experiences of leisure play may apply to it (say, experience points, o…See
Anon 13: We (Terrible Creations) cater most of our games to non-players. We don’t use the acronym larp at all because we found it was confusing them.
Anon 2: Anon 13: I tell my students they will be larpers by the end of the session when we edu-larp. They are nervous at first, but then have no trouble using the word larp afterward. (They span several decades for age groups). I think it’s okay for them to be confused at first.
Anon 13: Anon 2:D Good approach! We usually congratulate adult newcomers afterwards on losing their larp virginity. 😉
Anon 2: Haha not sure that would fly in American schools but intriguing approach 😉
Anon 13: Anon 2: Emphasis was on “adult”. Wouldn’t do it with a bunch of teenagers. 😀 But it tends to work well with grown-ups.
Anon 2: Adults too…. Americans tend to be very sensitive about sexualizing language. Which is probably for good reason considering power dynamics of teacher-student 🙂 but also religious students may be actually saving their virginity for marriage
Anon 13: Anon 2: Cultural differences may apply, of course. And should. We do stress it’s a larp virginity, though. But I can see how it might not sit well with some audiences.
Anon 13: Also, we avoid comparisons to theatre if we can help it because people tend to freeze when they think they have to act.
Mátyás Harpgándi I think using the term ‘deep’ roles was misleading. I’m not neccesarily talking about the quality of role-taking or the depth of immersion. Would you like to see an English infographic about the different stages of role-shaping?
Anon 11: I would love to, while I didn’t agree with everything, I would really like to read some more. 🙂
Anon 2: Absolutely!
Anon 2: I think what Harviainen means is not just playing a function or social role, but a personality, a more complex ego structure with additional motivations and characteristics. I think these things can evolve in role-playing even with thin characters depending on player choice, but a larper is still role-playing if the role remains thin and they are engaged.
Mátyás Harpgándi So as a summary, I dont really have any problem with our larp jargon, people talk the way they talk. But I think some of those words are so biased that we should avoid them and use more neutral terms when dealing with outsider specialist (especially if they are from a related sibling field like other forms of role-play)
Anon 4: That was something I encountered a LOT coming from theatre. I felt like larpers were using words that had a whole heckton of meaning and context behind them, in ways that were sometimes accurate and sometimes perversions of what they’d borrowed. But! Getting deeper into larp (or, in my experience, any field at all) you always seem to end up with these terminologies that have limited application outside that field, and the challenge is simply to be able to become familiar with the depths in other people’s fields and learn how to bridge between them.
Mátyás Harpgándi If I identify as a larper, everything I borrow from Drama in Education could be considered a part of edularp. If I identify with process drama, every technique from Nordic larps could fit into my DiE practice as a new convention. But is there a neutral language to communicate between fields? I think we who work with applied larp should work toward that if we want to avoid terminology wars.
Vedergällningen was a Viking horror larp focusing on the relationships between humans, and between humans and the gods. It was played in the Berghem larp village in Sweden, on 1-3rd November 2019. Vedergällningen was created by Karin Edman under the brand Wonderkarin. The larp was run in English, with players from both Sweden and abroad, totalling about 85 participants, including both players and crew.
The larp world was set in a fictional Viking age and time where magic exists and works, the gods walk the earth, and supernatural beings roam the forests. The larp itself was set in the village of Astfanginn, a village where völvas, their disciples, and thralls lived and worked. A völva is a person who knows sorcery, or as it is called in this world, magic “seidr”. The seidr are magic rites to make something happen, from healing someone, to giving someone power in battle, to calling down the gods to the earth. The völvas are usually female, but sometimes they can be male. What sets this village apart from other villages is that in this village the residents have settled based on their merits in seidr, and then the followers who are attracted to the residents also settled there.
The followers of Gyrid communing in the forrest, Gyrid being to the right. Photo by Hanna Olsson.
There was a set hierarchy in the village. The Council are firmly in the top, a group of völvas so senior they seldom leave the village. Then there were five travelling völvas, and then the followers of the travelling völvas. In the larp, there were also three different groups of vikings. At the bottom of the hierarchy are the thralls, also within their own group.
This all sounds a bit complex, so I will take myself as an example. My character was Halldora and I was part of the group The Followers of Gyrid consisting of me, Hjördis, Geirlaug and Hjerka and our leader Gyrid who was one of the travelling völvas. I had a mentor in the Council, Ljufu. I was also assigned a friend, Ranveig, in the Followers of Järngerd. This meant I had plenty of connections both to other characters and to other groups, creating an alibi for play. The other characters had a similar network of connections to explore. Each group also had their own house to sleep in, meaning it was relatively easy to find each other, even though it was dark after 9 pm and rained quite a bit.
This design worked very well for me, especially since I had signed up to the larp by myself without knowing too much who else had planned on going. And although I knew some people there off-game, I played with them very little, as I had so much play with my assigned connections. This design also meant that both I and most other players that I know of also had plenty of threads to follow, which in turn generated more play. It also created a feeling of the village being lived in, and relationships being established and being changed.
There were a number of set events within the larp; the vikings would arrive, the Vedergällningen ritual would be held calling down the gods, and the ending scene of the larp. This level of transparency gave me as a player room to steer my game and time the experience which I enjoyed.
Ingame, one dark and stormy night, Vikings arrived to the village to seek help as their ships had been destroyed, and they were in need of physical, mental and magical healing. Before the first night was over, the völvas became victims of a horrible crime. To get vengeance, the völvas called the gods for answers and aid. This did not go exactly to plan, and now the humans had to face both Loki and their beasts, as well as themselves.
Our group “The followers of Gyrid” believed in the goddess Idunn. Idunn was the goddess of youth and fertility; her symbol is the apple. Our magic powers were focused on rituals for healing and youth, using food and drink. I talked with the gods and sometimes got answers. Gyrid, the three other disciples, and I worked and lived in a small hut and this was also where I spent most of my time playing.
Gyrid Eirikdottir. Photo: Hanna Olsson.
If you were the person in need, something like this would have happened to you:
You stand outside our hut, in the dripping wet and cold November night. The door opens and you see lights and feel the warmth streaming out.
‘Welcome, come in, what ails you?’ we ask, inviting you in. You sit down on the warm blankets and pelts on the floor, sweet smell in the air. Gyrid sits behind you, directs her disciple with small gestures and eye contact. On the chest over there you see a bowl of berries, the spine of a big animal, and cup of mead. You lean back and when you look up into the ceiling, it is covered with hanging apples and branches; the lovely smell permeates the air. Hjördis sets the tune with her staff, the rhythmic sound reverberating in the hut. Geirlaug, then takes up the tune and Hjerka and Halldora soon chime in too. The song is about Idunn and how her power is granted to them. At first it is only pleasant, the song and soft touches and small nibbles fill you; then it turns darker and the soft touch turns into restraint; and the nibbles are not so delicious anymore and you don’t want to eat it but you are forced to swallow. But it is for your own good and soon, so soon, you will feel better. The song fills the hut, the smells and the screams. And then it is over; you are healed. What do you have that you can pay with? Maybe the price was a bit more steep than you first bargained for. What is the bitter pill you have to swallow? Is it a year and a day as a thrall, or losing the ability to ever have children, or simply the rage that helped you keep your men in check that you lost? But we all know, before long, you will be back again. Now out again with you, out into the rain and cold; there’s a line waiting.
This was my most hedonistic larp this far. If you’re imagining November in the Swedish forest to be a bit cold and drab, you are completely right. But despite the surrounding setting, I slept well, ate well (including eating a mallard!), danced, sang a lot, and had a lovely time performing rituals with players I had never met before and not really talked to before either; still we managed to form a very well functioning group by just the exchange of a few words, our expectations and wishes, and setting up the hut together.
Skadulf facing the Völvas of Astfangin. Photo by Cajsa Lithell.
I didn’t spend time thinking of how I looked or how I acted but could just follow my character and what my character was up to. I think this was largely due to the fact that the larp was explicitly queer friendly and lesbian-themed. Most positions of power were held by women, and there were overall a lot of female and nonbinary players, compared with relatively few men. This ensured that I could relax and just enjoy myself and go with it. I also appreciated the relatively high average age in this larp, and the maturity of the players. The calibrations ensured that I had time setting up scenes and following threads, allowing me to steer the experience.
Another factor that added to my feeling of immersion was how little time I spent talking and how much time I spent doing. There’s something special about carrying water, plucking mallards (so soft feathers!), stroking and touching and restraining other players, singing and feeding and eating. Running scared through the wet forest, beasts close by. Relishing the feel of wood, and bone, cold water on the hands and hot coffee in the stomach. The sound of the other villagers, the smells of wet fur and leather. Tip-toeing around Loki and their beasts as not to spite them. All my senses were activated and my body moved most of the time. Engaging the body and the senses so much gave me a deeper relation to the larp and it is something I will steer towards in the future more than I have done before.
What made Vedergällningen good to me was that there was so much room for different experiences, such as playing with power, being scared, being used and owned as a thrall, feeling like an outsider, being a witch, being a warrior and so on. Having different gender expressions and tastes. Lots of sex (in-game of course) or none at all, go for what you like.
What made me take the step from thinking of writing up this piece was two fold. I often wish larps that I did not attend had accompanying documentation pieces, so I offer this work as a contribution to others. Secondly, Vedergällningen is being run again and I wanted to let a broader audience know about it. If you’re curious, have a look at https://vedergallningen.wordpress.com for more information. (Disclaimer: I have no affiliation with Wonderkarin; I just had a good experience).
Cover Photo: Skade cursing out the Viking who killed the First of the Council. Photo by Cajsa Lithell.
In this article, I present feedback on my experience playing and writing on suffragettes in larps set in early 20th century Europe. I present the diverse angles through which the theme and characters were approached in these larps and contrast their differences. These games are set up at a time period with clearly separated gender roles, developing narratives around female archetypes and roles in society. As such, any mention of gender in this article will be set along the line of a strict binary division of male-female gender, which was used within the historical context of those games, and obviously does not represent the full extent of gender spectrum, identity, and expression. I examine which themes were mostly presented through these games and the challenges they created.
The Games
I have chosen to focus on these three games because they all focus on first-wave feminism by having all or most characters being actively suffragettes, which allows for interesting parallels and comparisons. While many games handle feminism or gender:
1. Winson Green Prisonis a game written by Siri Sandquist and Rosalind Göthberg in 2016, for up to 20 players and 4 hours of play. It sets up a group of women locked in the titular prison after being arrested during a protest march, as well as the men who have the legal authority over their lives (husbands, fathers, brothers) waiting for them to be released. The game starts by having the participants workshopping the characters as pairs, and then separates them for the entirety of the game except for their reunion during a brief epilogue scene. The game allows both groups to play in parallel, but at times only one of the groups play, letting the other group observe the opposite gender’s dynamics.
2. Sororityis part of the Belle Epoque trilogy, a series of games I wrote in 2017 questioning gender and class inequalities in early 20th century France. It plays for 8 to 12 players over 4 hours. The characters in Sorority are all women, and the game features them in three different time periods: in 1913 when patriarchal control is in full swing; in 1916 when the context of World War I has unexpectedly given women more opportunity to work and act independently; and in 1919 when, after the war, women are being pressured to return to traditional roles while the demand for suffrage gets stronger. The larp allows for the characters to evolve and change their opinions since it is played over a long period in game.
3. Suffragette!is a game created in 2014 by Susanne Vejdemo, Siri Sandquist, Daniel Armyr, and Cecilia Billskog. It originated in Sweden and was rerun in the summer of 2018 for an international audience, adding four groups of foreign visitors to the original Swedish cast. It played for 70 players over a 12-hour period. The characters are all women meeting in Stockholm for the International Women’s Union conference and preparing for the protest march, which is supposed to take place in the morning.
Post-game picture from Sorority by the author
The Hopes of Sorority
The three games all focus on female characters grouping together at the time when women didn’t have voting rights and were usually under the authority of their fathers or husbands. They all question the social dynamics of a non-mixed female group. They all support implicitly or explicitly the ideas that solidarity and union between women can really be a positive force for change, and that women should be more supportive of each other in the face of pressure from patriarchal structures.
In this regard, Winson Green Prison was especially powerful, since being imprisoned together in the same space instantly sets the stakes for the female characters very high. Trying to support each other and not break down in panic, within the context of being imprisoned, immediately felt important. For some characters, having been arrested meant the possibility of punishments at the hands of the men, when others had participated in the march against their express orders. In that context, those fears played as very real.
Sorority starts with a group of diverse women coming together over the years. They are clearly divided at first, especially along class lines, but solidarity between the women eventually manages to gain traction, when they are all able to take part together in a protest march. As such, the game is meant to be a metaphor of the collapse of old social structures after WWI, and to illustrate how solidarity can appear among women.
Suffragette presents a variety of women coming from diverse organizations or foreign countries. Being part of an organization or a specific group was definitely the frame wherein support was the strongest: the solidarity between the French group was a strong part of my personal experience. Solidarity was also quite apparent in the socialist and anarchist groups of the game, who were an active minority that seemed very supportive of their members. With a bigger player base, the sense of companionship worked more within small groups, or during specific activities such as the suffragitstu — a model of self-defense lessons developed specifically for women. On a larger scale, the game presented more the fracture lines around some controversial subjects such as prostitution, the status of natural children, and access to contraception.
This part of the experience will obviously differ according to each individual player’s personal narrative. However, I do feel that all games show the limits of female solidarity. They could sometimes have a bittersweet ending in the sense that there were limitations to what women could really accomplish and change, in the world as well as in themselves. Sometimes, the trappings of society and social conditioning just got the better of the characters.
In Winson Green Prison, the context of the women being arrested is the main conflict: for some of the prisoners, being in prison carries serious consequences, punishment, or social exclusion. In Sorority, the division comes from the class conflicts. In the beginning of the game, there is a strong class divide between the rich ladies and the working-class women. After the Great War, the richer characters get ruined and the class divisions start changing, though they do not disappear completely. As a consequence, some characters decided to leave the group before the final march, feeling that they didn’t belong and were not sufficiently integrated with the others.
The divisions become even more pronounced in Suffragette, possibly because the game was longer and had a larger number of participants who represented conflicting ideologies. Suffragette is a highly political game, with a significant part of the running time devoted to committees where the participants discuss various subjects such as voting rights, contraception, sex work, and the marching order of the morning march. The end of Suffragette brings together the whole audience to listen to two closing speeches. While to some extent uplifting and unifying, the speeches also emphasized the fact that in reality not much was accomplished, as the divisions remained significant.
As such, all three games question the difficulties of bringing different feminist views together, and show how solidarity can sometimes be difficult to achieve. It resonates with contemporary issues: there are a variety of feminist approaches and divisions and conflicted views and political takes do exist.
The Debate: Men Playing Female Narratives
Interestingly, Suffragette also raised issues regarding the participation of male players in what are clearly female and feminist narratives. This section will focus mostly on this issue regarding mostly cis-gendered males in light of social expectation and gender roles, which will be the group I will subsequently refer as “men” for this writing.
All games allowed for any participant to sign up, regardless of player gender. In my opinion, the integration of male participants (as female characters) was made easier in Winson Green Prison and Sorority, as the context of playing in larp conventions involves more abstraction and no costume and setting. Therefore, suspension of disbelief felt easier to achieve. In Suffragette, male players wore women’s costumes, but there were no specific workshops or demands regarding accuracy.
While the number of male participants playing female characters remained limited, the choice to allow male participants was motivated by expanding interest in sharing female narratives, and promoting the idea that female narratives can and should be of interest to people regardless of their gender. The educational value of playing a different gender as oneself can also be a motivation. As one of the male players of Sorority wrote to me afterwards,
“Seeing all the issues and learning more about the situation in France was eye-opening. It would be another 25 years before women secured the right to vote in France — and I’m glad I played it and was made to feel welcome by the other players.”
However, concerns were expressed regarding the fact that male players could end up taking the space in female narratives, especially if playing high-profile characters such as Emmeline Pankhurst, a role that was played by a man in Suffragette. Some argued that casting men in leading female roles would restrain opportunities for women to play powerful female narratives. Others argued that if female narratives are to be opened and embraced by all regardless of gender, then all roles should be also accessible to all regardless of gender. This is a legitimate issue and, while I support and hope to see more men play female narrative, the conditions to make them more accessible remain to be discussed.This debate is, therefore, still ongoing.
Conclusion
These games provide an interesting insight into different approaches to exploring the same theme. They demonstrate the tension in feminist narratives between promotion of sorority ideals and the reality of the conflicts and divisions inherent to any political movement. They also question the place of male players in female and feminist narratives, which, while an unresolved debate, is an interesting aspect of design to take into consideration for any who write and promote female narratives.
Cover photo: Winson Green Prison by Vicki Pipe for the Smoke Festival 2017.
In 1937 all members of The Hermetic Order of Ardor disappeared without a trace. The Order was gathered to motivate its members to ascend to a higher plane of existence. Notes found at their estate suggest that, during one of the summonings run by the Lady Templar, two deities slipped through the cracks in the aether and slowly condemned the members to hell. The larp BAPHOMET was the story of what happened.
The Idea, Story and Setting
BAPHOMET was a larp about personal horror with the themes terror, lust, desire, power and loss of control. The story was about what happens when a group descends into madness together. During the larp, the two deities Pan and Baphomet possessed the characters, and their aspects filled the characters and slowly consumed them.
Drawing done after the larp by Freja Gyldenstrøm
We wanted to explore a horror-themed larp where the basis of the horror was not external monsters, but how we as human beings are capable of doing horrible things if we are pushed just a little. A larp with nearly no special effects and with a focus on loss of self-control though the use of meta-techniques.
The Hermetic Order of Ardor that the characters were members of was based on a mix of real hermetic orders from the turn of the 19th century. Teachings of Madame Blavatsky, Aleister Crowley and Danish couple Michael and Johanne Agerskov formed the basis of the world view of the order. The tome mediated by Johanne and written by Michael Agerskov, Vandrer mod Lyset(Walking towards the Light), was used as the main inspiration.
Rituals were performed in the order to heighten the mental state of the members and initiate them in the next level. It was during one of these rituals that the two supernatural powers of the larp came into the world by mistake and started to corrupt the characters.
The outcome of the larp was locked from the beginning: Everyone would die at the end as they followed either Pan or Baphomet to their realms. The interesting part was not whether you died, but how your character would get to that horrific end: how a secret order would leave all sense of reason and mental illumination, give in to temptation and dive into madness.
The larp was set in what we called The Vintage Era. The vintage era looks and feels like somewhere in between 1910 and 1950. We wanted the visual style of the period more than re-enactment. So as long as the player’s outfits, hair and makeup looked and felt vintage, we were happy.
Sign-up and Characters
BAPHOMET had three different kinds of characters: Knights of the East and West (regular characters), staff and a chef. Everyone was a member of the order. The ticket prices were different for the three types: 210 € for members of the order, 60 € for staff and the chef participated for free. This was because the staff participants had off-game duties, needed to help with various happenings during runtime, and could not expect to play the larp uninterrupted. The chef had so many duties during the larp preparing the food that time playing was limited.
Room interior, photo by Andreas Ingefjord
If you wanted to participate as a member of the order, you had to sign up with a partner. The reason for this was that in the larp you would have a very close relationship with another character, and the larp demands a lot of trust between the two.
We also had a questionnaire you needed to fill in during the signup. The information requested was designed to help us understand the motivations of the player to participate, and to decide what character we would like to cast the player as.
“When signing up for Baphomet we were asked what we wanted out of the experience. I specified ‘exploring the topic of madness in a safe environment’, and this is one of the most valuable experiences I had during the larp.” – Player feedback
A secret agenda for the couple’s sign up and the questionnaire was to raise the threshold for participation. A larp like BAPHOMET demands a lot from its players, and by making the threshold for participation high we wanted to make sure the participants really wanted to participate, and not sign up and then later drop out. We also assumed that if you had signed up with a partner, the chances for you to drop out would be much lower since the partner also couldn’t participate if you cancelled.
Production and Location
Since we were only two people in the production team we wanted the production to be as easy as possible.
Lungholm Slot, photo by Andreas Ingefjord
We rented the amazing Lungholm Castle, a pristine estate located in an isolated spot of the countryside and filled with antiques, old paintings and a grand piano. The quality of the location was one of the key elements for the larp to work and the larp was partially written for the location.
“In my eyes the fantastic location was both the reason that the larp was a splendid experience but also the fault that it wasn’t amazing. Due to the cost of the castle, the amount of participants had to be doubled compared to earlier runs of PAN. This meant that the relation drama-driven design was packed with secrets and intrigues, to a point where it became trivial that someone screamed and cried in the hallway every half hour. It ended up being ten parallel explosions that dimmed each other, instead of five intertwined escalations that fuelled one another.”
– Player feedback
The runtime of the larp was done by the organizers from within the larp with big help from the staff and chef characters. To control the flow of the larp the organisers played the leaders (High Templars) of the order and could to some degree control the character’s actions.
The Game Mechanics
Since BAPHOMET was about possession and loss of control, we used a modified version of the possession mechanics used for PAN.
A possession was symbolized by a necklace; one for each god. When the necklace was placed around your neck, your character’s morals and ethics would fade and only the immediate needs and wants of the deity were present. You would be possessed, for the other players to notice and interact with, until you passed the necklace onto another player. The necklaces would move from player to player and leave a trail of intense, frightening and character-altering experiences.
Glass containers with beads, photo by Andreas Ingefjord
To keep track of where the characters were on their path down into insanity, each player had a glass container placed on a small altar in the ritual room of the estate. Each time you had been possessed, you went and put a bead in the container. A black bead for Baphomet and a white for Pan. The more beads, the more you were in the deity’s control; and your actions would be controlled even when you weren’t wearing a necklace. We would also in some cases increase the amount of beads in a player’s container if they forgot to do it themselves due to immersion in the game. This was also sometimes done to align the bead-visualisation of the progressing state of possession with the actual pace of the possession in the game.
To underline the mood of the larp, non-diegetic music played throughout the estate day and night. The music became more and more disturbing as time passed. This was also used at PAN and has shown to be very effective and highly recommendable.
The Safety Features
A larp like BAPHOMET, which is very physical and intimate, demands a lot of trust between players. We have to be absolutely sure that players are free to explore the themes of the larp and that they can opt in or opt out of a scene or interaction at any time.
First we all agreed on not disclosing what happened at the larp to anybody not playing it. This was not done to stop people from discussing or criticizing the larp; it was done to give the participants full freedom to do whatever they felt their character should, or should not do. To remove the element of competition of e.g. who larped the most intensely.
We then all agreed that the recipient of an interaction was responsible for steering the scene in a direction that was comfortable for them. This was done to remove some of the difficult nonverbal or verbal negotiations you always see in intense scenes. This works very well but needs to be workshopped before play
We also used the Tap Out mechanic, as a last resort if you were in a situation where you felt your boundaries were met and you didn’t want to play the scene any more. You simply double-tapped the other player with your hand and the scene would stop.
“The combination of unsettling sound effects, extreme emotional play, and topics that were a little too close for comfort left me close to having to “tap out” on several occasions, but at every turn I was surrounded by caring, experienced players who made it possible for me to deal and explore, rather than fold and admit defeat.”
– Player feedback
The Experience
The larp experience at BAPHOMET was a very intense and unsettling experience. Several participants have reported weird and terrifying dreams many weeks after the larp. When the possessions started the feeling of time and space slowly crumbled and you went from one interaction to the next without any time to rest. This was both good and bad, since the attrition pushed you further, but also diminished the individual experience.
“BAPHOMET was truly something else. The setting was magnificent, and as I felt that everyone shared this total suspension of disbelief, we trod down the spiral stairway into madness together. To the increasing presence of two malevolent entities possessing us in shifts. Constant immersion. Liberal amounts of champagne. Altogether overwhelming.
The intense play between the couples was full of tragedy, insanity and heartbreak. And the envisioned horror was very much present throughout. This is one nightmare I long for…” – Player feedback
BAPHOMET will be run again in 2018.
BAPHOMET
Credits: Linda Udby (design, production), Bjarke Pedersen (design, production).
Date: October 5–8 and 8–11, 2015
Location: Lungholm Gods – Rødby – Denmark
Duration: 3 days (2 in character)
Participants: 26 at Run 1 and 28 at Run 2. Players from Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Germany, England, Ireland, Poland and the US.
Budget: €4,750
Participation Fee: €210
Game Mechanics: Possession mechanics, non-diegetic sound, tap out safety rule.
An honest, possibly scrambled, and very emotional review and critique.
Trigger warning: Contains coarse language and depictions of violent acts.
In September 15-17, 2017, I attended the larp Freakshow by Nina Teerilahti, Alessandro Giovannucci, Dominika Cembala, Martin Olsson, Morgan Kollin, and Simon Brind. The larp was held in Vaasa, Finland.
Pre-game painting of Charlie “Edge” by Aarni Korpela.
This was a larp about Otherness. About what it means to be different inside a community where different becomes the new normal. We were a travelling freakshow consisting of real freaks and “carny” folk. We had conjoined twins, a bearded lady, a birdman, an albino, a mermaid… and there was a lot of supernatural stuff going on. Actual magic. An alien queen, the Paraca, who had been worshipped like a Goddess by an indigenous tribe in Peru many years ago. And an immortal badass — yours truly — spiced up our experience quite well.
What caught my attention very early on was the prospect of playing on a real life abandoned amusement park. And we did. It was grand; it was eerie. We had a huge circus tent and a lot of run-down places to explore. Of course, off-game we had to be very careful, since there had been actual destruction and chaos on the site. Most of the garbage laying around were not props, although there were a lot of easter eggs to be found. I loved this little touch; we could find plush animals, clothes, photographs, letters, and even in-game money just casually scattered over the huge site. This led to something happening in the game that I would not have expected or even dreamed of.
Five minutes into the game, the hermaphrodite Vic came up to me, holding a small teddy bear in a clown costume. They gave me the teddy bear. I named them Fuckface. And from that moment on, my character carried Fuckface around everywhere, introduced them to everyone, and even held a baptism for them on Sunday. It gave me so much unexpected play and hilarity. I loved it and I’m very sad that Fuckface was gone on Sunday evening when everything ended. Haven’t seen the little fucker since.
Pre-game painting of Vic by Aarni Korpela.
But let’s start from the beginning. How did I end up there?
In a larp group on Facebook, I noticed the trailer and website for Freakshow and I was immediately intrigued. I read the brief character descriptions and fell in love. I wanted to see them come alive. I wanted to be them. On the website, there were really short summaries of who the characters are, their powers, their dilemmas. Interested players would then have to sign up and fill in a form, providing information about how they felt they could fulfill the role they chose. I’ve never seen this method before, but I found it interesting, although it fed into my anxiety quite a bit.
After a while of contemplating, I decided to actually sign up, although I knew there could be issues arising from me possibly starting a new job exactly around that time.
Drawing of Birdie by Vira Takinada.
At first, I was in love with the character called Birdie. They were described as a dark, tortured soul, suffering from feathers growing on their body and seeking relief in drugs, which they would take but also distribute.
But there were already three people who had applied for that role, so I chose to refrain from it and rethink my choice.
Then, I stumbled upon Zombie. Zombie, the undead, was described to be a person who is numb to any form of touch or physical pain, with a full-body skeleton tattoo to stretch that point. But on the inside, they are very much alive and have a great deal of feelings.
Pre-game painting of Zombie by Aarni Korpela.
In the application, we were asked to describe what we were going to do with the role, and I said that I would not do the huge tattoo for various reasons. One of those reasons was that I have a bunch of colorful tattoos myself and I didn’t see myself capable of pulling something like that off, having to cover my own ink and then creating something of that scale. I was sure I wouldn’t get the part, because I basically shut down a major design idea. Also, the prospects of having six people who have never even met me evaluate my “worthiness” of playing a certain role bothered me for quite a while. Who are these people? What gives them the right to judge me based on what I wrote on a form based on what I wrote in a language that is not my first, not even my second language?
I took issue with wording like “evaluating,” because that for me added pressure to the situation, and I’m very perceptive to pressure.
But I got the part. I was ecstatic to say the least. I got to play Zombie the Undead. I had a Hangout session with my character designer. All of the players were assigned one of the GMs to help us create our characters and their background stories. Yet again, this was something I had never encountered in a larp before and I found it fascinating. For me, it went very smoothly, beautifully. We created something intense. Something real, despite all the supernatural that was going on within the concept. It was actually me who created this story of Zombie being immortal when subjected to physical violence. Not even a bullet to the head could kill her. This led to a frustration within the character — a frustration with herself, with death, with the world. Ultimately, it led to her decision never to kill a person. Because why would she grant anybody the satisfaction of dying when she can’t? “Fuck em, I’m not helping.”
Painting of Rocky by Vira Takinada.
I made connections with a handful of players way before the game and I am forever grateful for those friendships that grew out of this process. They made my experience all the more magical.
During preparations, I set Zombie up to be a reckless, loud mouthed danger to society and first and foremost: herself. She would blindly run into any kind of fight or even harm herself deliberately to prove a point. Also, I described her to be kind of a comic relief, to stretch the point of her being illiterate and thoughtless.
When the date of the larp came closer, my anxiety started to take hold of me again. I have that, it happens. I thought things like… what if nobody likes me? What if nobody enjoys my kind of play. What if they find me to be annoying or unapproachable or just unworthy of their time? What if I do everything wrong? What if I don’t do enough? What if I cannot provide them with good play, which I so desperately want to do more than anything else?
And then I went there. And it was wonderful. It was an atmosphere of immediate love, support, and understanding. Family. I got to know people in the Helsinki airport and the bus from Helsinki to Vaasa. We talked about what we could do with our characters. We tried to catch each other’s vibes to find out how to approach each other in- and off-game. I liked that. I needed that. After the game, I received beautiful feedback, saying that my portrayal of Zombie made her seem like an actual person, not like a one trick pony caricature with no depth. I hold this compliment very dear to my heart.
Painting of Ilmarinen by Toon Vugts.
In the workshops before the larp, I feel that one thing was missing. Beforehand in the Facebook group, we had established “shared memories,” which were situations in which we could choose to have our characters participate and show the others how everyone would react to them. I think it would have been very beneficial to the game if we had repeated at least some of the shared memories, just to refresh common knowledge within the group. This practice could be helpful for other games that use this method as well.
There is one shared memory in particular I feel the group should have refreshed: What does your character do when the big bad police come? Do they hide? Do they approach? Because the police did indeed show up at the site. And Zombie, who I had established to be a fucker-upper of the everything, could approach them without anyone batting an eye. In the shared memory, I had written that Zombie wouldn’t hide from the police, but needs to BE HIDDEN from them, which meant physical removal of her from the sight of the police. But nobody remembered that and everybody was so overly nice and considerate of everybody’s game, so nothing happened in that direction. And when a local (NPC) priest showed up, I even took it up a notch and was the first one to greet him and “show him around,” spewing typical Zombie bullshit while at it, and in the end, making that poor Reverend very, very uncomfortable by showing off what the Zombie do.
Pre-game painting of Scales by Aarni Korpela.
Being nice and considerate is not a bad thing. At all. I just think that the overall niceness and the uncertainty about physical boundaries amongst players (and NPCs) prevented some intense play which would have totally been possible and necessary. Maybe it would have been beneficial to do an overall round of “Who is okay with physically intense play, being touched, grabbed, held, etc.” at the workshops, so that we would have gained an overview and more certainty. Because my personal physical boundaries are at an estimated radius of -1. Grab me. Do it. Meanwhile, others need more space and/or are easily intimidated, which is absolutely fine and to be respected. So yes, more clarification on that would have helped.
The meals were something that didn’t give me much play, personally. I was very out of it for the most part. I felt confused and also I was forced to stop scenes, because we needed to go to the restaurant, which was about 1km away and we had to walk there. It felt unnatural to me, to see these people who just ten minutes before were arguing, crying, doing rituals or what have you, stand in line for lasagna in a cantine. I personally lost scenes, because we were interrupted by someone telling us to come to dinner or lunch. A set timeframe for meals and an open invitation to go and have the meals when it actually fit into play organically would have been better for me. Especially since we were instructed to be completely in-game for the meals as well.
Painting of Ophelia by Vira Takinada.
One thing that fascinated me from the first time it was announced was that there will be no photos of the game. Only drawings. A group of phenomenal artists was invited to come to the game and draw us. On Saturday evening, they played NPC town folk who came to the sideshow. That was really cool and I enjoyed them a lot. They gave my character a push towards a kind of inner development I would’ve never expected. Other players brought up the point that the town folk should have played in a more antagonistic manner, which does make sense. But I think this played into the issue of everyone being too nice in- and off-game, so there was no escalation at the sideshows except for the police threatening Big Sister. But that was in her “office,” pretty secluded and out of sight for the people who were doing the sideshows, so most of us had none of that play.
On Sunday, the real action for the artists started. They were playing “watcher spirits,” wearing black veils, walking around the site and drawing us. We were instructed to see them as an invitation for an inner (or outer) monologue and to feel the presence of either God or the Devil. A sense of impending doom. A very neat idea, of course. But in the actual game, it was a bit much. There were 11 watcher spirits roaming around the whole day and I felt that the players were not willing or able to play 8 hours worth of depression. That one of the spirits came up to me and hugged me in-game added to my confusion as to what to play on here, but I later on learned that they weren’t supposed to touch us and the person playing the spirit just thought I looked so sad. Which I was. I mean, Zombie was. And it’s totally fine, I had a fun story to tell off-game and chose to not play on it in-game. Overall, I think a lot of us were overwhelmed by the amount of dark creatures watching us and also we felt that we needed to play on constantly growing despair and misery. That was a bit much. I made the decision for my character to try and get people in a good mood again and it kinda worked out in the end.
Later on I had the pleasure of meeting the artists off-game and talk to them. It was glorious and I adore them all to bits.
Drawing of Charlie (top), Tick (left), and Yin (right) by Kaspar Tamsalu.
At the game itself, I had a blast. I have this thing where I very quickly create catchphrases for my character once I start playing them. This is a sign of me really being in there. So apart from calling everybody “motherfuckers” or just plain “fuckers,” Zombie had a choice of catchphrases and I really punched in the point of her being illiterate. She couldn’t read, write, count, or even read a clock. She approached someone to ask them what the money that she had just been given was worth. It was a fiver. It was big money. She also started to title everybody with “the.” The Rocky. The Scales. The Charlie. The Mabel. It was kind of a unique thing for her and her way of speaking and I highly enjoyed it.
Very quickly, I found Zombie to be a character who was incredibly — and inexplicably — trusted within the freakshow family. She could approach any group at any time and would’ve been told what’s going on. She learned secrets, theories, and a whole bunch of nonsense she then took and spread all over the place. “Have you heard?” was one of the most spoken sentences.
This trust that I received cemented Zombie’s loyalty towards what she perceived to be her family. She called Big Sister — the second owner of the Norman Sister’s Freakshow — “Momma”; she referred to Atlas — the strongman who now worked as the janitor for the show and had a marriage-esque relationship with Big Sister — as “Daddy.” This started out as an off-game joke. I just took it and ran with it. It worked out beautifully and gave me so much emotional play.
Pre-game painting of Oracle by Aarni Korpela.
Zombie cried. She was angry. Frustrated. Hurt. Desperate. Hopeless. Sad. It was a pleasure to play. She was a pleasure to play. The triggering moment for Zombie’s crying happened on Sunday morning. It was truly a sight to behold: Zombie leaning on the Oracle — who was stone-faced like always — and sobbing desperately in grief and anger. The Oracle was a character who could see the future, but had no power to influence it in any way. He firmly believed that nobody could escape fate. Zombie got into an argument with him over the death of Hope, the teenage son of the Freakshow owner, Little Sister. Hope was bludgeoned by townsfolk on Saturday night and the whole group was to discover his body at the gates of the amusement park on Sunday morning. No character was unfazed by this. Everyone of us had some kind of reaction and started their own way of mourning.
Also, Zombie’s story of not having killed anyone came full circle. I made sure everybody knew this for a fact, as well as the reason for it. Zombie even said it to the police officer who kind of interrogated her. “Nah, I haven’t killed nobody.” And the Oracle said, “Yet.”
At the last performance, Zombie and the Paraca planned to outsmart the Gods with a human sacrifice that won’t die. They wanted to perform a protection ritual to benefit the show and save them all. Because Zombie was known to be immortal to some extent, the two of them agreed to sacrifice her on stage. But of course, that plan failed horribly.The Paraca noticed that the ritual wouldn’t work without anyone actually dying and begged Zombie — who she had stabbed and partially gutted with a knife right before as part of the ritual — to kill her.
Painting of Paraca by Vira Takinada.
“Don’t make me. Please don’t make me. I can’t. Don’t make me. Don’t make me.”
“Do it for the family!”
Zombie turned her face towards the audience in the circus tent.
“I love you.”
And stabbed the Paraca in the heart.
After that, Zombie was eventually taken off stage and given a blanket… and sat somewhere on the side. That led to me not being able to enjoy the ending fully, because my perspective didn’t allow it. That’s something I regret dearly. But everything happened quickly, so I guess it slipped all of our minds to seat the Zombie and her gut — a piece of intestine I made for the show and carried around with me after being sliced open in game — somewhere more convenient.
Painting of Zombie by Vira Takinada.
I want to end this review by elaborating on something that I said during the debrief:
I learned from Zombie to let people love me. Because I usually don’t. I tend to try and be strong for everybody yet push people away when it would be my turn to show vulnerability. Zombie was loved. She had a family. She also had to learn to let people in and let them care about her. That is something Jasmin needs as well. I thank you all for this experience. For the enlightenment. For giving me a good giggle when we were told at the debrief to find a character we hated, to talk the experience over with them… and I actually stood there alone for a minute because there was no real hate for Zombie.
Thank you for everything.
For the baptism of The Fuckface Charlielover von Ballsack I, the teddybear in a clown costume. That fucker got his soul saved.
And I bid you all goodbye.
Fuck-cerely yours,
Grace Boleyn, Zombie the Undead
Cover Photo: Painting of the Freakshow larp set by Toon Vugts. Image has been cropped.
