Tag: Featured

This article, by Petr Kuběnský, was initially published in Czech on Larpy.cz on 27th August, 2020. It was translated into English there on 8th June 2021 by Iva Vávrová, and now appears here with the approval of the author and translator and with the permission of Larpy.cz.

This half of the article ends our story about the evolution of chamber larp in the Czech Republic (and Slovakia). I started writing this essay as a by-product of the recent larp book Check Larps because I thought it was high time for reflecting on the past before the details vacated my mind for good. In the first part, I covered the first six years and the way the genre transformed from its first timid steps to an era when we had a chamber larp festival on every corner.

The Golden Years (2011–2013)

I ended the last part of the article with the 2010 larp Rocker and I noted that its controversial nature was not as important as some conscious design choices made by the author, Lujza Kotryová. There are a few things to add to that. Firstly, at that time, publicly saying “this game works with realistic erotic physical contact” was scandalous to an unprecedented degree. It made the larp’s popularity skyrocket, and I believe that it still counts as the best known and most frequently run chamber larp, alongside Moon. Basically everybody also had an opinion on the game, whether they’d played it or not. This was the first time the Czech community talked about issues that are still being debated now, at a time when we have the first larps working with people having sex as part of the game (such as Dekameron): Should larps have erotic content? Won’t the realistic nature of eroticism destroy the illusion of “playing at something”? Will it make us distort pre-written dramatic relationships through steering?((The term “steering” refers to players influencing the in-game reality for off-game reasons, according to Jaakko Stenros. An example might be preferring an in-game romantic partner who is off-game attractive to us to others.)) And most importantly, is it socially acceptable to say that we were just doing that “in character”?

In any case, the taboo on real alcohol and real physical intimacy that had been in place before was broken. In the following years, this trend was replicated in larps such as Salon Moravia, Samael, Byznys a baroko (Business and Baroque) and (even stronger) the adaptation of the Nordic larp Kink and Coffee, which was run at one of the last Larpvíkends.

Now the next thing, what we call conscious design. Around 2010–2011, the Czech larp community was already quite large, but it was still quite interconnected. Local communities were interlinked with personal relationships. The hard core of players and organizers was around a few hundred people strong and they all knew each other from different festivals around the country. They exchanged design know-how and that subconsciously set certain norms on design and quality.

This was naturally helped a lot by the abovementioned Odraz conference and its publications. It is telling, after all, that Pavel Gotthard’s article ‘Píšu dobrý komorní larp a vím o tom‘ (I’m writing a good chamber larp and I know it) is still the most quoted source in Czech diploma theses focused on larping. That’s no mean feat considering it was published after the conference in 2011! It is sad that there are still no newer relevant sources on larp design in Czech, but we also have to admit that the main concepts in the article (the unique feature, topic, and framework of a larp) are still valid even today. After all, the author mentions the need for testing a larp before it is run and that only became common practice in recent years.

The environment where almost everyone knew everyone did not last long. Within a few years, the community grew rapidly, and we might say that Court of Moravia’s old dream of making larp mainstream finally came true. Some new players saw it as an experience for one night or one weekend and had no desire to continue playing or start making their own larps. Other newbies, however, stayed and became the main pillars of the following developments. Naturally, other players would later find they had enough of the format and pick other larp types.

When looking at the games themselves, the striking feature is especially the jump in the number of new larps. My (incomplete) records that I have been keeping for a few years show that a record number of 39 new pieces was written in 2011. That is triple the number of chamber larps that the Czech scene larps had produced only three years back. With this number, it is a bit hard to look for clear trends, but let’s try.

Bleed, Experiment, and Legend

I have already mentioned the popularity of the so-called ”Czechoslovak jeep”. After 2012, the number of larps in this genre went through the roof. At the same time, the form became more worn and shallower. “Czechoslovak jeep” larps were often relationship or family dramas, and rather than creative takes on the format, the games were often reduced to a railroad with scripted scenes. The original freedom and experimental nature innate to jeepform could therefore only be found in translated larps from abroad that we started running (Drunk, Fat Man Down). Still, I believe that we have been through this jeep madness: both because of the handful of truly excellent games that this gave rise to, and because this scenic structure was carried on to other larps that would shed its theatrical nature (Cien Años de Soledad), or emphasize it in a creative way (Telenovela, Bucañero).

Why are we talking about the “golden years”, though? Well, it’s not just about the sheer number of new larps and the adaptation of design principles. Most importantly, something changed the games themselves and the way they worked. We got the first truly good larp comedies, like Telenovela, Škola (School), or FK Perseus, where the players took the roles of a football team. I actually still believe that comedy is one of the most difficult genres to convey through the medium of larp and Kamil Buchtík, the author of two of the three larps mentioned above, deserves a Golden Globe (of larp) for his contributions.

We also did a lot of translating and adapting. If we count translated chamber larps, the number of new larps in these years would be even more striking.

There were a lot of them, but I’ll mention at least Doubt. The first runs in Brno were done by Michal Havelka and Vanda Staňková in 2012, and a lot of players left it with a profound feeling of “what the hell”. Things that were especially hard for Czech players to wrap their heads around at the time included stuff like: “OMG, somebody forgot to write half the larp!” or “Do you seriously expect us to drag our own romantic screwups to light here?” And then at the end: “Did we really spend eight hours here?” I’d say that while the term “bleed” had only been known by a few larp theorists a few years before, now with Doubt, it gained very clear dimensions.((You can find out more about how the larp developed and how it was received in Czechia in Michal Havelka’s article http://larp.cz/?q=cs/clanek/5952/doubt-aneb-pribeh-jednoho-larpu))

We also picked up a very peculiar habit: we started experimenting… Although of course if we look back at the early years, we could technically say that everything was an experiment, because no paths had been trodden before. Jakub Balhar wrote The Strings, a larp in which the players got tangled in a complex web of laws and clauses, while also getting tangled in a very real web of strings that tied the participants to special harnesses. Zuzana Hrnčířová designed a chamber larp that happened in the darkness. Her Terapie tmou (Darkness Therapy) was also remarkable because she got funded by a grant that allowed her to make the first ever tour of the Czech Republic with her larp. I also cannot leave out the crazy computer game adaptation Kytky versus Zombie (Plants vs. Zombies). Lesser-known games worth mentioning also include the crazy crossover Don Juan aneb strašlivé hodování (Don Juan or a terrible feast), which combines a telenovela aesthetic with dancing, plucking feathers, and absurd theatre.

Last but not least, there are three striking larps that must be mentioned. What they have in common is that, like the owls in Twin Peaks, they are not what they seem. I cannot avoid major spoilers, but since the larps are all quite old and in Czech, I don’t think it really matters. All these games have a sort of a second plane, a major revelation that completely changes their meaning in the end.

At first glance, I speak only da truth looks like the twin of the dirty cop drama Odznak, mentioned in the previous part of the article. The interesting thing is that the players are divided into gang members and police officers in the beginning and the groups spend most of the game in separate rooms. The real revelation only comes in the final credits (yes, there are real credits), when the participants find out that the whole story is a biblical allegory, in which a dead mobster plays the role of Christ.

Moon, a western space opera and the larp with the most reruns in the Czech Republic, is a similar case. While Only da truth was inspired by The Wire, Moon draws on the super popular TV show Firefly. But again, it’s not primarily about the stories of space cowboys – the story is a clever parallel to the dilemma that Czechoslovakia faced in the aftermath of the Munich Agreement before World War II – do we surrender our home or face an insurmountably more powerful enemy against terrible odds?

Eliška Applová and Rado Hübl approached this method slightly differently. While for a short time, their Samael took up the mantle of scandal after Rocker, the message was completely different. The larp contained realistic physical intimacy, real alcohol, and even some (relatively) realistic violence, but at the end, the wild party feel is drowned out by an epilogue containing the statistics on sexual assault in the Czech Republic, which is also the secret underlying the main storyline of the whole piece.

All three of these games count amongst legends of the chamber larp scene of old. Other legendary pieces include Iure, Hranice (Border), L-World, Never let me go and many of the games that I have already mentioned. This clearly shows that in these years, authors were often drawing on experience from designing older games. That helped them know what motives to accentuate and how to design their pieces to create the right experience.

The Harbingers of a New Age

The period of 2011–2013 also gave rise to a very significant sort of momentum that would impact the future of chamber larp in the Czech Republic profoundly: The onset of high-production content larps (even though we didn’t call them that yet). Let’s look at how it happened…

Some of the chamber larps of this time were already signalling a slow shift towards better production value. Moon, El día de Santiago, and Bucañero for example could no longer make do with your standard classroom and the costumes that players can supply. The Pirate larp Perla Karibiku (Pearl of the Caribbean) even had a VIP version, which added good food and drink on top of its splendid production. Still, these were quite isolated cases.

Things had already been set in motion a bit before that, with the creation of Projekt Systém (2009) by Court of Moravia. Suddenly we had a serious larp about a totalitarian regime, with robust plot design and game mechanics, and pre-written characters, which took place over three days in the realistic venue of a recreation camp from the Communist times. Costumes, full production, all-day catering, and mental terror all included.

In 2010, Central Bohemian designers came with Ardávské údolí (The Ardávia Valley), and a year later they ran their larp Porta Rossa, set in a renaissance town during a plague epidemic, which had almost film-like production values. From that point onwards, the machinery of big, high-production games was unstoppable. However,… when I say big, I don’t necessarily mean the number of players. Many high production larps of this type were actually quite hard to categorize. Skoro Rassvet, Salon Moravia, or Dance Macabre, for example, had between 3 and 8 hours of game time and (except for Dance Macabre) they did not have that many players, so we could technically easily classify them as chamber larps. But the experience as a whole also included workshops and in some cases an afterparty, so taking part in them usually took up an entire weekend.

This new trend also went hand in hand with more frequent and louder talk about the importance of pre-game preparation and the post-game phase (a debrief, reflection, and taking care of player safety in general). The aforementioned concept of “bleed” was in the foreground of this debate, though the meaning had shifted a bit.((Czech larpers still use “bleed” or “bleeding” to denote a player feeling sad or blue during or after the larp. In larp theory, the term “bleed” is more nuanced and refers to the transfer of (any) emotions between the character and the player.)) We started having discussions over whether the then common approach of “I want to feel emotionally shattered after the larp” was healthy. All this suddenly permeated the sphere of chamber larp as well, even though up to that point the common thing was to drown emotions in a pint of beer at the festival afterparty and limit reflection to questions like “what was your strongest experience in the game?”

It also seems undeniable that high-production content larps owe much to chamber larp. Their authors generally started in the chamber larp environment and tried out the fundamentals of design on making chamber larps. In the last period that we will mention, large-scale games with pre-written characters started pushing out the demand of chamber larps more and more. It is worth mentioning that most current content larp authors over 30 started writing and playing chamber larps around the period of 2011–2013 at the latest.

In the beginning of this article, I mentioned how interconnected the community was around 2011. I should also say that as the chamber larp scene rapidly grew, the situation became less clear. New towns started their own festivals: Plzeň, Pardubice, Lipník, or Ostrava. These attracted new young authors who took their first designer steps in their own little communities. The side effect of the increase in new debuts was, as could be expected, that a number of them were only run a few times.

Knowledge sharing and theoretical reflection slowed down a bit once again. The reasons are simple: the pioneers of larp theory who stood at the start of the chamber larp boom were slowly leaving the scene, which paralyzed projects that had served for these exchanges up to that point. This buried the work on the Czech larp wiki, Larpedia; Larpy.cz experienced a long hiatus; and the last Odraz conference took place in 2012.

But not everything was sad and in decline. 2012 also saw the start of Larp Database, and the first Czech larp podcast, Role, was launched only a little later. We also got new chamber larp initiatives, such as Hraj larp (Prague) and Hraju larpy (Brno). They took up the mantle of Court of Moravia and started organizing a chamber larp run every week or two. That reminds me: we also got our first chamber larp “assembly lines”. The first was Larpworkshop in Česká Třebová, while Brno even got a larp design course, Škool, that stayed active for several years. It was also a time when the first chamber larp authors passed their scenario on to a new organizing team. The honour belonged to the most famous chamber larp of the time: Moon.

The Swan Song (2014–present)

I have to admit the last period could probably be divided into multiple parts. If we look at the chart of new original larps in Czechia, we can see that the boom of the previous era lasted for several years, before the numbers plummeted. Yet the new trend of players slowly shifting their interest to large content larps is clear. The truth is I succumbed to it as well, so I only played around fifteen chamber larps from this period myself.

When I mentioned the shift, I didn’t mean just the players; organizers were part of this trend as well. The most famous figures of the past five years started this era by producing new weekend-long content larps, rather than chamber larps. These included Legion: Siberian Story or De la Bête. Figuring out why this happened doesn’t seem hard: The high-production, 360° illusion of an authentic, wide-ranging world was no doubt more attractive than larping in Mrs. Currywinkle’s basement. The fact that the target group got older definitely also played a role. Spending a weekend away once every three months started feeling easier than scuttling around Prague every week for two hours of larping.

The further development of chamber larp therefore fell mostly in the hands of newcomers and the Larpworkshop patrons. As most traditional festivals fell into decline, the main marketplace for chamber larps shifted to events organized by the Hraj/u larpy weekly initiatives in big cities. An interesting opportunity for targeting players who’d never larped before was the annual Gamecon, which gradually broadened its larp selection.

While the chamber larp community grew smaller and more fragmented, we still got local communities now and then, centred around dedicated larpwrights who kept pushing the train onwards: EH Games in the Slovak Košice, StopTime in South Bohemia, or the not-so-new Crex in Ostrava.

Chamber larps also entered completely new environments where they could address completely new target groups, for example libraries or art galleries: such as Vendula Borůvková’s “art larps” Nový Eden (New Eden) and Člověkohodina (Man-hour). They also turned out to be useful in education: the historical project Post Bellum ran workshops in schools, Josef Kundrát created edu-larps to teach practical applications of science. Reflective experiential learning also found its intersection with chamber larp, in the form of projects like V kůži pacienta psychiatrické léčebny (In the Shoes of a Psychiatric Hospital Patient) and Cesta za snem (Pursuing a Dream).

It is also no surprise that in recent years, the larp medium got into contact with the theatre world. We could see that in the larp adaptation of Pomezí (Borderlands), originally a successful immersive theatre performance, which took place at the original theatre set, as well as in recent performances by Janek Lesák’s company The Game and Městečko Palermo usíná (Mafia).

I remember that, once it had become clear that the heyday of chamber larp was past, I predicted that the format could become a sort of experimental laboratory that would serve for testing new, bold concepts. That turned out to be an overly idealistic and mistaken idea, which did not suit the interests of both participants and authors. After all, unconventional, non-traditional larps had quite a lot of trouble finding players (such as Cien Años de Soledad).

Nevertheless, we did get interesting new takes, mainly because seasoned organizers wanted to make something original. That gave rise to the non-verbal Čí sny sníš (Whose Dreams Are You Dreaming), the abstract and improvisation-based Figurky (Pawns), or the civil larp Nejdelší zpoždění (The Longest Delay) where four out of six players take the roles of the protagonists’ thoughts. Orlov, in return, represented an interesting fusion of larp and computer game, with a spaceship crew dealing with their internal struggles and external threats, while also flying their ship using a computer simulation.
My favourite chamber larp from this period is the narrativist Karavana (Caravan), an intentionally non-dramatic game inspired by Arabian Nights. A group of people sitting around the fire in a tent in the desert tell stories based on the organizers’ input.

We also kept translating lots of larps from other countries, and this period also gave rise to a number of comedies, often with quite bizarre topics. These allowed you to try out the roles of Greek gods, sardines, or preschoolers: Medvídek Pú (Winnie-the-Pooh), Poprask na Olympu (A Scandal at Mt. Olympus), Prom, Pískoviště (Sandbox), Ryby (Fish), Výjimeční vyšetřovatelé 2 (Incredible Investigators 2). Chamber larps also started breaking out of the conventional mould more frequently: Some were not played in one room (such as the outdoor Stezky šamanů (Paths of the Shamans), or lacked pre-written characters and plots – Figurky, Hrací skříňka (Music Box), Poprask na Olympu, etc.

This is no Theatre, My Boy…

Almost every chapter of this article mentions an article by Pavel Gotthard, so this one won’t be an exception. In 2013, he published a provocative debut novel Léky smutných, a lovingly teasing commentary on larp escapism. A year later, he wrote his essay ‘Není pravda‘ (Not true), a call for authenticity and understated acting. He sees potential for that both on the side of the player, who can use these to make their performance deeper and more believable, and on the side of the author, who can be challenged to look for deeper motivations for character conflicts. If we learn to observe everyday details and behaviour patterns, we’ll improve our ability to generalize our own experience to give a broader account of interpersonal relationships.

I believe the author’s view was informed by larps oriented on an everyday setting, such as Samael or Doubt. In a previous chapter, “It’s alive”, I mentioned that in the previous periods, a “good, dramatic scene” was closely linked to a slightly overdramatic, exaggerated acting style. Pavel’s article suggests the direction in which the scene had moved since then. This was not only due to the players, but the larps themselves. Building shallow plots around “you want something from Frank, and you hate Henry because he stole your girl” was suddenly not enough anymore. This desire for nuance and authenticity was later also reflected in larger dramatic larps, such as spolu/sami (together/alone) and Příliš krátká neděle (Sunday Ends Too Soon). In chamber larp, it became the signature look for larps by Lucie Chlumská and Zuzana Hrnčířová.

Zuzana became a pioneer of new approaches, which often toed the line between larp and experiential psychological games. Her larps intentionally blur the boundaries between player and character by making the participant answer difficult questions, such as: “Are you happy with where your life is going?” The one-person larp Probuzení (Awakening) can answer that. “How do you communicate in your relationships?” Explore that in My dva (The Two of Us). If there is somebody we can point to as a larpwright who developed their unique auteur style over the years, it’s definitely Zuzana.

Lucie Chlumská’s name, on the other hand, gradually became a mark of quality. The success of her L-World was followed by the social drama Takové hodné děti (Such Good Kids) and most importantly her hit piece Příběhy hříchu (Stories of Sin), set in an Irish Magdalene Laundry. Příběhy hříchu had two remarkable elements: Firstly, its scene design was unique and resembled a film mise-en-scène. The space where the player was standing determined whether they were in the dominant part of the scene or in the background. Secondly, the larp also confirmed a trend of the previous few years and showed how the demographics of the audience had changed. The game had solely female roles, to be played by women – although there were also several all-male crossgender runs. If we look back at the older games, for example those by Court of Moravia, mentioned in the previous part, we can see that in most cases, only a third of the roles at best were for women.((It was, and to some extent still is, customary that characters were either male or female and people picked them based on their gender. Over time, as the proportion of women in the community grew, this meant a strong push for writing more and more interesting female characters. Crossgender play (people playing character regardless of their gender), as well as characters outside of the binary, have only become somewhat common in recent years.))

Now it seems the time has come to conclude my piece. I have to admit I don’t know exactly how to do that without sinking into nostalgic rambling. The thing I was thinking about the most as I was writing was how much we had progressed in both larp design and how we play larps in those fifteen years. We no longer have to teach Paul not to act as Paul in the game, but as the character he is playing. (Almost) nobody is shocked that larping is not just a specialized hobby for a handful of nerds, but an activity that’s accessible to anyone. We are not surprised that there are think-pieces on larp national weeklies and that larps get their own documentaries. We don’t clutch our pearls at sometimes getting served real whiskey in the in-game saloon, rather than apple juice. We know how to show in-game emotions by means other than screaming our lungs off. We understand what words like design and metatechnique mean. And I could go on forever…

The truth is that chamber larp has become an endangered species and there’s no point crying about that; it’s just the times that are changing. But before it started singing its swan song, it had given us a lot. When I look back, I also see another thing that we should perhaps take away from its history: Its boldness. The courage to go where no one has gone before. To try entirely new paths, even at the risk that you will hit a dead end.

Cover image: Pomezí (photo: Michal Kára)

This article, by Petr Kuběnský, was initially published in Czech on Larpy.cz on 25th June, 2020. It was translated into English there on 16th March 2021 by Iva Vávrová, and now appears here with the approval of the author and translator and with the permission of Larpy.cz.

Last year, a team of authors published a Czech collection of chamber larp scenarios called Check Larps. I wrote the introduction, focused on the specific features of the Czech approach to this format, and in the process, I realized that it would be interesting to look back on the history of Czech chamber larps in general. I was interested in looking at major shared features and intersections in their development, as well as important milestones. After all, there was a time when chamber larp was one of the main drivers of innovation in Czech larp and would often massively determine the shape of larp as a medium in the Czech Republic overall.

I will start my story in 2004 – in a moment. If I am to truly delve under the surface of history, I first need to make a short introduction of how we got to that point. I will not go into too much detail about the predecessors of larps in Czechia (others have already done that for me), so I’ll just mention the basics: Larp became a thing in the Czech Republic soon after the fall of the Iron Curtain, around the beginning of the 1990s.

At first, this mostly meant battle-larps or DnD party-style fantasy games, both outdoors and in urban environments, with participants going through sets of clearly given quests. Around the end of the 1990s, the first open world sandboxes appeared – larps which gave their players quite a lot of freedom in deciding what to do or not to do. This meant quite a mindset shift: It suddenly wasn’t enough to wait until the adventure and plot found the player; players had to look for it actively.

The first years of the new millennium saw a rise in political games and intrigue. This was especially salient in urban larps, where it was somewhat influenced by the prevalence of the World of Darkness setting, but outdoorsy sandbox larps were influenced as well. Production value and maintaining an all-around illusion of the larp world also became more and more important. And, perhaps in contrast to political larps where the point was to climb as high as possible in the game’s hierarchy, some authors decided to make their larps less gamist and focus on narrative experience.

As you’ll soon see, this trend went hand in hand with the birth of chamber larp – a format that markedly broadened the genre spectrum of Czech larp and made experience design much more conscious and deliberate than ever before.

The Czech Way

I will just add one more caveat related to the specific features of Czech chamber larp, in order to make sure international readers have the chance to be on the same page. Until the first chamber larps were created, there were basically no larps in the Czech scene that would have multiple re-runs. On the other hand, chamber larps were almost always designed to be rerunnable and some of them had over a hundred runs.

Since its very beginnings, chamber larps were always seen as works that belonged to their authors and that would be run almost exclusively by these authors. Publishing notes, content, and methodology to allow others to run them was extremely rare. Cases where authors would intentionally pass their larp to other larp runners were just as unusual.

A typical Czech chamber larp is non-transparent in its design. Roles are pre-written by the authors and do not change between runs, which allows the authors to control how the story developed. In the beginning of the game, participants have no idea about the goals and motives of other characters or future story developments, which allows them to play with secrets and surprise. The game runner generally does not participate in the game – at most they help the plot progress through non-diegetic (announcing new chapters of the story structure etc.) or diegetic entries (short-term entries into the game as an NPC).

Exploring the Format (2004–2006)

Chamber larp is just like any other kind of larp: we generally understand the label in similar ways, but any strict delimitation will always be imperfect. For example, if we look at the definition used by the Czech Larp Database, we can see that chamber larps are “larps that are generally played in one or two rooms, take up to eight hours and have up to 20 participants”.

Needless to say, there are chamber larps that break one or more of these rules. But most importantly… wouldn’t this definition also fit to the Mafia/Werewolf party game? Or educational games, like Humanus by the Czech Lipnice Summer School?((Humanus was a lightly structured production, with a group of characters, sheltering in a bunker after a nuclear incident, who had to deal with a variety of issues (what to do with a survivor from the outside who wants to get in the bunker, what to do when one of the characters has an infectious disease, and so on).)) And even if we stick to larp in terms of the authors’ intention, I don’t doubt that someone could find an old-school sandbox from way back in the day that would fit these parameters.

To be a bit more specific, we could add another condition: pre-written characters and plots. That symbolized a real milestone. In the first years of the new millennium, it was not at all common for an organizer to prepare the characters for their players. Let’s set aside questions such as how long the character needs to be or whether all the games we’ll mention really adhere to this tradition without any controversy. We simply need a starting point for our purposes. That doesn’t mean a perfectly accurate definition, but rather a point where this set of conventions started being formed and established. What we’re talking about is influence – the epicentre that ripples started spreading from. For us, this point in time will be 2004.

At that time, the organizer group Veselý Kopeček, formed by Tomáš Kopeček and Jindřich Stejskal translated Fire at Midnight, a murder mystery larp, and modified it for the Czech community. Its story was connected to the popular RPG Vampire the Masquerade, since its target audience was the community around urban larps organized by Court of Moravia (CoM), a Czech larp association based in Brno. A year later, the same pair of authors came up with their own sequel, and the Veselý Kopeček group also produced another mystery larp Překvapivý podezřelý (The Unexpected Suspect) written by Lukáš Veselý.

All of these had several runs and in 2006, small-scale larps were already getting created in several places in Czechia and Slovakia – even though finding any connection or causality between them is difficult. VUML, a Southern Bohemian larp group, wrote a larp adaptation of a Czech mystical musical Tajemství (Secret). In Brno, a larp group called LED even ran their Bunkr Eugenika (Eugenics Bunker) in a real underground bunker. What both these games had in common was treading the line between larp and Experiential Education and the characters were quite minimalist, if there even were any. A Slovak group, Osobné Kakavo Production, organized a 12-player larp Gebäude 9 in 2006. It was set during the Nazi occupation of Slovakia and while it took place in a specific building by the Danube, an equal part of it was spent outdoors. There were also almost as many organizers and NPCs as players – which was in fact common with early chamber larps at this time.

Most importantly, in 2006, the abovementioned Court of Moravia took over the mantle of pioneers of the genre: first they created the fantasy larp Cela (The Cell) and soon after also Rodinná oslava (A Family Celebration). Cela could in fact easily serve as a case study to list the most common pitfalls that appeared in many chamber larps in the following years:

1. Create an environment the characters cannot escape (prison, shelter from an external threat, locked doors, etc.)
2. Revolve the plot around a murder mystery. If possible, add interrogations.
3. You need several pages of information for everyone; most of them useless. The players should get it all at the beginning. No worries about giving it to them gradually.
4. Add special skills. If no skills, at least have skill numbers for attack that people have to compare.

The point here is not to mock Cela; just to illustrate that in the beginning, we all kept copying one another and reinventing the wheel.

Picking up Speed (2006–2007)

In the fall of 2006, the M6 manifesto was published, outlining the basic features of the chamber larp era. Its points include a mention of pre-defined roles, and a shift of the main focus from outdoors action to roleplaying and story (co-)creation. To illustrate what role-playing looked at the time (though naturally not always): the most interesting parts of the manifesto show that at this time, organizers do not automatically expect that the player and the character are two separate entities and that the character has their own goals, motivations, and attributes.

The first generation of Court of Moravia’s games show quite nicely how attention gradually shifted to playing and immersing in one’s role. The lion’s share of the credit for this definitely goes to Jana Hřebecká, who came into Court of Moravia without much knowledge of vampire larps, but with experience from her studies at JAMU (Janáček Academy of Music and Performing Arts Brno). She was one of the main drivers behind the kitchen sink drama that was Rodinná oslava. Its story revolves mainly around airing one family’s dirty laundry at a multi-generational celebration. This emphasis on dramatic relationships and ambiguous characters was also typical for CoM’s later games, often in combination with a specific genre.

Looking back, it seems as if the group of authors centred around Petr Pouchlý decided to make one game for everyone: “Do you want a tough Tarantino-style flick? Play Kořist (Loot). Prefer a modern political drama? Ok, here you go: Sestup (Descent). Or something more mystical? Well, then you want Seance. A decadent conversational Victorian larp? We can offer Klub sebevrahů (Suicide Club)…” This genre diversification gave chamber larp the kick it needed to find its place in the sun.

The main driving force of CoM was its desire to make chamber larp into a reasonable alternative to spending the night in the theatre or the cinema. Naturally, that meant opening the format up to the broader public, outside of the larp scene. I still remember how at some point in 2009, I was on the tram and saw colourful ads for the Larpvíkend chamber larp festival, promising a strong, “cinematic experience”. The first Larpvíkend had taken place three years earlier.

Court of Moravia’s transition from urban vampire larps to chamber larp helped stabilize the format. There was more production value, though it all still had to fit in one box, as well as a general “take and play” approach. Every player got a basic costume. Character sheets were divided right before the larp started. The larps generally took place in one room, and while organizers tried to seek out venues at least generally similar to the setting (a bomb shelter to represent a submarine cabin), it was extremely common to play in classrooms and clubhouses.

The wheels were truly in motion. Thanks to the Larpvíkend festivals, we can probably talk about a ripple effect starting somewhere around this point. The Veselý Kopeček group escalated their efforts and created a fairly authentic space station simulation, including a computer interface – Pandora IX. At the same time, new larp groups took to the stage: No Happyend Team from Northern Moravia, and Prague groups such as Mad Fairy with their Tak zpíval Listopad (Thus, November sang) and Lorem Ipsum with Bunkr (Bunker), which had quite a lot of reruns.

It’s Alive! (2008–2010)

The time had come. The chamber larp mania struck Prague with full force. Prague by Night, an association of older organizers, rolled up their sleeves and added their own pieces to the puzzle. Mention-worthy works include Petra Lukačovičová’s slow and atmospheric adaptation of O’Neill’s angsty dysfunctional family drama Cesta dlouhým dnem do noci (A Long Day’s Journey Into Night) and the ambitious Derniéra (Closing Night) set in a theatre company, played both on the stage and behind the scenes. In Derniéra, Petr Maleček created something that remains unique in the Czech scene to this day, by mixing the medium of larp with theatre, its older sibling.

In 2008, Prague started its own chamber larp festival tradition with the Prague Larpvíkend, organized by Prague by Night. Gradually, more and more young organizers joined in and made their first larps. That was no accident: Prague by Night had intentionally decided to launch a young talent incubator by organizing a larpwriting course for people around 18 in the local Youth Centre. The course participants’ debut was the above-mentioned Bunkr and while its story was not exactly stellar (but anyone could probably say that about their first larp), it opened the floodgates for a slew of other games by other young Prague by Night members. An example of their work would be the melancholic fanfic-y adaptation M*A*S*H by Radek Morávek and Zdeňka Vojtíková.

In the meantime, Court of Moravia continued in their crusade for promoting chamber larp in public. Their Larpvíkend festivals in Brno would occasionally be visited by journalists, and while that probably won’t wow you now, back in the day, it seemed like an incredible feat. Around this time, they also started the tradition of inviting international authors to come run their larps – which might be a good point for a slightly more in-depth analysis.

In 2007, the people around CoM and Veselý Kopeček started attending Knudepunkt, which at that time had overwhelmingly Nordic participants. The appearance of larp creators from Central Europe was therefore a bit of a sensation at first. Most importantly, Knudepunkts helped CoM establish a useful network of contacts. The 6th Brno Larpvíkend saw its first guests from Poland and Hungary and in the following years, international larps became a regular occurrence (T. Wrigstad, F. Berg etc.). Czech authors also started to adapt and translate international larps, such as A Midsummer Night’s Dream or Club Felis.

Court of Moravia’s later works followed the previous trend of creating a diverse portfolio – though sometimes at the cost of discovering dead ends. For example, their conversational larp Versus Bůh (Versus God), inspired by the film 12 Angry Men, had no pre-written characters. At the beginning, players would choose one aspect of their character from a pre-written set and in the following rounds, they would add more attributes on a “first come first served” basis. This sometimes gave rise to extremely bizarre combinations. Their wild concept of a gamist supervillain larp, Zlouni (Bad Guys), which revolved around solving puzzles and riddles more than role-playing, was not much of a hit either.

On the other hand, their Hollywood-style rom-com Star was quite the success. If I’m not mistaken, it was also the first larp to feature the Ars Amandi mechanism for simulating intimate contact. In the following years, larps where couples snuggled each other’s arms in dark corners started cropping up at every corner, which just goes to show that everybody was copying everybody else at that time.

The Slovak Wildstyle and the Regions

When I talked about “international larps”, I intentionally avoided mentioning Slovakia. But Slovak creators are important, because for a short time, they became a major innovation drive for the Czech scene. The Slovak larp group ERA first piqued the Czech community’s interests with their larp Subkultúra (Subculture). Its run in Nitra was attended by members of Court of Moravia, who then invited ERA to run their (still fairly conventional) mystery chamber larp Bytovka (Tenement) in Brno. Later, in 2009, Lujza Kotryová, Aleš Svoboda, and Tomáš Kozlík also came to the 6th Brno Larpvíkend with their two larps inspired by the Nordic jeepform, Minulosť s.r.o. (Past inc.) and Dva svety (Two Worlds). The reason I’m mentioning them is that these runs were extremely influential, and the Czech scene was soon flooded by larps with scripted scenes.

Czechoslovak Jeep

I’ll now go off on a bit of a tangent to explain how exactly this came to be. In the spring of 2010, I ran my surrealist jeep drama Lunapark život (Carnival Life) for the first time, at a festival in Třebíč. This raised the awareness about this new type of larp in the Czech scene. But at the same time, it also confused the terminology a bit.

The Nordic jeepform is a relatively free and extremely transparent form, which does not use scripted scenes or work with non-transparency and secrets at all. The ERA authors were aware of that, but they also believed (and I think they were correct) that the Czech audience would not accept a larp like that. What the Slovak authors did like, however, was that jeepform was narratively oriented, allowed for cuts and scene jumps, and intentionally used symbolism in working with the space and props (after all, at that time larps were often played in classrooms and random underground spaces).

In any case, around this time, this category of larps was labelled “jeep”, later specified at least a little bit more as “Czechoslovak jeep”.((For more details on the differences, see Kamil Buchtík’s http://www.larp.cz/?q=cs/clanek/5882/jeep-vs-ceskoslovensky-jeep (in Czech))) Since Dva svety, Lunapark Život and Zbyněk Štajer’s extremely popular Sen o múze (Dream of a Muse) all had quite a lot of runs, Czechoslovak jeep became a very widespread format for many years. I would just note that while both Dva svety and Lunapark were fairly loosely structured games, quite open to interpretation, later Czechoslovak jeeps went down the path of a high level of scripting and abandoning the symbolic scenography. I’d say the absolute pinnacle of this development was probably the high production (almost theatrically scripted) larp El día de Santiago.

Slovakia and the others

Now, let’s go back to Slovakia. ERA were not the only ones massively inspired by Nordic larp. In 2009, the Bratislava group Nový pohľad (New Outlook) was established. They were so ahead of their time that they openly declared they “saw larp as a full-fledged interactive medium”. Unheard of! More importantly, Tomáš Dulka and Andrej Tokarčík were making games that intentionally challenged the conventional mould of Czech design (even though design in itself was not a particularly common term in relation to larps). For example, the existential larp Cez mŕtvoly (Over Dead Bodies) had no pre-written story, only a set Kafkaesque theme of persecution. In Otcova rola (Father’s Role), the key character of the father transforms into an archetypal “shadow” in the second part of the game and influences the decisions of the central protagonist, the son. Nový pohľad’s larps were always a sort of provocation, which, after all, would not always get a warm welcome.((This just confirms what I mentioned in relation to ERA: Most of the Nový pohľad larps were similar in form to the Nordic jeepform, which generally felt too abstract and insufficiently immersive to Czech and Slovak players.))

At this time, chamber larp was spreading incredibly fast. This was naturally helped by festivals. I’ve mentioned three of them so far, but there were several others, including new regional ones. Its organizers wrote several chamber larps and later disappeared from the scene. In the meantime, the Buchtík brothers entered the chamber larp scene with their police procedural Odznak (Badge), which made its mark by combining a gamist investigation plot with the dense atmosphere of a corrupt cop drama.

The last thing worth mentioning might be that in 2009, Court of Moravia tried to make two truly high production larps in the hopes of a commercial success. In both cases, we’re talking about quite borderline cases of “chamber” larps. Noir did only have 5 players, but it included travelling in a limo around different locations in Brno, while Oka nezamhouříš (You Won’t Close Your Eyes) was a site-specific horror experience built around the venue of an abandoned mill. Both larps aimed outside of the larp community, but they failed to find an audience willing to pay a market price for them.

Chamber Larp Crisis

To conclude this part, I should just add something to summarize what the chamber larps of this era were really like and what conditions influenced them. Czech players who played any of the above-mentioned larps (or any unmentioned ones from the same period) in recent years generally noticed that they have a very outdated feel. In most cases, they lacked any sort of design structure leading to gradual escalation. Typically, players would have to make whatever they started with last them the whole game. At best, they might get a few story-building hints from a letter or a voice over the radio. These larps would already use (more or less inventive) mechanics, but did not have much in the way of holistic experience design.

But even that slowly started to shift. In 2008, the first Odraz larp conference took place and the larpy.cz website started filling with (mostly international) theory and larp reviews. At the third Odraz, Pavel Gotthard for example talked (and published an article) about dramatic structure and tension triggers in chamber larp.

Since a lot of new organizers jumped onto the rolling bandwagon, there was suddenly a huge number of debuts, which rarely astonished with their quality. But the immense hunger for new games meant we all devoured even these first works with gratitude. After all, at this time it was generally still possible for one person to manage to play all of the new games in a given year. Later on, that possibility vanished, never to return. The genre spectrum became much more diverse, although generally speaking, we could say that it was relatively dominated by fantasy, sci-fi and kitchen sink dramas.

Last but not least, chamber larps became more dynamic. There were fewer conversational games focused on huddling over a candle, even though it was still very common to build a larp around making the players decide who is guilty, who will go outside, or who they’re going to kill.

Looking back, I feel that the acting in moments of crisis was much more dramatic and seemed more over the top than in the later years. For example, it was fairly common that at the end of a larp, a player would grab a gun and start shouting that they’d kill themselves or somebody else. Later on, similar displays became less common – though that was caused in equal measure by the fact that players learned to be a bit more subtle in their role-playing and by design progress (there were fewer plots revolving around having one gun in the room). A lot of the chamber larps of this generation were only run a few times before they disappeared into the void. Only a few better, resistant pieces remained, and many were later reworked. After all, at this time, testing larps was not particularly common.

Finally, when talking about this period, we must mention Tomáš Kopeček’s provocative article, ‘Komorová krize‘ (Chamber Crisis) from the beginning of 2009, which asked the question “Is the chamber format dead?” When looking at the roughly 30 games that had been created by then, it seems a bit ridiculous that this was even on the table at the time. However, the main point of the article was somewhat justified.

At that time, the author mainly criticized the fact that chamber larps mostly meant “parlour larps”, focused on conversation, and that they worked with a much lower level of player participation: the player became a passive consumer of content without having any responsibility over co-creating the story. He argued that organizers simply mechanically copied the format as a template that seemed simple and undemanding in terms of preparation, instead of first deciding what type of larp they wanted to make and what goals they wanted it to achieve. The author believed that a reflection like that must precede any creative decisions on the style, genre, and format.

While the article is quite vague in its definition of player participation, many of its points seem to be true in retrospect. CoM, which had a hegemonic role in the community and a massive influence, intentionally made larps that were easily accessible, since its agenda was centred around making larp a part of the mainstream culture. Most new organizers, then, were generally enthusiasts without much experience, who often simply mechanically copied existing know-how. As a slight overstatement: every larp had some less significant characters that could be omitted if not enough players signed up; violence was resolved by comparing attack numbers; and erotic play was dealt with by using Ars Amandi. All that seems a little funny from the point of view of the current Czech community.

The game-changer was Rocker, which came in 2010. From today’s perspective, its major contribution was not any amazing design or that it had “scandalous” content; it was mainly that the author, Lujza Kotryová, set all templates aside and gave the larp what she believed it needed: a party feeling, real alcohol, and the first design that used realistic portrayals of erotic content. And she did that in a way that accomplished the goals of the larp (portraying a wild rock band party).

Rocker will be the end of this part of my reflection. In the next part, I’ll look at the golden years of Czech chamber larps and on the reasons why this chapter of Czech larp later subsided. Don’t be mistaken, though! While chamber larps have become scarcer today, many new Czech small-scale works are still worth playing and have interesting, fresh design approaches.

On that note, I’ll just summarize some chamber larp collections that have been published so far:

• Check Larps (available at lulu.com)
• Crescendo Giocoso (available at nessundove.it)
• Larps from the Factory (available at blogspot.com)

Cover image: Rocker (photo: Karla Štěpánová)