Editorial note: This article was originally published in the Knutepunkt 2025 book Anatomy of Larp Thoughts, a breathing corpus. It has been reprinted from there with the editors’ and authors’ permission. It has not been edited by Nordiclarp.org.
The purpose of this qualitative survey study was to discover the perceived benefits for adults participating in Live Action Role-Play (larp) games or events. The study builds on and contributes to work in creativity theory, Self-Determination Theory, and student engagement theory. The constructs from these salient theories include autonomy, collaboration, perceived competence, and emotional, behavioral and cognitive engagement. Knowing the answers to what motivates adults to spend time, money, and emotional energy on a game seemingly not valued, may provide insights into developing roleplay further as pedagogy beyond recreation.
The context: SWORDCRAFT Australia
Australia has over thirty-seven larp groups throughout the country. The Australian larp community “Swordcraft” is the largest larp community in Australia, boasting the largest medieval battle game and live action roleplay events. Set in the medieval “Warhammer Fantasy Universe” (originally a board game), it follows the storyline of the Border Lands. Their website describes the game as follows:
“Our battles boast the involvement of hundreds of people in large scale field and forest battles, sieges and skirmishes.…we fight with authentic-looking foam weapons and real steel armour, chain maille, leather, and high-quality costumes…Swordcraft hosts weekly battle games across Australia.”
The Swordcraft website describes week-long “Quests” that happen annually. The event brings larpers and merchants from all over Australia to “roleplay, eat, drink, and battle.”
Swordcraft began in 2011 and is a well-established not-for-profit organisation that seeks to “develop an inclusive community”. Leadership positions include president, treasurer, secretary and founders. Other positions include logistics and new player training, community liaison compliance, quest event organizer and head martial. Additionally, you have officers for rules and equipment, community engagement, public relations and media liaison. There are ten chapters of Swordcraft in Australia, including Brisbane, Melbourne and South Australia.
Swordcraft is set in one world involving battles in the medieval Warhammer universe. Participants’ characters are inspired from the vast list created for the board game and Swordcraft battles take place in field settings across Australia. Despite its obvious differences with Nordic larp, what I wanted to study is rooted in collaboration among players and organizers, something universal to larp.
Methods: An Open-ended Online Survey
Swordcraft agreed to sponsor my research survey on their websites.((The research used a Qualtrics online survey that ensured the ethical requirements were met: all respondents had to indicate that they were 18 years of age or older before beginning the survey, and all survey respondents were anonymous. All data collected is securely stored at James Cook University in Townsville, Australia.)) A total of 58 respondents completed the survey over a six month period. The survey consisted of four questions, with no limit to the length of responses allowed:
What factors influenced your decision to join a larp group?
List, describe, explain the different benefits you get from participating in larp.
List, describe, explain the different challenges you face participating in larp.
What would you like others to know about participating in larp?
The questions were open-ended, because I wanted to investigate larp as a lived human experience. Self-reflexivity and references to personal experiences were the primary sources. I recognized and respected the participants’ subjective meaning contained within their statements. I chose this approach, because roleplaying and game-playing itself involves constructing subjective meaning.
Theoretical frame: Creativity, Autonomy and Self-Determination Theory (SDT)
Education and training platforms are increasingly calling for the development of critical skills, which Lisa Gjeddes identifies as “creativity, collaboration, critical thinking, and communication” (Gjeddes 2013, 90).
During this study, I was interested in looking at creativity as developed through social environments that foster “autonomy” (Manucci, Orazi, and de Valck 2021, 650). As defined by Blumenfeld, Kempler and Krajcik (2006), “autonomy” is experienced when the social context of the activity affords adults with a sense of psychological freedom and perceived choice over one’s own actions. Sam Bolton, who also wrote about Swordcraft, makes clear that the basic requirements for creativity, namely collaboration and autonomy, are key in larp:
“There is a shared sense of creation, a constant reinforcement that your imagination means something to the collective. Swordcraft promotes collaboration and asks you to immerse yourself not only in a roughly medieval fantasy world of epic battle and adventure, but in a much richer community of like-minded participants, working toward the same vision” (Bolton 2013, 36).
In my research, I have combined these references to the frame of Self-Determination Theory (SDT), which is a macro theory of human motivation. There, autonomy, perceived competence, and relatedness are identified as psychological needs innate to the individual, and fulfilling these needs facilitates intrinsic motivation (Ryan and Deci 2000). As Finnish scholar Tuomas Harvianen notes, there is much speculation on player motivation. While most studies use a predetermined list of motivators,((See McDiarmid (2011), Stark (2012), and Yee (2012).)) Bienia allowed participants to add their own (Bienia 2013). Bienia then found that “Support” was an added motivator from 44 individuals, “…stressing the motivation of supporting other players and the game”. This notion of “support” speaks to the construct “perceived competence” in SDT theory, making it a motivator but also part of the constructs of relatedness (collaboration) and autonomy, which are key to developing “creativity” in creativity theory.
Research questions
Respondents to the survey do not point to autonomy and perceived competence: Autonomy is built into the larp experience, and participation happens through the supportive larp network, enabling feelings of competence. To keep my theoretical frame at the center of this study, I used three main questions when analyzing the larp participants’ open-ended survey responses:
What indicators of the constructs of engagement (emotional, behavioral, and cognitive) are reported by larp survey respondents?
What indicators of the constructs of autonomy, collaboration, and perceived competence are reported by larp survey respondents?
Will the qualitative data be corroborated by the quantitative data? The validity of inferences arising from research findings will be strengthened through this analysis, showing magnitude (Creswell, Plano Clark, Gutmann, and Hanson 2003).
Methodology
I used deductive thematic analysis, utilizing both qualitative and quantitative approaches, aligning with content analysis to assess the magnitude of responses. The frequency of responses indicating an identified construct are shown as percentages. For example, if a question has 46 “social indicating” responses out of 58 participants, the percentage or strength of that response is 79%. I also averaged the responses for each construct over the four questions. Some responses to individual questions pointed to more than one engagement construct. Tabulations were made for each engagement construct for each question.
I included quotations for some of the responses which can illustrate motivating factors and key types of engagement. Sample responses are indicative of the most commonly represented.
Data Analysis: What Resonated Most in the Four Question Responses
Although larp provides emotional, cognitive and physical engagement, and although larpers enjoy the creativity of developing their character and kit, what stands out most is the social benefits.
Question 1: What factors influenced your decision to join a larp group?
SOCIAL: “I have met a huge group of people with common interests and made many new friends”…”Having this amazing and friendly community to be a part of, socialization”
PHYSICAL: “fitness”…”it is really good exercise, physical health”
EMOTION: “I discovered a new confidence in myself, stress levels have gone down”
CREATIVITY: “drives me to be creative in my costuming and characterisation, it pushes me to try new things”
COGNITIVE: “skill gain, increased confidence, organizational skills”…”Practice skills like leadership and critical thinking”
Question 3: List, describe, explain the different challenges you face participating in larp.
EMOTION: “It’s bloody fun”…”it can be a very engaging and rewarding hobby”
COGNITIVE: “learn new skills in a community with a wide range of skills, knowledge, and passions”
SOCIAL: “that there is a broad range of people that participate, we have teachers, plumbers, electricians, it really is its own little community”
PHYSICAL: “There is competitiveness, adrenalin, fighting, physical combat”
CREATIVITY: “recreating costumes to fit the era”…”immersion”
Note: While the survey shows that social motivation is central to larpers, larp also suffers from negative stereotypes that, in turn, can impact participants’ social status. However, when questioned about these negative stereotypes, the respondents further advocated for larp as an opportunity to be part of a community and do something fun.
Reflections
In my teaching career I found roleplay to be an extremely effective way to learn, both in live simulations and writing in role. Similarly, larp-like simulations, both physical and virtual, are employed in a wide range of settings including the military, various workplaces, and higher education. The constructs embedded in the larp experience showcase the power of roleplaying beyond leisure. Larp benefits are seen as especially important for the development of “21st century skills” such as creativity, social and interpersonal skills etc. Larps are being used to enable people to engage with history, heritage, and culture. Larp can be instrumental in creating positive change for communities through raising awareness and generating solutions and possible interventions.
McDiarmid, who also studied the motivations, benefits, and challenges facing larpers, urged further research in this area with a call to “compare larp motivations internationally” (McDiarmid 2011, 102). My study’s findings regarding the motivations of Australian larpers and how they are engaged by the activity aims to contribute to this dialogue with Nordic larp researchers. Of particular interest to me is McDiarmid’s assertion, “With the rise of mobile computing and augmented reality technology, more possibilities for different ways of larping arise” (McDiarmid 2011, 102), predicting further interesting comparisons between traditions of larping and player’s motivation.
References
Bienia, Rafael. 2013. “Why Do They Larp? Motivations for Larping in Germany”. In The Wyrd Con Companion Book, edited by Sarah Lynne Bowman and Aaron Vanek. Creative Commons.
Bolton, Sam 2013. “Crusades and kinship: Live action role play in Melbourne”, Kill your darlings new fiction, essays, commentary and reviews. 29-36. The INFORMAT.
Blumenfeld, P.C., Kempler, T.M., and Krajcik, J.S..2006. “Motivation and cognitive
engagement in learning environments”. In The Cambridge handbook of the learning sciences, edited by R.K. Sawyer. Cambridge University Press.
Creswell, Plano-Clark, Gutmann and Hanson. 2003. “Advanced mixed methods research
designs”. In Handbook of mixed methods in social and behavioural research, edited by A. Tashakkori and C. Teddie. SAGE.
Gjedde, Lisa. 2013. “Role Game Playing as a Platform for Creative and Collaborative
Learning”. European Conference on Games Based Learning. Proquest.com.
Manucci, P.V., Orazi, D.C., and de Valck, K. 2021. “Developing Improvisational Skills: The
Influence of Individual Orientation”. Administrative Science Quarterly, Vol. 66 (3): 612-658. SAGE. DOI: 10.1177/000183922095697
McDiarmid, Rob. 2011. “Analyzing Player Motives to Inform larp Design”. In Branches of Play: The 2011 Wyrd Con Academic Companion, edited by Amber Eagar. Creative Commons.
Ryan, R.M., and Deci, E.L. 2000. “Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic
motivation, social development, and well-being”. American Psychologist, 55(1): 68-78. Doi: 10.1037//0003-066X.55.1.68
This article is republished from the Knutepunkt 2025 book. Please cite it as:
Barta, Sam. 2025. “What Do Adult Participants Get Out of Larp? A qualitative survey based on SWORDCRAFT Australia.” In Anatomy of Larp Thoughts, a breathing corpus: Knutepunkt Conference 2025. Oslo. Fantasiforbundet.
Editorial note: This article was originally published in the Knutepunkt 2025 book Anatomy of Larp Thoughts, a breathing corpus. It has been reprinted from there with the editors’ and authors’ permission. It has not been edited by Nordiclarp.org.
In my larp Hyvät museovieraat (Eng. Dear Museum Visitors), artworks came alive and possessed the bodies of the participants. I designed the larp for Amos Rex, one of the three big art museums in Helsinki, Finland. I ran it twice at their exhibition Musta tuntuu, toistaiseksi (I Feel, for Now), which presented artworks from their collections. It was a scalable larp that could accommodate at most 50 players, and tickets were sold online on a first-come-first-served basis. Players included both experienced larpers and newcomers. The larp was run when the museum was closed, so there were no spectators and players had privacy.
Amos Rex profiles as a “young” museum. For example, they have featured exhibitions by teamLab, Hans Op de Beeck, Ryoji Ikeda, and other artists who create immersive installations – sometimes like alternative visual realities that you experience from the inside. Amos Rex has also held Game Amos seminars about game art. No wonder, then, that they also wished to have a larp in their repertoire.
I could have used the exhibition as merely a venue where some events happened to play out, but I did not want that, I wanted my larp to be in dialogue with the exhibition. Neither did I want the larp to be just one art piece among others in the exhibition. I wanted the larp to be about the exhibition, and I wanted the participants to be in constant interaction with the artworks as they played.
The game scholar Jaakko Stenros pointed out to me that I was doing in reverse something that artists like Brody Condon and Adam James have been involved with. Whereas they make art objects (such as a film) out of a larp, I made a larp out of an exhibition of art objects. Each player used one artwork as a basis for creating a character that would then possess the player’s body during the larp. The idea was that the artworks were living creatures with personalities of their own. In the beginning of the larp, they would take over museumgoers’ bodies: Each player walked into the exhibition as themselves, stopped in front of their artwork, and let it take control of their body (or, in other words, began playing the artwork-character). Thus, there was a pervasive element, and the players became the artworks.
Design philosophy from the blackbox tradition
For the Amos Rex museum, the larp was a way to draw in new audiences that might revisit the museum on other occasions. At the same time, we were showcasing larp as a form of expression to people with no previous experience of it. When a larp is advertised on the social media channels of a large museum, it attracts people from outside the larp community.
I aimed for a beginner-friendly design and for a larp that would be easy to access: Participants needed to be able to walk in without preparing beforehand. Dropouts and no shows were common at museum events, so I went for a scalable larp. It could not be too long; it had to be something that could be played in one evening after work. As no preparations, short duration and scalability are common in Nordic blackbox larps, I applied several design innovations from that tradition.
I aimed to fit the larp in 4 hours (which is the typical length of a larp slot at blackbox festivals). We ended up with a 2-hour workshop and about 2 hours of play. As in many blackbox larps, most of the design effort went into the workshop. I began the workshop with a guided meditation that introduced players to the themes of the larp. Then, there was a warmup designed to help them play artworks physically, and finally, we created characters and relationships.
Newcomers can find it difficult to come up with things to do in a larp. It becomes easier if there are experienced larpers present, whose example the beginners can follow. This is called herd competence (Lundqvist 2015). To achieve herd competence, we aimed for half of our participants to have some previous larp experience. There were two ticket categories, one for beginners and another for experienced larpers.
In the fiction of the larp, Amos Rex was a museum where artworks came alive and possessed the bodies of visitors every now and then, and the guides knew about it. It was their job to advise paintings, sculptures and other pieces of art who were confused in their newly acquired human bodies. Most of the guides were played by actual museum guides, and we had a lot of fun together brainstorming “nighttime personalities” for them in preparation for the larp. Participants could always consult these museum guides – either in-game or off-game – if they felt at loss during the larp and did not know what to do.
Goals and Rituals
Clear (and perhaps even slightly gamist (see Edwards 2001, Bøckman 2003) goals are often helpful for first-time larpers. When players focus on a goal, it is easier to come up with things to do, and they don’t get bored. Goals generate action that helps structure playtime.
Another possibility to make a larp beginner-friendly is to have a lot of pre-planned events to which the players can react. Since Hyvät museovieraat involved exploring a large exhibition space, planned events didn’t feel practical, and I decided to go for goal-oriented play. Moreover, I wanted to give players who so wished the possibility to just freely delve in the museum space and concentrate on interactions, and in a larp it is easier to ignore goals than planned events.
The goal for some characters was to stay in the body of a visitor, leave the museum, and become a human (the players got to decide for themselves whether their characters wanted this). To achieve this, an artwork had to perform a ritual that attached it permanently to the body, and it needed help from two other artworks. However, these assistants would have to give up the possibility of performing the ritual for themselves and thus give up on their hope of becoming human!
Keiken (2023-2024): Spirit Systems of Soft Knowing ༊*·˚. Photo: Niclas Warius / Amos Rex.
Museum guides instructed characters on how to perform the rituals, which meant we did not need to use workshop time on practicing them. Experiential artworks were used as ritual sites. One of these was Spirit Systems of Soft Knowing ༊*·˚ (2023–2024), a science-fiction style installation by the artist collective Keiken (see photo above). It is a glowing, shell-like space curtained off from the rest of the exhibition, where visitors lie down on soft pods with a vibrating silicone womb on their abdomen, listening to the installation’s soundscape through headphones (see Amos Rex 2024). In the ritual, the group of three artworks – one who wished to stay in a human body and two helpers – would occupy one of the pods.
Characters could also have other objectives. Some of them wished to continue their existence as artworks somewhere else than in this particular museum. Others wanted to prevent another character from escaping the museum so as not to be separated from them. Players came up with these goals in guided workshop exercises. Sometimes the outcomes could be quite drastic: one painting hated its maker and wanted somebody else to escape the museum and kill the artist.
Characters who went for the ritual option faced the challenge of persuading two other artworks to assist. One way to do this was to offer deals. An artwork could promise to do a favor for another one once it was outside the museum. The characters could trust each other’s word on it since the ritual would bind them to it. Kalervo Palsa’s painting Itseriittoisuus (1978; Eng. Self-sufficiency, see cover photo) desired to be hung on display in a meeting room of the Confederation of Finnish Industries, a lobby group and major wielder of economic power. It helped another painting in the ritual on the condition that the escapee would convince the Confederation to purchase it from the museum.
Emotions and inter-character drama
Unlike many collection exhibitions, I Feel, For Now did not present artworks chronologically or arrange them based on art movements. Instead, the art pieces were organized thematically, with a focus on the emotions they expressed (in the curators’ opinion). Five major themes had emerged this way: Beneath the Surface, Memory Games, A Moment of Extasy, Emotional Language and Carried Away by the Senses.
Since the exhibition was about emotions, I hoped the larp could be about them too. Moreover, I wanted to incorporate the main themes of the exhibition in the larp. So I decided that the curators’ theme groups would determine who could help a given artwork in the ritual.
All the characters were artworks from either the Beneath the Surface part of the exhibition or the Memory Games part or A Moment of Extasy part. The emotional life of an artwork was more limited than that of a human. Thus, in the ritual, an artwork who wanted to stay in a human body had to absorb the whole spectrum of human emotions. This meant that an artwork who was labeled under Beneath the Surface (which usually meant that they had dark, hidden emotions) needed the playful childlike emotions embodied by the Memory Games artworks and the feelings of almost religious ecstasy from A Moment of Extasy. Each ritual group would contain artworks from three different theme groups, and in the ritual, the two helpers would donate part of their own emotional landscape to the character who was going to become human.
To create emotional drama, I wanted to make the decision to leave or stay in the museum hard. Either way, the character would have to make a sacrifice – to let go of something. One obvious design choice was to divide the characters into tight-knit groups that would split during the larp.
In the workshop, we divided the characters into groups of about five. These artworks had been displayed close to each other in the exhibition, and their group dynamics resembled that of a family. We workshopped the details with the players and instructed them to create both negative and positive relations within the group. These groups would eventually break apart when some members would stay in the museum and others leave.
Physicality
Physicality was another thing to be considered in the design process. There is a social script for a museum space: a mode of behavior to which you tend to instinctively fall back when you enter an exhibition. In an art museum, people are likely to slowly wander around looking at the objects and talk in low voices. One of the goals with Hyvät museovieraat was to break the script and encourage people to behave in ways you don’t usually see in a museum. For this to succeed, it was crucial that there were no outsiders in the museum during the larp.
The rules of the museum constrained the possibilities for physicality. For example, running is not allowed in the exhibition space, and there are other limitations in place to ensure the safety of the artworks. Moreover, intense physical touch was ruled out since the larp was in the official program of the museum and tickets were sold online on a first-come-first-served basis. Participants could touch each other on hands and arms and hug each other after asking for permission.
However, nothing stopped players from e.g. crawling on the floor or moving their bodies in unexpected, non-human ways. A museum representative mentioned this at the beginning of the workshop when explaining the museum rules. During the workshop, I encouraged participants to explore new ways of moving that could suit their characters. The players warmed up for the larp with an exercise where they looked at different artworks and then tried to move the way the artwork would move if it were a living being.
In the character creation exercise, participants chose an artwork from a given area in the exhibition, and we would then broadcast from the museum PA system a list of questions that helped them create the character. There were questions about the character’s personality and goals, as well as questions that inspired the participants to look at the artwork in new ways. Some questions guided them to think about movement, such as the following:
When you take over the human body, how do you move it? How does this movement convey your true essence? Take a few steps and try out this way to move.
The first run of the larp became surprisingly physical and emotional, given that it was such a short larp. One participant kept his hands behind his back all the time since a character in the artwork lacked arms. People crawled on the floor and screamed at each other. There was emotional drama, and players cried. I hadn’t expected it to be so intense and wondered where the emotions came from. Maybe it was the artworks that inspired people’s play.
On the other hand, the second run seemed much less physical and emotional. In the end, every player group makes a different larp.
Art pedagogy
Ultimately, Hyvät museovieraat was a way to experience art in a new fashion. The participants concentrated on one artwork and went quite deeply into it – often the way you immerse in a larp character. Thus, it was like looking at the artwork from inside.
Melanie Orenius, who works as a curator of education at Amos Rex, brought an art pedagogical angle to the larp. She formulated character creation questions that had to do with the size of the artwork or the technique used to create it. These questions guided the participants to pay attention to details they might have otherwise ignored. For example, one question was:
“Think about the colors in the artwork. Is there a tinge that dominates it, and is it tranquilizing or energizing? What do the colors tell you about the character?”
The questions also discussed how art is displayed and went into deeper inquiries about its worth. Part of the PA announcement went:
“Dear artworks. You are part of the collections of Amos Rex. But did anyone ask your permission for it?
Would you rather be in another museum, in a public space, or in somebody’s – maybe your own – home? How valuable do you feel you are, and what determines your value?”
When we were workshopping the small family-like groups, players looked at each other’s artworks when creating relationships. One group spontaneously came up with the idea of checking the years when the artworks were made and created a seniority hierarchy based on them: The older artworks would treat the younger ones like children or little siblings.
Curation and display became major topics during the larp. Many artworks wished to be moved to another place in the exhibition. In the second run, there was even a discussion about what would happen to the artworks who stayed in the museum once the exhibition ended. When I told them, in the role of a museum guide, that they would be moved into a storage space, it created an uproar.
Artworks who permanently took over a human body had to find a place to store the human spirit (that of the players) – a suitable artwork in the exhibition. At the end of the larp, everybody filled in details about their artwork (either the one they played, or the one they stored their human into) on a small form with questions like the name of the artwork, how it should be cared for, and how it should be displayed.
Many players left these little pieces of paper in the museum, and they were archived. It was fun to read them afterward. One participant renamed her artwork – a stylistic, acrylic neon sculpture of a pig – The Plexiglass Queen and wrote that champagne should always be served in front of it. Another one wrote that his artwork should not be displayed at all: curtains should be drawn in front of it.
Radical interpretations
During the larp each participant held the interpretative authority on what their artwork-character was truly about. There were no introductions to the exhibition or its artworks beforehand. It was the participants who decided how exactly to transform the artworks into characters.
This meant that there were some unorthodox and unusual interpretations. For example, one participant found their artwork ugly – a horrible sum of mistakes that just wanted to be destroyed and to destroy the artist who had made it. Based on the feedback, some participants found others’ ways of seeing the artwork shocking.
How a larp turns out always depends on the ensemble of players. A group of curators and critics would probably have played Hyvät museovieraat differently. Maybe their interpretations of the art would have carried more weight and been better justified. However, some motivations for the larp came from the field of audience development, where guides and curators who do interactive tours wish they could get visitors to be bolder about expressing their thoughts on the art.
The larp functioned as a platform for exactly this. Most people who look at art are not art professionals, and they always make their own readings and judgments on the art. They just don’t usually express them to people within the art world. The new and radical thing about the larp was that it served as a forum to voice those thoughts and play with them.
Other reflections
All in all, Hyvät museovieraat got good scores on the participant feedback forms. Originally, the larp was to be run only once, but a rerun was scheduled because of the positive feedback. However, the larp probably wasn’t as beginner-friendly as it looked on paper – even experienced larpers reported that it was not an easy larp.
In some sense, I knew this all along, deep down. Shortness and no preparation requirements lower the threshold for newcomers to participate in the larp, but they don’t make it easy to play. First-time larpers often need clear instructions and struggle when they have to come up with stuff themselves. They are not sure what is possible, and they wonder what they are supposed to do. It is often more difficult to make your own character than to play a pre-written one. Furthermore, it is definitely easier to throw yourself into something familiar than to start creating characters and relationships out of artworks that might not have obvious connections to each other. There are a myriad of ways to turn an artwork into a larp character, even with guiding questions, and that very freedom makes it difficult.
However, we got positive feedback also from newcomers who had great experiences. Many of them also created beautiful play. Creating content for Hyvät museovieraat lay heavily on the players, but I don’t see any other way in which we could have made this larp. If the goal is to engage participants with art, you have to do it on their own terms, with no readymade interpretations and easy-to-apply formulae.
Hyvät museovieraat (Eng. Dear Museum Visitors)
Location: Amos Rex art museum, Helsinki
Runs: May 21th and August 20th, 2024.
Duration: 4 hours
Number of participants: scalable, at most 50
Admission fee: 30 / 15 euros
Design: Kaisa Kangas (larp design) and Melanie Orenius (art education)
Producer: Sanja Kulomaa
Special thanks: Syksy Räsänen, Dare Talvitie, Bjarke Pedersen, Halden Pfearsen, Miles Lizak.
Bøckman, Petter. “The Three Way Model”. In As Larp Grows Up – Theory and Methods in Larp, eds. Morten Gade, Line Thorup and Mikkel Sander. Projektgruppen KP03. 2003.
Edwards, Ron. 2001. “GNS and Other Matters of Role-Playing Theory, Chapter 2” The Forge, October 14, 2001. http://www.indie-rpgs.com/articles/3/ (last accessed Jan 26, 2025)
This article is republished from the Knutepunkt 2025 book. Please cite it as:
Kangas, Kaisa. 2025. “Experiencing Art from Within.” In Anatomy of Larp Thoughts, a breathing corpus: Knutepunkt Conference 2025. Oslo. Fantasiforbundet.
Editorial note: This article was originally published in the Knutepunkt 2025 book Anatomy of Larp Thoughts, a breathing corpus. It has been reprinted from there with the editors’ and authors’ permission. It has not been edited by Nordiclarp.org.
This article describes our artistic practice and design principles focusing on the bodily experience. First, we theorize what we are doing and then give a practical overview of some of our pieces.
We have worked mainly in the Finnish art field as an artistic duo. As artists, we look at larp from a slightly different angle, and there is no perfect word for our approach. Our interdisciplinary artistic works are not quite like larps are usually understood. We call them instruction-based performances, built around short directed scenes emphasizing a particular theme or experience. Embodily design often plays a big role in our pieces, both in creation and the final piece.
Vili and Nina on one of the actual sites where a coven did rituals working on a larp about them. Photo: Vili Myrsky Nissinen 2024
What we mean by embodied art
Larp is the art of experience, but not all larps are embodied art. For us, embodied art is art created by researching bodily experiences and trying to find ways to replicate them for the participants. Embodied art designs the bodily experience directly.
Larp designers often focus on fiction, information, and physical objects to create an immersive setting, skipping thinking about the participants’ bodies beyond keeping them safe and accommodating basic physical needs like food and sleep. Larp designers expect emotions and experiences to emerge from the information and setting they have created, and many times they do. But, larp is first and foremost experienced through the participants’ bodies, and what happens in the participants’ bodies creates the piece. In larp, participants strive for certain emotions, narratives, and human experiences. All things humans start from our body and senses. The bodily experience can be designed; bodies guided and prompted towards the emotions we aim to create to support our narrative. We as creators believe that body-focused design is a very direct and reliable way to achieve the experience larp designers want to create and that it significantly accommodates participants in achieving it.
The body as a design tool
Our pieces in the art scene are mostly based on the history of queers and other oppressed. For us, a crucial part of doing background research on certain groups or events is recreating their footsteps and actions using our bodies to understand what they were doing. We aim to understand how the events felt in the bodies of the people whose stories we are telling. This is crucial for us to tell their tale respectfully and in the right tone.
For example as preparations for Fenezar! (2024), a larp about a working-class witch coven that radicalized and did horrific acts in 1930s Helsinki, we visited two of the coven’s actual ritual sites and did spells there based on their rituals. The other ritual site is not easy to reach, as it is far away from the center of Helsinki and in the middle of an overgrown grove. But it was important for us to follow down the witches’ road to the sacred wellspring and sink an offering there, just as the coven did. We got a glimpse of what they might have felt during the exhausting trip and while practising their magic and this bodily experience we tried to transfer directly into the piece we created.
After bodily experimenting and researching, we verbalize what our bodies experienced and figure out how to translate those experiences into exercises and meta techniques so that our participants can safely get the right feeling. In test runs, we try out these exercises and evolve them when needed. If test runners express that they felt the feelings we aimed for, it is a sign that our body-based exercises are working and that the design is reaching its final form.
Experiencing the right bodily reactions and emotions is a powerful tool for the participants to understand the tale we are telling. We, as creators, don’t find larp an unpredictable and uncontrollable medium like many larp designers do, and we think this is because of our focus on bodily experience. Embodied design can do miracles in finding the core of the piece and giving the players the tools to reach it.
Easy things to design from the body perspective
We think the bare minimum of bodily design all larp creators should do is to check that your participants’ bodily experience is not against aimed content. For example, being cold or hungry makes it hard to feel like you’re in a comedy, or being on a tight schedule and in a hurry makes it hard to drop into the feeling of being in a slow-paced slice of life experience, or uncomfortable and complicated costumes may make it impossible to engage in a free form dance improvisation larp. Make sure your participants can easily engage in the emotions you want them to feel and that their bodies will not be against it by design.
Examples of bodily design from our pieces
In Inner Domain players draw together on the floor. Photo: Nina Mutik 2024
In this section, we will give several practical examples of how we have used our bodies as design tools, and how this has been transformed into exercises or meta techniques and the experience replicated in the actual piece.
Finding Tom (2020) tells the story of Tom of Finland’s (1920-91) art’s effect and meaning on the freedom fight of Finnish gay men of his time. We researched a lot on how it was being a gay man between 1940 and 70s in Helsinki. In Finland, homosexual acts were a crime until 1971 and homosexuality was classified as a disease until 1981. Homosexuality was a shame and not a lifestyle choice or an identity, but rather a heavy burden. Gay men mostly met at parks, finding contacts for sex in secret. After reading history and documentation from those times and interviewing researchers and gay men, we went to the actual cruising sites and followed Tom of Finland’s routes. We re-enacted finding company in the shadows of the parks and tried to embody the fear of getting caught, the shame of being ill this way, the strong sexual urge, and the short relief of relieving the symptoms. We immersed ourselves in the stories we found and tried to feel how being torn between sexual need and shame under heavy oppression felt.
To embody the shame of being gay and the pressing feeling of hiding your true self we created a prop that we call the oppression jacket, a relative to a straitjacket. It is a trench coat with straps sewn into them over the chest and stomach. The straps can be pulled tight so that it is a bit hard to breathe. The oppression jacket does not restrain the participants’ movement but gives a pressing feeling around the chest and stomach. Each participant wears one during the larp. The jacket represents the feeling of shame, fear and being oppressed and at the start of the piece the participants have the jackets closed, the collars pulled up to hide their faces and the straps pulled as tight as they are still comfortable with. As the piece progresses and the characters start slowly finding community and identity, the jacket’s straps gradually loosen and open, until the jackets are dropped off and left behind completely as the characters go into Finland’s first Pride parade. The oppression jacket has gotten a lot of thanks from participants as they help get into the right emotions. They are both great metaphors and cause parts of the right emotions directly in the participants’ bodies.
Inner Domain (2024) tells the story of an all-female esoteric group gathered around the Swedish artist Hilma af Klint at the start of the 20th century. These women used theosophy and spirituality to create a safe space for women to break gender norms and to explore same-sex romance and sexuality in a time when women’s roles and possibilities in society were extremely narrow. We picked one method from their rituals, automatic drawing, to be the center of our piece. Drawing together, close to each other on the floor, guided by the spirits allows exploring things that can not be voiced in another way. Communication through touching creates a wordless way to experience the sensual and fragile erotic tension and emotional relationships we were looking for. The touches while drawing could be gentle, shy, brave, flirty, or even violent. All the character communication in the piece happens only through touching and drawing, there is no talking. During the workshops, participants go through a series of touching exercises, so that it is easy and safe to touch and communicate wordlessly during the larp. This piece has also received a lot of thanks and has surprised its participants on how safe it felt to engage and how intense narratives they lived through in such a short time.
Part of Fenezar!’s design aims to imagine how it was to be poor, suffering from illness, pain, and hunger and existing with no hope of finding anything better, all added to the shame of being poor as it was considered to be your fault by authorities. Endless meaningless physical labor that leads to nothing permanent became the core of this experience. In the larp, we give players some carpet rag to crochet with their fingers as they sit around a table over empty plates and talk. After each act, we unravel the crocheting, and they have to start the same roll of rag from the start again. The constant crocheting also physically narrowed down what they could do, so the meaningless work was restricting them in play. Our participants felt the frustration and the repetitiveness of manual labor well through this tool. In Fenezar! we also discuss radicalization. As the coven does rituals and magic to improve their situation in life and nothing happens, the magical acts become more and more severe to keep up the hope that things will improve, and these people have agency in their lives. To embody this we created props based on actual sacrifices the coven sank into the well-spring, and they become physically heavier and larger as the story progresses. Carrying your more and more extreme deeds was concretely heavier and harder. This had a direct emotional impact on participants they found easy to engage with.
These are some examples of how to affect player bodies directly as a medium for the larp to create the emotions and narrative you are aiming for. These tools can not be invented without experiencing the emotions or events you’re trying to tell with your own body or without testing and iterating with test participants.
This article is republished from the Knutepunkt 2025 book. Please cite it as:
Mutik, Nina & Vili Myrsky Nissinen. 2025. “Larp As Embodied Art.” In Anatomy of Larp Thoughts, a breathing corpus: Knutepunkt Conference 2025. Oslo. Fantasiforbundet.
Cover image: Doing rituals at the actual wellspring the coven used to create Fenezar! Photo: Nina Mutik 2024
Editorial note: This article was originally published in the Knutepunkt 2025 book Anatomy of Larp Thoughts, a breathing corpus. It has been reprinted from there with the editors’ and authors’ permission. It has not been edited by Nordiclarp.org.
It is a quite common phenomenon after a larp. In the larp FB-group, or other social media platform, a thread is created. ”Comment with a picture of your face,” it says, ”and let people compliment you on your larping!” Then the thread explodes with pictures, and lots and lots of compliments. Such a lovely trend, right? So why does it always make me slightly uncomfortable and anxious?
The reasons are many, and I will try to detail them here. As the title suggests, this is an opinion piece. It is meant to identify a problem that I experience, and that I think I am not alone in experiencing. It also suggests alternatives that I think might work better for people who share my experience.
Unequal distribution
One of the core issues is that there will inevitably be an unequal distribution of compliments. Some will get many, some will get fewer. And while comparing is rarely something that makes us happier, it is hard to resist, especially if we are already feeling vulnerable and self-conscious.
The reasons for uneven distribution are many. One might of course be the quality of your larping (as well as casting and style, which we will return to below), and how many people you interacted with. Another is timing: those who are quick to post their picture in the thread will get more comments, while those who join the party after a few days might not get as many, as some people will already be ”done” commenting. On top of that, those who diligently compliment many others will themselves get more compliments back – which is not wrong in itself, but risks giving the compliments a transactional nature.
What is good larping?
When comparing how many, and how enthusiastic, compliments people receive, it is easy to see it as an unofficial rating; the ”best” larpers will get more positive attention, and if you do not get as much praise that means you larped poorly. However, in my experience the people who get many compliments are also the ones that were noticeable and easy to remember. People who are cast as characters who are seen and heard, or who have a more expressive, extroverted playstyle, are more likely to receive a lot of compliments. And the people with a subtle playstyle, who play subdued characters, and mainly have intensive play with a few close relations, are more likely to have gone unnoticed by many at the larp.
Personally, I quite value the more subtle playstyles, the brilliance that is mainly visible when you get up close. And while more showy playstyles are often very valuable for larps as well, most larps thrive when they have a balance of different playstyles, and the right kinds of players as the right characters. But looking at the overall picture created by compliment threads, it is easy for the less noticeable larpers to suspect that they are simply not a very good larper, and that if they were showier and took up more space, they would become a better larper.
Doubting authenticity
People approach it differently, but there is a general understanding that you should compliment as many people as possible. As mentioned above, there is also a trend of reciprocity – people try to compliment the people who complimented them. And while it is a good principle to be generous and compliment everyone, an anxious mind like my own will often doubt: is this a genuine compliment, or are you just saying something because you had to come up with something.
Why it is so tempting
After a larp, many of us are still completely absorbed by the experience. We can think of little else. And many of us yearn for connection. We want to know that we were seen, that we mattered to others. We want to feel that we were as important to our co-players as they were to us. We want to spread positivity and let people know how awesome they are, and we want them to think we are awesome too. This makes it very hard to resist the compliment threads, especially when we see the love bombing happening. There have been many times where I have initially resisted participating in a compliment thread, but eventually gave up and participated anyway, even though I know it makes me anxious.
So what am I saying?
“Are you just sore that you don’t get complimented enough for your immersive, introverted shenanigans? Just don’t participate in the compliment threads, if they’re so terrible, and let people enjoy them!” Well, this is exactly what I do. However, I thought that others that share my discomfort might feel some comfort in knowing that they are not alone, and perhaps get perspectives on what makes them uneasy.
I also do have a suggestion of what I think is a far better practice. I tend to give compliments directly – either after the larp, in person, or reaching out to them via social media. A fellow anxious friend mentioned to me how this can be really difficult and intimidating (reaching out to someone when you weren’t invited). While I absolutely understand this, I am happy that it is something I feel able to do. I rely on the fact that most people relish compliments and honest appreciation, and I try to do it in a way that is not imposing, or seems to demand reciprocation or further interaction. Something along the lines of ”hey, I just wanted to let you know, I really liked the way you played [scene]. You portray [emotion] so beautifully. It was great to see, thank you!”.
The benefits of doing this are many. For one, a spontaneous compliment is great to receive, and it usually makes people happy. It also feels enjoyable for me to give compliments in this way. Another great benefit is that there is no comparison, you don’t have to wonder if other people are noticing you more or less than others.
It should be mentioned that some people enjoy compliment threads a lot, and enjoy the benefits without any of the anxiety or overthinking that I describe. It is not necessarily something that we should all stop doing. But I think it is worthwhile to consider the options, and what feels best for you, and if there are other ways you can spread the love and appreciation after a larp.
This article is republished from the Knutepunkt 2025 book. Please cite it as: Greip, Julia. 2025. “Why I hate post-larp compliment threads.” In Anatomy of Larp Thoughts, a breathing corpus: Knutepunkt Conference 2025. Oslo. Fantasiforbundet.
Cover image: Photo by Nataliya Vaitkevich on Pexels.
Editorial note: This article was originally published in the Knutepunkt 2025 book Anatomy of Larp Thoughts, a breathing corpus. It has been reprinted from there with the editors’ and authors’ permission. It has not been edited by Nordiclarp.org.
For Mike, may he rest well.
When I learned that a dear friend and mentor had passed away, I was at home, scrolling through social media. In that moment, a part of me that usually stays quiet—my other self, the character I embody in another world—rose to the surface, refusing to remain in the background. My grief seemed to split in two. As myself, I mourned the loss of a kind and dedicated man who had spent years creating a space where imagination thrived. As my character, I froze, feeling the absence of a mentor who had guided me, encouraged me, and helped shape the person I had become in that world. I did not know Mike for as long as others, but he always had a smile and an open ear for me. Our fantasy and real-life selves often shared a space at the same time; while he mentored my character as a ritualist and taught her how to command a circle, he also mentored me—ensuring that I would not be lost under the weight of others’ wants and needs.
Even now, as I write this, I can still feel myself trying to hold back tears. Two selves wrestle for control of my thoughts: one grounded in reality, and the other still standing at my mentor’s wake, deep in a forest, where a tree now grows in his honour. The UK larp community lost a very good man the day he passed; a man who pushed the boundaries of what could be in a game, yet even when he was busy, he always gave more than just a moment of his time for others.
It wasn’t the first time I had encountered death in this hobby, but it was the first time the loss felt so permanent. There would be no new character bearing his face with a different name, no scholar sipping tea near the College of Magic, no kind smile waiting at the Watchers’ table to open the circle for me. I miss his smile.
This death was quiet. Those of us who loved Mike gathered to mourn. His closest friends shared stories of how he had helped shape Curious Pastimes; a UK larp that has been running since 1996, and currently runs four mainline events a year set in its game world. We listened, sometimes laughing in remembrance, but mostly sitting silently on the late summer grass, holding hands, hugging, crying, and honouring a man who had given so much and asked for so little in return.
The memorial was meant to be entirely out of character. We came together, ostensibly as ourselves, to grieve him. Yet, looking around, I noticed most of us weren’t dressed as ourselves. We wore the clothes of our other selves—the characters Mike might also have met through his own alter ego. It was an unusual wake, held during a time when the event itself was in full swing, laughter echoing through the trees on the hillside. But in that space, we were caught in a strange in-between, neither fully in-character nor fully out of it. Two selves occupied one body, coexisting in shared grief.
I did not walk to the wake alone, and I am forever grateful for that. A friend—a brother, really, as he has been to my heart for many years now—walked from our faction’s camp with me. I am, by nature, an emotional person, but I—perhaps foolishly—hoped that I could witness this event with the strength of an unbending face. Instead, I found strength in those around me who also allowed themselves to feel this loss.
I remember my heart-brother taking my hand as I cried. In that instant of vulnerability, he was every version of himself I had known, and I was every version of myself he had known. New friends, old friends—the Claw and his cub, the brother and sister—all of them were present in the way only this community could allow. Letting him wrap his arm around me brought far more comfort than forcing a brave face or pushing any part of myself aside. He has long been a safe place, across so many lives.
The Emotional Complexity of Larp
Death is a frequent part of larp, but it is rarely permanent. In Al’Gaia, one of the factions in Curious Pastimes, the primary belief is that when someone dies, they return to the cycle—the eternal loop of life, death, and rebirth. While the specifics vary depending on the character’s beliefs, path, and connection to the deities of Al’Gaia, the core idea remains the same. For many, this belief offers comfort, something often reiterated by those in positions of authority during in-character funerals.
When someone in Al’Gaia dies, their body is carried back to camp and laid to rest in the glade where we set up our shrine at the start of the event. We gather, sometimes packed tightly into that sacred space, mourning the loss of one of our own. Yet, we are always reminded not to grieve but to rejoice—because the departed has returned to the cycle, and we will meet them again in another life.
I’ve always found it a complicated kind of comfort to hear those words.
I’ve attended many larp funerals. In both of the larp games I play—Curious Pastimes and Wilde Realms—I’ve taken part in these ceremonies as both an active and passive participant; someone who was directly affected by a loss and spoke on the individual whose spirit was now in the stars, and as a listener there to pay my respects to another that I may not have known as well. I’ve sung beneath the trees with others as fallen comrades “disappeared” (stepped out of play). I’ve stood with my herd, setting fields of the dead ablaze with violet fire. I’ve stood among the bodies, pleading with my in-character family to remember the fallen and continue the fight in their name.
Death in real life is not as dramatic, but it is just as deeply emotional. I cry the same tears, hold the same hands, and think the same thoughts in both of my lives. The key difference is that death in larp is not supposed to be permanent. You mourn a character as though they were a real person—because, in many ways, they were. They had a family, a personality, a story. You fought beside them, bled with them, and waited anxiously for their return after a battle. It feels almost cruel to experience loss so frequently in larp, knowing it’s temporary, yet still feeling the full weight of grief as if it were real.
This is, perhaps, one of the limitations of the magic circle—the invisible boundary that separates the world of play from the real world. (Huizinga 1938, 10) In larp, though we grieve our loved ones, we eventually see their face again in another body and continue living with them. In real life, death is final. My friend will not return.
This stark difference can intensify the phenomenon of “bleed”; a concept I am deeply familiar with, originally coined by Emily Care Boss in 2007 at Ropecon. In ‘Bleed: The Spillover Between Player and Character’, Sarah Bowman defines this concept by writing that “role-players sometimes experience moments where their real-life feelings, thoughts, relationships, and physical states spill over into their characters’, and vice versa.” (Bowman 2015) Bowman states that bleed can occur intentionally or unintentionally, and its effects range from catharsis to profound emotional devastation.
Bleed can be observed in three ways:
Bleed-in: when the player’s emotions, thoughts, or experiences affect their character.
Bleed-out: when the character’s emotions, thoughts, or experiences affect the player.
Bleed feedback loop: when the boundary between player and character dissolves, especially in overwhelming emotional moments. (Bowman 2015)
What I experienced during Mike’s wake—and even when I first heard the news of his passing—was undeniably a bleed feedback loop. I could not tell you who I was as I sat listening to his dearest companions recount their memories. I entered the wake as myself, but my body was dressed as another, and the distinction between the two identities blurred. Or perhaps they didn’t blur at all. Perhaps they simply merged, becoming one.
I often say that playing at larp is a way to explore and embody facets of yourself—ideals, dreams, or fragments of your personality that you bring to life. In moments like these, the boundary between the player and the character collapses, creating an experience that is simultaneously beautiful and overwhelming.
The Fragility of the Magic Circle
The magic circle in larp serves as a boundary between fiction and reality, creating a space where players can safely embody characters and explore narratives. Central to maintaining this boundary is the concept of alibi; originally discussed by Markus Montola, Jaakko Stenros, and Annika Waern in 2009 in ‘Philosophies and strategies of pervasive larp design’, in Larp, the Universe and Everything, (Montola, Stenros, Waern 2009, 214). It is further deliberated by Bowman in her work on bleed from 2015, and again by Bowman and Hugaas in their 2021 article ‘Magic Is Real: How Role-Playing Can Transform Our Identities, Our Communities, and Our Lives’. Alibi acts as a psychological shield for players, allowing them to place blame for their actions directly on their character when engaging in situations that might otherwise feel emotionally or morally fraught. (Bowman 2015) (Bowman and Hugaas 2021)
But although alibi allows for emotional and mental distance between a player and their character, this tool of detachment is not infallible. The strength of alibi can vary depending on the story’s proximity to the player’s real life—playing a character who experiences grief, love, or loss that mirrors the player’s own can weaken the alibi, making it harder to maintain a sense of separation. In these cases, bleed—where the emotions, thoughts, and experiences of the player and character intertwine—becomes almost inevitable.
This fragility became glaringly apparent at Mike’s wake. I entered the space carrying the raw weight of personal grief but dressed as someone else entirely—a character who also mourned. My usual reliance on alibi, the assurance that my emotions were distinct from my character’s, crumbled. Instead, my two selves began to blur. My character’s performed grief became my own, and my own feelings deepened their reaction. It didn’t matter that my character hadn’t been “let out to play” yet, I could feel their emotions just as solidly as my own. They were just as real. The magic circle, meant to protect and isolate, instead amplified the collision between fiction and reality.
This breakdown of alibi wasn’t simply jarring—it was transformative. The safety net of the magic circle exposed me to an emotional intensity that might not have been as deeply felt outside of it. I wasn’t sure where I ended and my character began. I didn’t just mourn for Mike as myself—I mourned for him through my character. This merging of identities exemplifies how bleed can erode the structures we rely on in larp, creating profound, often overwhelming emotional experiences.
The Duality of Grief and Bleed
Grief within larp exists on a unique emotional spectrum, heightened by the phenomenon of bleed. Bleed, as players know, blurs the line between character and self—emotions from one spilling into the other. This becomes particularly pronounced during moments of grief, where the loss of a character or even a fellow player can create a shared sense of vulnerability among participants. We all felt it when we lost Mike; we weren’t alone in that field, listening to his dear friends talk about him. We were together in our grief, whether we knew each other personally or not, that moment connected us; Mike connected us. In ‘Why Larp Community Matters and How We Can Improve It’, Laura Wood highlights how larp evokes intense emotions and provides spaces for connection, amplifying empathy and deepening bonds. These spaces allow grief to feel communal and cathartic but can also make players more emotionally exposed. (Wood 2021)
Grieving alongside others in a larp setting can strengthen a sense of belonging, as moments of vulnerability bring participants closer. However, this same openness can exacerbate emotional overwhelm when grief spills over, especially if the loss feels personal on both in-character and real-world levels. Without adequate support, these heightened emotions may lead to unintended consequences, leaving players feeling isolated in their dual mourning.
Promoting Safety and Awareness
Mike ensured that I knew I was more than a ritualist with powers for others to use. He spoke to me about the importance of saying “no”, and helped me manage my anxiety about being in such a prominent position. Because of Mike, I learned to be powerful and powerless; my job was to lead the players in the circle, but the outcome of a ritual was not up to me. He was my touchstone in the Watcher’s box; someone I could count on to be fair, but to encourage me with positive criticism. He was, in my opinion, the best Watcher that Curious Pastimes had. He looked beyond the play and saw the player, and I think that is something that is missing now.
We may have lost Mike, but we haven’t lost his beliefs or his words. I can do my best to advocate for myself at larp and encourage others to do the same. Together, we can create an element of larp culture that is dedicated to wellbeing, we can manage the challenges of subjects like grief and bleed, we can understand that safety—physical, emotional, and mental—must become a cornerstone of our games. Wood’s call to normalise safety tools like safe words and exit mechanics are just the start. (Wood 2021) These tools allow players to protect themselves without disrupting the experience for others, making it easier to process complex emotions such as grief. Educating both organisers and players about these tools—and creating environments where their use is encouraged and introduced to players before a game and during pre-game briefings—can help safeguard everyone’s emotional well-being.
Self-awareness is crucial when engaging with grief in larp. Players should understand their emotional limits and approach topics thoughtfully, recognising that their fellow participants may be carrying their own burdens. Community-wide education on managing grief and bleed—through workshops, post-game discussions, or even casual conversations—can create a culture of care and responsibility.
By weaving empathy, safety, and self-awareness into the fabric of larp, participants can transform grief from an overwhelming experience to an opportunity for collective healing and deeper connection. As Wood suggests, this is the magic of community: learning to protect each other’s vulnerability while embracing the shared humanity that grief uniquely reveals. (Wood 2021) I can’t help but feel that Mike would share the same sentiment.
Bibliography
Huizinga, Johan. 1938. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture. Angelico Press. 10.
Montola, Markus, Jaakko Stenros, and Annika Waern. 2009. “Philosophies and Strategies of Pervasive Larp Design.” In Holter, Matthijs, Fatland, Eirik & Tømte, Even: Larp, the Universe and Everything. The book for Knutepunkt 2009. Knutepunkt. p214.
This article is republished from the Knutepunkt 2025 book. Please cite it as:
Greenwood, Lyssa. 2025. “Grief in Larp: Bleeding Through Two Lives.” In Anatomy of Larp Thoughts, a breathing corpus: Knutepunkt Conference 2025. Oslo. Fantasiforbundet.
Eclipse is a three-day sci-fi larp set in 2059. Earth has been wracked by environmental disasters, leading to widespread civil war. Humanity’s hopes lie in the Eclipse space programme, established to find a new home using wormhole technology.
When the larp begins, all 150 players are in a base on Gliese 628A, one of seven candidate planets for colonisation. The three days take place in real time as the base initiates first contact with aliens. Like Arrival and Interstellar, twin inspirations for Italian creators Chaos League, it’s less about space battles and more about the self-destructiveness of humans and the nature of existence. These themes aren’t unusual in Nordic larp, which I’ve covered recently, but Chaos League follows the New Italian larp tradition, which favours top-down storytelling over player-driven plot, like Odysseus, a recent Battlestar Galactica-inspired larp.
Photo by Chiara Cappiello
Both Eclipse and Odysseus are blockbuster or “international” larps, so big and ambitious they draw players from multiple countries. They also have spectacular settings, hiring entire castles for medieval or fantasy stories. Now that player are willing to spend more and production costs have dropped, it’s become possible to create convincing science fiction environments, too. In Eclipse, everyone gets their own 8” tablet loaded with fully customised software; everyone wears a jumpsuit that looks appropriately sci-fi; and 3D printed props and impeccably-designed banners and instruction manuals make you feel right at home in 2059. Something barely feasible just ten years ago can now be organised by volunteers.
Even better, Eclipse takes place at Alvernia Planet, a massive network of concrete and glass domes spanning 13,000m2. It looks like it’s ripped straight from the cover of Amazing Stories. Originally a film studio, it now hosts exhibitions and events, located just outside Krakow in Poland. Castles are plentiful, but Alvernia Planet is rare indeed.
Maybe this shouldn’t matter. Some long-time larpers are dismayed by the growth of expensive blockbusters, arguing they’re exclusionary distractions from the things that make larps distinctive: role play, relationships, dialogue, and gameplay, none of which require castles or domes.
Photo by Chiara Cappiello
In blockbusters’ defence, visual and physical verisimilitude can be a scaffold for our imagination, easing our way into immersion. At the very least, it can be aesthetically pleasing, and it does wonders for marketing. I met someone brand new to larp who signed up for Eclipse just because they saw a photo of Chaos League’s Sahara Expedition, which really does take place in the Sahara. But the best argument for blockbusters is that they can be a gateway toward more affordable chamber and blackbox larps, not least because even blockbusters need to use their lo-fi techniques for more abstract and emotional gameplay.
My journey has been in the opposite direction. The longest larps I’d played were a few hours at most, at The Smoke and Immersion festivals, in conference rooms and blackbox theatres. I enjoyed them a lot, but I was told you can get much more into character with longer larps. Eclipse would be my first multi-day “proper” larp, a test of how far the art form could go.
This is a detailed account of my time at Eclipse in May, on its first run in English and second overall.
Cost
A ticket to Eclipse starts at €680. Players are expected to dress suitably, and most opted for the official jumpsuits (€45 to rent, €95 to buy). Accommodation at a decent hotel was €165 for a double/triple room and €265 for a single room; players with subsidised tickets could sleep for free at Alvernia Planet with their own sleeping bag. All meals were included, all vegan. They were fine!
The total cost for most people – a standard ticket, jumpsuit rental, and accommodation – came to €890 ($1000 / £750). Not cheap, but you could easily spend the same on a nice European long weekend. Still, one experienced larper blanched when I told her the price.
Photo by Chiara Cappiello
All four remaining runs of Eclipse in 2025 are almost sold out and none have been announced for 2026.
SPOILER WARNING If you intend to play and don’t want to risk any spoilers, stop reading now and come back later. That said, the first part will only cover information from before the larp begins, meaning details from the public larp guide and the pre-larp workshops. I’ll make it very clear when I begin spoiling the larp itself.
This account is as complete as I can reasonably make it, but larp is an individual experience. I didn’t see everything in the main plot and barely a fraction of the interpersonal drama that surrounded it.
Pre-Larp
Eclipse provided a vast amount of writing and videos detailing the gameplay, characters, relationships, and three decades of fictional history. Players weren’t expected to memorise it, but they did need to choose some characters they’d be happy to play.
Rather than read 150 unique character sheets totalling over 1000 pages, I narrowed them down based on gameplay. Each character belonged to one of three Divisions:
Hard Science: “Mindlink” to aliens, carefully interviewing them about their biology and history. Heavier on deductive gameplay, lower on physical activity.
Soft Science: Learn an alien language’s glyphs, then communicate through highly controlled face-to-face encounters. Heavier on social “parlour” role play, lower on physical activity.
Exploration: Venture outside to alien sites to deploy sensors and gather information. Heavy on physical activity.
I was intimidated by the level of performance required by Soft Science and worried Hard Science would be constant puzzle solving, so it was easy to opt for Exploration, especially given my past experience in outdoor gameplay making Zombies, Run!
A hard science team performs a mindlink. Photo by Chiara Cappiello.
Then I had to choose one of six Academies. These are like school Houses, where members belong to different divisions but are trained with a common ethos. Each academy comes with its own secondary training (“sidespec”) used in emergency situations, covering co-ordination, security, psychology, communications, medicine, and engineering. Some people chose to learn into their academy’s ethos when role playing, while others ignored it. I filtered the list for security and engineering, and scanned through the one-line descriptions of a dozen characters.
There were a few happy-go-lucky individuals but most had darker histories reflecting the dire state of Earth, not to mention whatever would drive them to volunteer for a risky mission lightyears from their family or friends. I chose seven characters and a few weeks later was told I’d be Bex, “The eternal nomad who does not trust relationships”.
Bex had a nine page character sheet. There were three pages on their personal history, a three page diary of their first weeks on Gliese 628A, and the remainder covered their in-game relationships. Like all characters, Bex was ungendered and could be played however I liked (male, I decided).
As a piece of literature, Bex’s backstory felt dense, verging on overwritten, and hard to mine for ideas on how to role play. The same went for much of the writing about Earth, the Eclipse program, the six academies, and so on. I didn’t have to remember it all, but there were details I overlooked that became genuinely important during the game, if only because they were important to other players. Apparently a helpful player on the larp Discord made a cheatsheet, which I missed entirely.
While such detailed worldbuilding may seem self-indulgent, it’s crucial to Eclipse’s project to create a convincing and original fictional universe, even if it’s through dry factsheets rather than Harry Potter or Star Wars’ books and movies. Why bother? The obvious answer is that it’s basically impossible for larps to get the license for those kinds of IPs. The real answer, however, is that making your own fictional universe means you can tailor it for a specific kind of gameplay and politics and emotional experience.
The lounge, pre-larp. Usually it’d be full of people.
The problem with Harry Potter and Star Wars (Andor aside) is that they glorify very small groups of saviours, so everyone wants to be the main character and save the world. This just isn’t possible in larp traditions that prioritise everyone being able to contribute and feeling valued. Sure, you could base a story around the anonymous scientists in Arrival and Interstellar, but at that point you might as well start from scratch, which is what Chaos League did. Every single one of the character backstories I read described people who were decidedly unheroic but always intimately tied to and reliant on others, whether they realised it or not.
A few weeks before the larp, the organisers asked players to record a short Departure Log video, as if made before the departure to Gliese 628A. In-character, we were to explain our hopes for the Eclipse mission, how we’d like to be remembered if it failed, and so on.
I happened to be travelling at this time so I completely failed to record the video. I did manage to connect with some of Bex’s friends from their academy and the base via Discord in case we wanted to do anything special with our relationships (answer: no). Some players did a lot of pre-larp co-ordination, writing shared histories and chatting in multiple calls, while others told me they turned up at the larp knowing next to nothing.
Day 0
I arrived in Krakow the evening before the larp and went to a meetup at a bar in town. Amusingly, most of the players were Explorers, clearly the jocks of Gliese 628A. Several players were novices like me, but a lot went to multiple blockbuster larps each year. I guess it’s like people who are really into cruises or theme parks, except blockbusters are considerably cheaper.
Day 1
From central Krakow, it was an hour to Alvernia Planet via the official coaches.
The two largest domes were occupied by a Harry Potter exhibition, on the opposite side of the complex from us. We never noticed their guests except when embarking on expeditions, during which we were encouraged to view them as hallucinations of Earth.
I was instantly impressed by Eclipse’s graphic design. I am cursed with a preternatural ability to detect misaligned and poorly-spaced layouts but everything – banners, patches, branded water packs, even the custom door signs – was perfect. “Just look at that kerning and line spacing!” I marvelled to a friend.
We stowed our luggage and found our individual lockers in the basement, stocked with our jumpsuit, name tag, and tablet. But before putting them on, we had three workshops to attend.
Introductory Workshop
Larp workshops teach everyone how to play. By requiring attendance, they guarantee everyone’s on the same page, meaning you can role play knowing others will understand what you’re trying to do and support it. This first hour-long session largely covered the same ground as the 7000 word larp guide, correctly assuming some players skipped or forgotten it entirely. Here’s a brief run-down of what we were told:
There are three pillars to Eclipse: work, the planet, and social life. Work is organised by division, with a morning and afternoon shift each day. Work doesn’t need to be done perfectly, and we shouldn’t stress out if we mess up. “You can’t break the game” because it was designed with redundancy in mind, with multiple teams in each division tackling the same general problem.
There’s no winning. Don’t play to save your character from failure. Eclipse isn’t a campaign larp where your character returns across multiple games, so use them like a stolen car and try things you wouldn’t try in real life. “Make wrong choices!”
Improvise in your character’s personal life. Some people got married in the first run, with ten people attending.
Some story would be communicated extra-diegetically. For example, each day would begin with a voiceover to set the scene, but we shouldn’t mention the voiceover in-game.
At the end of each shift, we would report our professional opinion on Gliese 628A’s alien life to Yggdrasil, the base’s AI. Yggdrasil exists both in-game and out-of-game, aggregating opinions to steer the plot in lieu of open voting. There are different possible endings. If we disagree with the path of the game, we can be angry but we need to follow the decision rather than, say, attempting a coup.
There won’t be any massive twist removing players’ agency. “This is not a dream, you aren’t all dead, it’s not fake, the premise is real.”
Each day, we should record a two minute video diary. We can address it to people back on Earth, and they can be a memento of the game afterwards.
Twice during the game, we’ll have calls to our “affections” on Earth, affections being family members or close colleagues or friends rather than romantic relations. During calls, we’ll be paired up to take turns playing each others’ affections, with those “on Earth” receiving a sheet with our character backgrounds and prompts. We have the option of giving our affections a free ticket to Gliese 628A if the planet is deemed safe.
We can visit the lounge while off-duty for drinks and snacks. Real alcohol won’t be served, but we should role play as if fizzy drinks are alcoholic.
The upper deck of the lounge has an “Earth Wall” corkboard where we should put pictures of our loved ones. Players can visit it to talk about their relationships.
“I’m done here” is Eclipse’s safe word. If someone says it, don’t ask why they’ve left the room or mention it when they return. (I never saw it being used myself).
Escalate altercations slowly and de-escalate quickly. If you want to get into a fight, all parties should verbally invite it, e.g. “Oh yeah? Come over here and say that. What are you gonna do, punch me?” etc. A very convincing and effective demo was provided.
If you see someone crying in a corridor and aren’t sure if they’re role playing or in genuine distress, give them the OK hand sign. A thumbs-up means they’re fine, a wobble or a thumbs-down means you should fetch an organiser.
No phones may be used during the game, and absolutely no photos. You can use them in the toilets, if you want. I usually went outside and hid behind a pillar to take notes.
Eclipse deals with themes of colonisation. Your character can have colonialist intentions, but it’s only your character, not you. The purpose of larp is to experience different points of view, then reflect seriously and critically upon them afterwards.
This was a lot to pack into just one lecture, and I’ve missed out a bunch. Compared to some Nordic larp workshops I’ve been to, however, it was swift, and there weren’t any physical exercise on embodying our character through how we walked and talked. I’m told this is typical of Italian larp, which may have less emphasis on interiority and immersion into character. I don’t know if exercises about walking were necessary given the characters we were playing, but I wouldn’t have minded a bit more about talking. Some players constantly used idioms from 2025 or pop culture references from the 1980s and 1990s, which I found unconvincing, like how every Star Trek character only likes culture up until our present day.
The main auditorium, pre-larp
Novices are always shocked by the existence of larp workshops, which have next to no equivalent among commercial immersive experiences or immersive theatre. Lately I’ve seen designers, especially those newer to larp, try to “design away” workshops, arguing they reduce accessibility and hurt the commercial viability or financial sustainability because they take so long.
I understand the sentiment but it seems deeply mistaken. Workshops are a necessary part of Nordic-style larp because they guarantee a base level of understanding and safety required for substantive role play. Sure, you can skip the workshop if you’re absolutely sure every single player knows and remembers the rules and you aren’t introducing any new design elements. You can also skip it if your game doesn’t have any substantive role play, but then you aren’t making a larp any more, and you might as well accept that.
Academy Workshop
Next, we split up into our academies for an hour. Mine was Blackstone, with its sidespec of base security.
Blackstone is not military, the organisers stressed. We would not carry weapons and there is no brig on the base. If we noticed an altercation, we should use reason to de-escalate, not force.
As civil protection, our responsibility during a base emergency would be to search for cracks in the domes. In practice this meant turning off the lights in each dome and using torches to find fluorescent stickers on structural elements like walls and ceilings. If we found two or more cracks, the entire dome would be evacuated.
Blackstone used one of the Explorer domes as its headquarters
There was a slightly tedious Q&A about splitting up during emergencies to cover more ground, which was obviously something we as players would need to figure out (or not) during the game itself. I did appreciate how the organisers had come up with their own in-universe explanation for how the domes were shielded and why the central dome was immune from cracks, being repurposed from our starship’s reactor.
It was during this workshop that I realised I’d forgotten all of Blackstone Academy’s history. Someone suggested we split up the room along rival “white” and “green” lines. I had no idea where to go until I was reminded that Blackstone cadets were once instructed to fire upon protestors: the greens laid down their weapons and were later tried, while the white followed orders.
The next 15 minutes were spent in groups of three, representing friendships made in the academy. From a design perspective, this gives players a number of people they can justifiably hang out with during the larp; for the same purpose, I wouldlater sync up with the friends Bex made shortly after arriving at Gliese 628A. Bex’s friends at Blackstone were both white cadets and we brainstormed why we might have followed orders during the protest, though this didn’t end up being significant.
We then paired up with the person who’d play our “affection” during the two calls. This was about calibrating the kind of role play we were looking for: some might ask their partner to shout at them or manipulate them, while others might explicitly put those things off-limits.
Base map, taken from the tablet
Next, a quick tour of the base. All nine domes were connected by at least two tunnels each, with the central K2 dome leading to most. Each dome had two or three storeys, and some were enormous, with multiple rooms and entire cinemas and auditoriums. You could easily fit a thousand people in the space we had, and we were just 150. Nowhere was off-limits unless explicitly signed as such. It was big enough for every group to have their own private space but small enough for plenty of chance encounters.
After lunch, some couldn’t wait to get into their jumpsuits. There was plenty of customisation, like patches denoting blood type, 3D-printed magnetic nametags, utility toolbelts, tablet holsters, and sling bags. One player even had a smartphone in a high-tech forearm vambrace on which she wrote notes in-game, a reasonable exception to the “no phones” rule.
Explorer Workshop
My final hour-long workshop focused on Exploration. During our five work shifts, we would venture into the forest to investigate alien sites:
Shifts begin with a 15-30 minute briefing, then 45 minutes outside, then a debrief.
Outside, Explorers wear “spatial sonar” headphones delivering atmospheric sounds and music, half in-game and half out-of-game, a kind of emotional influence from the planet itself. In practice, they were silent disco headphones controlled by our team supervisor, meaning we all heard the same pre-recorded track and the sonar wasn’t actually location-based.
Explorers are forbidden from talking outside. Diegetically, this is for safety reasons (or something) but out-of-game, it was to make things more interesting. Simple hand gestures are used instead, like a fist held in the air for “stop”, and others for “gather”, “danger” etc.
Exploration mission procedures
There are three types of explorer mission involving deploying sensors or searching for specific objects. In practice, the sensors were LEDs and lasers housed in 3D-printed units. We might set up four lasers around the perimeter of a site to “scan” it, or place flashing LED devices in a grid. This process is designed to look “scientific”, and because the sensors weren’t smart, it’s up to players whether they play a deployment as successful or not. It turns out you can save a lot of time and money by trusting players to play along rather than making a genuinely functional sensor setup, though you do lose out on skill-based gameplay.
Any failure during a mission, such as only scanning two out of three sites, is treated as a partial success yielding incomplete information rather than something to feel really bad about.
There was a lot of chat about the science and rationale for processes, much of which boiled down to “it’s more fun if we do it this way.” Why not use little whiteboards rather than hand gestures? Hand gestures look cooler.
Emergencies may occur during when the “sonar” detects psychic threats. Players might have to hide, or drop to the ground, or inject an antidote.
One or two players are designated “hooks”. Hooks mask the “bio-imprint” of everyone else in their team, at the cost of being even more exposed to psychic threats. Before embarking on a mission, hooks are surreptitiously handed a note telling them what to do during an emergency, like sitting down and refusing to move, or running away.
Players are free to role play missions however they like: they can care more about completing a scan than saving a team member, and vice versa. They can also train in advance, create more hand gestures, etc.
The organisers put signs around the forest warning of a film shoot so the public wouldn’t bother us. I don’t think anyone took notice of rhem, and we never had a problem.
Afterwards, we suited up and headed to the main auditorium for the beginning of the game. The lights lowered, we closed our eyes, and music and extra-diegetic narration eased us into the fiction. The game would start the moment a video played.
MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD DO NOT READ IF YOU EVER INTEND TO PLAY!
Game
Above the music (from Interstellar), we heard an unnamed member of our crew describing the journey to Gliese 628A and the importance of our mission. It was a quick and effective way of saying “this is how you should be feeling right now.”
A video call from Earth appeared on the huge cinema screen, a pin-sharp, good-looking 4K image that made a great first impression. Our commander announced that phase 3 of our mission could begin: first contact with Gliese 628A’s non-human intelligent life (NHIL), along with outside exploration. Afterwards, a staff NPC told us to go to our division to begin work.
Photograph of a printed exploration map
There were five Exploration teams with around ten people each, mine designated “Romeo”. Our NPC team supervisor told us our first shift wouldn’t require a hook, which was met with much grumbling and set a fun tone of “us vs. the bosses”. We consulted a map, talked about how we’d use our sensors, practiced hand gestures, and divvied up the equipment.
Stepping outside the dome initially felt a bit awkward – we were, after all, walking out across part of Alvernia Planet’s car park, which didn’t look like an alien planet – but after a couple of minutes we were into a largely deserted forest. With the headphones playing muted musical tones and sonar pings, it felt eerie.
Exploration team with headsets. Photo by Chiara Cappiello.
We spotted a cluster of basketball sized eggs a few minutes out, hanging in webbing between trees. Should we be shocked or blasé? I wasn’t sure, which in itself was interesting. We awkwardly set up tripods and sensors on the uneven ground and “measured” the site. Not for the last time, I regretted that I hadn’t bought a utility belt.
Occasionally we heard faint dragging sounds and footsteps, but nothing happened. We returned silently, trooping back to Romeo’s headquarters and slumping down in a ring of chairs. Our team supervisor disappeared to deliver our data to her bosses and returned with an “analysis” printout explaining what we’d seen, apparently some kind of alien (NHIL) nursery.
Our goal during the debrief was to discuss what we’d seen, then individually report to Yggdrasil on our tablets whether we thought the NHIL were instinctive, emotional, or rational. We each gave our hot takes, our supervisor gently interjecting “last sentence” if someone went on too long.
Sending a report to Yggdrasil
But the discussion was inconclusive. One could see the arrangement of the eggs as any of the three options; whatever you chose was a reflection of your character’s biases and preconceptions more than anything else. Perhaps that was the point, a Rorschach test for humanity, but it felt doubly abstract because our personal observations of the eggs were essentially overridden by the objective analysis of the data we gathered.
This lack of direct correspondence between gameplay and plot-relevant discoveries may have been unique to Explorers, though. From what I understand, players in hard and soft science communicated with the NHIL more directly. That this was accompanied by ambiguity or confusion helped generate speculation.
To make matters worse, explorers couldn’t talk to each other about anything they saw. The five exploration teams rotated between the five sites, and while it made (in-game) sense that they shouldn’t prejudice each others’ observations and (out-of-game) not spoil the surprise, it meant we couldn’t speculate about the greater meaning of our discoveries like other divisions did. Still, explorers had their own unique pleasures; I found it much easier to role play as a Nostromo-style space trucker grunt than a know-it-all scientist.
During a lull in our debrief, I opened my tablet. These included manuals and procedures for each division, like instructions on how to deploy sensors outside; a daily news feed from Earth; a readout of the status of the six other Eclipse missions; a form to submit your reports to Yggdrasil; and Yggdrasil’s predictions of the overall outcome of the Gliese 628A mission (more on this later). But the tablets’ most important feature was the chat channels. Each player was automatically enrolled into channels for their team, division, and academy, and they could direct message any player.
Blackstone Academy’s chatroom from Day 2
As the game progressed, the channels became busy with rumours and gossip. Unfortunately, the tablets struggled with the traffic. People blamed the wifi, but this seemed unlikely; 150 devices isn’t a lot for corporate-level infrastructure, and the error messages (“too many connections”) suggested the chat server was overloaded. Everyone quickly got used to force-closing and reopening the Eclipse app, though this didn’t always work.
Shortly after the first shift, we gathered for our first call with our affections on Earth. I was imagining the Comms dome would be a series of phone booths, but instead it was a vast dark space with a cloudy plastic sheet hanging from the ceiling, arranged in a square. We lined up in pairs on either side of the sheet and atmospheric audio counted down. With the connection to Earth established, everyone stepped forward and started talking. You had to get quite close to hear each other above the babble, but you could still only see a blurry silhouette. It was much lower-fi than I expected, but perhaps the only way they could process every player’s call in a reasonable amount of time.
Photo by Chiara Cappiello
As mentioned, the “affection” side of the call had a cheatsheet with their background and conversation prompts. This made it straightforward for me to role play as a burgeoning eco-freedom fighter/terrorist on Earth who’d been left behind by their friend who’d run off to Gliese 628A. At seven minutes, calls were long enough to have a proper discussion and feel appropriately awkward, but short enough that you didn’t run out of things to say. Surrounded by dozens of calls, cajoling and joking and shouting and crying, I had a sense of what everyone else was going through. It felt more like performance art than anything else. Of course, as with everything else in larp, it requires everyone to buy into the premise.
Like the affection calls, dinner was split into two shifts so everyone could sit at the communal tables. A scientist joined my table and, on spotting my Blackstone Academy patch, asked whether I was a white or a green. Thankfully I knew the difference by this point and we had a thoughtful conversation about the ethics of following orders and his belief that humanity’s true foe was capitalism, not terrorism. But as others arrived, it devolved into a tedious rehashing of colonial tropes, one of those annoying situations when you can tell who’s completely closed to conversation and you already knew everything they’re going to say.
In the lounge, I chatted with teammates and groused (in-character) about the lack of snacks and drinks. I felt beat, so I collapsed into an armchair. It turned out the tablet was a great way to participate even when you needed a rest. Instead of mindlessly scrolling through apps, you knew everyone looking at their device was still inhabiting the same fictional media space. I got into a fight with a troll about the whole white vs. green issue, and later bumped into them and joked about it. If only more of this happened in real life!
Photo by Chiara Cappiello
Another great bit of design in the larp: every team was making momentous discoveries (e.g. finding a nest of alien eggs) but because they weren’t instantly and globally communicated meant players had to actually talk to each other, mostly in person, to learn what the hell was going on – like the discovery that one of the six other Eclipse missions had just failed. This didn’t make the conversations any smarter, but it did provide an excuse (an “alibi”, in larp parlance) to approach random strangers and say, “Hey, you’re in soft science, what did you find out today?” We all need practice in forming connections and persuading one another, and like so many good larps, Eclipse provided that where real life often doesn’t.
People followed threads wherever they could. Earlier that day, I idly mentioned on chat that I’d been bitten by an insect outside. When medics from Lighthouse Academy heard, they tracked me down and conducted an impromptu psychological evaluation which, in retrospect, I should’ve played into more. Next time!
Being an international larp, Eclipse attracted players from all over Europe and even some from the US. The different accents added to a feeling of an international mission, though I only saw one other Asian-looking person, an older woman. There weren’t any obvious player cliques – I got the sense a lot of people simply didn’t have the time to pre-plan individual storylines. The demands of work shifts and the social organisation of the larp forced people into new groupings anyway.
After I got bored of the lounge, I wandered through the vast empty Soft Science dome and looked at the circular Arrival-style glyphs players had pinned on whiteboards, surrounded by scribbles of best-guess translations:
“We escaped home, no sorrow (do not despair) / We got angry the natives threatened (our) beloved / We made a mistake, waged a war and are guilty of dead children.”
Soft science gathers around alien glyphs. Photo by Chiara Cappiello.
I got chatting with a lone soft scientist about the translation. A hard scientist joined us, asking about my team’s mission outside. It made me nostalgic for when I was a neuroscientist at Cambridge and Oxford, chatting to colleagues after-hours. We marvellled at what each of us had discovered. Apparently the NHIL had come from a great distance after their own planet had been destroyed by a supernova. On arriving at Gliese 628A, they somehow wiped out an indigenous intelligent species known as tænari or “farmers”, though now the NHIL themselves were dwindling, despite their highly advanced technology.
Around 10:30pm, right before the end of the game period, everyone’s tablets sounded an emergency notification to head to the enormous K1 “Containment Grid” dome. Inside was a large rectangular space curtained off with cloudy plastic sheeting. A large, spidery alien slowly walked in, and the same unnamed narrator from the beginning of the day described how they felt awed by the encounter.
Then, David Bowie outro music, and we were officially out-of-game. We left our tablets on the front desk to charge and boarded coaches to our hotel. I realised I’d barely used my phone all day.
Day 2
I loaded up on breakfast at the hotel, then boarded a coach back to Alvernia Planet at 9:45am. Most people I spoke to appreciated having a proper sleep but admitted that some “vibes” were lost from not being in-game 24/7. Getting just four hours of sleep is part of the attraction when you’re run from bloodthirsty aliens; less so in Eclipse, which is a much more sedate affair.
Back in the domes, some players were a bit too eager to get into character before the game officially started, which caused a couple of awkward moments. But soon enough, we assembled in the auditorium and closed our eyes…
Game
Sci-fi music (Arrival, this time), narration, then a briefing video. Everyone on Earth was excited about our progress and hopeful we’d declare Gliese 628A safe for mass colonisation. An NPC staff summarised each team’s findings from yesterday. Though I knew most of them from impromptu chats, it was a good way to catch up anyone completely left out.
Before we headed to our work shifts, the staffer said they believed an explorer was smuggling recreational drugs into the base. Despite investigating this on my tablet and in person, I never quite got to the bottom of this story; I wonder whether this was a product of player-driven behaviour or an organiser-led prod to role play in a particular way. In a similar vein, I tried to get Blackstone Academy interested in “New Era” cult pamphlets I discovered in Romeo’s headquarters, hyping them up as a potential security threat, but to no avail.
An explorer sets up a laser. Photo by Chiara Cappiello.
Romeo was much better organised during our mission to analyse a large monolith, practicing with our laser transmitters beforehand. While on mission, an emergency – poison gas, I think – required us to hit the deck and inject an antidote. Some teammates had to hold our “hook” down and find out where he’d stashed his syringe. Amid the confusion, we lost a sensor.
(I expect our NPC team supervisor triggered this emergency at an opportune moment, switching the audio track broadcast to our headphones when we reached a secluded spot).
Back home, our team complained about a malfunctioning laser. Despite the organiers’ ingenuity, players understood things would break, so rather than getting annoyed at them and demanding a refund as one might in a commercial immersive experience, we redirected our frustration in-game at our higher-ups on Gliese 628A. How could they expect us to do these missions properly if they don’t maintain the equipment properly?, and so on. That’s the social technology of larp, a collective pretence that everything is working even when it isn’t. Players aren’t alienated from the creation of larps – we know how the sausage is made because we’re making it too. And so, denied the camaraderie of the scientists, the explorers shared hacks. We measured and cut spare pieces of fabric so we could space out sensors faster and devised procedures to run multiple sensor sweeps at once. It was a lovely demonstration of people taking pride in their work, as good a simulation of a workplace I’ve ever seen.
News from Day 2
I was distracted from our surprisingly thoughtful debrief about the meaning of memorials and statues by news that Blackstone’s “white” cadets on Earth might be retried for shooting at protestors. This set our chat on fire, and naturally I got stuck into the ensuing flamewar. In larps, digital distractions are just another opportunity to role play.
Everyone was making discoveries and very eager to share: someone from soft science asked me whether we were the explorer team who’d found crystals that morning. Very normal, except I happened to be in the toilets. It was a little more fun to talk about that than the news that a second Eclipse mission had failed.
Ymir, the black hole near Gliese 628A, was due to make its closest approach later in the day, wreaking all kinds of mayhem on the base’s shields, psychology, and comms. Blackstone met in advance to co-ordinate an emergency response, but the meeting was fraught. There was no established hierarchy, tablet problems meant people arrived late, and everyone kept talking over each other about how we should divide into groups, who’d get the walkie talkies, what to do if they didn’t work, and so on. Eventually we muddled through it without concluding much at all: classic office politics.
As I watched, I reflected that it’s hard to know whether someone is just playing an asshole in a larp or they really are one. Maybe there’s less difference than it seems, especially when it comes to extreme duration role playing; no-one can wear a mask for a long time, as Seneca put it (a worrying thought given some characters’ colonialist leanings). Metatechniques are meant to help calibrate intensity, but I didn’t see any used in real time during Eclipse – perhaps everyone was OK with the rare bit of poor behaviour, as I was when confronted with rude players. When I brought this up to some experienced larpers, they suggested it might be due to misunderstandings caused by mixing different “larp cultures”. I found this to be a diplomatic rationalisation of behaviour I usually saw from the same few people – people whom I noticed other players eventually learned to avoid. I suppose the good and bad thing about international larp is that players don’t carry their reputations around with them quite as much.
Wild rumours abounded after lunch. The alien eggs had grown in size, an explorer team had stolen data crystals from a research site, the NHIL killed the tænari with a superweapon summoned from the planet itself. Some were exaggerations, others were jokes repeated as facts. A larp wouldn’t be a bad place to teach media literacy…
Note Yggdrasil’s predicted outcomes for our mission
Romeo’s afternoon shift took us out to a “cemetery”. Once again, our equipment malfunctioned and we had to cope with multiple emergencies. Still, I enjoyed the slower, more deliberate pace of our work outside.
Analysis of our sensor data revealed the NHIL killed the tænari, or something. Again, I wondered what use it was to report our opinions to Yggdrasil when the results of its analysis were far more pertinent to its questions (are the NHIL good/neutral/bad?) than anything we’d observed ourselves. Regardless, we had a good discussion about the ideas of existential threat.
The approach of Ymir triggered a base-wide emergency around 5pm. I rushed to Blackstone’s headquarters where walkie talkies were being handed out to roving teams inspecting domes. The role play was more military-themed than I liked – why ask people for their “callsign” when you mean their name, especially when the term has literally never been mentioned in the game before? – but unlike our earlier meeting, communication was surprisingly good-tempered and efficient. Who knew that when people are actually doing stuff rather than endlessly talking about it, they get along better?
I led a small team to help inspect a couple of domes, and I’ll admit that my leadership was quite poor because I ran around too fast for some people to keep up. In each dome, we fetched a supervisor to turn off all the lights so we could look for “cracks” (i.e. stickers). This was disruptive to everyone else who had their own vital work to deal with, like decoding messages or fixing energy systems or manufacturing medicine for Ymir-induced space madness (my term), so we negotiated with them on the best time to turn off lights and where to put displaced teams. More practice in logistics and communication, disguised as a game!
Manufacturing medicine. Photo by Chiara Cappiello.
An hour or so into the emergency, players were summoned to shelter in the K1 “Containment Grid” dome. There, a radio transmission indicated we’d jumped forward in time by seven years due to Ymir’s gravitational pull. Time travel is a classic sci-fi trope whenever black holes are around (e.g. Interstellar), but I genuinely hadn’t seen this coming, my thoughts being occupied by the NHIL and more prosaic concerns.
We trooped into the main auditorium for a very short video call from Earth, who thought our base had been lost entirely. As soon as the video ended, some players began shouting and others shouted to tell them to stop shouting, both in-character and out-of-character at once.
Our second affection calls went ahead as scheduled, more dramatic and emotional than expected. By unstapling the folded sheet we received at the start of the game, people playing the affections revealed new backstory and prompts – my eco-freedom fighter/terrorist had blown up an oil rig and been imprisoned for years. Beside me, I heard joyful calls where people reunited after being thought dead. Others were darker.
Photo by Chiara Cappiello
With the news that every other Eclipse mission had failed and Earth’s climate was worsening, there was even more pressure for us to secure Gliese 628A for human colonisation. I dreaded what that might mean given fears of the NHIL.
An impromptu rave in the hard science dome also went ahead at 9:30pm, powered by portable speakers and LED lights some players had brought along. This was very fun and had some great dancing. Because it was a larp, some players distributed space drugs (again, my term) and of course, one person overdosed and was administered to by medics. The party continued, another person fell over but then got up again because he was only playing as drunk.
Voight-Kampff style Hard Science Mindlink procedures
While chatting to a soft scientist at the rave, I realised I had no idea exactly what they were doing during their work shifts. When they said they were talking to the NHIL, did they literally stand in front of the alien? What did the alien do in response? My uncertainty felt peculiarly thrilling and realistic, aided by the larp’s lack of internal photo and video documentation; some philosophers might even call it a process of re-enchanting the world.
Day 2 also saw the opening of the larp’s focus rooms. These were partly in-game and out-of-game, a way for players to abstractly experience the process of travelling lightyears from Earth. You entered a dark room with moody lighting, sat in front of a mirror, and put on a headset. The looping audio had an ASMR quality to it and prompted you to breathe, open or close your eyes, while visualising a kind of Powers of Ten movie scene. It was a nice way to chill out while remaining in the game space.
Me in the empty focus room
The day ended with our being summoned to K1 again for an encounter with the NHIL. It looked ill, our unseen narrator explained, and it swore vengeance against us for the harms we’d done to its children.
Bowie outro music again, then coaches back to the hotel.
Day 3
Game
During our opening briefing, we discovered that the NHIL from the previous night had attacked our base’s environmental systems. It had failed to cause any damage, however. All humanity’s hopes lay with us.
Our morning exploration shift required two hooks this time, perhaps due to the elevated threat. One of the Romeo team members began planning out our mission so I asked, a little grumpily, who made them our supervisor. Someone said “she’s Argo” and expected me to understand. As I later read in the larp guide, members of Argo Academy are trained as leaders and co-ordinators, so they were actually role playing correctly – but I didn’t know this and so didn’t support her role play. Afterwards, a player suggested Academy “sidespecs” were under-theorised in that they had no substantive recognition by the game system or other characters outside of emergencies.
No matter – we had a mission to find artefacts in a tænari “village”. We assumed this would be easy because most of the sites we’d visited were pretty small, but the village turned out to be an entire collection of huts and barns. We fanned out, eventually encountering three statues of NHIL, surrounding an etched metal disc, which later caused memory loss from people who touched it (I’m still not sure whether it was secretly prompted by our supervisor or just a fun bit of improvisation). Analysis of the disc revealed the location of NHIL’s home planet, along with a special plant cultivated by the tænari that could kill the NHIL in minutes.
Photo by Chiara Cappiello
Because we’d seen the statues and village with our own eyes rather than just read about them in a report, this was by far the most interesting debrief of the game, one in which we, once again, were trying to determine whether co-existence with the NHIL was possible. What did the statues mean? Did the tænari hate the NHIL or respect them? I noted the status hadn’t been defaced, which is what you’d expect in a conflict, but others suggested they were placed at the edge of the village as a warning (out-of-game, I assumed this was for “level design” purposes, so we’d discover them last).
One team reported that when the NHIL arrived on Gliese 628A, they erected a monument declaring they came in peace; only later was there a misunderstanding that led to war. There were rumours a hard science team had talked to the planet itself; others claimed the NHIL had summoned a “sword of light” from the planet to attack the tænari, though exactly what that meant was anyone’s guess. I felt I’d been transported into a Stanislaw Lem novel. Hubristic colonisers, exhausting debates about the impossibility of communication, Soviet aesthetics, annihilation superweapons – it was a perfect hard sci-fi cocktail that benefitted from larps’ extreme duration.
Imagine the person in the centre of this explorer team debrief is me, all the time. Photo by Chiara Cappiello.
In the afternoon, Romeo team took a group photo, taking advantage of an official base photographer. They tried to find me for twenty minutes and pinged me via chat, but decided to go ahead without me. I was a little annoyed when someone asked why I hadn’t come; the bad network connection meant I didn’t bother checking my tablet regularly. Not coincidentally, I was troubled about how I was playing Bex. For an “eternal nomad who does not trust relationships” he was getting on far too well with his teammates. I couldn’t figure out how to play a loner in a game that’s fundamentally social in its nature but it felt wrong for him to suddenly become trusting.
Being left out from the group photo was the perfect opportunity to turn things around. At Romeo’s afternoon briefing, I upped my annoyance from a 3 to a 10 and lashed out. I fumed and swore at my teammates, saying I was going to request a transfer since I clearly wasn’t wanted. I even got to chew out the character who always had an answer for everything.
My eruption didn’t delay our final shift, in which we scanned an underground NHIL temple. One player was careless with handling their laser, leading to amusingly fussy disagreements on whether the measurements had been done “correctly”. Still, we covered a huge amount of ground, much to the delight of our Argo team member.
Analysis revealed temple inscriptions stating the NHIL had visited multiple planets on their way to Gliese 628A but had moved on because “genetic merger” wasn’t possible. The analysis also confirmed that human/NHIL merger was possible, with other teams revealing their aim to incorporate humanity’s “progressive traits” so that both species could survive.
Photo by Chiara Cappiello
Merger or annihilation? That was the subject of our final debrief. With Earth on the brink of environmental collapse and our base being their only hope, a few in Romeo wanted any excuse to kill the last remaining NHIL on Gliese 628A in an attempt to pave the way for “safe” human colonisation. The temple inscriptions could be lies, they argued. It was them or us. And didn’t they try to murder us last night?
It felt distasteful to hear players pushing for genocide even though I knew it was an act and the larp was fiction. I struggled, unsuccessfully, to not let it affect me personally. Abigail Nussbaum says novels lead us “outside of morality”, making us accomplices of jealousy and revenge, in order to illuminate their boundaries. Larps help us explore distressing boundaries more directly, even as players remain thoughtful and self-reflexive. It’s legitimate for Eclipse to tackle these issues given humanity’s dark history of colonisation. But as an experienced larper suggested, when there are actual genocidal people in the real world being more public about their aims, it’s harder to know whether a player is putting on an act or not. Someone can act evil in a game, but they should understand they’re the villain.
Our argument was repeated across the whole base. Yggdrasil’s final predictions of our mission’s fate only raised the temperature:
Put everyone into cryogenic suspension and wait for another way forward.
Make Gliese 628A safe for human colonisation by nuking the entire base and the last remaining NHIL along with it.
Genetically merge all humans on Gliese 628A with the NHIL, initiating a consciousness and memory reset.
As we awaited our fate to be announced by Earth, the final few hours of the game revealed everything the larp had become.
Deepwater Academy called an emergency meeting in the main auditorium. I was told it descended into a shouting match despite their “empathic, intuitive, analytical” values. Touchingly, some explorers organised knowledge sharing meetings; now that each team had seen all five sites, we could finally talk about them openly and record everything we’d seen in writing. Our writeups are probably still archived on Chaos League’s server somewhere.
But most people I saw had a sense of anticipation, or resignation – there would be no further work shifts, nothing left to solve or discover. Waiting in line for dinner, a member of Romeo who’d also played my affection on Earth had a toy duck on his shoulder. Someone asked what it would say if it could talk. He said Bex should know he had friends at the base. A broker roved the hall with a handwritten list: the seven year time jump meant some people had spare tickets to Gliese 628A and they aimed to be a matchmaker.
We were called into our final briefing from Earth after dinner. Cryogenic suspension was dismissed out of hand, and they didn’t think a nuclear explosion would destroy the NHIL. Therefore, we were ordered to merge with the NHIL. Earth was lost, but at least this way something of humanity might still survive.
Our NPC staffer quickly modelled the larp’s desired behaviour, saying he hated the decision but would abide by it, and asked us to meet in K1 for our merger with the NHIL in a couple of hours. Lots of people shouted that they’d never merge. Everyone gradually drifted away, meeting with their teams one final time.
I remained, mordantly chatting with a friend that this was the best outcome we could have hoped for. I wasn’t planning to seek out my Romeo teammates, thinking a Hollywood ending didn’t make sense for Bex, but as we got up to leave, we spotted them right at the top of the auditorium. I decided to join them, curious what they made of our orders.
Just a few hours earlier, Romeo were arguing vehemently about the merger, but the finality of Earth’s decision seemed to have crystallised something in the doubters. We were explorers, so why not continue exploring the stars? Better for humanity’s last mission to make something new rather than simply die, forgotten. I didn’t say it out loud, but I chose to reconcile with them. What more could I want than friends who could face the unknown without fear? For the last thirty hours I’d felt a bit distant from my character, but now, in an empty auditorium at the end of the world, Eclipse finally seemed astonishingly real.
We decided to record a group video diary on one of our tablets for our descendants. This time, I joked, we’d get everyone in. Just one person left afterwards, unwilling to merge. I later heard she committed suicide by overdose with a few other holdouts in the focus rooms. Other explorers walked out into the forest on a final expedition.
In K1, we assembled for the grand finale. Our unnamed narrator described the bodily feeling of merging. Inevitably, it was a little underwhelming because the moment had been built up so much, but it’s hard to know what could’ve worked here given Eclipse’s limited budget. What came after was the perfect capstone, though. A hidden projector flickered to life, displaying a montage of players’ departure logs recorded weeks earlier, describing their hopes for the mission. I couldn’t imagine a better transition back to reality.
Post-Game
The moment the outro music began, everyone started hugging each other. For practically the first time in three days, we could talk about what had happened to our characters.
The lounge was converted into a bar selling real alcohol to support future Chaos League larps. Payment was done on trust – I wrote down my drinks and got an invoice a few days later.
The afterparty is a beloved staple of larps. Organisers rarely make money so they need to find motivation elsewhere, and being thanked by grateful players isn’t bad at all. One member of Romeo asked me whether I was genuinely annoyed by being left out of the photo. Another praised how I made our final briefing more exciting (“they were getting a bit boring”), while the teammate I argued with enjoyed that I pushed back. Everyone joked about acting differently whenever they saw a photographer.
The coach arrived at 1:30am. I left for the airport the next morning, missing the two-hour debrief. I asked Alessandro Giovannucci, co-founder of Chaos League, how it went. Here’s my summary of his notes:
We started with some de-roleing activities to gradually get out of character: structured conversations to make sense of the experience and socialise what happened in the game; visualisation exercises (the character walking away, etc.); and writing down one’s experience on a piece of paper to make it “external” and thus understand it better.
Next, discussions in groups of three. Prompts included: “Who did you play with that touched you deeply? What was the most intense scene in the larp? Did you feel something you had never felt before? What was something you liked about your character you want to carry on with you?”
Finally, free time for unstructured discussions to progressively descend before leaving the venue.
Some Notes on Gameplay…
Larp is deeply personal. Not just in terms of taste, but in the simple fact that your experience will vary greatly depending on your character and relationships and what you put into the game. Some think a player reviewing a larp is as nonsensical as a violinist reviewing their orchestra – larpers aren’t consuming media but co-creating it as they watch it.
For that reason alone, I want to be careful in drawing broad conclusions about Eclipse, but also because Giovannucci has thoughts about critique in larp I fear I will not live up (PDF, p281). While I’ve read an awful lot about larp, this was my first multi-day experience, so I have little to compare it to. I had to lean on experienced larpers to get more context for these notes.
Eclipse’s gameplay is avowedly idiot-proof. Its team-based structure means that if one player doesn’t contribute, the game and plot as a whole can continue. Apparently this is very different to Odysseus, where individual players failing to do their jobs can cause real problems for others. Someone even suggested to me that Eclipse felt more like an immersive experience than a larp.
Photo by Chiara Cappiello
This is very much intended by Eclipse, whose larp guide cites redundancy as a key design principle, and yet is contradicted elsewhere by the suggestion that “every character will have one or more duties to carry out, all of which will have a meaningful impact on the mission’s survival and outcome.” I was so carried away by the story and setting and relationships that, outside of my problems with explorer gameplay, I didn’t notice this lack of agency, but when I compare it to other larps I’ve played, the contrast is clear. During Seaside Prison, a larp set in a fictional occupied Finland, I played a student. Nominally, I had very little agency, but depending on the letters I wrote and decisions I made, I affected everyone’s fate.
Arguably, the same was true in Eclipse, at least in terms of characters’ personal lives. I’m sure the wedding in the first run of the game was very significant for everyone involved. However, our personal lives in Eclipse were essentially firewalled from the wider plot, which didn’t care whether anyone got married. Reporting to Yggdrasil was the only way for players to affect the outcome, and because decisions were aggregated from 150 players, individual agency felt weak. Had the ending not required every player to have the same outcome, something that only makes sense in a quasi-military setting where characters can be ordered to do things, decisions made in character’s personal lives – like marriages – would have had a greater lasting significance.
Is this bad design? Not if you want a larp that prioritises forward narrative momentum and has a collective ending, nor if you place more value on the journey rather than the destination.
…and Story
Chaos League cites Arrival and Interstellar as key inspirations, but Eclipse reminded me most strongly of Stanislaw Lem’s science fiction, particularly Fiasco, The Invincible, and Solaris. Lem was Polish, and actually lived in Krakow for a while, not far from Alvernia Planet. According to Wikipedia:
Lem’s science fiction works explore philosophical themes through speculations on technology, the nature of intelligence, the impossibility of communication with and understanding of alien intelligence, despair about human limitations, and humanity’s place in the universe.
Eclipse’s spectacular setting, costumes, and technology got me in the right frame of mind for a science fiction experience, but it was the larp’s gameplay, social organisation and, most of all, storytelling that truly evoked Lem’s core themes. We could only guess what the NHIL really wanted and the constant arguments within the base certainly drove me to despair. The themes of nuclear annihilation and genocide are as depressingly topical today as it was in Lem’s main period during the mid-20th century, too. Interestingly, genocide was also the focus in Odysseus. It is a little disquieting that the two blockbuster sci-fi larps in recent years both essentially force players into a moral choice between survival and extermination.
Photo by Chiara Cappiello
But Eclipse is not Stanislaw Lem. There was a third outcome, one that presented transformation – a leap into the unknown – as a hopeful, beautiful act. It was not conservative or fearful or nostalgic, and for that, it’s something I will always treasure.
Epilogue
Eclipse’s players weren’t professional actors reading from a script, but weeks later I can still remember conversations vividly. It still amazes me that it works, yet, for seasoned players it’s just another larp.
Some larpers are waiting for the moment when the mainstream will take them seriously. In truth, there’s barely any mainstream left, just bigger and smaller influencers and interest groups that occasionally coalesce into moments of monoculture. Larp may be incompatible with traditional media and arts coverage that’s obsessed with scale and convenience and is terrified of participation, but it’s very compatible with the move away from massive algorithmically-driven online communities to smaller ones that value embodied interaction.
In many ways, larp isn’t accessible. You need to participate in hours of workshops. You have to commit to the premise earnestly. Big events are few and far between, and surprisingly hard to find. If you want them to exist, you have to help build them yourselves, and then co-create them in the moment. On paper, larps are the same kind of frictionless, transactional liminoid experience as immersive theatre or theme parks or escape rooms, but in practice they require and reward a level of commitment that looks much more like genuinely liminal rituals – a ritual of rituals, even.
At the afterparty, I remarked to Giovannucci that Eclipse’s production values rivalled those of multimillion dollar immersive experience. He didn’t seem at all surprised. Volunteers might not be as skilled as the very best professionals, but if they’re doing something they love they can give much more of their time than the latter, whom even well-funded companies can barely afford. And to think that fewer than a thousand people might ever see Eclipse.
Bex’s personalised New Era pendant
One of those players left a New Era pendant by every locker. I didn’t check mine until someone said that each had its own personalised message. Other players wrote and ran a three-part TTRPG epilogue on Discord. Nordic-style larp only survives if people have such a good time they come back with their friends and eventually become creators themselves, so there’s little room for gatekeeping. Never-ending “campaign” larps can reward players with character advancement across years and decades, but since each Nordic larp starts from scratch, players can feel more like equals – not to mention it opens the possibility for stories with actual endings.
The demands of larp raise fears that it’s impossible to write about them. Doesn’t reflecting on them in the moment, taking notes as I did, de-immerse you? Are you really participating if you’re observing what you’re doing all the time? It’s an odd argument. Movie and video game critics manage it just fine. Our lives are a constant act, it’s just that in larp the act is more transparent and reciprocal. If anything, larp trains us to observe ourselves better.
Lately, digital distractions have become society’s bête noire. Conservatives blame them for a drop in sociality, declining birth rates and, by implication, the end of “western civilisation”. Other than returning to religion or banning technology, they have no solution.
I know a fair bit about digital distractions myself. I spent 45 minutes a day solving crosswords and puzzles on Puzzmo for 556 days in a row. There are far worse things to do with one’s time, but I don’t mind saying it went beyond a habit to being an addiction. I maintained my streak despite travelling all over the world on holiday and for work. I played while I was jetlagged, while I was ill, while I was with friends and family.
Eclipse broke my streak. I easily could’ve stepped outside during the larp to play one or two puzzles at a time, but… I didn’t want to. There was something more meaningful to do.
Larp can be so consuming it ejects you from your normal relationship with reality. It looks scary from the outside but even at three days, it’s only a short moment in our lives. During that moment, we had the opportunity to shift angle. Eclipse was like a simulated near-death experience, an attempt to convince players they were on the brink of unimaginable transformation.
A month on, life is mostly back to normal. I’m doing the same work and exercise and reading I did before. But I still haven’t touched Puzzmo once.
Me in my Explorer jumpsuit
Thanks to Alex Macmillan, Alessandro Giovannucci, Chaos League, and the entire crew of Eclipse Run #2 for their contributions to this essay.
All photos by Chiara Cappiello are from Run #1, while all other uncredited photos are by me from Run #2.
Cover image: The Eclipse site, photo by Chaos League
Editorial note: This article was originally published in the Knutepunkt 2025 book Anatomy of Larp Thoughts, a breathing corpus. It has been reprinted from there with the editors’ and authors’ permission. It has not been edited by Nordiclarp.org.
The Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser, popularly known as the “Star Wars hotel”, was a live action experience in Walt Disney World, Florida. Over the course of 40 hours, hundreds of guests (Disney’s term for visitors or players) picked sides between the heroic Resistance and the evil First Order, taking on missions from spies, smugglers, and soldiers. Basically, it’s a romantic drama – Casablanca in space.
The Starcruiser opened to great fanfare in March 2022 as one of the most ambitious permanent “immersive” experiences ever made. Initial reviews were generally positive, but coverage was dominated by its price – as much as $6000 for a cabin holding up to four or five people, far more than traditional cruises or theme park stays. Many people couldn’t understand how it could justify such a high price. Eighteen months later, the Starcruiser closed for reasons that are still not fully known. In 2024, after the closure, YouTuber Jenny Nicholson described her poor experience in a four hour video((Jenny Nicholson, “The Spectacular Failure of the Star Wars Hotel,” May 19, 2024, Jenny Nicholson, YouTube, 4:05:38, https://youtu.be/T0CpOYZZZW4.)) that attracted over ten million views. The video and the closure established a widespread narrative of the Starcruiser as a cynical, unmitigated disaster.
When I learned of the Starcruiser’s impending closure, I rushed to book a ticket for one of the final “sailings” in the summer of 2023. As an augmented reality and alternate reality game designer, I was keen to see it with my own eyes. Based on that visit and my subsequent research, I believe the Starcruiser is more interesting than a simple folly. It has many parallels to larps – especially high price, deeply immersive 360º((Johanna Koljonen, “eye-witness to the illusion: an essay on the impossibility of 360° role-playing,” in Lifelike (Knudepunkt 2007), ed. Jesper Donnis, Morten Gade, Line Thorup (Knudepunkt 2007, 2007), 175.)) blockbuster larps such as Odysseus (inspired by Battlestar Galactica), Conscience (Westworld), and Eclipse (Arrival/Interstellar) – with many innovative and impressive aspects that are worth studying. At the same time, its confusing marketing raised unrealistic expectations and exacerbated flaws like poor onboarding.
This article explores the contrasts between the Starcruiser and larps, such as its lack of workshops and training; highly realistic player tasks; spaces for relaxation and guest-to-guest interaction; app-based NPC interactions; and its profit-based commercial nature. This will include observations of the experience, its technical achievements, and my encounters with other players. Finally, it will explore the Starcruiser’s financials, confusing marketing, and the circumstances surrounding its closure. The Starcruiser represents a harbinger of the future for all blockbuster larps, whether made by volunteers or billion dollar corporations.
Disney has long experimented with role playing. Early Disneyland rides were designed from the perspective of protagonists, meaning guests on the Snow White attraction or Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride saw neither Snow White nor Mr. Toad – they were the characters.((Leslie Iwerks, “Chapter 2: The Happiest Place on Earth,” in The Imagineering Story: The Official Biography of Walt Disney Imagineering (Disney Editions, 2022).)) This was later changed due to the confusion it caused, but the interest in role play remained. The cancelled Disney’s America theme park, intended to open in 1998, would have included Civil War battle re-enactments;((Iwerks, “Chapter 16: The Battle of Disney’s America,” The Imagineering Story.)) Bob Weis, Senior Vice President, said, “We want to make you a Civil War soldier. We want to make you feel what it was like to be a slave or what it was like to escape through the Underground Railroad,” arguing the park couldn’t present a rose-tinted view of America.
Less controversially, guests would later be chosen to play roles in a re-enactment of Beauty and the Beast, and new Star Wars and Marvel attractions in the parks have emphasised making guests “part of the stories being told, to give them a role other than passive view”, such as using web slingers to fight alongside Spider-Man. These examples afford comparatively little agency to guests, but the direction of travel is clear.
Along with researching escape rooms and immersive theatre, senior Disney Imagineers – the workers responsible for the company’s theme parks and attractions – have been playing Nordic Larp for years. A number of Imagineers were on the Monitor Celestra in 2013, and Sara Thacher, a senior Imagineer who worked on the Starcruiser, attended the College of Wizardry twice. “A big ‘Aha!’ moment for me there was just being in a castle, in a wizard robe, having a cup of tea, and having this alibi, this reason to be there,” she told The New Yorker.((Neima Jahromi, “LARPing Goes to Disney World,” New Yorker, May 23, 2022, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/05/30/larping-goes-to-disney-world.)) In the Starcruiser, guests have a full schedule of classes and activities and optional quests, but the Sublight Lounge bar also provides an alibi to relax with a card game of Sabacc.
Playing Sabacc in the Sublight lounge bar, photo by Adrian Hon
These explicit links make it possible to view the Starcruiser through the lens of larp. Given the Starcruiser’s use of schedules and NPCs and its lack of boffer-style combat, the best parallel may be Eastern European larp like the College of Wizardry. Scott Trowbridge, another senior Imagineer, noted that some larps “can be intense experiences, and that is probably not what we want to offer to our mainstream audience,” indicating a reluctance to give players the intense emotional experiences that often characterise Nordic larp.
The biggest argument against the Starcruiser being a larp, let alone a Nordic Larp, is that it provides precisely zero training or workshops for guests in how to role play. Guests are not given or suggested characters or character archetypes to play; instead, they arrive on the Starcruiser – a cruise ship for interstellar tourists – as naive passengers from Earth, playing themselves, with their own alibi to ask basic questions about the Star Wars universe. Some guests did create their own characters and backstory, and performers would play along, within reason: claiming to be Darth Vader wouldn’t work.
Rather than train guests how to participate, I’ve been told that the Starcruiser’s professional “NPC” performers were trained to “meet people where they are”, which is to say, interact with guests and encourage them to participate to the extent they appear comfortable to do so, whether simply through eye contact or by dialogue. No doubt there are financial and practical reasons behind this, too: workshops were not automatically welcomed in Nordic Larp and it’s safe to assume the Starcruiser’s guests would be similarly sceptical toward a multi-hour introductory workshop.
During my visit to the Starcruiser in July 2023, I noticed two problems with the zero-training philosophy. The first was that for some guests, “where they are” was in their cabin, away from any opportunity for anyone to engage them. The second was that despite the impressive number of performers, there were too few to engage every guest in the first few hours.
While loitering in the lobby shortly after boarding on the first day, I saw two young guests watching as others talked to a First Order performer. They were wearing impressive, custom-made costumes and were clearly keen to participate, but didn’t know how. Even a brief workshop might have given them the confidence, but their approach to the dark side would have to wait.
Given how its designers evidently steered away from Nordic Larp’s fundamental tenets, it’s wrong to view the Starcruiser as a literal larp. Rather, it’s better to view it as a hybrid form, at the far end of larp, not merely at the far (less involved) end of role playing, but also at the far end of physical scale and technological complexity. No imagination was necessary on the Starcruiser: the engineering bay was packed with ducts and pipes and cables to be fixed, the bridge bordered by a vast panoramic view of space, and the Sublight Lounge’s bar atmosphere was suffused in the perfect combination of luxury and intrigue. All views of outer space on the bridge and through cabin “portholes” were synchronised in real time. In formal terms, every effort was made to make appearances and tasks indexical((Jaakko Stenros, Eleanor Saitta, Markus Montola, “The General Problem of Indexicality in Larp Design,” in Liminal Encounters: Evolving Discourse in Nordic and Nordic Inspired Larp, ed. Kaisa Kangas, Jonne Arjoranta, Ruska Kevätkoski (Ropecon ry, 2024), 64.)) rather than iconic or symbolic.
The Starcruiser was presented to guests as an interstellar luxury cruise. The idea of a cruise felt discordant with how the Star Wars universe has been popularly depicted – we don’t see Luke Skywalker embark on a cruise, but we do see Harry Potter going to classes in Hogwarts – but it provided a reason to structure guests’ time like a real cruise; one hour might be dedicated to lightsaber training, and another to Sabacc lessons. This is not unusual amongst Nordic Larp; Odysseus has been described as a “clockwork larp”, running on a strict schedule of hyperspace jumps, and the College of Wizardry and various magic schools have scheduled classes. The Content Larp Manifesto((“Content larp manifesto”, accessed December 19, 2024, https://manifest.larpy.cz/en/)) also describes Czech larps (e.g. Legion)((“Legion: Siberian Story – LARP by Rolling,” accessed December 19, 2024, https://legion.rolling.cz.)) that use timed and pre-written scenes in the service of dramatic stories. Indeed, a planned and predictable experience is what some larpers desire,((Anni Tolvanen, “A Full House Trumps a Dance Card,” lecture, September 9, 2022, posted September 11, 2022, by Nordic Larp Talks, YouTube, 24:01, https://youtu.be/SPWCXf_LrSs.)) perhaps at the cost of openness and serendipity.
Performer movements were, if anything, even more tightly scheduled. Earpieces conveyed timing cues so they knew when to move on for an “accidental” confrontation in a hallway. In retrospect, performers’ ability to improvise dialogue with guests to fill the precise amount of time before their next move was remarkable.
Where the Starcruiser appears to depart from Nordic Larp is that guests were incapable of influencing the major beats and ultimate outcome of the story. No matter what guests did, there was always a confrontation between the ship’s captain and a First Order officer during dinner. Chewbacca always escaped from confinement, and Rey always made it on board – and yet guests felt crucial to the story because we were actively relaying secret messages and distracting Stormtroopers.
Caught up in the excitement, it was easy to forget our lack of agency to dramatically change events. This was not surprising given the source material’s spectacular nature. Odysseus’ play instructions also elevated discipline over agency: the larp was “designed to be a tunnel not a sandbox… this is not a game to be hacked, won or overachieved.” However, the absence of meaningful deliberation was most notable during the conclusion, which reminded everyone that in the final analysis, the Star Wars universe remains dominated by superpowered Force users – in this case, Rey and Kylo Ren battling on a balcony – rather than one where passengers gets a vote.
Talking to other guests wasn’t a necessary part of the Starcruiser experience. It was encouraged, but the endless scheduled activities and optional quests (see below) meant it was less of a priority in terms of creating entertainment and drama. I quickly abandoned my attempts at role playing a morally ambiguous scientist after a couple of conversations went nowhere. However, NPC performers worked hard to engage guests. A lovelorn musician who needed relationship advice would ask children for help writing songs, while a Han Solo-esque scoundrel NPC recounted his exploits to guests in the bar. Some guests played along, talking about their own exploits or poking holes in his stories. One guest demonstrated his homemade droid collection in the lobby. Many had become friends on previous voyages or via forums, which inevitably felt a touch exclusionary, but their costuming and role playing-adjacent attitude helped enrich the Starcruiser’s atmosphere.
None of these activities “mattered” in terms of changing the plot or ultimate fate of characters, but they were enjoyable and gave meaning to guests’ own stories. It was as if the sheer quantity of performers and length of the experience partly made up for the lack of workshops – most guests who didn’t know how to interact at the beginning could learn by watching, their initial discomfort long forgotten by the end. Since performers were trained to memorise guests’ names, it was common to be asked for an update on your activities by Resistance or First Order agents while on your way to dinner.
What many accounts fail to convey is how much of the Starcruiser experience was driven digitally. Every guest had access to a Datapad smartphone app with which they could talk to NPCs – the very same NPCs walking around the ship. In classic video game RPG fashion, guests could respond to messages with 1-3 prewritten options of varying levels of curiosity and enthusiasm. More unusually, not only could you lie to NPCs by giving them incorrect information, you could outright betray them.
Lt. Croy, flanked by stormtroopers, photo by Adrian Hon
On my first mission for Lt. Croy, a First Order officer, I was tasked with hacking into a physical console to find the ship’s logs. I discovered the Starcruiser had diverted its itinerary on previous cruises to supply Resistance bases with weapons; I was able to copy the logs to my Datapad, but I could have deleted or overwritten them. Because I am a boring role player, I sent the logs to Croy, but I don’t doubt that betraying him would’ve had lasting consequences through the branching story, perhaps introducing me to Resistance members.
As more NPCs introduced themselves on the Datapad, barely a moment passed between invitations to sabotage the ship’s systems, hack the computers, search for contraband, or smuggle on board an agent – all of which involved physically walking to the engineering bay or cargo hold to connecting wires and scan codes, with NPCs instantly “knowing” when I’d completed my task. It was deeply impressive technology that worked flawlessly for me, a gold-plated version of the busywork seen in other sci-fi blockbuster larps like Odysseus’ RFID-powered HANSCA((James Bloodworth, “Odysseus 2024 / A Retrospective,” Critical Path, September 2, 2024, https://criticalpathsite.wordpress.com/2024/09/02/odysseus-2024-a-retrospective/.)) smartphone app. Another digital experience was delivered by the video comm link in my cabin, where droids would periodically call asking for help to aid or stymie the resistance. This worked wholly via voice recognition and was surprisingly funny. It goes without saying that all of these tasks and experiences were fundamentally “single player”, in the sense that co-operating with other guests was unnecessary – a marked difference to Odysseus.
A highly indexical puzzle in the engineering bay, photo by Adrian Hon
The technical complexity of the Starcruiser is likely the reason why some guests suffered major issues around the launch period in early 2022 wherein their Datapad didn’t steer them toward interesting activities. Other accounts suggest these problems were largely fixed within weeks or months, but the damage had been done: critics((Charlie Hall, “Disney’s Star Wars hotel Galactic Starcruiser was torpedoed by bad app design,” Polygon, May 28, 2024, https://www.polygon.com/star-wars/24166456/disney-star-wars-hotel-video-galactic-starcruiser-jenny-nicholson-bad-app.)) then and now incorrectly believed the technical issues were permanent, like a rollercoaster whose tracks couldn’t be moved rather than a video game that could be updated over time.
The cost of tickets to the Starcruiser also fuelled the notion that it was a cynical ploy to rip off guests. Depending on the timing of a visit, it was possible to spend as much as $6000 (€5500) for single person staying in their own cabin – an astronomical amount compared to other attractions. However, if four people shared a cabin, as is common in larps and on cruises, each person might only $1200 (€1100). There is no way to make €1100 sound cheap, but it’s comparable to the cost of blockbuster larps; my ticket to Eclipse this year will cost €875 (including a shared room in a 3 star hotel). The fact that I met so many repeat visitors, most of whom were staying three or four to a cabin, indicated they felt it was good value. Caro Murphy, Immersive Experience Director for the Starcruiser, revealed((Caro Murphy, “Reacting to a reaction,” Caro Murphy, May 30, 2024, https://www.polygon.com/star-wars/24166456/disney-star-wars-hotel-video-galactic-starcruiser-jenny-nicholson-bad-app.)) it achieved a 91% guest satisfaction score, supposedly the highest rating in the history of any Disney attraction. Starcruiser fans have organised conventions,((“Halcy-Con | A 2-Day Galactic Starcruiser Superfans Event,” Halcy-Con, archived September 12, 2024, https://web.archive.org/web/20240912154545/https://halcy-con.com/.)) created podcasts, and made movies.
The closure of the Starcruiser may seem to contradict this argument, or at least suggest it was not popular or profitable enough. It’s too soon to know Disney’s real reasons, but Kathryn Yu has noted that most analyses fail to take into account wider corporate circumstances. In 2023, Disney faced an activist shareholder battle; in a bid to raise free cash, returning CEO Bob Iger promised to cut $5.5 billion in costs, quickly selling off TV shows and eliminating 7000 jobs.((“Disney Completes 7,000 Job Cuts,” Variety, May 31, 2023, https://variety.com/2023/tv/news/disney-layoffs-end-7000-1235629809/.)) Closing the Starcruiser effectively unlocked hundreds of millions of dollars via accelerated depreciation,((Suzanne Rowan Kelleher, “The High-Flying Death Of Disney’s Star Wars Hotel,” Forbes, May 28, 2023, https://www.forbes.com/sites/suzannerowankelleher/2023/05/28/why-disney-closed-star-wars-hotel-galactic-starcruiser/.)) a move that may have been hastened by the imminent phasing out of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act’s “bonus depreciation”.
Regardless, it’s undeniable that the Starcruiser had an uneven launch and was poorly understood. I can’t help but think the Starcruiser would have been more successful, or at least made more sense as an expensive multi-day attraction, had the setup been that guests were secret agents merely pretending to be guests on an interstellar cruise. As much as the conceit of being naive cruise passengers provided structure and alibi in the absence of a workshop, it also made the entire experience appear deeply boring from the outside – a sample “itinerary”((Shannen Ace, “Disney Releases Sample 3-Day Itinerary of Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser Hotel Experience,” WDW News Today, August 4, 2021, https://wdwnt.com/2021/08/disney-releases-sample-itinerary-for-star-wars-galactic-starcruiser-experience/.)) revealed in 2021 suggested that these opportunities to sabotage the ship would be few and far between, rather than the bulk of the experience. It’s tantamount to marketing malpractice that these more adventurous aspects were omitted in favour of a focus on “luxury” – misleading, since the Starcruiser’s cabins and amenities were not luxurious in a conventional sense.
Disney’s position at the top of the entertainment world comes with increased expectations and a lack of willingness for customers to accept problems. Larps, as largely co-created, volunteer-run, non-profit experiences with little to no marketing budgets, attract players who are more experienced and tolerant of problems, creating a reservoir of goodwill understandably absent for a multi-billion dollar corporation. Larp promotion also tends to be more transparent about the details of player experience, helping avoid problems. This is no doubt borne out of decades of experience throughout the larp community – something the Starcruiser’s marketers and customers lacked.
Goodwill is essential with larp-like experiences becoming as technically complex as video games – and growing the chances for things to go catastrophically wrong. Game developers have adapted by instituting lengthy beta testing and “early access” periods. A similar strategy may have helped the Starcruiser’s launch; failing that, proactively offering full refunds for major technical issues would have restored some goodwill. Other blockbuster larps could manage technical risk by pooling resources on open source projects, as Odysseus did with the open source EmptyEpsilon “bridge simulator” game engine. This was probably not an option for Disney given the highly specific needs of a Star Wars-based experience and their desire to maintain a technical advantage over competitors.
An undercover agent beside Chewbacca, photo by Adrian Hon
The Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser was an admirable foray into creating a larp-like experience for mass audiences on a gargantuan scale. It was not perfect, but it was far from a disaster.
One can imagine a different outcome. If the Starcruiser had been marketed better and had launched with more robust technology, it could have attracted more guests; if Disney hadn’t been subject to a shareholder battle, there would have been less incentive to close it. The Starcruiser might be expanding around the world, employing hundreds of people to entertain hundreds of thousands of guests per year. It almost got there. Regardless, the Starcruiser highlights a growing appetite for larp, and a growing willingness to pay for blockbuster experiences. Some of its fans have moved on to larping as a way to continue their hobby.
It’s impossible to say when Disney or other theme parks will create another blockbuster larp-like experience given the negative sentiment now surrounding the Starcruiser. But this demonstrates the strength of the decentralised, non-profit, volunteer-run international larp community – it can withstand failures and misunderstandings, learn from them, and keep going.
This article is republished from the Knutepunkt 2025 book. Please cite it as:
Hon, Adrian. 2025. “Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser – The Blockbuster to End All Blockbusters.” In Anatomy of Larp Thoughts, a breathing corpus: Knutepunkt Conference 2025. Oslo. Fantasiforbundet.
Cover image: The bridge of the Starcruiser, photo by Adrian Hon
Nordic larp thrives on intimacy. Whether through whispered conspiracies at a dinner table, a dramatic breakdown in an argument with a sibling or silent devastation in a lover’s embrace, the magic of larps often hinges on the connections between players. For me, relations between characters are at the core of what enables connection when it’s narratively driven and not purely based on player chemistry.
This article started as a reflection on why I design relations the way that I do. You may also already write relations. I hope this article serves as an inspiration piece for one of the very interesting ways to enable intense relations in a larp: dyadic play. In this framework, characters are designed in pairs and two people are locked into a singular dynamic which shapes the experience around them.
What is Dyadic Play?
Dyadic play is a larp design structure where two players embody characters deeply entangled with each other (Bowman, 2024). This pair can take many forms: lovers, enemies, siblings, rivals, or even two halves of the same character. Dyads are not always romantic; friendships, rivalries, and toxic dynamics are equally valid. For me, the defining element is that their narratives and/or experience are not just intertwined but interdependent.
The Inspired of Comedy, Christian Schönburg, and the Muse of Comedy Thalia at Helicon. Photo: Bjørn-Morten Gundersen.
Variations
Some larps, like Baphomet (2015), have used dyadic play to explore themes of marriage and partnership, ensuring that each player always has a deeply connected co-player. Delirium (2010) went even further by requiring five workshop days where pairs who signed up together built their shared culture, relationships, and character dynamics before stepping into the game itself.
Many blackbox larps and chamber larps have also used an intimate pairing where you could for example be a ghost of a deceased family member following the character around or the internal monologue of the person. In larps where one character exists in a liminal state – such as a ghost tethered to their living counterpart – this dual perspective also provides a unique means of influencing the external world without direct interaction.
Cecilia, the snake, and Professor Rowan McMillen at Daemon showing different sides of the professor. Photo: Bjørn-Morten Gundersen.
In Daemon (Wind, 2021-) I wanted to both push the dyadic design element to its extreme and detach it from the conventional themes of romance and sexuality. The dyadic structure forms the vision and the core of the experience by casting players as two facets of the same person: daemon and human. All other design choices tie to this vision of experiencing being two people who together play the whole character. The daemon, manifested in an animal form, embodies the human’s subconscious and deeper self: the soul. A key design priority for me was ensuring that both players were physically present within the diegesis and that communication between them remained fully audible and intelligible to all participants. This is coherent with the novel series that inspired the larp, His Dark Materials (Pullman 1995-2000).
Daemon also adds enforced physical proximity: players in a dyad can never be more than two meters apart. This heightens both the narrative tension and the interdependence between the two parts of the character. I added a further mechanic to enhance the complexity and special form of dyad by introducing a physical taboo — it is absolutely a transgression to touch another person’s daemon — making the dyad create even more narrative weight in the larp. I call this extreme form of dyadic play symbiotic which was also the term I used for years when describing the core mechanic of Daemon before I learned of the term dyadic.
A beautiful part of playing two aspects of the same character is the transformation of internal monologue into external dialogue both through conversation between human and daemon and externalised through the daemon’s actions. This mechanic particularly appeals to players like myself, who prefer collaborative, spoken roleplay over introspective play. Obviously, these aspects can exist within the same experience, but I have often felt alone and bored with too much time without verbal or non-verbal contact with other players, and the symbiotic dyad-mechanic ensures that this never happens.
Diegetically, the humans can hear everything the daemons are saying and vice-versa but we practice to not treat everything too literally. If two daemons are fighting on the floor while the humans are having a pointed but polite conversation, it is more a sign that the humans don’t like each other than the daemons actually wanting to kill each other. It is very hard to describe this subtlety in writing and it is always an intuitive understanding that has to be built with exercises before the larp and by practicing during the first hours of Daemon.
House of Craving. Photo: Martin Lindelien.
With this extreme form of dyadic structure, even moments of inactivity become opportunities for co-creation; if one player feels disconnected from the action, they still have a partner with whom to discuss their next move, react to the unfolding story, or voice their character’s internal dilemmas. Because of this complete interdependence, in Daemon I would never offer that you can sign up without a partner and I then cast people together; for me there needs to be a pre-existing agreement between the players and a firm wish to play together like this. In other dyadic larps, I do offer to connect people who don’t sign up together or even know each other.
The players are encouraged to talk about their dyadic relation beforehand and we workshop the dynamic at the location, doing connection enhancing eye contact exercises and using two-meter-long strings to explore proximity and connection. More about this later.
In Helicon (Wind and Pettersson, 2024-), we choose a version of a dyadic structure somewhere in the middle of the extremes and assign characters in pre-designed duos, exploring power imbalances, control, exploitation, and inspiration through enforced dynamics. Unlike the mutual relationships of a marriage in Baphomet, Helicon pairs players in a non-consensual pact — a human Inspired in a drug-like dependency with their enslaved Muse, mirroring themes of artistic obsession, addiction, and subjugation. We strive to create a deep narrative cohesion between the dyadic characters as they both represent the same artform/science/leadership type. Rituals reinforce the hierarchical bond, deepening the emotional weight of the connection. You could call it a co-embodied narrative. As Sarah Lynne Bowman describes in her analysis of the larp (Bowman, 2024), these relationships highlight the tension between devotion and control.
There can also be options for playing with something like this in a very close ensemble with more than two people. In Helicon, we have a triad where two Inspired siblings share a Muse. However, for the rest of the article, I will only describe this kind of dynamic as dyadic.
Prime minister of Britain and the Inspired of Politics, Percy Shaw, and his Muse of Politics, Kallistrate. Photo: Kai-Simon Frederiksen.
How to determine “how dyadic” you want your larp
The chart below shows Axes of Attachment and is intended to provide some clarity of how different larps work regarding character relations (see Figure 1). It attempts to provide a way you could think about how and why you design certain kinds of relations. It’s basically about seeing the larp as a room: how do you place the players inside of the room together with the mechanics, space, physical conditions, setting etc.?
Figure 1. The Axes of Attachment model charts intersections of relative degrees of relational interdependence and shared identities in dyadic play.
X-axis (Dependency → Independency): How much a character’s arc depends on their dyadic partner-character. This could be emotional, practical, physical, narrative, or social dependence. How dependent are you on the other person being present? How closely do we bind the characters and to how many (it doesn’t have to be two).
Y-axis (Shared identity/concept -> Individual identity/concept): How closely the characters are tied internally. How much are your characters the same being? For example, Daemon has two people playing one character, while Helicon has two distinct characters with connected fates and arts. So both are more “shared” than completely individual, but Daemon is more extreme.
All larps on the left side of the figure have in my opinion some kind of dyadic design.
Another example is House of Craving (Edland, Wilson, Jansen and Pedersen 2019-). On the first day, you are playing a character and then on the second day, the same character but as a ghost in the house who is very attached to your own living person’s story. As a ghost, you can affect your own human and the others more and more as the larp moves further, and since you have the same identity as the human, you have preferences as to what they should do — and try to push them there. You could call this dynamic parasitic more than symbiotic. But the reason why I chose to define it as slightly less shared than Daemon is that you are not playing the character together and you can still walk away from each other not having to share most specific scenes. They also don’t share a consciousness. There is also a very interesting dyad complexity in House of Craving in the fact that you are knit tightly together in smaller groups as humans where the experiences are actually dependent without you sharing an identity or concept.
The Inspired of Dance, Danielle Lafontaine, holding her Muse of Dance Terpsichore during a ritual at Helicon. Picture: Kai-Simon Frederiksen.
Interestingly, it has been hard to find examples that fit into the top right quadrant where you are relationally and narratively independent but share the same identity or concept. Gothic is a good example, however, as it has a form of shared concept and identity of the characters even though it isn’t designed specifically for dependency between two characters. The two are dependent as you have just played the poet the day before and then you play the servant of the same poet the day after. As lead designer Simon Brind notes in a personal conversation (2025): “The characters were written as reflections of the poet, looking at the flaws of the poets and playing them back in different ways. Byron’s servant – Tita – is everything that Byron wants to be for example.”Simon also mentions that there is a one way dependency from the poet to the servant later in the larp as the servant has influence over the fate of the poet.So in my purely analytical opinion, you share more of an identity in Gothic (also because of off-game affiliation to a character you just played yourself) than a dependency on the individual experience, which places this experience in the top right quadrant. And this is interesting, because maybe off-game factors can also make some play experiences dyadic. If you provide the option of signing up together with someone, and you offer a lot of dependency with mechanics and/or pre-designed character relations, you might not have shared identity and/or concepts, but you move the experience further to the left on the x-axis, getting it closer to dyadic play.
Most larps will be in the bottom right quadrant and not have any dyadic play in the design. That doesn’t mean that you can’t have intense relationships without dyadic play. The chart is just meant as a help to conceptualise which kinds of relations you provide in your larp.
You might be thinking, “But you can just write a dyadic relation yourself with a friend in a larp where you write your own characters.” Yes, you could and maybe you already have. You could get some kind of a dyadic experience even playing a larp with almost no pre-written ties between characters and nothing in the design to support it. You don’t even have to sign up together for it to be a dyadic experience. However, in this article, I am more interested in the design-heavy Nordic style of thinking through coherent design on many levels and creating a clearly communicated larp experience. So while I describe here a specific philosophy for designing relations in a whole larp, you can use these strategies as individual player preferences as well.
Lady Evelyn Wiltshire and her snow fox daemon Atlas at Daemon. Photo: Bjørn-Morten Gundersen.
The next part of the article shares the experiences I have made by adjusting my larps along the two axes in the chart. There are also some things I haven’t adjusted. So here are the vulnerabilities and what you win by engaging in dyadic character relation design.
The power of playing in pairs
Dyadic play is a purposeful design choice that serves multiple functions:
1. Guaranteed connection
Unlike most larps where relationships emerge organically or are written but dependent on player chemistry (Nøglebæk 2023), dyadic play ensures that each participant has a deeply connected co-player. This prevents isolation and guarantees intimate interaction throughout the larp. If there is an option to sign up together, you are also guaranteed to play closely with someone you really want to play with, which is devastatingly hard to be able to in lottery based larps.
2. Catering to specific themes
Certain themes — dependency, rivalry, obsession, or supernatural bonds — are, in my opinion, best explored through tightly structured relationships. Daemon exemplifies this by requiring players to act as two entities within the same being, forcing them into an intricate push-pull dynamic.
From Baphomet. Photo: Carl Nordblom
3. Physical and emotional presence
Dyadic play externalises internal struggles, turning them into performative, tangible elements in the diegesis depending on the degree of dependency on each other for the larp experience. In Daemon, the constant physical presence of one’s partner heightens the sense of being truly two minds in one body. Many players report that they accelerate their closeness with their co-player exponentially and that they quickly get used to the closeness. Even though the Muse has a bit more free range in Helicon, the Muse’s lack of autonomy and physical proximity required by the narrative — that Muses have to stay within 100 m of where their Inspired commands them to be — creates an embodied experience of control and restriction, which are core themes of that larp.
4. Built-in narrative depth
Pre-established relationships provide immediate emotional stakes. The weight of history between the characters and expectation add layers to every interaction, making the experience feel dramatic from the outset. Non-dyadic relations can do this as well but dyadic relations enhance the probability of it actually happening in practice at the larp.
5. Emotional safety
Navigating intimacy in larp can be complex. Dyadic play provides a structured framework where trust is central, making high-intensity scenes safer and potentially more rewarding. In the most extreme versions of dyadic relations like Daemon, you will always be at least four people when you have a conversation with another character and you will physically have experienced almost exactly the same scenes as your dyadic partner. This design makes it much easier to connect off-game over the more difficult aspects of your larp experience like an interaction with a co-player you didn’t like or feeling ostracized in the larp. Dyadic design might even make it a good experience for newer larpers as they will be able to lean on their dyadic partner and are never left alone.
6. High stakes drama
When your character’s fate is intertwined with another’s, every action becomes consequential. A betrayal isn’t just a plot beat — it’s devastating. A declaration of love isn’t just a moment — it’s a turning point. This goes for all kinds of dependencies; they are guaranteed to a higher degree with dyadic play.
7. Carrying the story together
You are not alone in developing and experiencing a narrative in dyadic play. When you run out of ideas, there is another person to carry the story onwards. The ghost version of you in House of Craving might push you as a human to do something in your story that you didn’t anticipate. The Daemon version allows an excellent excuse to portray an energetic or extroverted character even though you aren’t such a person off-game if your co-player is portraying it for both of you.
The Inspired of Dance, Danielle Lafontaine, trying to strangle her Muse of Dance Terpsichore during Helicon. Picture: Kai-Simon Frederiksen.
Challenges and potential pitfalls
1. The risk of isolation
The intensity of dyadic play can create an insular bubble. If the game world revolves too much around the pair, broader interactions may suffer. Daemon players, for example, may become so immersed in their internal struggle that they disengage from external narratives. It’s not often that I have seen it happen, but it is a potential issue to be aware of in dyadic play. This is more risky the more dependent the relation is. If the dyad does not have a fulfilling dynamic for both players, that can also be further isolating especially when witnessing other dyads highly engaged together in enjoyable play.
2. Strain in the sign-up process
If you have to sign up together, finding the right partner can be stressful. Some larps allow players to sign up together, while others assign partners based on casting. The latter requires trust in organizers to balance chemistry and compatibility of wishes for the experience. You also have to make sure that you agree on energy levels and that you are okay with the playstyle the other person wants.
3. Unequal Investment
Not all players engage at the same level with specific activities or themes. If one seeks deep psychological introspection while the other prefers a light dramatic arc, friction can arise. Establishing expectations beforehand is essential — much more so than if you are free to flow through the larp to engage with whatever you find the most interesting.
4. Limited Agency
Solo players can pivot their stories at will. Dyadic players, however, must consider their partner’s trajectory. This can feel restrictive if the dynamic doesn’t align with evolving personal goals. In a completely solo experience, you can be affected by other players, your own exhaustion, etc. But the other person’s tiredness is an immaterial factor. The characters are closer than other relations in the network. Several times during Daemon, the partner had to leave. What do you do? What are the rules?
Douglas Eden and his cat daemon Haze at the Belgian run produced by Sandy Bailley. Photo: Ork De Rooij.
5. Relationship Bleed
The depth of dyadic play can be emotionally overwhelming. The sustained investment in one relationship can lead to burnout if not managed well. Ironically, there can also be disappointment if you don’t have that close feeling with your play partner afterwards. Some of this can be attributed to relationship bleed in which aspects of social relationships bleed between player and character. Romantic bleed (Waern 2010; Harder 2018; Bowman and Hugaas 2021) is the most frequently discussed subtype (Bowman qtd. in Hugaas 2024). For example, some characters in both Daemon and Helicon are rewritten with pre-existing and complicated romantic entanglements that have the potential to enable romantic bleed.
Many dyadic larps, including Daemon,Helicon and House of Craving, integrate voluntary debriefing and aftercare to help players process their experiences.
6. Predators and safety
As with all larps where we try to be brave, safety is of the essence. Preventing predators from accessing such a vulnerable type of relation requires a strong safety set-up from the organisers as well as a responsible group of players (Rotvig and Wind 2019 in Wind 2019; Brown 2017a; 2017b). This is not any different from larps with sensitive themes in general but you have to be aware that the dyadic play design choice exposes players to specific risks of emotional impact, which can be taken advantage of by problematic people.
Making dyadic play work: Expectation management, mechanics and workshops
Designing an effective dyadic experience requires structured preparation, ensuring that players feel safe, engaged, and emotionally attuned to one another. Here are key methods I use to make it work.
1. Consider which kind of experience you would want the players to have with your dyadic design
There are different ways to create dyadic experiences. So consider what you actually want to design into. Is it:
A shared physical experience?
A shared narrative?
An intensely interdependent emotional bond?
A shared consciousness?
All of the above? (Not always possible).
One or more of these factors may appeal more to you than others, so consider carefully what you design for.
2. Expectation management between the players before the larp
The Devil You Know. Photo: Daniel Andreasson.
One of the most critical steps in dyadic play is ensuring that both players are on the same page about their engagement levels. Besides communicating specifically that this is a larp with dyadic play and what that means, players should discuss a few specific things before signing up together or playing together in an organiser-determined dyadic relation:
Emotional intensity comfort levels: Are both players interested in exploring deep emotional drama, or do they prefer lighter interactions?
Scene preferences: What kind of interactions (conflict, care, degree dependence) are desired?
Narrative flexibility: How much improvisation is expected versus structured interactions?
Off-game communication plans: Establishing ways to check in during the game without breaking immersion on the level that both prefer.
Energy levels: How do you usually function during a larp to have the best experience? There could also be health reasons for you needing breaks from the larp. Should your co-player be aware of these needs?
By clarifying expectations in advance, dyads can avoid misalignment that might disrupt immersion during play.
3. Mechanics to reinforce dyadic interaction
You can choose to implement a dyadic dynamic simply by writing a dependent narrative for the characters and possibly some degree of shared identity. However, some larps integrate mechanics that actively support the dyadic dynamic. It is a general design point of mine that mechanics provide more tools for the toolbox of the player to experience emotional impact from the written material (Wind, 2025). Here are some examples:
Physical proximity rules: In Daemon, players must remain within a two meter radius, reinforcing their reliance on each other. In Helicon, Muses need to stay within 100 m. of where their Inspired commands them to be. This doesn’t create a physical proximity in the larp experience itself but it creates an experience of imprisonment.
Shared resources or abilities: In Helicon, Muses can only give Inspiration to their own Inspired unless allowed otherwise, ensuring that their power remains tethered to the dyadic relationship.
Same character identity: In House of Craving, as a ghost, you can affect your own human and the others more and more as the larp moves further, and since you are the same identity as the human, you have preferences as to what they should do — and try to push them there.
Restricted autonomy: Preventing one character from making major decisions without the other’s involvement (e.g., Inspired in Helicon dictate where Muses can go).
From the larp Thyself. Photo: Kai-Simon Frederiksen.
4. Workshops to build trust and connection
I have a very strong sentiment that when we act (that is: do something), we experience. The ability to play in a dyadic way is emergent, so we have to just try to play in our dyads, and then our perception of the dynamic forms when we do it. For example, I stress at Daemon that we practice the first day and that it is okay if the dynamic is wonky. We have to try it out. Before play begins, workshops can help partners develop their dynamic and understand the expectations of their shared experience. Effective exercises include:
Eye contact exercises: Building comfort with intimacy and presence. They really have to be longer than you think!
Movement mirroring: Practicing responsiveness and fluidity in interactions.
Physical boundaries training: Establishing safe ways to express physical connection or distance.
Practicing the dyadic specific mechanics.
In Daemon, for example, players use a two-meter string during workshops to simulate the forced closeness of their characters, gradually adjusting to the physical restrictions of the play experience. In Helicon, we practice the core mechanic of taking/giving Inspiration in Helicon in the workshop by using a sash that is the representation of the transferral of Inspiration, which the players will also use during the larp.
5. Safety and debriefing measures
In general in many Nordic larps, we are offering people the opportunity to participate in an emotional extreme sport. Therefore, I think we have a responsibility to at least think of what we offer regarding emotional safety in general. But specifically for dyadic play I have found that it can touch a lot of people in an impactful way. Here are some suggestions for how you could handle it.
The witch and broken war hero Loviisa Raisanen and her peacock daemon Kaligas. Photo: Bjørn-Morten Gundersen.
Safety regime: I find we sometimes forget that the feeling of safety is not only important for its own sake. The right safety regime helps us feel brave; makes us less afraid to play on challenging themes. I often find that safety mechanics that are not designed or introduced in a good way are more restrictive, frustrating, and meaningless. They don’t create a good feeling about daring to make brave choices. Especially in Nordic larp, many people are very considerate and careful, and while you need safety measures, I often find it equally important to remind people that if you are worried about doing something, it is better to do it than not to do it, so you don’t regret it after the larp. The safety measures are just there to ensure that you know within which boundaries you can explore this larp experience. Feeling safe is particularly important for dyadic play to work. I do it by building what I call “The House of Bravery.”
In practice, I introduce this concept in one way or the other in all my larps by building the foundation of the house before the larp with the flagging process, transparency, expectation management, and an explicit code of conduct on the website. I also provide a floor of the house: “This is what you should at least be okay with” and the ceiling of the house: “This is the most you can encounter here.” I publish this on the website and then build on it during the safety workshop. In larps, experience designers often only actually provide a “ceiling” OR a “floor.” I have observed that the greatest houses of bravery are built when people feel more free because they know the whole boundary of the house. So just be considerate about which measures you put in place to create a sense of safety and be a bouncer to keep predators out of the house.
Structured debriefs: Facilitated discussions to reflect on the experience in order to address lingering discomfort can be a good way to get out of a very bleedy experience. I think that debriefs should mostly be voluntary, as you can easily feel out of place if you are not bleedy or didn’t have a mind blowing experience (Pedersen 2017). I realise that not all organisers want their participants to get out of the bleed but I think it is responsible to at least offer the tools if the players would like to. Then they can choose for themselves if they want to take the offer.
Buddy check-ins: Encouraging dyads to support each other after play, discussing what worked and what felt challenging. Specifically, I always ask players to check what their dyadic partner needs right after the larp and encourage them to try to find common ground. Some might want a lot of hugs, and others might want a shower and alone time. I also ask players to contact their partner in the next couple of days. Most will do so, but some are just completely over a larp right away and wouldn’t necessarily contact their co-player a few days after the larp. You can read more about after care needs in the article “Leaving the Magic Circle: Larp and Aftercare” by Anneli Friedner (2020) and other resources about how to deal with post-larp emotions.
After party: It is an organiser’s choice if you want to offer as much larping time as possible and running the event right until everyone has to leave the venue. I prefer to offer time for common off-game socialising after the larp — preferably with an extra night before leaving the venue. For dyadic partners, I have often found it beneficial for their experience of the whole event and for aftercare that time is provided for hanging out out of character after the larp ends.
Decompression exercises: Movement exercises, journaling, or lighthearted interactions to transition out of character. (Note: I never use any of these myself, but they are resources you can use).
Two connected dyads. The married human couple basically share two Muses. The Inspired of Music, Maximillian Stern holding his Muse Euterpe while Sophia Newton, the Inspired of Sculpure is being held by her Muse Athanasia at Helicon. Photo: Bjørn-Morten Gundersen.
Conclusion: The beauty of togetherness
For those willing to embrace the intensity of a dependent narrative, the rewards can be unforgettable. So, the next time you sign up for a larp, ask yourself: Who do you want to be — and who do you want to be with?
Dyadic play can offer a uniquely immersive experience using strong narrative tools, but it isn’t for everyone. Before committing, also ask yourself:
Are you comfortable with emotional intensity and intimacy?
Do you trust your partner (or trust the organisers to pair you well)?
Are you okay with a storyline that depends heavily on someone else’s choices?
Do you prefer restricted narratives, or do you like to explore more freely?
Dyadic play isn’t just about roleplaying with another person—it’s about exploring the fundamental truth that we are deeply influenced by our relationships. Whether soulmates, rivals, or two halves of a whole, these larps remind us that no one stands alone.
The two lovers, Lord Alistair Dormer and the commoner born star scientist Yosaphine Darling observe their daemons Luca and Ramchii showing what is going on beneath the facade of the humans. Photo: Bjørn-Morten Gundersen.
Brown, Maury. 2017. “19 Truths about Harassment, Missing Stairs, and Safety in Larp Communities”. Nordiclarp.org, March 14.
Brown, Maury. 2017. “The Consent and Community Safety Manifesto”. Nordiclarp.org, March 14.
Friedner, Anneli. 2020. “Leaving the Magic Circle: Larp and Aftercare”. Nordiclarp.org, April 15.
Hugaas, Kjell Hedgard. 2024. “Bleed and Identity: A Conceptual Model of Bleed and How Bleed-Out from Role-Playing Games Can Affect a Player’s Sense of Self.” International Journal of Role-Playing 15 (June): 9-35. https://doi.org/10.33063/ijrp.vi15.323
Nøglebæk, Oliver. 2023. “The 4 Cs of Larping Love”. Nordiclarp.org. November 15.
Pedersen, Troels Ken. 2018. “Tears and the New Norm”. Nordiclarp.org, February 13.
Rotvig, Klara, and Katrine Wind. 2019. “Tryghed.”Larping Out Loud podcast, March 29.
Wind, Katrine. 2025. “River Rafting Design.” In Anatomy of Larp Thoughts: A Breathing Corpus, edited by Nadja Lipsyc et al. Knutepunkt Conference 2025. Fantasiforbundet.
Ludography
BAPHOMET (2013-2019): Denmark, Linda Udby and Bjarke Pedersen.
Daemon (2021-2025): Denmark, Belgium, USA, UK. Katrine Wind. Daemon Larp
Gothic (2023, 2024): Denmark. Simon Brind, Anna Katrine Bønnelycke, Maria Østerby Elleby, Halfdan Keller Justesen, Laurie Penny, Martine Svanevik, and Sagalinn Tangen. Gothic Larp
Helicon (2024-2025): Denmark. Maria Pettersson and Katrine Wind. Helicon Larp
House of Craving (2019-2023): Denmark. Tor Kjetil Edland, Danny Wilson, Frida Sofie Jansen, and Bjarke Pedersen
Spoils of War (2019-2025). Denmark. Katrine Wind. Spoils of War
Cover photo:War hero Sgt. Theresa Williams and Nico, her antelope daemon. Photo by Bjørn-Morten Gundersen.
A new generation is slowly joining the Nordic larp community. This fact is undoubtedly true; it can be seen at Knudepunkt/ Solmukohta/ Knutepunkt/ Knutpunkt and at the local smaller larps. But why are so few of them joining the multinational Nordic larp community and why are they not attending as many Nordic larps as previous generations? These are burning questions that I was sitting with, so I did the most logical thing. I asked them. I visited multiple Danish larps and larp organizations, where I conducted short semi-structured interviews with about 30 larpers aged 15-25, to try and get answers to my questions.
The two most common answers to the question were, “I can’t afford to attend Nordic larps” and “It’s not inclusive enough, because there is not enough info beforehand.” While talking about lowering larp prices,
the thing that really stuck with me was, “It’s not inclusive enough.” Having been part of the Nordic larp community for some time, this statement really shocked me. This shock naturally leads to curiosity and so the hunt for more answers began. What did they mean when they said it wasn’t inclusive enough?
There is an old saying, that answers often come when we least expect them. While working on a website for an unrelated project an email arrived asking about content warnings. Having worked with content warning before as part of a larp I was organizing, I wrote back only to realize that we were thinking of content warnings in different ways. In the past, I had used content warnings to
warn about sensitive themes. However, she was asking about content warnings for the actual physical mechanics, like a content warning for prolonged eye contact, because she had sadly had a bad experience in the past where this was only brought to her attention at the pre-larp workshop. Because this hadn’t been shared beforehand it basically prevented her from playing the larp.
Hearing about this experience guided the path towards further stories from newer players and their
experiences with Nordic larp (Editors n.d.). Another theme also arose in regard to spoiling a scenario vs. keeping players informed. Organizers sometimes want a big twist in their games to surprise their player and keep them on their toes, but in keeping the twists hidden, especially twists with hardcore themes, can be very damaging to the player experience. For this new player, the twist was so out-of-left-field that they ended up leaving the scenario midway, because they simply weren’t prepared for this experience.
So now comes the central question, “How can we design larps for this new generation of younger larpers?” While there is no central answer to this question, there are tip and tricks you can integrate into your larp design to include this newer generation of larpers. I have here tried to formulate 3 tips and tricks to use in your larp design based on the interview responses, as well as my experience designing for this audience for over 10 years.
1. Remember your content warnings, also for your mechanics.
If you are not already using content warnings for your themes, you should consider using them to make
sure your players are prepared for what your larp is about (Koljonen 2016). Remember all the pre-workshop information you give out is both to attract the players you want, while also giving players enough information to opt-out of your larp if your themes are not for them. If you are using content warnings for your themes, consider expanding your practices to also include your mechanics. Does your larp involve long periods of eye contact? Are you expected to be physically intimate with other players? Will other players touch each other without immediate consent because negotiations occur at the workshop beforehand? Then include that information as content warnings on your website. All of these mechanics are okay to have in your larp, but letting your players know before the workshop will give everyone a better experience.
2. Prepare your players, even for the twists!
Continuing on the content warnings, they are all about preparing your players for what your larp is about.
While it can feel great to shock your players with a twist in the story of the larp, this can also lead to a really bad experience for your players (Torner 2013). I am not saying that you should tell your players about all the twists and turns, but you should prepare them for these surprises. If someone is suddenly murdered in front of all the players during the larp, then it should be clear beforehand that this is a possibility either in the form of content warning or as some text available on the website. You don’t necessarily have to spoil your twist in order for your players to be prepared for them.
3. Have this information available on your website.
While for some it might go without saying, but remember to have all this information on your website or at least make sure your players have access to this information before they sign up. There is nothing worse than a player having a truly horrible experience because something wasn’t spelled out beforehand. Therefore, it is very important to have everything ready before signup to make sure you get a great player base that is ready to play your larp.
There are many more things you can do to design larps for newer generations, but the hope is that this has been a stepping stone for further ideas and an interest to delve deeper into the subject of designing larps for a new generation.
Torner, Evan. 2013. “Transparency and Safety in Role-playing Games.” In The Wyrd Con Companion Book 2013, edited by Sarah Lynne Bowman and Aaron Vanek, 14-17. Los Angeles, CA: Wyrd Con, 2013.
Editorial note: This article was originally published in the Knutepunkt 2025 book Anatomy of Larp Thoughts, a breathing corpus. It has been reprinted from there with the editors’ and authors’ permission. It has not been edited by Nordiclarp.org.
As larp communities evolve, it becomes increasingly important to consider how we include young adults (12-18 years old) in our communities and at our larps. This article explores how larp designers can design larps that span generations and include young adults as co-creators and peers in the design and play processes. The article’s approach is practice-based, utilized at Østerskov Efterskole as well as at our mythical fantasy larp campaign Fladlandssagaen (Denmark 2006-, Eng. The Flatland Saga), which means that its tools and insights are created in a Danish context. The article touches upon themes such as accessibility, connections, workshops, hopeful narratives, and presents practical strategies to empower young adult (and new) players and provide safe spaces for self-exploration. It emphasizes the relevance of designing for hope, agency, and inclusion for young adult players as well as integrating and respecting popular young adult tropes and themes.
A young adult-only scenario or an intergenerational larp
The first step in the process is to determine whether the larp you are designing is targeted towards young adult players only, targeted to young adult players with the possibility for other age groups to participate, or if it is intended as part of an intergenerational larp, for example including children, teens, and adults. Different formats offer different advantages, and all have merit – being aware of this from the outset will clarify your needs as an organizer.
Larps for young adults only can be comforting and empowering. To play alongside peers at a similar level creates a safe space wherein they can explore and be braver than they would normally be. In addition it builds a strong bond with peers they can mirror. Playing in an intergenerational larp can help build relationships across age groups, expand one’s perspectives on life and forge an understanding of hopes and dreams for the future no matter what the participant’s age is. Regardless of the format, when designing a larp with young adult participants in mind it can be an advantage to include a co-organizer or consultant who is a young adult themselves to make sure their experiences and perspectives are included in the design of the larp. Your format and the age gap among players will need to be considered when you help your players calibrate, understanding their responsibility in relation to each other, together with your larp’s themes and meta-techniques.
Off-game accessibility
Larp preparations. We The Lost (2024). Photo by Luka Safira Søndergaard.
When you have chosen your format, it is important to reflect upon how to make it possible for youths to
participate in your larp, both economically and practically; young adults typically have less spending power than adults with stable income and they usually have less experience with the practical aspects of attending a larp, such as coordinating transport and costume. If possible, try to find ways to make the larp accessible for low-income players. This could for example take the form of lower ticket prices for specific target groups, or easily accessible (or low requirement) costumes. You can also have a designated person who is visible and easy to contact if they have any practical questions or problems, or design your larp so that every group has an experienced player who has the offgame responsibility to coordinate the group and its members; just make sure they know how to give space and agency to the group’s young adults.
You should also take the implicit knowledge one gains from earlier larp experiences into account when designing and communicating with young adults. Some in the target group might be just entering the community, and it can be challenging to find information and navigate the scene without connections who have knowledge of how larps are structured. Here it can be beneficial to consider whether you communicate on the appropriate social platforms, whether there are social connections you can engage with to help spread information about the larp, and whether the materials you develop are presented in language that is both accessible and relevant to young adults.
If you have an age limit for the larp, make it clear why the limit is set where it is, whether exceptions or accommodation are possible, and what expectations exist for the young adults in relation to other age groups. For instance, do they have additional responsibilities toward children in the game, or are there types of play they are not allowed to join because they are intended for adults?
Familiarise yourself with the player group
When designing a larp aimed at young adults, especially if you are not part of that age group, it is often beneficial to immerse yourself in media, stories, and life experiences that resonate with them. This helps you to understand the narrative conventions, themes, and tropes they are familiar with. If you are unsure where to begin, the best step is to find someone within the age group and ask for their guidance to get started. This could be a family member, a student, a friend’s child, or someone from your local community. Ask them questions about which media they consume, which social media they are on (and how they work) and how they prefer to be part of a story when they larp, and let them provide examples from their own life.
Creating meaningful narratives
An essential part of developing a young adult larp is crafting the narratives so that it is clear and transparent what the stories are about, which outcomes the players can experience when they interact with them, and how they can follow the plotlines. Surprises and unexpected revelations are of course welcome, but it is crucial that players feel they can trust the designers – that they will not be tricked or exposed if they fail to understand something, especially when the designers are from outside the target audience. This is particularly important because designers often hold greater social power and influence within our communities.
Some designers favor larps that teach young adults about life’s darker sides: about the political challenges of our world, injustice, and how one can do everything right and still lose. While it is undoubtedly important to engage with and learn about the realities of our world – especially issues like the climate crisis, famine, wars, and systemic injustices, most of the young adults I design with and for are already acutely aware of how much darkness exists. Many of them feel a profound sense of helplessness, believing there is little they can do to make a difference. As designers, it is not enough to simply highlight the darkness. We have a responsibility to design in a way that conveys hope, that creates spaces of possibility, that demonstrates how even small actions can hold value in a larger context, especially when we design with and for young adults. Of course, we can use dark narratives and themes in our designs, but then we should balance it with aspects and plotlines that show that factors like age, gender, or background need not be barriers to making an impact, give the young adults self-confidence, teach them how to handle real-life situations and give them trust that they can make a real change in the real world. Therefore, we have a duty to design for hope and agency.
Themes, characters and relations through workshops
Often, our larps end up revolving around themes such as identity, self-discovery, tension between duty and freedom, relationships and responsibilities, together with social and ethical dilemmas. Essentially these are all themes involving choices and changes that the young adults in our community like to explore. These themes challenge players to reflect on morality and consequences, allowing their characters to win or lose something meaningful without any real-world repercussions for the player. For some, larps with these themes become a mirror, a transformative experience in which they can see themselves more clearly, and then use their experiences as guidelines for the direction of their lives. Especially if you include a debriefing wherein the players can reflect, by themselves and collectively, upon the shared experience of the larp.
When we use these themes, one of our recurring tropes involves young adult characters who see the world as it really is, not as they are told it is, and who strive to challenge authorities to change the status quo or the adults’ pessimistic worldview. This provides an alibi to practice speaking up, standing one’s ground, collaborating, and forging paths forward.
In addition, we write characters for young adults in which they act as protectors, leaders, explorers, healers, teachers, or gatherers; the characters have clear goals and believe they can influence the world around them together. These characters are connected to qualities like empathy, wisdom, strength, ingenuity, courage, and hope, giving players agency and opportunity to influence the larp and its outcomes without being hindered by their age or existing knowledge. We give their characters something to stand up for, even when all seems dark. This gives them an alibi for action, something to fight for.
To support this, we focus heavily on workshops aimed at building strong relationships between the player characters. Every character is integrated into multiple group dynamics to ensure they have several connections if one set of relationships fails to generate meaningful play. Furthermore, we typically create four core relationships: one with a best friend, one with a nemesis, one sharing a common dream, and one sharing a common fear. This layered approach ensures characters are deeply embedded in the world, with clear, impactful roles that empower young players to explore and affect the story meaningfully.
Thoughtful use of clichés in your design
Some seasoned larpers speak negatively about clichés and stereotypes, not because they did not at first enjoy them, but because they have seen them repeated across numerous larps and therefore end up dismissing them as a sign of “lazy design”. While the frustration of encountering a trope or narrative element you have experienced many times before is understandable, I find that clichés hold value and have their merit as design tools. I’m not advocating for their exclusive use, but thoughtful clichés that are incorporated and embedded in your design do have their worth. Why?
Clichés create an accessible and recognizable entry point for players to step into and explore the larp, by making it easy to decode the structure, story, and roles through shared cultural references among designers and players (even though there are different clichés in different cultures and age groups). They can work like a gateway into the larp and immersion by giving players predetermined patterns of actions, role developments and opportunity spaces that players know from other media. They can use these in the larp without doubting whether they are playing “correctly” or fearing being judged by the rest of the players.
Through the familiarity of the cliché, players have a safe platform from which they can choose to follow, challenge, or even break the stereotype when they feel ready. Overall, clichés can help free up the player’s mental energy so they can use it on engaging with the larp and getting to know the rest of the players, as well as working on being confident in the medium itself. When designed right, clichés give new players access while older players can be reminded of their first encounter with them and experience the bittersweet nostalgia of reunion. Clichés you use should be empowering, intriguing, slightly quirky, or familiar, and used to develop the characters, narratives, and experiences you offer. Avoid those that do not align with the larp’s ideals and values, ensuring you do not compromise your vision by recycling harmful stereotypes that maintain toxic beliefs and behaviours.
We The Lost (2024). Photo by Helle Zink
Clear activities, groups, and functions
Clear activities with tangible consequences and rewards serve as fallback options for those inexperienced players who may feel less confident, are overwhelmed by choices, or lack energy to take active initiative in the larp. These could include puzzles, smaller quests, brief blackbox scenes, or other elements that still support the goals of their groups and characters but require less initiative and larp know-how. We use this in our designs because many experience fluctuating energy levels and even though they deeply want to be part of the play, they have not yet developed larp endurance to play a full day of larp without breaks. Well-defined activities make it easier to navigate those situations, since they are just as meaningful and helpful for the rest of the team if one decides to influence the plots, develop relationships with others, immerse themselves in their character’s inner emotions or to take a break. To support this, when a player has an in-game responsibility, they share it with at least one other player. This way, one can take a break without feeling guilty about the possibility that it hinders the rest of the play. Important responsibilities often have an non-player character (often shortened as NPC) attached, in case both players need to take a break or need to reflect upon what the next right move is, so the players know that someone has their backs if they find themselves in deep water.
In some larps it can be a great option to use role models as clear examples of how to play and portray roles, showing the players what to do. If you have two or more opposing factions, it works well when the adult role models clearly show how one could choose to play. This works best if you train the role models to switch between standing behind the participants, giving them the confidence to take center stage, and taking center stage themselves to drive the story forward when the players need guidance. It is often interesting to let the role models disappear during the larp, losing their power or giving the important positions to the players. For example, the mayor could be forced by the players to arrange a new election and lose, or the leader of one clan could die in an attack from another, so the young ones need to step up and take charge.
To make sure that the young adult players feel real freedom to choose their larp experience and take needed breaks, we articulate clear expectations, objectives and success criteria as a framework for them to play and navigate in. We measure success in initiative and participation, based on the good enough attempt rather than focusing on the perfect performance with the right in-game outcome. For example, it would be enough to take part in a ritual, opposed to running one, or to dare to act politically in front of the others, as opposed to ending up as the mayor.
To emphasize this, we design our stories so that the characters only face consequences in-game that their players understand off-game. If the players somehow do not understand the consequences when played out, we make time, space and alibi to reflect and to help them with what they can do next, if needed. These framings are crucial, as without them some feel pressured to prove themselves to others to feel validated, or out of fear of not being welcome at a larp again.
The best way to help the participants when their energy levels fluctuate and they need a break, is to not make a big deal out of it and just give them time to get to a place where they are able to rejoin the larp. A designated break room is a good way to explicitly communicate that it is okay to take a break during the larp. Players may, rightfully or not, worry that taking too many or long breaks can result in them losing touch with the narrative of the larp. To remedy this problem it may be beneficial to structure the larp in acts with clear endings and beginnings, possibly with planned breaks in between so that players as well as organizers can recharge. These bookend scenes can then be used to summarize the act, and ensure that everyone is on the same page, as well as provide a natural point at which to rejoin the action!
Let us start the talk
There is a gap between children’s and adult larps. To bridge this gap and seriously work on the integration of young adults in larp communities, it is crucial to take their experiences seriously and make them feel involved as teenagers. To do so, we must take active steps to include the next generation by initiating dialogue, and that includes having some difficult discussions about the communities we have built. Some of the questions we should ask ourselves and each other are:
Could we lower the age limit of an event from 18 to 16?
Could our larp events include less alcohol?
Is it necessary to include this adult-oriented theme?
How do we talk to and about young larpers?
How do we address the topics, themes, and narratives that captivate younger audiences without ridiculing them or being dismissive of their fascination?
Which themes can young adults and adults explore together? Which are adult only themes, and which themes can youth play on without adults?
How do you communicate with young adults so they feel involved, being at eye level with the rest of the play and being respected as human beings?
Healthy, growing, and stable communities require ongoing integration of young and new people who, with passion and vibrant energy, feel at home among the older and more experienced players, and who dare to both be a part of the communities and to challenge the pre-existing canon so we can evolve together.
We have a responsibility to make it easy and safe for young (and new) people to become part of our community, and we have the power to make it happen. To include these new larpers we must design for hope and agency, using larp to tell stories that make them confident that they have a voice to be heard and choices to make in this world.
Ludography
Fladlandssagaen (2024): Denmark. The organizer team of Fladlandssaga.
Tin Soldiers (2024): Denmark. The Blackbox Project Liminal.
We The Lost (2024). Denmark. Østerskov Efterskole’s study trip scenario.
Østerskov Efterskole (2024): Denmark. The Larp School, Østerskov Efterskole.
Editor
Elin Dalstål.
Reviewers
Gijs van Bilsen, Laura op de Beke, Maya B. Hindsberg, Mathias Oliver Lykke Christensen, Paul Sinding, and Rasmus Lyngkjær.
Young consultants
Asta Hansen, Artemis Torfing, Eva Fernandes, Frida I. L. Grøfte, Nicolai Lindh, and Sam Hvolris.
This article is republished from the Knutepunkt 2025 book. Please cite it as: Høyer, Frederikke S. B. 2025. “Design for young adult players: The relevance of designing for hope, agency and inclusion.” In Anatomy of Larp Thoughts, a breathing corpus: Knutepunkt Conference 2025. Oslo. Fantasiforbundet.
Cover image: Larp photo from the blackbox larp Tin Soldiers, played during Project Liminal (2024). Photo by Kalle Hunnerup. Photo has been cropped.
![Tablet screen displaying a "SEND A REPORT" interface. On the left, several "PROFILE" sections are visible with labels like "DAY #1 [AFTERNOON] // INSTINCTIVE // EMOTIONAL // RATIONAL //." On the right, instructions for sending a report are given, with dropdown menus for "SHIFT" and "REPORT."Sending a report to Yggdrasil](https://i0.wp.com/www.nordiclarp.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/send-a-report-tablet.webp?resize=1024%2C640&ssl=1)
House of Craving. Photo: Martin Lindelien.
Figure 1. The Axes of Attachment model charts intersections of relative degrees of relational interdependence and shared identities in dyadic play.
The Devil You Know. Photo: Daniel Andreasson.
Larp preparations. We The Lost (2024). Photo by Luka Safira Søndergaard.
We The Lost (2024). Photo by Helle Zink