The Finnish edition of the Nordic larp conference Knutepunkt, Solmukohta 2016, is now over. This post will be continuously updated with links to articles, reports, photo albums, videos, slides, books and other relevant documentation.
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Last update: 2016-04-12, 09:30 CET
While not specifically written for Solmukohta 2016, Elin Nilsen’s guide to handling the post Solmukohta blues is quite relevant for participants:
In this larp we didn’t have restrictions. We just wanted to organize the coolest larp ever played in Italy. At least, that’s what I wanted.
Chiara Tirabasso, Black Friday larpwright
Chiara Tirabasso is one of the many larpwrights behind Black Friday. She perfectly sums up two elements of the organizing team: a great ambition on quality for this larp and a strong authorship.
The game was played two times in November 2014 and totalled 140 players. Looking at reactions and feedback from all of them based upon surveys on player satisfaction, one can be pretty sure that Black Friday was a remarkable larp for the Italian scene for many reasons.
First of all, it was a high-budget larp written in the Nordic tradition, which is getting more and more attention, but is still quite uncommon in Italy. The larp was also heavy on technology and scenery. But the most important feature in its design was the organizing team, which comprised people from very different associations and traditions, as well as “lone wolves” and even newbies to larpwrighting. For this reason, this article will discuss this larp through the voices of some of the people behind it in interview style.
The Beginning
“It all started during Larp Symposium 2013,” explains Francesco Pregliasco the project coordinator. Larp Symposium is a yearly meeting of larpers and the Italian equivalent of Knudepunkt. “Some organizers from Chaos League, Cronosfera, and Terre Spezzate met and realized that everyone was interested in working together. There was mutual respect.”
Mario Di Cintio elaborates, “On the occasion of Larp Symposium, I had the chance to know a lot of different associations. Each of them sees larp in a different way than mine. But still, everyone had the will to share their experiences. Hadn’t there been that meeting for knowing each other, I’d never had the grounds to think this project feasible.”
Aladino Amantini continues, “We wanted to accomplish something new. Something that could raise the quality level from the larps that we had organized until that moment. At least in my case, enthusiasm brought me to the synergy.”
But why look for new partners in organizing such a high expectations event? Wouldn’t it be easier to rely on a well-established team?
Alessandro Giovannucci, explains, “Matching with other people helps you [find] new ways. You can get inspiration from every source, but larp is a performative art like music or theatre, so it also needs practice. And you can improve it only by doing things together. You learn jazz by taking part in jam sessions, not reading books. That said, theory must not be overshadowed: most of the bad larps had too few [thoughts] behind them. My organizing team, Chaos League, has more than 20 years of experience, with a strong identity in style. But working with others is very interesting, useful, and funny. I [taught] and I learned. I hope that in Italy, we’ll have more projects like that. It’s a hard way and not many people went through it before, but the renewal of the national larp scene can begin also here.”
Francesco Pregliasco continues, “For a long time, I had the ambition to make a particularly well-crafted larp in [collaboration] with others, so that we could get the support from [the] skills, energy, and contacts that we wouldn’t have on our own. This ambition has never been satisfied – I didn’t know other teams or [a] single people who could organize events even remotely near ours, quality-wise. Also, a few months [before], I played Monitor Celestra, that incredible Battlestar Galactica Swedish larp. It was a colossal [event] organized by several larp groups cooperating together, and I was very impressed by that.”
Mario Di Cintio elaborates, “Personally I sensed, since the beginning, that this project would have enhanced larp development in Italy and contributed to [writing] a piece of its history. For a long time, I hoped [for] the chance of doing something choral. Something different from usual larps and, most [importantly], disconnected from the dynamics of the biggest larp events in Italy.”
Themes, Plot and Organization
Black Friday defined itself as a “technology enhanced thriller.” It was set in a mining town during an emergency – the authors begged us not to disclose which kind of emergency, in order to avoid spoilers. The themes explored in this larp were the deprivation of civil liberties, struggling with the great fears of the modern world, and choosing between “peace and violence, ethics and progress, individualism and common good, protection and freedom.”
As Francesco Pregliasco describes, “The very first idea of Black Friday was, something went wrong in a small American mining town – but what’s behind [it]?’ I think it was an idea from Fabio Bracciolini during an evening where we were chatting about interesting concepts for larp. Fabio had never organized nor written a larp.”
Chiara Tirabasso elaborates, “Even before forming the team, I was already liking a lot of the themes that we developed [earlier]. I think that once we agreed on the main idea, the themes just sprung [up] naturally. The first time we wrote down a list of TV series and movies for inspiration, it seemed like we had already reached a previous agreement! We were absolutely [attuned]. The winning choice was to put together writers and crew so that we could cover all the very different skills we needed to set up Black Friday. Not only character, scenario, and plot writing; but also webmastering; filming dozens of videos; programming a database and other diegetic software; and so on.”
Lorenzo Giannotti states, “I’m very proud. Black Friday was thought [out] with a complex structure with different game styles for each of the player groups. Miners, scientists, and law enforcers had very different rhythms and dynamics, and all of them merged into a whole, synergic storytelling. The scientists had [a] frenetic pace, repetitiveness, pressures from above, and moral choices. The miners had a more ‘classic’ game, mostly made of drama and experiences; they were scarred by suffering, oppression, [the] search for answers, and glimpses of hope. They also had most of the backstory, [which] the other group could understand with interrogations or searches. The law enforcers, finally, played a more physical game or an investigation game, depending on the role of each character in team; their drama was given by steady pressure from above, so that they could have moral dilemmas. Somehow, they were three different but synergic larps. A lot of players said that they’d like to play again in a different group.”
Obviously, putting together a complex project like this requires a strict organization of the team.
Aladino Amantini explains, “We had different groups. Mine had to write characters and plots; others worked on scenery, supervised the logistics, controlled the budget, worked on promoting the event. There’s been a strong supervision so that the groups could match their deadlines and give all the results to proceed with the overall job.”
Alessandro Giovannucci continues, “The project had two complimentary souls, at least to me. The community brainstorm one — magmatic and chaotic – and the rigid one, where we divided into groups with hard deadlines. Every member of the team was both chaotic and rigid. This allowed us to put together ideas and suggestions, but at the same time to put them into practice. The larp development was based on the purpose of a mature and entertaining event that could leave a lasting impression on the players. And to the organizers, too!”
Chiara Tirabasso states, “We worked on this larp since January. Softly in the first months, than speeding up while we were getting closer to the gaming date. I think that [this has] been the right time and pace to agree on the themes; otherwise it wouldn’t have been the same thing. We indulged in having only choices [that] we agreed upon, like we were a well-adjusted team instead of a completely new one.”
Technology Advancements
As said above, one of the main features of the game was technology. This choice added verisimilitude, but also a further level of complexity.
Francesco Pregliasco elaborates, “A truly unique feature for basically every player was the abundance of gadgets to interact with, and the quality of scenery and props. Our comparatively high budget, the hard work from the scenery team, and some [rentals] allowed us to have a remarkable bunch of computers, uniforms, walkie-talkies, cars, special fx, telephones, cameras, microscopes…”
Marco Ascanio Viarigi agrees. “We had very high production values. We put into the game interactive videos, interfaces where players could enter data (and have a response), pre-registered communications… During the larp, we used technology to let some phone [calls] arrive from the outside. There were also “satellite video chats” with fake backgrounds that let us introduce characters not physically there, but still in game through the screen.”
Chiara Tirabasso recounts, “In the first run, the bad weather struck our scientists’ lab. The computer we had in there broke and the strong wind nearly uprooted the whole lab! We had to move it in the heart of the night, as part of the game, thanks to help from scientist characters and staff members disguised as lab technicians. In a few hours, it all went well, but how exhausting!”
Michele Pupo elaborates, “One of the criticalities was science. On one hand, we had to have a strong plot, scientific enough to be believable. On the other hand, the story had to be playable without too much procedural accuracy. We did a lot of [research] and tweaks; the purpose was to make every procedure actually playable and entertaining. The second challenge about science was having scientists as player characters, which unavoidably generated criticisms. We had to try and make believable scientists with players [who] hadn’t studied the subject…their whole life. We had workshops and written texts to give them at least the basic information and the right jargon, but a lot of work came from the players themselves who studied in advance! The result was quite good. Of course, someone noticed that a scientist or two dropped some nonsense… but I think you can’t overcome this without…yearly preparation. In fantasy larps, this isn’t a problem, while we find it in contemporary settings. In fantasy games, meeting highly specialized characters is very rare, and usually our basic [knowledge is] enough. Conversely, every contemporary larp has problems with highly specialized roles. Even…so, I think we managed to operate very well.”
Technology was crucial also in internal communication between staff members during the game. The location of the larp was divided into two areas: Pole Creek Lodge and Liberty Town. During the game, the staff members were split into three teams. There was someone always in game, both as a non-player character and as a fake player characteri.e. “partners in crime” of the staff members, but introducing themselves as regular players. Another team was in Pole Creek Lodge, almost always inside an apartment with all the technology to make video chats. They portrayed government officials calling from faraway, so they were more or less always available to players. The third staff team was inside a hut in Liberty Town and had the duty of making phone calls, delivering active gaming direction, giving instructions to other staff members, and so on.
Aladino Amantini elaborates, “Coordination during the larp was crucial. We had two different directing teams that had to synchronize and keep up to date very frequently.”
Mario Di Cintio continues, “The basic concept was to let the organizers themselves be part of the game. A turnover that allowed everyone to contribute, both behind the curtain and acting a character. We didn’t want someone to be always hidden while someone else was in the game.”
Great Expectations
Communication was very important also before the larp itself.
Luca Tenaglia explains, “It’s a non-trivial feature where I think Black Friday shone. Months before the game, we weren’t sure that this setting could raise interest. After all, we had to persuade 140 players to pay a high fee for a new kind of larp. In the end, we came very [close] to [selling] out. This, and the comments on players’ part, let us understand that even in a niche world like larp, we shouldn’t underestimate the originality and quality of the communication.”
Speaking of communication before the event, it must be noted that part of the success of a larp comes from forming the right expectations. To achieve this purpose in Black Friday, the organizers had to tune very finely the mood. After all, they all came from different styles of gaming.
Mario Di Cintio elaborates, “We, from Abruzzi, are mostly into a realistic style with high verisimilitude. We have a preference for events and plot turns that are more likely to occur in the real world. Others, like Terre Spezzate, had a more ‘fiction’ approach. But with after some discussion, and evaluation of pros and cons, we came to an agreement. That’s where the ‘cinematographic’ style of Black Friday came from. Before the larp, the players received a [guide], where we showed the basic concepts about the event and the kind of play style we were expecting from the players. Also, the event on social networks was a showcase for the game and its values, but also let us give clarifications to the players.”
Alessandro Giovannucci continues, “Having different players was one of the main purposes of the project. It was very exciting to see players coming from different gaming circles and traditions, and discover if the creative feedback would become a further strength.”
The Budget
Black Friday was a non-profit larp. The whole budget sums up to 16k euros, which is quite high for Italian larp standards. Half of that sum was invested in toy guns, cameras, hifi, prints, gadgets, and scenery. The rest covered the gaming place, the meals, car rentals, and so on.
Apart from that, it can be considered a high value production because of the human time spent in the project: up to 17 people during 8-10 months.
Chiara Tirabasso explains, “I didn’t keep track of the hours spent [on] the project, but I’d like to stress the fact that it’s not possible to produce events like this if you’re paid as writer or scenographer. At least, it could be possible, but the admission fee would be madly high. There’s so much attention behind this project…only passion and artistic ambition can support this.”
Conclusion
Francesco Pregliasco summarizes, “There have been in the past even broader collaborations between larp associations. But they didn’t really work, probably because they lacked a strong idea. They were just ‘meetings’; their style was towards compromises among the groups, so they were soulless and uninteresting for the players.”
Alessandro Giovannucci concludes, “The Black Friday experience was exhausting, but very positive. I’d do it again for sure with other people, given that we begin from the same open matching. Also, I’d really like to see more initiatives like this.”
Thanks to Aladino Amantini, Marco Bielli, Fabio Bracciolini, Daniele Dagna, Mario Di Cintio, Lorenzo Giannotti, Alessandro Giovannucci, Francesco Pregliasco, Michele Pupo, Luca Tenaglia, Chiara Tirabasso, and Marco Ascanio Viarigi.
Many thanks to Federico Misirocchi for sharing his post-game interviews.
Ludography
Black Friday, Mountain village of Lusernetta, Turin (Italy), November 2014.
Cover photo by Alessandro Vizzarro. Other photos by Alessandro Vizzarro, Luca Tenaglia and Marcello Corno.
A new Polish book about larp is out, this is what the authors has to say about it:
From the intense 5-players chamber larp to the post-apocalyptic week-long larp festival for almost 600 people. Polish larp scene is diverse and is rapidly evolving. In the first documentation book about polish larp scene you will have a look at 64 larps portrayed at 176 pages. Have a look beyond the blockbuster castle larps and discover variety of experiences created by Polish larp scene.
The Book of Polish Larp by more than 40 authors who in the short texts describe the games they created. Brought together by Mikołaj Wicher, one of the creators of College of Wizardry, published by Rollespilsakademiet.
The book is a glimpse of a certain period in Polish larp history. It does not strive to be not objective, or complete for that matter. However, it is a wonderful image of the Polish larp milieu.
I thought I’d write up a game summary about my experience playing Fairweather Manor, as there seems to be some interest. My background is as an American larper with some-to-moderate larp experience in the American scene, whose first international larp was College of Wizardry earlier this year.
Fairweather Manorwas set in early 1914, and the larp was run at Moszna Castle, a period-appropriate residence. An international crowd of roughly 150 players participated. The premise was that Sir Edward Fairweather, Duke of Somerset, was celebrating his 60th birthday and had invited many of the disparate branches of the family together to celebrate.
My Character
I was playing Richard Wayward-Fairweather, the patriarch of the American branch of the family. The American branch was represented by myself and my in-game family consisting of my wife, my daughter, my sister-in-law and my niece. Our background was that the American plantation — we named it Wayward Hall — was mismanaged horribly by my elder brother, who had died two years before. It was starting to recover, but still suffered under an extreme amount of debt. My primary goal in the larp was to find investors to restore the manor, possibly by finding a rich suitor for my daughter.
The characters were well-written, but there needed to be more information shared across characters. As an example, my wife had information about our dead son which didn’t make it into my packet. Also, my character had invited someone else to the manor, but I was unaware of it until I was approached by them at the larp.
It would have been very helpful to have a “family background” packet that shared all the relevant common information about the family, then allowing the individual packets to fill out the private information on a character-by-character basis.
Schedule
The game ran from Thursday to Saturday. Thursday we arrived, had about 90 minutes to get to our rooms, change into costume, and play a brief in-character scene. This included picking up our costumes if we chose to rent them. I was staying in a room with the other members of the American branch; noble families were housed together, and this was a great idea, as the rooms were large enough to comfortably accommodate everyone and it provided a way for families to communicate.
After arrival, after everyone had unpacked and arranged their costumes, players broke into small groups for workshops and dinner. The first scene, which was filmed for the documentary, was all the guests arriving at the manor at night, greeting the family, and heading into the great hall for a brief address by the Duke.
Friday and Saturday began with everyone waking up in game. There was generally a servant available in the morning to help us get dressed, which was extremely helpful, as a number of women in my room were wearing corsets. Then breakfast, followed by a brief homily in the chapel. Following that, there were various activities around the manor; examples include a poetry reading, a political discussion, and a scene from a play. This was followed by lunch, another round of activities, some speeches, and an hour to dress formally for dinner. The evening started with dinner, then men and women separated into two groups for discussions. Finally, each night ended with a formal ball: a Servant’s Ball on Friday and a Grand Ball on Saturday.
Meals, with the exception of breakfast, were served for all the nobles at once; servants ate at different times. There was assigned seating and the servants would serve each course to the table in order. Some people complained about the pace of the meals — they ended up taking a significantly longer time than predicted — although to some extent, this was an artifact of the period.
What Worked Well
By far the biggest reason the larp worked as well as it did is the setting, followed closely by the care and effort the players put into their characters and costumes. Moszna Castle is stunning, and filled with servants and nobles, it’s very easy to imagine you’ve been transported back in time.
Another strength for me was the “brute force” design. Some of the hallmarks of brute force design are having many subgroups with different agendas, having members within each subgroup disagree with one another, and seeding power imbalances and secrets through the character writeups. Rather than have specific plots or events woven through the weekend, characters were free to play out their stories naturally, and players were given the agency to create their own game. This allowed a number of different play styles and themes to coexist. Some players lived out a gothic tragedy, others a Belle Époque romance, still others a Remains of the Day-style elegy. This was obviously more work for players, but it accommodated a wide range of approaches.
What Needed Work
There’s only one thing that requires serious attention: the servant/noble mechanics. They are sufficiently complex that I discuss them in more detail below. Otherwise, there were some fairly minor issues to address.
When we arrived Thursday, we were rushed to get dressed for the workshops and the opening scene. I felt like the day could have been structured better. I was hoping to start playing on Thursday rather than just having one short scene, and some of the workshops could have been more focused on specifics like etiquette, rather than the more general information. As an example, a number of nobles found it difficult to get out of the habit of thanking servants when they did something, which struck many people as jarring and out-of-character. Some explanation and practice beforehand could have alleviated those problems.
In casting and plotlines, it seemed like there were a lot of women looking for eligible bachelors, but not very many young men looking for women. This created some frustrating play for some people.
Meals were assigned seating, which I thought was a great idea as it provided an opportunity to interact with people whose characters wouldn’t normally interact. Unfortunately, there could have been more thought put into the rotation; I found myself frequently at the same table with many of the people I had sat with for different meals. Others commented on the same thing.
Servants and Masters
The biggest challenge for the larp, though, was the relationship between the nobles and the servants. While most of the nobles really enjoyed the game, the players to whom I talked who played servants had much more varied opinions. They certainly had a lot more demands placed on them: their day started several hours earlier than the nobles, they were constantly pulled away from their stories to serve the whims of upstairs, and they often had no opportunity to sit down or relax at all.
There were also times — like the servant’s mealtimes, or when they were preparing for their ball Friday night — when it wasn’t possible for nobles to find servants.
I think it comes down the fact that there are essentially two separate and fundamentally different larps running simultaneously, with only a few points of connection between them. I’m not sure that’s a bad thing, but it does require being up front about the experience you should expect as a player. One suggestion, which may or may not be feasible, is to raise the price for nobles, while dropping the price for servants; that makes it more clear what the expectations of each role should be. Increasing the number of servants, as well, would reduce the burden on each individual player while increasing their availability.
Overall
In short, this was a largely successful iteration of the “blockbuster” formula, and a particularly interesting one, proving that it works even for genres which don’t rely on action or adventure to drive their plot mechanics. These games are ambitious and difficult to pull off, owing to their expense, logistics, and reliance on a fully engaged player base to generate play. But when they work, they provide an impressive amount of latitude in the play they can generate, and can be uniquely engaging to their participants.
Ludography
Fairweather Manor (2015). Agata Swistak, Agnieszka Linka Hawryluk-Boruta, Akinomaja Borysiewicz, Alexander Tukaj, Beata Ploch, Charles Bo Nielsen, Claus Raasted, Dracan Dembinski, Ida Pawłowicz, Janina Wicher, Krzysztof “Ciastek” Szczęch, Krzysztof “Iryt” Kraus, Maciek Nitka, Mikołaj Wicher, Nadina Wiórkiewicz, Szymon Boruta. Rollespilsfabrikken and Liveform. Moszna, Poland. http://www.fmlarp.com/
All photos are exclusively licensed for use by John-Paul Bichard. Contact him for use of these and other photos from Fairweather Manor.
The Great War, or the first World War, was a massive, horrible massacre on a truly industrial scale, and it is one of the wars I find most fascinating. I’ve read so much about it it, know so much trivia and still I had almost no knowledge of the Czech Legion in Siberia. Walking a few miles in the shoes of those legionnaires not only opened my eyes to a very important piece of history most of us probably have no knowledge of, but also brought me new friends and some very emotional memories.
NOTE: This article is purposefully vague on the actual events during the larp, in line with the organizers wishing to keep story and plot spoiler free for coming runs.
Legion, or Legie as it is called in its original language, is a Czech larp that had already had six runs by the time the international run was played, and is a game for 54 pre-written characters, both soldiers and civilians. The story is based on (very well researched) historical accounts of the Czech Legion as they found themselves in Siberia, unable to return west to their newly proclaimed state after the collapse of Imperial Russia. It is a rather complex history, one that I highly recommend you at least look up in Wikipedia, but basically they were stuck for years along the Trans-Siberian Railway fighting or negotiating to evacuate to Vladivostok and go home to Czechoslovakia.
The Story of the Legion
When signing up for the larp, players got to describe their views on what they wanted out of the game etc, even writing about a person that they would identify with or be inspired by, and I take it all of this was taken into account when the organizers decided on what characters to offer the different players. Once that process was done players were offered three characters (with a short synopsis) and told to rank them in preference, and down the line you were handed one of them to play.
Characters were really diverse and spanned thematically very well over the different aspects the organizers wanted us to relate to; there were soldiers naturally, both idealistic volunteers and less enthusiastic ex-prisoners of war, there were nurses and civilians, wives and followers, and a few local guides. The character material was hefty, quite a few pages of back-history, motivations, relationships etc and you could tell the organizers had spun a very thick and wide net of relationships, potential drama and friendships (and animosity). All in all I think I had some 80 pages to print in total, including history, character, player notes, practical info etc, so quite a lot to read but very well produced and meaningful.
As stated earlier, the organizers asked us to be mindful of the game not being transparent, and since I don’t want to spoil the game for players who have not yet played it, I’ll just say that the plot itself really felt cinematic but at the same time realistic. There were all kinds of emotions and motivations flying around – love, hate, community, survival, morality vs pragmatism, democracy vs chain of command etc – and I found that it worked really well, especially since the journals pushed most characters into changing or evolving during the game, sometimes in grand ways, sometimes very discreetly. The game has really grown on me once I had time to process it, there was just so much going on and so many emotions to handle that it took time to process it once out of the grueling march.
Dial up the Hardcore
Right from the start we knew Legion was going to be a hardcore larp. Uniforms and gear would be provided. Blank firing guns too. It would be played in the dead of winter in the Czech countryside (one night march the temperature was twenty below zero centigrade), we were going to be marching quite some distance (as it turned out, 25 kilometers through snow and ice, up and down some pretty steep and slippery slopes), we were going to be hunted and harassed and boy, did the larp deliver. For many of us, it was the most physically challenging larp we have ever played, and some players (myself included) came close to the breaking point at one point or another – but I don’t think anyone actually reached the point where they had to stop. I must say I was very impressed by the preparations and care given by the organizers here, which made us feel very safe and able to keep going.
The focus on the physical – the marching, the cold weather and the rest – really brought you into the mindset of being a soldier (or nurse, or prisoner) in a really shitty situation, a taste of what it must be like forcing yourself to go on taking one step after the other or just falling down and giving up. Many of us found the marching and physically challenging environment really helped getting “inside the head” of your character.
Railroading and Larp Culture
Going to an event where there is another larp culture than you’re used to is an interesting experience. Culture clashes will inevitably happen, and I think most of us had that in mind going there. We were not sure exactly what the conventions were or how the play style would be, but the organizers were very clear on two things: the larp would be heavily railroaded and there would be very little transparency and lots of secrets. This is, coming from the nordic larp sphere, a bit unusual but I think most of us just accepted the premise and went along with it – when in Rome…
As it turned out, the format of Legion was in some ways similar to what you’d expect a nordic larp to be, and in other ways contrary to current nordic larp trends. One example of the latter is players not being aware until mid-game that their characters had a scripted death scene and that they would be given an new character for the remainder of the game. That the game was heavily railroaded made sense; if we’d just been let loose in the icy countryside the larp wouldn’t have worked, and some other aspects were both interesting and useful, like the fateplay instructions in players journals or the combat/damage/healing system, but some design issues felt like they could use some improvement.
I think the biggest problem, at least for me, was the sheer amount of stuff to be done once the legion was stationary at a location. There was a conflict between playing soldierly duties (standing guard for instance), resting and recuperating, larping with your co-players and playing out the suggestions or orders in your journal. For some of the locations it felt as if you either had to drop the soldier character to do relationship drama, or vice versa – this however got better once we got deeper into the story. There were other things in the written suggestions that felt a bit weird or off track compared to where you were in the game as well, which kind of made me “hack” the game a bit (even though I tried respecting the rules and vision of the game). Unfortunately, for me and a few other players, the plotlines that had to do with romance came at a time when I was just physically too exhausted to really play them out.
As usual, we had some problems with what I refer to as “larp democracy”, the situation in which your game can become bogged down in debate and making compromises and making sure everyone gets to speak up. We also had the all too common problem of players (as a collective) smoothing over or trying to solve conflicts arising, instead of letting them play out to their conclusion. This was however not the fault of the organizers per se, but a common occurrence at almost every larp (regardless of where), and I think there needs to be instructions, workshops or just talks about it before the game unless that concept is actually part of your design.
In hindsight, the game could have really benefited from an hour or two workshopping how to act as a soldier (lining up, saluting, chain of command, passing orders down the line, marching etc). Because of delays in transporting players to the site etc time ran a bit short.
Czech Your Privilege
Having said all that, I realize I was a guest at one specific event with its own history, norms and culture, and I come from a larp scene where we just have different experiences, different dos and don’ts, so instead I’ll end this short summary with the things I think the organizers did really well. The logistics, information and production values were very, very high – some of it much better than I’m used to from the nordic scene. The organizers had a huge, committed team and they really inspired trust and enthusiasm in me and my co-players. There was so much cool gear, everything was so well planned and executed, and we felt really well taken care of. Very inviting and hospitable atmosphere. I can imagine just how much work went into creating this experience for us. Also, I have never seen a more beautiful larp site than the one we trekked across, and some of the locations were just marvellous.
The NPC team did a marvellous job as well, keeping the pressure up and really populating the locations we visited. You really felt as if the entire team gave their very best performance for us to enjoy. But, maybe the biggest takeaway from Legion is that we were given a story that just grows on you, and makes you realize there is a whole country and its history that you know so very little of smack in the middle of Europe. I now have a burning interest to learn more.
Brothers, sisters, if there is another international run of Legion, don’t hesitate. Sign up. I’ve had maybe one the most powerful and interesting larps I’ve had in a very long time.
Legion: Siberian Story
Date: January 18 – 21, 2016 Location: Czech Republic Length: ~38h game time Players: 55 players + NPCs Website:http://legion.rolling.cz
Cover photo: Soldiers of the legion charging over a field (play, Karel Křemel). Other photos by Karel Křemel and Hana Maturová.
Fairweather Manor is a historically-inspired international larp for 140 whose first run took place in Zamek Moszna, Poland, on the 5-8th of November 2015. It was created by the Liveform/Rollespilsfabrikken team already behind the creation of College of Wizardry. As such, the format, creative team, and overall design of the larp connects Fairweather Manor to the previous games considered as following the Blockbuster Formula, while also having its own, unique identity.
This article will therefore try to analyze how we might examine the design choices of Fairweather Manor in this light, how this larp also might differ singularly from those others, and which elements pertaining to the Brute Force design may also apply to Fairweather Manor.
In the Grand Scheme of Things
In the continuity of The Monitor Celestra and College of Wizardry, Fairweather Manor utilizes the full potential of running a game in a truly breathtaking location and of using both the setting and players’ efforts to create a spectacular 360° illusion. The Castle of Moszna possesses a variety of small sets whose exploration works as a perpetual incentive and makes for the possibility of a variety of scenes. A grand staircase, the dining area opening on the Winter Garden in the Orangerie, the chapel, the grounds, and Graveyard were all spectacular settings. On the upper floors, the big suites of the Castle served as family rooms for the nobles, making them a little less accessible, but giving some players the opportunity for other grand scenes.
The sheer size of the game — 140 players divided into three character-type groups — and the collective efforts of the players ensured that the experience would be a descent into 1914. Players could offer activities, such as a fencing lesson, an open stage, a play rehearsal, concerts, or speeches, which would become part of the frame for the larp. You could go on a car or a coach run, and then discuss the comparative merits of the two. You would meet different people at dinner and hone your skills at small or big talk.
The larp, like its predecessors, also benefited from the established world material factor. Historical resources on the period are numerous and, by claiming only a loose historical accuracy, the larp allowed for some flexibility on that ground. For the dramatic side, knowledge of the inspirational television series Downton Abbey was certainly an incentive for most of the players and the melodramatic aspect of the series’ narrative combined with the play-to-lose approach of the larp ensured that the play style of the participants, even when they came from a lot of different nationalities and backgrounds, would remain sensibly the same. These elements ensured that, overall, the game presented itself as a flowing, immersive experience with an extremely high production value.
Characters at Play: The Legacy of the Brute Force Design
However, Fairweather Manor seems to differ from the previous blockbuster models in regard to context, background, and the way it would influence the characters’ agenda. In a context such as those larps, which were inspired by Battlestar Galactica and Harry Potter, the incentive comes from the universe in itself. In other terms, the context drives the plot. In Battlestar Galactica, there is a (space)ship to run for the sake of the preservation of humanity and duties to be fulfilled. In the Harry Potter-verse or any magical equivalent, the combination of school routines and a general sense of exploration, fun, and adventure is more than enough to drive any narrative. In the confines of the strict hierarchies and overall lack of universe or plot-driven incentives, however, the narratives of Fairweather Manor had to rely mostly on characters.
Following heavily the character template established by College of Wizardry(CoW) — albeit with a little more room for pre-established character interactions — the characters of Fairweather Manor followed the same logic, aiming at giving the players something very flexible with which to play. Characters could be changed and exchanged at will, and players had to prepare as much interactions and development by themselves as they could. However, where the location and structure of College of Wizardry makes this type of flexibility fairly easy with most characters being students in the same location, the same cannot be said of Fairweather Manor, where characters came with established gender, age groups, family ties, social functions, etc. This design was a necessity to establish the society ofFairweather Manor in a credible way, but also, combined with a rather arbitrary distribution of characters between players, it limited the liberty that some players would have to transform their character at their will. Furthermore, the characters had gone through a variety of approaches in the writing process, making them extremely diverse. Some characters were, within the confines of the CoW model, more detailed, with pre-established storylines. Some were more constrained within their social function; some would prove fairly difficult to enact. Furthermore, Fairweather Manor, while run by a substantial staff of organizers, chose to dispense entirely with NPCs. While the purpose was obviously to make the larp completely self-sufficient and self-contained, it meant that Fairweather Manor would not have the leeway that College of Wizardry would have when it came to letting players create their own storylines. As such, most of the character work had to be done upstream when it was needed, the margin for freeplay being much more reduced once onsite. Therefore, as is often the case with the huge sandbox type these games prove to be, any character would only be as good as the way each player chose to handle them and co-create their own narrative.
When characters worked, however — and a significant number of them did — they provided the frame for a lot of deep, emotional interactions. In keeping with the social norm — and thanks to the rather clever technique of “think of the family” (an in-game expression that would also work on a meta-level to incite the player to keep secrets hidden) — most of the interactions were kept low-key, avoiding for the most part the risk of expansive melodrama or plot overload that can happen in this type of format. Lastly, we might underline the fact that two elements associated with the Brute Force design also came very much into play in that regard: secrets, and conflicting characters’ agenda.
Although the approach of the larp was fairly transparent, with all characters published in a common folder, players did not have to read them if they did not want to do so. Existing storylines often included personal or familial secrets, and pre-game preparation between players also tended to include secrets of the backstory that would come to fruition over the course of the game. A lot of players wrote letters addressed to or sent by their characters, which would be used to put their secrets in the open. Again, in keeping with the play-to-lose approach, secrets were used only as hooks for big reveals and intense conflicts. Whether this aspect makes for interesting role-play or not is of course a matter of personal preference, but seems necessary to a design such as Fairweather Manor, where (dysfunctional) family values really came out as an overarching theme.
Conflicting characters’ agenda were also present, a matter for which players expressed some concerns, for fear that these would hijack the sense of narrative and become a competitive gameplay. Issues pertaining to the Duke’s inheritance, matrimonial strategies, the search of patrons for the artist, the opportunities for better employment, or improving one’s situation for servants, for example, relied on characters’ agenda, and sometimes caused oppositions, but they also were played in a low-key, mostly narrative manner. Although it was not explicitly stated in such a way, most players seemed to choose that any accomplishment in that regard would come with strings attached, or at some cost, which worked well enough, as a valid take on these issues.
The existence of social hierarchies and subgroups — family groups, artists and intellectuals, higher and lower servants — also appear as a legacy of the Brute Force design. They were used, however, less to create conflict than as a backdrop for the enacting of social conventions and constraints. These, however, could have been more forcefully enforced, especially in regard of what would be considered proper and acceptable or not, and what the cost of deviation from the norm would be. More workshops on these issues, manners, and body language might have been useful. At the in location, briefings tackled essentially the subjects of play style, location, safety, and ideologies of the time period. A slot devoted to behaviors and cultural calibration could have been helpful to some, but was probably left out by design.
Players’ Duties and Sequencing
Like College of Wizardry, Fairweather Manorwas based on a strictly timed structure — activities and meals being used to structure the daily lives of the residents — relying on some players’ duties.
Most were taken voluntarily: players wanting to host an activity registered to do so ahead of the larp, providing the entertainment fit for a high-end reception. Artist characters, of course, were very much encouraged to do so. This aspect, combined with a general sense of goodwill in the audience, ensured that the setting always felt active and alive.
The main branch of the nobles — the characters who were the hosts of the reception — were hand-picked and cast way ahead of the lottery. These players did a lot of work pre-game and in-game to ensure that the reception would be running properly, and that information about timing and activities were properly delivered. How heavy a duty that was and how much the larp came to rely on these characters is hard to clearly evaluate, but it certainly should be emphasized that the structure of the larp needs this core group of characters as its foundation.
Then, there is the matter of the servant characters. A huge amount of work has been put to make them operate as a corps, some players being directly involved in the writing of the servants’ handbook. However, if the standing ovation the servant group received at the end of the game is any indication, it is quite obvious that the servant group took upon themselves a much bigger workload than was originally announced or expected of them. In addition, the higher servants — butler, housekeeper, and their seconds — obviously held a great many organizational tasks as well. Could the communication on these aspects have been clearer? Most certainly. But this point also shows how Fairweather Manor worked in no small part through the willful commitment of the participants, and managed to stir their passions, in combination with what remains a grand production design.
A Story about Love?
To quote from the second teaser, “Being at Fairweather Manor, that’s love.” I would believe that; for all the complexity and issues that are always raised by the grand scope of a blockbuster larp such as this one, it managed to hold up through the love that so many of its actors put into it. This sense of affection is perceptible in the show that inspired it: Downton Abbey is, in my opinion, a nostalgic, benevolent took at a Time that Was, while overlooking its obvious limitations and gruesome inequalities. Likewise, Fairweather Manor displayed all the outdated charm of the period that was called in France La Belle Epoque the Beautiful Era — before the upheaval brought by the war transformed all of society, for better or worse. The high-grade staff production, combined with a significant volunteer work and player commitment to the larp was considerable, its undeniable success as a result, and the surest testimony of the way it succeeded in engaging its participants wholeheartedly in its construction. While being clearly connected to the blockbuster model, Fairweather Manor also managed to be quite unique in distilling elements of the Brute Force in its own narrative. Whether other larps and future runs will manage to follow and improve on the same delicate balance will surely be interesting to contemplate.
Fairweather Manor (2015). Agata Swistak, Agnieszka Linka Hawryluk-Boruta, Akinomaja Borysiewicz, Alexander Tukaj, Beata Ploch, Charles Bo Nielsen, Claus Raasted, Dracan Dembinski, Ida Pawłowicz, Janina Wicher, Krzysztof “Ciastek” Szczęch, Krzysztof “Iryt” Kraus, Maciek Nitka, Mikołaj Wicher, Nadina Wiórkiewicz, Szymon Boruta. Rollespilsfabrikken and Liveform. Moszna, Poland. http://www.fmlarp.com/
All photos are exclusively licensed for use by John-Paul Bichard. Contact him for use of these and other photos from Fairweather Manor.
A visit to Russian “Larp-poem 1905” to do living history and dream of changing the past
Have you heard about the Russian revolution of 1905? Don’t be embarrassed if you haven’t, it’s not that well known, not even Russians talk much about it. Yet, it was an interesting and decisive time in Russian history and, as it turned out, a great theme for a larp. A larp with an impressive scale and ambition, a cavalcade of beautiful costumes, and highly complex mechanics.
The event was called “Игра-поэма 1905“, translated to ”Larp-poem 1905”, and was set up by a group that has done some of the world’s biggest larps. It is also one of few Russian groups with the capacity to invite foreign participants. We ended up being two Scandinavians at the game. Erik played Finnish-Swedish nationalist Konni Zilliacus, a historical character who was active in politics at this time and who has been described as a “Monseigneur cowboy”. Frida took the shape of Anja Sjö, a journalist with communist sympathies. They were in Saint Petersburg to support Russian revolutionaries, undercover as a newspaper tycoon and a cultural reporter.
Life the Saint Petersburg Way
It was astounding to see at what rate the old Soviet era children’s camp, in the woods south of Moscow, was turned into a larp version of Saint Petersburg. There were lots of restaurants, bars, cafés, a casino, opium joints, hairdressers, hat makers, an opera/ballet house, an amateur theatre, photographers, telegraph and post station, and several newspapers. The hundred-headed game master (GM) team, together with the five hundred participants, managed to raise most of it in a day. It was a town where you could get a hair-do and a new hat, eat in restaurants, have tea in a café, see a theatre play in the evening, and much else – all for in-game money.
Not only did these options exist, but many were of remarkable quality. The restaurants and cafés were serving good food, cake and tea most of the day. Each newspaper was told to print two daily issues, which they did, apparently they had more than enough of material. The telegraph station gave the option to send letters and telegraphs to other players as well as to the GMs. From the station some twenty telephone lines spread out, leading to houses all over town. The players could thereby communicate over the phone, through an old fashioned switchboard in the telegraph station, operated by a person constantly on duty.
Perhaps the most impressive was the “Mariinsky theatre”. It had new ballets and operas each night, which were one to two hours long. The quality of these were almost as you would expect when going to a real opera house. It was way, way beyond any acts we’ve seen before at larps. The singers and dancers were professional or semi-professional, but had not all met before the game. They created the four evening shows in a week, starting with rehearsals on Monday and did the final act on Saturday. The music was playback but most of the singing, and of course the dancing, were original acts.
The game had a very well working economy. The fact that there were so many things to spend in-game money on meant that all players had good reasons to acquire and hold on to money. The bills and all kinds of paperwork – there was huge amounts of paperwork – were good looking. For one thing, everybody had their own passport, and you better hold on to it. After the first larp day there started to be inflation, a planned design feature from the GMs. While at first we hadn’t cared much about costs, when the price of restaurant food went up three-fold we were forced to think more economical.
The producers had successfully created a strict hierarchical system with large gaps in income; rich people had thousands or roubles while poor workers were dealing with kopek coins. The rich people who had property would receive a daily income, while workers were given a petty salary. Although anyone could enter any district, workers were in most cases effectively excluded from play with the higher classes. It seems a focus of the game was the experience of the unjust class system. Having an excluding game design can in some cases be problematic for the players that are excluded, but less so in this game, because with 500 participants you have more than enough play within your own ranks.
Plastic Fantastic
So how do you build a city in a matter of a few days? One thing is certain, it cannot be done with the 360 degree “what you see is what you get” realism of Nordic games. At larp-poem 1905, small wood buildings became pompous embassies, a school theatre was turned into an opera house and tent structures were palaces. The popular method of creating the transformation was to put a giant plastic tarp in front of a building or tent, with a photo-realistic image of the building it resembled. For example, the Winter Palace had a photo banner of the actual palace outside it. Although superficial, it did create a good game space where one could get the feeling of walking around in a city rather than camp grounds. If anyone finds it laughable, consider the fact that Nordic larpers use tape on the floor of classrooms for the same purpose. Fact is, the printed banner technique could be seen in other places in Russia, even in central Moscow, where giant tarps with imagery were put in front of buildings under construction to hide the building platforms.
If one could get used to the symbolic buildings there were, however, other aspects of the physical environment that were more difficult to understand. It was seemingly a haphazard which things that were put a great effort to make in-game and which things that no-one cared to bother with. While most players had put a tremendous effort into their costumes and personal gear, there were plenty of non-character GMs walking around, in plain sight, wearing very off-game clothes. One even had a big toy moose on his shoulder. There were other GMs who had put on in-game clothes so it apparently depended on personal preference, and which part of the huge Russian larp culture that they came from. Similarly, there could be a gathering of people sitting around a café table with wonderful cutlery, fine cakes and very authentic documents on, but in the middle would be modern soft drink bottles and candy wrapped in plastic. While some restaurant served their food and drink on fine china, others had single-use plastic for the purpose.
Next Stop: Far East
A particular aspect of the larp was that it spanned a much greater time and space in the fiction than in reality. The in-game town symbolised all of Saint Petersburg. It was divided into different districts, separated by rivers that were manifested by bright blue or white plastic tarps. The only way to pass between the districts was over wooden “bridges”. These would be drawn at some instances, some predicable and others less so, hence effectively preventing characters to get to other districts. The fact that one could get stranded in a district created openings for social game play, such as when two dancers from the ballet sat in our house for an hour or two in the middle of the night, sharing a drink and waiting to get home to their sleeping quarters.
Russia was at this time in war with Japan, a conflict that took place in Manchuria in the Far East. It was possible to go there as well, by taking the Trans-Siberian railway. The producers had actually built a train car out of wood, painted it nicely and added speakers with sounds to give an atmosphere. The train only left three times a day in each direction, so a trip to Manchuria took most of the day. We decided we wanted to try a trip to Manchuria, so Konni and Anja embarked the train as war reporters. After thirty minutes of mingling in the economy class, we arrived to the Far East. The exit was on the other side of the train car. Our whole group was led past the parking lot and into the forest. There we got to a separate camp, built with tents and plastic tarps. It was mainly a military camp but also had a large field hospital and “oriental cafés” with red rice paper lanterns to add an exotic atmosphere.
The war in Manchuria was played out at a battle front of sand bags close to the camp, where volunteers from the GM team playing “Japanese troops” would regularly show up for a fight. Konni jumped into the action at one of the battles and was shot in the arm. They had an interesting system at the game where the weapons used, which were real or well-looking replicas, were armed and shot soft felt bullets. It didn’t hurt to get shot, but it was noticeable.
One thing that was completely new for us Nordic players was the constant fast-tracking of time. In the larp, one day for the player was three months in-game. Not by using act breaks, but by the clock running constantly during game time. In this way, politics could speed forward and it was possible to cover a larger range of events. It made some things more logic, like the fact that it took a months to go to Manchuria and back, while other aspects were confounding. When we were told something like “I’ll have your hat ready for tomorrow” they usually meant the next day for us as players, not for our characters.
Five Is a Crowd
Russian larps work a lot with symbolism and larp-poem 1905 was not an exception. Not only in the physical environment, like the tarp resembling canals, but also in the game play. Most of it was rule-bound. For instance, if five or more players gathered in a public place, carrying placards and handing out flyers, they were counted as a revolution. That would activate other rules, like that it was possible to kill other characters more easily. The larp never got to a “revolutionary situation”, however, because the police were very effective in stopping the opposition from mobilizing.
We saw some very fine examples of symbolism one night, when Anja and Konni were led to an opium joint by the actors from the Mariinsky theatre. They served the drug as beautiful origami art, on which instructions could be read when it was unfolded. The instructions were very precise: 10 minutes of hallucinations and then 30 minutes of joyfulness. There was also a rule that anyone who took three or more doses of opium on the larp became an addict. Luckily, for our characters, we stayed on the safe side of that limit.
Konni and Anja risked their life and health in other ways, by engaging with the opposition. Anja participated in worker’s gatherings and established contacts with the leaders of worker’s movements. They were connected with Konni, who had a printing press in Stockholm. Letters were sent and some hours later – a few weeks in-game time – a GM arrived with fresh propaganda material. Konni had just delivered it to the distributors, when the police stormed in to catch them. Konni got away on the closest possible call, but the police were on his tail. After evasive manoeuvres, including hiding in the German embassy to avoid Russian law, the gendarmes caught him. He was locked into a prison cell in one of the houses, together with other political prisoners. The window was open and they could just climb out, but the rules would not allow it, because in-game they were on a high floor. The only way to get out was if someone on the outside found a ladder and helped them escape. Anja actually managed to do that, with the help from some students, but when they came to save Konni he had been taken to interrogation and it was too late.
The symbolism, together with the possibility to extent time and space, opened a lot of possibilities. It was possible to create a full, functional city and get a good coverage of a large and complex historical event. However, it also created some ambiguity. For one thing, the shooting in Manchuria could be heard in St Petersburg, which was a bit confusing, particularly since shooting was also possible within the parameters of the city. We could occasionally see people asking the GMs questions like “that thing over there, can my character see it?” The many rules required much GM intervention. Still, it was beautiful to see the intricate mechanics that were created for the game. There were so many details. For one example, if someone interrupted the workers in the factories, who were making the felt bullets, or stopped an arms shipment with the train, then the soldiers at the front would have nothing to shoot with and have to fight hand-to-hand in the battles.
Happily Lost in Translation
How was it then to play with Russian larpers? One thing is certain, they take larping very seriously. There is apparently much effort put into the role creation. Many of those we interviewed or talked with had well developed characters, where we could dig deep with questions and keep on discovering interesting views and traits. There was also a great focus on playing one’s function. A telegrapher worked hard to send and deliver telegraphs, the police really tried to stop political radicals and terrorists, and the priests put much effort into doing the rituals right. One restaurant owner who served us in his expensive establishment on the English embankment was flawless in clothes, manner and English. We noticed our neighbours, the German ambassadors, sitting up a full night just to sort out their paper work. The clockwork of the game was ticking well.
The dedication that players put into their functions gave many good moments of play. Being checked by police forces before and during train journeys meant some really intense experiences. When Konni got injured in Manchuria, there was a long sequence in the field hospital that was probably the best example of realistic medical play we have ever experienced. The operating scene in itself was some 20-30 minutes long and involved a surgeon and two nurses in intense, immersive play with a lot of different tools and procedures. There was also much energy put into enacting scenes like trials, university classes, and of course the theatre plays.
What we saw less of was emotional play. There were quite few who took the opportunity to play out their grief of losing a husband or friend, their fear of going to the front, anger towards unjust laws, strong friendship between friends, passionate new-found love, and so on. One GM told us that many view a high degree of acting out as “fake”. It appears that subtle or spontaneous reactions are better received. It was apparent that what many wanted with their larping was to do a good re-creation of the time, their character and the events, and preferably make their character succeed in what he or she was doing. We could see players laughing while demonstrating or lying wounded in the hospital. One larper told us that “we just want to larp to have fun“. That said, the Russian larp scene is huge and there are many different larp styles.
Over the board, there seemed to be no great emphasis on staying in character. Players frequently broke game play to discuss something with GMs or one another. In the evenings, when people gathered for some joyful drinking and to sing Russian folk songs, staying in-game was not always that stringent. Many also went off-character to ask us how we were experiencing the game, as it is uncommon to see non-Russian speaking players at Russian larps. They could also stop to explain who their historical character was – a very kind gesture, but a bit difficult to incorporate with the immersive role play that we are used to. In these cases, the language was a saviour. Much of the off-game talk passed us by completely, simply because we did not understand what people were saying.
The fact that we were playing on a foreign language was both difficult and very rewarding. Since many players were not that fluent in English, we had to have our two interpreters around in most cases. One situation where it worked out very well was in the medic scene, since the surgeon and the nurses could bullshit anything and it would seem very realistic, only because they were talking in a credible tone. Talking through an interpreter, when you really don’t know what the other person is saying, creates some dynamics that were fun to investigate. The fact that the interpreter can withhold some information can do lots for the game play; not passing on off-game things is just one of the benefits. It would have been a great situation to play out a romantic relationship, with the interpreter in between, so we hope to do that next time. What works less well with the foreign language is to view theatres and public announcements, to interact socially with large groups and to eavesdrop. It would have been almost impossible to understand what was going on and interact with the Russians without our interpreters.
The Dream of Unity
The larp ended with a scene where a parliament was elected, one person representing each of the classes in society. The emperor voluntarily gave up some of his powers, for the benefit of his people and to avoid revolution. One member of the game master crew described this as a symbolic ending, where the characters played out what they – or the players – wished had happened. Like HC Andersen’s “The little match girl”, the players light a match together and, for a fleeting moment, saw their dream of a happy, inclusive nation being born.
The main game master declared that the game was a way to urge people to learn from history and not repeat stupid mistakes over and over. That we should instead understand each other, think about things carefully before we spring into action, and then move forward – because getting stuck in history is not a good option.
How did it end for Konni and Anja? They did not spark the revolution as they had hoped. Konni was still in prison when the final gathering was held. We know that, IRL, he was caught and deported from Russia in 1903. It’s reasonable to think that he did not fare much better in our alternative history. And Anja? We think she found her way back to Sweden and took an important place in Konni’s newspaper, to take a stance for worker’s rights and the liberation of the Finns. She did get the communist revolution that she wanted, in 1917. The rest is history.
Larp-poem 1905
Credits: Main designers and producers were larp organizing group “Stairway to Heaven” led by Vladimir “Nuci” Molodych.
Our personal thanks to Vladislav Rozhkov with family, who helped us get to the larp, with gear and housing, and Olga Vorobyeva who helped us with translations, interpretation and knowledge about the Russian larp scene. Date: July 29 – August 2, 2015 Location: Former children camp, near Stupino, south of Moscow, Russia Length: 3 days (active game time) Players: About 500 Website:http://1905.rpg.ru/
Cover photo: Demonstration in front of the royal palace (play, Frida Aronsson). Other photos by Erik Pihl and Frida Aronsson.
The theme of alternate sexuality, identity, and freedom juxtaposed with the tragedy of death permeates Just a Little Lovin’. Photo by Elina Andersson. CC-BY-NC.
Just a Little Lovin’ is commonly touted as one of the best Nordic larps ever designed by those who have played it. Originally written in 2011 by Tor Kjetil Edland and Hanne Grasmo, the larp explores the lives of people in alternative sexual and spiritual subcultures during the span of 1982-1984 in New York who attend the same 4th of July party each year. As the larp progresses, the AIDS crisis increasingly sweeps through their community, affecting each member directly or indirectly. The result is a cathartic explosion of emotions that leave a lasting impact on the majority of the players.
This article will discuss some of these rhetorical threads surrounding the design of Just a Little Lovin’. Then, I will emphasize the importance of the ritual spaces and structures within the larp, which work to enhance communal connection in- and out-of-game and help produce these strong moments of catharsis.
Player Discourse Surrounding Just a Little Lovin’
Oh no, not I! I will survive!
Oh, as long as I know how to love, I know I’ll stay alive!
I’ve got all my life to live.
I’ve got all my love to give.
And I’ll survive! I will survive!
Gloria Gaynor, I Will Survive Most characters came together each year in a ritualized fashion for the drag/variety show. Here, they enjoy a performance by the rock band Urban Renaissance. Photo: Petter Karlsson. CC-BY-NC.
In play reports, participants mention several powerful elements of the design. The characters have realistic motivations and relationship dynamics. The intersecting themes of desire, love, friendship, and fear of death interweave beautifully throughout the larp to provide a roller coaster of emotions for the players. The mechanics for sex and death are thoughtfully implemented, providing a meaningful, relatively safe framework in which to experience these powerful moments. The larp is organized into three Acts, with careful workshopping and debriefing exercises framing each phase. These breaks allow players opportunities to co-create the experience with one another through negotiation and agreement. While the larp does deal with the tragedy of disease impacting a tightly knit community of creative, experimental, open-minded people, the emphasis of the larp is not to dwell in tragedy, but rather to undergo a strengthening of that community through shared experience.
A lesbian contingent with their dutch boy. Participants emphasize an intensified sense of community after the larp in their play accounts. Photo: Petter Karlsson. CC-BY-NC.
I have never had my mind opened more by a larp, nor felt more bonded to a group of co-players – including those who I didn’t actually interact with during play. And, importantly, this is not because we came through a terrible experience together: it wasn’t like that at all. It’s because we came through an amazing and uplifting and life-affirming and worldview-changing experience together.
Similar accounts exist in articles by other former players:
I’ve got this sense that I’ve stolen a true glimpse of the past, or at least a past that could have been. We’ve created something real, and beautiful, and momentous. I don’t know how to handle that. It’s immense pride and I already feel nostalgic for it. In the most literal sense — I’m starting to feel the pangs of loss that are nostalgia. It’s exactly the right emotion I need to be feeling right now. Beauty, loss, sorrow, pride, admiration, longing, pining for something.
Just a Little Lovin’ was full of life and color. Death was real, but we needed to make the most of whatever time we had left, in order to be together. The very structure of the game was oriented towards living, and even suffering was just another way to interact with others, to deepen a character, and add even more meaning to his or her life. Death was not a beautiful release; it was just the end.
Eden Gallanter, The Bridge Between Love and Death, Cheimonette, July 6, 2015 Although death permeated the lives of the characters in the game, the party went on even through Act III as a celebration of existence and love. Photo: Petter Karlsson. CC-BY-NC.
Picture, if you will, a group of people discussing the death of one of their characters, which is directly brought about by the nature and behaviour of another in the scene, talking about what kind of impressions they want to construct in this scene. Then they play the scene, to spec, with screaming, tears, loathing, self-hatred, disgust, horror, everything. Then one raises their head and calmly says ‘thank you,’ and, with tear tracks still drying and breath still shaking, they dissect the emotions that each other’s play brought about, praising the particular moves, words, and timing that brought the greatest effect in their character’s response to the other characters. I still can’t decide if its madness, emotional vampirism, or the most awesome thing I have ever participated in.
JaLL is without a doubt the most intense and [thoroughly] designed game I have ]ever played. I understand now why some call it the best larp in the world. There [are] other as well-designed games out there, but it’s the mix of brilliant design with a theme and especially the handling of the theme that creates just a more intense experience.Simon James Pettitt, Just a Little Lovin’: Intro Post, Pettitt.dk, July 7, 2015
Documentation book for the 2013 Danish run filled with player and organizer accounts.
Ultimately, much of the discourse surrounding the larp focuses upon the intense connections the experience creates between participants, the enhanced understanding of the struggles of countercultural movements during the period, and increased awareness about the AIDS crisis. From a design perspective, Just a Little Lovin’ is also touted as successful due to its inclusion of metatechniques from the freeform and blackbox scenes and its careful framing with regard to workshops, negotiation, de-roleing, and debriefing.
One war veteran comforts another during a PTSD episode. The theme of death was woven into the larp in multiple ways: from AIDS to cancer to war. Photo by Elina Andersson. CC-BY-NC.
My examination of Just a Little Lovin’ will discuss this framing in more detail, emphasizing the multi-layered, ritualized nature of the larp design. The careful construction and use of ritual space facilitates progressively deeper and more intense levels of play. In this analysis, I will discuss ritual in terms of both a) atmospheric rituals within the larp transpiring in specifically established spaces, and b) the overarching game framework.
My intent in sharing these accounts is not to support the claim that this larp is the “best designed in the world,” but rather to emphasize that careful inclusion of heavily ritualized processes in larp design can guide players to deeper levels of connection and catharsis.
All Larp is Ritual
Is everybody in? The ceremony is about to begin.
The entertainment for this evening is not new.
You’ve seen this entertainment through and through.
You have seen your birth, your life, your death.
You may recall all the rest.
Did you have a good world when you died?
Enough to base a movie on?
Jim Morrison, The Movie
According to scholars Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner,((Victor Turner, “Liminality and Communitas: Form and Attributes of Rites of Passage,” Excerpt from The Ritual Process (London, UK: Aldine, 1969). http://faculty.dwc.edu/wellman/Turner.htm)) ritual involves three stages: a departure from the mundane world with thorough separation, an entrance into an in-between state called liminality, and a return to the mundane world with an incorporation of the liminal experiences.
Separation: During the separation stage, the group prepares to shed their everyday roles and enter into new ones for the purpose of the ritual. The separation phase can include practicing the ritual, costuming, makeup, masks, establishing ritual space, or other activities intended to facilitate the transition.
Liminality: Participants enter their temporary social roles and play parts in a performance of some sort, either actively or passively. They cross over a “threshold” – or limen – into another state of being, which often transpires in a physical location specifically demarcated for the ritual. All participants agree to take part in this temporary, “betwixt and between” state, collectively agreeing to these new terms of their social reality. Turner refers to the liminal state as a “moment in and out of time”: a paradoxical, transitional experience.((Turner would distinguish play activities like larp as “liminoid” rather than “liminal” as they arise from leisure cultures, but this distinction is beyond the scope of this current discussion. For more information, see Victor Turner, “Liminal to Liminoid in Play, Flow, and Ritual: An Essay in Comparative Symbology,” Rice University Studies 60.3 (1974): 53-92.))
Incorporation: Participants then return to their previous social roles, leaving the ritual space behind. However, they incorporate the liminal experiences into their own lives to greater and lesser degrees. For example, if a community holds a rite of passage to mark a marriage, the couple leaves the wedding with a new social status acknowledged by all present. After leisure ritual activities – called “liminoid” moments — the individual can determine how the experience will impact their involvement in the community and their development of self.(( Turner, ibid.))
Turner believed that rituals create communitas: a greater feeling of communal connection between participants. Additionally, rituals are often guided by a shaman figure: some sort of guide or facilitator of the process who helps establish the atmosphere, tone, and components of the ritual.
Larp designer and co-organizer Tor Kjetil Edland gets everyone’s attention during pre-game workshopping. Organizers often serve the role of guide in facilitating the ritual activity of larp. Photo: Petter Karlsson. CC-BY-NC.
Several scholars have emphasized the ritual nature of larp itself.((For a few examples, see Christopher I. Lehrich, “Ritual Discourse in Role-playing Games,” last modified October 1, 2005, The Forge, http://www.indie-rpgs.com/_articles/ritual_discourse_in_RPGs.html; J. Tuomas Harviainen, “Information, Immersion, Identity: The Interplay of Multiple Selves During Live-Action Role-Play,” Journal of Interactive Drama 1, no. 2 (October 2006): 11; Sarah Lynne Bowman, The Functions of Role-playing Games, Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010, pp. 15, 48-53; J. Tuomas Harviainen and Andreas Lieberoth,”The Similarity of Social Information Processes in Games and Rituals: Magical Interfaces,” Simulation & Gaming (April 10, 2011): 528-549; Sarah Lynne Bowman, “Returning to the Real World: Debriefing After Role-playing Games,” Nordiclarp.org, December 8, 2014, http://nordiclarp.org/2014/12/08/debrief-returning-to-the-real-world/)) While not religious as many rituals are, secular ritual rites do exist in society. Generally speaking, larp includes the shedding of social roles, donning of new identities, performance of these identities in a temporary space guided by an organizer, and a return to the previous self, often with some sort of change individually and socially. Players often report a greater sense of community as the result of these experiences, as evidenced by several of the quotes above.
Therefore, Just a Little Lovin’ is not unique in its ability to create these bonds, as all larp has the potential to do so. What I believe the larp excels at doing is creating well-timed, nearly continuous ritual activities that have the potential to personally transform both the player and the character. Due to the personal nature of the larp’s content and its emphasis on sexuality, intimacy, vulnerability, and fear of death, the play offers participants the opportunity to reflect upon these aspects within themselves.
The larp afforded players the opportunity to shed old social roles, including sexual preference and identity, and explore intimacy in a relatively safe framework. Photo: Petter Karlsson. CC-BY-NC.
Each of the three Acts is framed by standard rituals common to the experience of most Americans to greater and lesser degrees: 1) the raising of the American flag while singing the National Anthem in the beginning and 2) a funeral at the end. Between these two poles of ritual experience, several smaller rituals are timed at regular intervals to offer potent, transformative experiences for characters and, by proxy, their players. On each side of these Acts, out-of-character ritual activities of workshopping, debriefing, and negotiating provide an even more structured frame. In this regard, Just a Little Lovin’ can be seen as producing rituals within rituals within rituals for the players. Leaving mundane life to go to a camp for five days with a group of people is a shift in perspective in and of itself, which is then followed by larping, and then followed by ritual activities within the larp.
Ritual Spaces and Subcultures in the Larp
Hey, babe. Take a walk on the wild side
Lou Reed, Walk on the Wild Side
The structure of the character relations in Just a Little Lovin’ involves each character belonging to one or more subcultures that were representative of the alternative scenes of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s in America. These subcultures include: rich gay men; the gay leather/fetish scene; drag performers; lesbian clubs; literary circles; the night club scene as exemplified by Studio 54; alternative spirituality seekers; tantra practitioners; members of a polyfidelity commune; performance artists; swingers; peace activists; a group of cancer survivors; the Radical Faeries masculinity movement; and AIDS activists. Effectively, each character had multiple connections within some of these subcultures, including their core group of friends, their primary social circle, and their extended connections within their party scene.
Map of the character core groups and subcultural associations in Act 2. Photo: Petter Karlsson. CC-BY-NC.
These subcultures often had ritualized activities associated with them, as outlined in detail below. I played Joani, one of the leaders of the Spirituals, which meant that my in-game husband Kohana (Kevin Burns), best friend Kim (Caroline Christiane Kasten Koren), and I were responsible for running some of these rituals ourselves. Joani and Kohana ran the Saratoga Pact of friendship for the cancer survivors in a copse of trees in the woods; Kohana and Kim ran the Green Drink ritual of personal transformation around the bonfire at midnight; Joani ran tantra workshops in a special room complete with lava lamps, dark lighting, and pallets; and Kohana ran all-male drum circles, also around the bonfire. Other subcultures had similar ritual spaces, such as the stage, the dance floor, and the “dark room.”
Joani, Kohana, and Kim made up the Heart of Saratoga core group, running rituals for the cancer survivors and the larger gathering as a whole. Photo: Petter Karlsson. CC-BY-NC.
These spaces were established carefully as important parts of the scenography and were not in any way incidental to the setting. They offered Temporary Autonomous Zones for the Temporary Autonomous Identities of the characters: spaces where the rules of reality could function differently and where both characters and players could explore new facets of themselves.((Mike Pohjola, “Autonomous Identities: Immersion as a Tool for Exploring, Empowering, and Emancipating Identities,” in Beyond Role and Play, edited by Markus Montola and Jaakko Stenros (Helsinki, Finland: Ropecon ry, 2004), 84-85; Saitta, ibid.))
This design created the possibility for overlap and exposure to new experiences. Rather than creating little pockets of exclusion, the social space was designed so that the environments occupied by members of these groups were in close physical and social proximity to one another. For example, the tantra room where my character ran workshops was physically next to the “dark room,” where cruising, BDSM, and lesbian activities transpired. Sounds from that room emanated into our space and some participants wandered between both at various times.
Members of the Saratoga Pact of cancer survivors and their loved ones head to the woods for their yearly ritual of recommitment. Photo: Petter Karlsson. CC-BY-NC.
This design encouraged “regular” attendees of each subcultural space to experiment with new ones, especially when all characters were expected to participate in group rituals such as the Green Drink ceremony, which might normally not interest some individuals. As an example, my character helped run the Saratoga Pact ritual, an annual ceremony in which cancer survivors renewed their vow to remain true to themselves, live life to its fullest, and always support one another. As the years went on, we inducted new members into the Saratoga Pact based upon their connections with previous survivors: lovers, close friends, family members, etc. Therefore, other characters were exposed to a small part of the survivor experience, just as many from the Pact were exposed to the new worlds of drag queens, BDSM, performance art, etc.
In another example, due to my off-game interest in drag and desire to help with the show, my character spent a good deal of time helping with makeup in the backstage area. This experience gave her access to a new subcultural realm and mode of artistic expression, as well as deeper connections with that social group in the game. The design of the physical and social space facilitated these sorts of crossovers.
Ritual in the Structure of the Larp Design
You can dance, you can jive
Having the time of your life
See that girl, watch that scene
Digging the Dancing Queen
ABBA, Dancing Queen
Just a Little Lovin’ takes place over the span of three Acts, each focusing upon a central theme: Act I is Desire, Act II is the Fear of Death, and Act III is Friendship. The total game time is approximately five days. 5pm until 12pm the next day is spent in-character during the Act, framed by workshopping before and debriefing after. Before each Act, players negotiate with their groups about how best to proceed, followed by 1-2 hours of downtime. The whole experience is followed by de-roleing and debriefing, with a much-needed afterparty in the evening after Act III, where players can reconnect with their out-of-game selves, as well as process their experiences and connect with others.
Off-game negotiation within core groups in between Acts helps direct play for the next phase. Photo: Petter Karlsson. CC-BY-NC.
Game time itself is heavily structured with back-to-back in-game rituals, which I detail below. Players are empowered to design and run many of these rituals themselves, with the exception of the National Anthem, the Lottery of Death, and the funerals, which are run by the organizers. The 2015 run of the game had roughly the following structure, with some variation from Act to Act of non-essential rituals like tantra, BDSM, and drum circles:
Kohana during the raising of the flag, National Anthem, and subsequent speech. Photo: Petter Karlsson. CC-BY-NC.
Song: The organizers play the “Just a Little Lovin’” song by Dusty Springfield while characters are frozen. This song ritually starts and ends the entire larp.
Entrance to Mr. T’s party: The party is itself a ritualized escape from the mundane world, as people can feel free to explore new identities. For example, a professor by day can engage in gay BDSM scenes at night.
National Anthem: The raising of the American flag on the porch, accompanied by the singing of the American National Anthem.
Speeches: T gives a welcome speech. Kohana gives a speech to honor the Saratoga Pact and summons members to that ceremony.
Saratoga Pact: Joani and Kohana run the Saratoga Pact ceremony for the cancer survivors in the woods away from the main party. When I ran this ritual, I had us recite the words of the pact in call-and-response format. Then, I asked each of those gathered to state their intentions for the year, evaluate past intentions, and induct new members. I hoped the intention part of the ritual would serve as a form of steering ((Markus Montola, Jaakko Stenros, and Eleanor Saitta, “The Art of Steering: Bringing the Player and the Character Back Together,” in The Knudepunkt 2015 Companion Book, edited by Charles Bo Nielsen and Claus Raasted (Copenhagen, Denmark: Rollespilsakademiet, 2014), 106-177.)), where player-characters could focus their goals for each day of play in a directed manner.
The Games (optional): The Indigo House members organized some fun physical game activities in the field during Act II.
Eating together was an important ritual activity as members from different social circles had the chance to become acquainted. During the breakfast of Act III, an impromptu gay wedding took place. Photo: Petter Karlsson. CC-BY-NC.
Dinner: Ritual of eating together. Mr. T usually gave a speech during dinner.
Tantra Workshops (optional): In the tantra room, I ran workshops in Acts I and III, primarily using techniques of guided mediation, eye gazing, and ars amandi.((Nudity and actual sex were forbidden at the larp, as was the consumption of real drugs or alcohol. The sex mechanics are described in the next section.))
Dark room (optional): BDSM scenes, lesbian hour, and cruising pick-ups. The dark room was intended for characters willing to have semi-anonymous sexual encounters. Lesbian hour was part of the structure of the larp in order to establish liminal space for those characters as well.
Drum circles (optional): In Acts II and III, Kohana/Kevin ran all-male drum circles for the Spirituals and Radical Faeries around the bonfire, with several other men attending as well.
Blackbox scenes (optional): Transpiring throughout the Acts, the blackbox was a liminal space within which players could negotiate and play out scenes from the past, the future, or fantasies. Two blackbox rooms were set aside for these purposes and did not “exist” in the normal game space. Our group used this space, for example, for Kohana to guide the Spirituals through a shamanic journey to meet their spirit animals — a scene that had transpired in the past.
DJ Tony, singer-songwriter Marylou, and Nate, the Queen of Manhattan during the drag/variety show. Photo: Petter Karlsson. CC-BY-NC.
Drag /variety show: Performance art, drag shows, singing, male stripping, poetry readings, anti-war protests, safe sex public service announcements, and rock band performances. Most of the characters attended or participated in this ritual during each Act.
Dance party (optional): Seduction on the dance floor, vogue-offs, circles where characters danced in the center, and general revelry transpired during this time.
Hookah smoking (optional): A “love nest” similar to a treehouse in the woods was set up with lights, pallets, and a hookah. Characters ritually smoked tobacco, laughed, and shared stories.
Green Drink Ceremony at midnight: Serves as an in-game ritual and a metatechnique. The characters consumed the Green Drink, which has unspecified contents in-game. This technique allowed players the chance to steer their characters toward explosions of building conflict or redirect them into new perspectives. Brilliant in replicating the transformative moments of hallucinogens that many people experience, while also offering the player an opportunity to take the reins of the character in their desired direction.
Lighting the paper balloons to commemorate the fallen. Photo by Elina Andersson. CC-BY-NC.
Fireworks and paper balloon ceremony: Each night after the green drink, fireworks were lit. In Act II and Act III, paper balloons were lit in memory of those who passed that year. The balloons rose into the air, then the lights winked out just over the horizon.
Aerobics (optional): In at least one Act, the Amazons, a lesbian-run aerobics club, led a workout session for interested parties.
Breakfast: Ritual of eating together. During Act III, two gay characters had an impromptu, “unlawful” wedding during breakfast to celebrate being alive and in love. Another ritual within a ritual. This moment later proved poignant for the players; Marriage Equality was finally ruled legal by the Supreme Court the next day in the U.S., over thirty years later in real time.
Song Between Life and Death: In the diner, a song was played to indicate the space between life and death, as well as the passage of time. All players were expected to remain quiet during the song, though they could hold hands or hug.
The Lottery of Death: Angels arrived to announce the Lottery of Death. Characters had to place the amount of lottery tickets in the hat equal to the risk level of their sexual activity in the last year. Names were drawn and those characters were called away.
Death was personified in the larp, guiding the characters to the Funeral and delivering the eulogy for those who passed. Photo: Petter Karlsson. CC-BY-NC.
Death arrives personified as a woman: Characters were led outside and instructed to collect flowers for the funeral. Chopin’s “Funeral March” was played in the background.
Death marches the group to the funeral space: Individuals who survived death that year were released to their loved ones.
Funeral: The group approached the coffins, where the characters who died lay. Death read the second chorus of the National Anthem like a eulogy, which framed the end of the Act.
Little downtime existed between the non-optional scheduled events, but characters had plenty of time for seduction, explosive arguments, breakups, drug overdoses, or laughing around the hookah. The tight schedule ensured that usually no more than 1-2 hours passed where no significant group event was transpiring. This structure afforded players consistent involvement with the larp on some level.
Additionally, these in-game spaces sometimes changed meaning or significance over the course of the larp. Spaces where casual sex once occurred such as the dark room were often eerily empty in later Acts as the fear of death became a palpable mood. Rituals also changed; the drag/variety show became much darker and sadder as the Acts progressed. Still, having the primary rituals and spaces remain intact added a sense of consistency for a community plagued by fear and grief.
Off-game Ritualized Structures
Let’s have some fun, this beat is sick.
I wanna take a ride on your disco stick.
Let’s play a love game, play a love game.
Do you want love or you want fame?
Are you in the game? Dans le love game?
Lady Gaga, Love Game
Another important ritualized structure within the larp involved the sex mechanics. In everyday life, sexual encounters are sometimes considered liminal acts in their own right. In larps, sex scenes are approached in multiple ways: not pursued at all, played literally, or enacted using representational techniques such as backrubs, ars amandi, rock-paper-scissors, or other “resolution” mechanics.
In Just a Little Lovin‘, sex scenes also followed a ritual structure. One player would offer a pink feather to another, which represented an invitation to a sex scene. The other could choose to accept or deny the feather. Denying the feather did not represent an actual in-game rejection, but rather out-of-game consent to play a scene. Players would then go off-game and negotiate the boundaries of the scene, comfort with kissing/touching, and the events that would occur. Groping of breasts or genitals was not permitted. Players had to remain clothed and use a wooden phallus as a representational object to indicate sexual touch regardless of whether the sex was gay, lesbian, queer, or heteronormative. When the negotiated scene was over, characters stood side-by-side and used the Monologue metatechnique, which allowed them to externalize their character’s thoughts to the other player. Altogether, these metatechniques ritualized the beginning, middle, and end of each sex scene in a way that allowed for intensity, while maintaining a sense of safety and player distance.
Members of the Indigo House, a polyfidelity commune in which all members were in an exclusive, group relationship. Photo by Sarah Lynne Bowman. CC-BY-NC.
Players could also call “cut” or “brake” in any scene. They could move their bodies to subtly indicate discomfort with kissing or touching in a non-verbal way that did not break the scene, a maneuver that was termed Deflection. Again, these safety mechanisms did not affect the fiction of the larp, but provided a greater sense of comfort for many of the participants engaging in intimate encounters.
Overall, extensive workshopping in large and small groups served as the separation phase for the main ritual of the larp, as did costuming. For the incorporation phase, the organizers ran structured debriefs that lasted around 1-2 hours in groups of approximately ten people. After Act III, we de-roled by placing a piece of our character’s costuming in the center of a large circle, then wrote letters to our characters as ourselves. We were assigned a de-roleing buddy, to whom we read the letters. We were expected to exchange contact information and check in with our buddy in two weeks after the larp. These processes aided in both the return to the self and in reconciling the relationship between the self and the character. The organizers then invited guest speakers to discuss their experiences with HIV activism and with cancer, which served as a way to contextualize the themes we had just larped with real world experiences and facts.
Post-game connection between participants through the playing of music and drums, which were central ritualized activities during the larp.
As mentioned earlier, the afterparty was another crucial part of this larp, allowing players time to decompress, distance, and discuss events with other participants. Additionally, each year at the Nordic larp conference Knudepunkt, organizers host an hour-long Just a Little Lovin’ dance party, which many players attend in their costumes from the larp. Social media sites like Facebook also provide outlets for people to discuss their experiences, organize reunions, and share information about HIV and other relevant topics.
Summary
The game content of Just a Little Lovin’ on its own is powerful, exploring themes of sex, love, death, and friendship. Adding ritual elements to the larp works to draw players even deeper into the experience. For example, many participants can no longer hear the songs built into the larp design without a flood of memories and powerful emotions returning to them. Even if the character rejects the content of one of the rituals in-game, thinking it “weird” or “uninteresting,” these events offer the opportunity for the character to react to in-game stimuli, which can draw them deeper into immersion. Additionally, the repetition of these in-game rituals in every Act with changes in the fiction each time can create new meaning: a sense of irony, feelings of grief, a sense of stability in an uncertain world.
All larps can include these ritualistic techniques and many larps have similar spaces set aside. Some fantasy and post-apocalyptic larps, for example, have elaborate religions built into the game, complete with rituals, sacred spaces, and mythology. Other Nordic larps such as KoiKoi and Totem have included extensive rituals as well, which are worth examining with regard to their impact on the larp experience.
In the case of Just a Little Lovin’, however, the inclusion of vulnerability, sexuality, romantic intimacy, and death summons a particularly cathartic element for many of the players, especially since these elements become intertwined. Therefore, Just a Little Lovin’ demonstrates how ritual elements in larp design combined with complex interweaving social connections and a strong theme can provoke intense emotional reactions and feelings of communal connection in the players.
Cover photo: The rock band Urban Renaissance closed the drag/variety show every night with an energetic performance. Although Rain (right) died in Act II, the show went on in Act III. Photo: Petter Karlsson. CC-BY-NC.
Hinterland was a Swedish post-apocalyptic larp about refugees and disease. It was language-neutral, in effect meaning that people did their best to switch to whichever language was most inclusive for the players present in any given scene. What follows is my personal take as a player on some aspects of its design, and in particular on the way it used real weapons and real physical misery.
The raiders have left, taking most of our scavenged food and blankets with them. Now a group is checking everyone for Rosen (“The Rose”, the deadly infectious disease spreading among the refugees). I’m slowly removing my stinking shirt and jacket when I see it, the tell-tale symptom: a bleeding rash on my stomach. God, please, no…
Physical Misery
Hinterland was pretty hardcore. In it, players took on the roles of exhausted refugees in a post-nuclear war, plague-ridden Sweden for 48 hours. They could not bring any food with them, and organizers provided very little. Even this was partly taken from them by NPC raiders, along with most of their blankets (temperatures dropped to about 5°C at night). Characters then fought over what was left, stealing anything unguarded.
Organizers encouraged those who felt that digging for one meal a day and shivering in their dirty rags wasn’t hardcore enough to “play to lose harder,” for example by finding an excuse to sleep in a leaky barn instead of staying in the main house. As a result, many players were actually cold, hungry and tired.
This was of course the whole point, as I perceive that one of Hinterland’s aims was to make participants experience the life of a refugee for two days. This facet of the larp was akin to agendas of other games, such as Last Will (where you can play a slave) or Just a Little Lovin’ (where you can play a gay person). Even though the organizers more or less explicitly stated their objective (in particular during the debrief discussion topics), one didn’t have to engage in political discussion around the larp to enjoy it. Personally though, I found it a pretty cool and effective way of getting the point across.
But back to the misery! So how do you get people to play along so far into hardcore-land? The trick, I feel, is the presence of a safety net: if at any time, a player felt they had had enough (too cold, hungry, stressed), they could just head off to a designated off-game area for a meal and warm bed. Apart from a few caffeine-addicts, no one actually made use of this possibility on the run I attended (the larp was played twice). But knowing it was there made many of us feel safe when “playing to lose our food” or stealing someone’s blanket.
The system is not foolproof, of course. Just like safety words, all sorts of things can still go wrong. But I personally found the safety-net approach to hardcore misery to be simple and effective. Not only did people agree to get pushed into something closer – if naturally not equivalent – to what a refugee might experience, but it also created an improved framework for dramatic play. Things which are powerful topics for conflictual scenes, but are in many larps not to be messed with (especially not all at the same time), were fair game here, knowing yourself and the other player had this safety net to fall back on: getting thrown out of the only warm place to sleep, hiding a can of rice while others are hungry, etc.
As I stumble towards the barn, coughing blood, I notice the sign planted in the middle of the road. On the torn-off plank, the moonlight reveals crude letters hastily drawn in charcoal: ROSEN. All I can do is stand there and stare at it, shivering in my dirty blanket.
So, No Boffer Weapons, Huh?
Most weapons used by the characters were knives or tools, such as old pitchforks for example. Real, sharp ones, that is, not the boffer versions. This made for a very immersive experience; after all, nothing looks more like a rusty blade or a metal club than the actual thing.
Of course, this meant that anything beyond threats was almost impossible, for safety reasons. Armed fighting needed to be very carefully planned, and even then, it was limited to things like “a deadly stab in the back.” This, in turn, meant that weapons in Hinterland were more a way to control or influence people and situations than actual fighting tools, thus serving the larp’s narrativist agenda. It might seem surprising, but when properly workshopped, real knives mean more drama.
It’s been some time since I’ve traded our last scraps of food for painkillers. People are leaving, saying goodbye, while someone strokes my hair. Dying bodies lie crumpled on the ground. Enya, how I wish you were here… I’m floating away…
Conclusion
Having a safety net allows players to “go harder”. This can be interesting for its own sake. It’s also a smart design move for larps that rely on getting participants out of their comfort zone to make a political point. Hinterland is a prime example of this, making people experience some of the hardships faced by refugees.
The other main design lesson for me here was the use of real weapons. While initially surprising, it’s a great way of shifting a larp’s focus from actual fighting to drama; with the added bonus of looking good.
Hinterland
Credits: Main designers and producers were Olle Nyman, Sebastian Utbult & Erik Stormark, for Berättelsefrämjandet. Co-produced by Karin Edman & Simon Svensson, with the help of Andreas Sigfridsson, Helen Stark and Ida Eberg. Date: May 8–10, 2015 & May 22–24, 2015 Location: Private land (abandoned 19th century farm) near Kopparberg, Sweden Length: 40 hours of play, 3–4 hours of workshop (per run) Players: 83 (max 50 per run) + NPCs Budget: ~€7,000 (Proceeds were donated to Ingen människa är illegal/No One is Illegal) Participation Fee: €50–€250 (depending on income), €80 for a standard ticket Game Mechanics: Honor System, playing to lose, safewords, pre-larp workshop, act structure, blank-firing firearms & blank weapons, meta-techniques (opt in). Website:http://beratta.org/hinterland
Cover photo: Bandits raid the refugee camp (play, Sebastian Utbult).
In 2014, I conducted a survey about attitudes towards photography and video in larp. I got nearly 500 responses from many different countries, and while I would love to publish the full results here, they’re a bit long for the scope of this KP book. The numbers are available at ars-amandi.se instead, and they’re really quite interesting, so I suggest you take a look if you’re organising or photographing any time soon. What I will do here is outline some of the different arguments and thought processes concerning the way we play and the way we document.
Images and the Nature of Larp
For good, bad, or ugly, we’ve all been photographed in larps. Someone has managed to catch that moment where your costume looked brilliant and you’re screaming at someone, and damned if you don’t look like a movie star. As organizers, we’ve also probably felt the crushing stupidity of not having recorded anything at a larp, and about three months later finding out that nobody cares about our larp if there aren’t pics.
We take images, share images, store images, publish images, broadcast images, and print images, in both still and moving form. So we should talk about images in larp.
Particularly in larp, because as it happens, larps are semi-private (and sometimes transgressive) events. One feature of larp that allows us to play some very interesting things is that the larp is a contained and (ideally) safe space, both physically and temporally.
Our collective understanding seems to be that transgressive play is at times fun and desired, so we make it possible through a space that is contingent – it only exists here and now, and in the context of a game. You might even wonder whether larp is safe so it can include transgression, or if larp became transgressive because it was “safe”.
The contingency of a larp is an important feature for many kinds of play, but also for many kinds of people.
What one player considers transgressive may be less remarkable to another player, and this may simply be a matter of life experience or taste, but can also relate to one’s situation in real life. A schoolteacher may want to play a murderer; a politician might want to play a coked-up rock star; a person in a committed relationship may want to play a fantasy romance; a judge might want to play a slave owner. Larp can offer some freedom of expression and play not only for transgressive or illegal acts, but it offers this to people whose real world lives impose restrictions on what they’re publicly allowed to consider “fun”.
We like to ask “what if” our world had different norms – for violence, sexuality, social structure, or pretty much anything else we can imagine. I, for one, am an artist and frankly can be photographed doing pretty much anything and it will only help me.
But I have seen people do things in larps that, if taken out of context, would ruin their career. I have seen people standing next to other players who were doing things that, if photographed, could ruin that person’s career. A third of the survey respondents reported that some in-game photos could cause trouble for them.
(Speaking of standing next to someone, one of the reasons why Facebook’s own facial recognition software is more accurate than the CIA’s is because Facebook knows who you know, and recognizes who you’re likely to be standing next to.
Just a fun fact for anyone who thinks that not tagging people by name on Facebook is sufficient to protect anonymity.)
Larp, as we have been doing it, is not a public performance; everyone present is complicit in the course of action and has both interest and agency in where the story goes. When you sign up, you might have a ballpark idea of what you’d like to do and what kind of activities you’ll indulge in, but I think most players would agree that if you knew beforehand exactly what was going to happen, there would be no point to larping at all.
Combine this with larp’s famous alibi for indulging in things we can’t do in real life, and this makes most players likely to do or say things that they can’t vet beforehand, and which might not be palatable if taken out of context – in part because the whole point of the larp was to create a context that would not be possible or morally defensible to live out in our real lives. This makes organizers responsible for at least some degree of privacy.
It’s not exactly a completely private event, either: we trust others – some of them near strangers – with our play. We work towards building this trust in person. And yet, we trust people who are potentially hostile with our images. Images do a great deal of violence to the safeness of a larp. They bring something from within the frame of the larp, outside that frame. They are objects that expand the agreed safe space in a way that is not predictable.
They have the potential to expand it very far geographically as well as temporally, and they very quickly collapse the context. They take a private-ish event and bring it into public consumption.
One recent example of this is the Czech larp Hell on Wheels, the first few runs of which included players who darkened their skin to play characters of African descent. This was largely unremarkable until photographs reached the larp community in the United States, where putting dark makeup on white skin to play a black person is inescapably racist and very offensive indeed.
The ensuing conversation saw accusations of racism towards the Czechs, imperialism toward the Americans, and rather a lot of publicity for the larp in a way that the Czech organisers likely never even considered.
Was the dialogue useful? Hard to say. On one hand, it often takes an outsider to an in-group to point out where your blind spots are. On the other, can the piece be condemned on the strength of its images alone, without hearing how the topic was handled in-game? Expect this issue to show up again:
72% of respondents said they’re okay with photos of themselves playing a different social group, class, or culture.
The Public Image of Larp
It’s curious that photographs from a larp get taken out of context so quickly – it almost seems as though people are waiting to find something. But perhaps that’s human nature. A photograph of the larp only recalls the event for someone who was actually there; for anyone else, the context stands only on the weight of what is visible in the picture.
The public does not (yet) understand larpers to be like actors. If Brad Pitt plays a Nazi, we all understand that Brad Pitt is a very cool guy for playing such a hardcore character; in interviews he can even discuss the humanity and interestingness of that role, and we will still understand Brad Pitt to be a pretty cool guy. However, Prince Harry dressing up as a Nazi to go to a costume party is apparently a problem, because for some reason the public feels that it sends an ambiguous message as to how he feels about Nazis; after all, he dressed up as one for fun.
Larpers seem to fall somewhat more on the Prince Harry side at the moment. If you are photographed playing a person dying of AIDS, or wearing black-face, the photograph does not in itself convey any information as to whether this photograph was cultural production (i.e. art) or “fun”, and the overwhelming impression seems to be that you will give off an air of endorsement. And then there’s the Daily Mail (see below):
Ironically, headlines like this one are exactly why photographs and videos from larps are also needed. The popular view of larps (sorry, ‘LARPS’), which to this day retains the hint of Satanism it’s enjoyed since the 1980s, is one in which a bunch of well-meaning but sadly broken people get together in the woods and push each other psychologically until they can’t tell what’s real anymore.
Then someone dies, and it’s the plot of a blockbuster movie.
There will always be a misrepresented “popular view” for those who are outsiders of any activity, just as there is one for contemporary art (“My six year old could’ve painted that”) or sport (“Team sports are just a sublimation of the war impulse”). All of these are created by a combination of images and ignorance. Larp could benefit from having more images in the public – good images, attached to positive advocacy.
Interestingly, Cosmic Joke’s teaser and 18 min. documentary about College of Wizardry (2014) seemed to attract the “right” kind of press: admiration for a job well done, cool costumes and setting, and respect for the sheer crazy guts to put 120-200 people (depending on which article you read) in a castle for 2-5 days (depending on which article you read) to play as Harry Potter/in Hogwarts/in the Potterverse/in the Polandverse (depending on which article you read).
It appears to be the first single larp to get global media attention – and what’s more, positive media attention. The trailer and teaser combined had over one million hits on YouTube, among them Warner Brothers execs who had a few words to say about intellectual property – but that’s another essay entirely.
It should be noted that even the “wtf-type” attention garnered by the documentation of Panopticorp (2013) also caught the eye of people internationally who were interested in running the game; so clearly larpers know how to read between the lines of the Daily Mail. It seems that video documentation in particular is useful for getting media attention, and media attention is, we assume, good for the larp scene. It is certainly helpful for getting venues, financing, and interest for one’s next big project.
What to Record, When, Why, and How
It’s quite clear that players love photographs of themselves and their friends; particularly in the 48-or-so hours directly after a larp, players cry out for the visual proof that tells them yes, they were really there and they looked beautiful with all that snot running all over their faces after all their friends died and they had a desolate epiphany about their own existence. Most of us are guilty as charged here.
No organizer I spoke to would dream of letting a larp go un-photographed. For grant money, for pitches, for clout, for academic research, for being able to contribute to the ongoing creation of the Nordic larp canon, evidence is simply essential. It’s participation.
Video is a bit more fraught. Most respondents are okay with or enthusiastic about video so long as they know beforehand that it’s going to be there. My biggest beef here is that video crews and larpers aren’t used to each other – the boom operator will put a mic in the middle of a scene, and half of the larpers will shut up because it suddenly feels like filming a TV show and they don’t want to mess it up, or they’ll move out of the shot because they don’t want to be on camera. Video crews can literally alter the plot this way.
But either way, larp documentation is here to stay. So I’ll finish up with a little bit of advocacy and again invite you to check out the survey.
Should I Have In-game Photographs?
Yes, in general. People love them. If you want to be a bit sensitive and avoid affecting play, only photograph public scenes – or have your photographers playing characters, so we can interact with them, pose for them, or tell them to go away.
Should I Have Off-game Photographs?
Even better. A surprising number of people (67%) reported they were willing to recreate scenes afterwards for the purposes of photography. I would love to see an organizer design for this – it’s opt-in, and to anyone who wasn’t there, it’s not likely to make a lick of difference. Also, players are often quite happy with one or two decent character portraits.
When Should My Photo and Video Plans Be Communicated to the Players?
Before sign-up. A quarter of respondents reported they’d been photographed in-game without knowing there would be cameras present. The same amount agreed that we need photography policies as part of the sign-up process.
How Many Photographs Do I Need for Documentation?
I think there’s such a thing as too many photographs. If you want to make a film, go make a film. If you want to make a larp, for goodness’ sake leave players alone and let them play.
Should My Photographers and Video Crew Be In- or Off-game?
Respondents slightly favor in-game, by a factor of about 20%.
Can I Photograph Sensitive Scenes?
Ask your players. Maybe agree that interrogations or sex scenes won’t be photographed. Don’t assume everyone has the same common sense. Players (60%) reported their immersion gets really interrupted by the presence of a camera in a tough scene.
Is It the Player’s Responsibility to Tell a Photographer to Go Away?
Tricky. Some players will not want to go off-game to do this. Some will be playing characters of low agency, and this can affect the agency they take as a player.
Can I Use Hidden Video Cameras or Gopro’s to Be Less Intrusive?
Merlin’s Beard, no. Unless you’ve communicated it to your players and they either know where the cameras are, or they are totally okay with playing with hidden cameras, don’t do this. Always allow players to review hidden camera footage.
Can I Post to Instagram During Run-time?
No. Unless it’s part of your design, no no no.
Do Players Really Need to Vet Pictures Before They’re Published?
It’s a pain in the ass, but it’s their face you’re using, and you might not know what’s okay for them. It’s polite to do so.
But I Want to Do a Larp Where Photography Is Part of the Meta/rules/world!
Of course! Most players (78%) would love to play something where photography works as a game mechanic.
Photos and videos have the power to delight us, make our larps better, improve the scene and help us convince outsiders to take us seriously. Because of the nature of what we sometimes do together, photos and videos – and even just the act of taking them – have the power to violate the trust we place in each other. Larp is not a public performance – 69% of you agreed with this statement. It’s up to us to find ways to keep our hobby dangerous while we show it to the world.
“It all started during Larp Symposium 2013,” explains Francesco Pregliasco the project coordinator. Larp Symposium is a yearly meeting of larpers and the Italian equivalent of Knudepunkt. “Some organizers from Chaos League, Cronosfera, and Terre Spezzate met and realized that everyone was interested in working together. There was mutual respect.”
Alessandro Giovannucci, explains, “Matching with other people helps you [find] new ways. You can get inspiration from every source, but larp is a performative art like music or theatre, so it also needs practice. And you can improve it only by doing things together. You learn jazz by taking part in jam sessions, not reading books. That said, theory must not be overshadowed: most of the bad larps had too few [thoughts] behind them. My organizing team, Chaos League, has more than 20 years of experience, with a strong identity in style. But working with others is very interesting, useful, and funny. I [taught] and I learned. I hope that in Italy, we’ll have more projects like that. It’s a hard way and not many people went through it before, but the renewal of the national larp scene can begin also here.”
Black Friday defined itself as a “technology enhanced thriller.” It was set in a mining town during an emergency – the authors begged us not to disclose which kind of emergency, in order to avoid spoilers. The themes explored in this larp were the deprivation of civil liberties, struggling with the great fears of the modern world, and choosing between “peace and violence, ethics and progress, individualism and common good, protection and freedom.”
Lorenzo Giannotti states, “I’m very proud. Black Friday was thought [out] with a complex structure with different game styles for each of the player groups. Miners, scientists, and law enforcers had very different rhythms and dynamics, and all of them merged into a whole, synergic storytelling. The scientists had [a] frenetic pace, repetitiveness, pressures from above, and moral choices. The miners had a more ‘classic’ game, mostly made of drama and experiences; they were scarred by suffering, oppression, [the] search for answers, and glimpses of hope. They also had most of the backstory, [which] the other group could understand with interrogations or searches. The law enforcers, finally, played a more physical game or an investigation game, depending on the role of each character in team; their drama was given by steady pressure from above, so that they could have moral dilemmas. Somehow, they were three different but synergic larps. A lot of players said that they’d like to play again in a different group.”
As said above, one of the main features of the game was technology. This choice added verisimilitude, but also a further level of complexity.
Michele Pupo elaborates, “One of the criticalities was science. On one hand, we had to have a strong plot, scientific enough to be believable. On the other hand, the story had to be playable without too much procedural accuracy. We did a lot of [research] and tweaks; the purpose was to make every procedure actually playable and entertaining. The second challenge about science was having scientists as player characters, which unavoidably generated criticisms. We had to try and make believable scientists with players [who] hadn’t studied the subject…their whole life. We had workshops and written texts to give them at least the basic information and the right jargon, but a lot of work came from the players themselves who studied in advance! The result was quite good. Of course, someone noticed that a scientist or two dropped some nonsense… but I think you can’t overcome this without…yearly preparation. In fantasy larps, this isn’t a problem, while we find it in contemporary settings. In fantasy games, meeting highly specialized characters is very rare, and usually our basic [knowledge is] enough. Conversely, every contemporary larp has problems with highly specialized roles. Even…so, I think we managed to operate very well.”
Communication was very important also before the larp itself.
Mario Di Cintio elaborates, “We, from Abruzzi, are mostly into a realistic style with high verisimilitude. We have a preference for events and plot turns that are more likely to occur in the real world. Others, like Terre Spezzate, had a more ‘fiction’ approach. But with after some discussion, and evaluation of pros and cons, we came to an agreement. That’s where the ‘cinematographic’ style of Black Friday came from. Before the larp, the players received a [guide], where we showed the basic concepts about the event and the kind of play style we were expecting from the players. Also, the event on social networks was a showcase for the game and its values, but also let us give clarifications to the players.”
Black Friday was a non-profit larp. The whole budget sums up to 16k euros, which is quite high for Italian larp standards. Half of that sum was invested in toy guns, cameras, hifi, prints, gadgets, and scenery. The rest covered the gaming place, the meals, car rentals, and so on.
As it turned out, the format of Legion was in some ways similar to what you’d expect a nordic larp to be, and in other ways contrary to current nordic larp trends. One example of the latter is players not being aware until mid-game that their characters had a scripted death scene and that they would be given an new character for the remainder of the game. That the game was heavily railroaded made sense; if we’d just been let loose in the icy countryside the larp wouldn’t have worked, and some other aspects were both interesting and useful, like the fateplay instructions in players journals or the combat/damage/healing system, but some design issues felt like they could use some improvement.
The game had a very well working economy. The fact that there were so many things to spend in-game money on meant that all players had good reasons to acquire and hold on to money. The bills and all kinds of paperwork – there was huge amounts of paperwork – were good looking. For one thing, everybody had their own passport, and you better hold on to it. After the first larp day there started to be inflation, a planned design feature from the GMs. While at first we hadn’t cared much about costs, when the price of restaurant food went up three-fold we were forced to think more economical.
The war in Manchuria was played out at a battle front of sand bags close to the camp, where volunteers from the GM team playing “Japanese troops” would regularly show up for a fight. Konni jumped into the action at one of the battles and was shot in the arm. They had an interesting system at the game where the weapons used, which were real or well-looking replicas, were armed and shot soft felt bullets. It didn’t hurt to get shot, but it was noticeable.
