In the year 2013, the Swedish midsummer idyll is shattered to pieces when Russia suddenly attacks. A war without winners commences, followed by the deadly epidemic called Rosen (the Rose). In refugee camps around the country, tens of thousands die from starvation, violence and sickness. Three years after that first fatal bombing night, the gates to Kolsjön’s refugee camp finally fall and a small group of survivors find their way out into what was once Sweden.
Thus begins Berättelsefrämjandet’s Hinterland, the most recent larp of the Solnedgång campaign. I participated in the second run of two, together with 45 other larpers who also decided that a “hardcore sandbox larp in a post-apocalyptic setting” was just right (although that might sound intimidating, several first time larpers participated and reportedly had a blast). However, I’d rather like to create the new category called “survival larp,” and label Hinterland as that.
The instructions from the organizers were clear: don’t bring stuff! The entire packing list encompassed a water bottle, something to eat out of, and possibly some personal memorabilia. Food had to be found in-game, as did sleeping gear and heat sources. After the first run of the larp, the amount of findable food had been adjusted and reduced to make it too scarce for everyone to be fed at the same time. The strong or the cunning survived.
The safety aspect was of course carefully planned on the organizers’ part. For example, there was always enough water for everyone, and sandwiches and a bed in the off-game house. Just knowing this existed calmed a lot of people, and for me it meant that I never had to use it: I was perfectly safe in knowing that the option was there while we tested new larp limits.
Thou Shalt Readily Steal
One of the strongest taboos of all in larping is to never steal people’s food or sleeping gear. Hinterland went outside the box even here and encouraged stealing these things in order to emphasize the sense of scarcity, vulnerability, and exposure. Before the larp, several participants mentioned how hard it was going to be to steal someone’s food or let someone freeze at night. What helped me in momentarily shutting down my off-game moral compass was the common agreement we’d all accepted when signing up for the larp. We were prepared for rough times, for being hungry and cold, and we wanted to experience that.
During the larp, there was indeed some sneaking and stealing, but I think it could have been expanded even further. One culprit turned out to be, somewhat surprisingly, the Swedish freedom to roam. It was clear that this part of Swedish culture provides us with knowledge and access to food at all times without us considering it as special, something that one of the foreign participants noted in wonder:
And then I saw people starting to pick grass, and I thought that I hope they’re not going to eat… Yes, they’re eating it.
Another culprit was the “niceness trap”, which was discussed briefly prior to the larp albeit hard to avoid. It’s much nicer if everyone is happy: we are supposed to share, we are supposed to meta-think that it will be too much for someone if they don’t get lunch. A big push in the right, individualistic direction came when a group of raiders robbed us of everything they could find – including the iron stove in one of the houses! When 46 people own 3 blankets instead of 50, the situation is suddenly quite different.
Control of the Sandbox
The larp was labelled as sandbox, i.e. very little control and guidance came from the organizers, while the participants were free to create the story they wanted. The location itself also offered “physical sandboxing” as several houses set for full renovation, entailing lots of scrap, were at the larpers’ disposal. To be able to break windows, smash furniture, and steal anything not nailed down really added to the immersion in a larp like this.
While it can be really hard as an organizer to let players be “bored” during a larp, this was crucial to the Hinterland experience. Long periods of downtime and a low-speed larp in general offered both opportunities for processing, fine-tuned play and internal misery. Also, downtime made the action-filled elements much stronger as they became a sudden contrast to the low pace. A few occurrences of NPC groups (Non-Player Characters) appeared to stir the player pot, where the example of raiders has been mentioned above and others were the national forces or neighbouring farmers.
The use of dogs as a terror and power aspect with the NPCs worked excellently. It’s a physical trigger both visibly and audibly, and at the same time it touches upon fears tied to survival even off-game. Naturally, the dogs must be well trained and the players must act safely around them at all times. Hinterland had clear rules regarding this. The character creation process also included a common memory for all characters of leaving the camp and getting past the guard dogs, which made the dogs easy and believable triggers that enabled strong play.
There was some guidance apart from the NPC elements. A small number of players from run 1 participated during run 2 with the explicit function of being able to escalate the play or increase hardships if the story became too “cozy”. Their characters could also vanish from play earlier than Sunday, which I think gave a deeper emotional game than otherwise, since people lost friends and were simultaneously reminded that no one was safe. The organizers had instructed us in the dramaturgic curve of the larp as well, which ranged from cooperation during Friday to breakdown during Sunday. That aided me in steering some of the choices I made, even if that was a more subtle kind of guidance.
1, 2, 3, Gulp!
A large part of the larp circulated around the deadly disease Rosen. To determine who was infected during the course of the weekend, the organizers had created a system of “disease pills”. At run 2, we got three pills each to be taken continuously on Saturday. If the pill contained sugar, we were healthy, but if it contained salt, we had been infected. It was up to us as players to determine how fast we wanted to act out the passage of the disease and if we wanted our characters to die on Sunday. According to the organizers, 10 out of the 46 participants were randomly selected for infection, and I was one of them.
The pills didn’t exist in-game; they were a meta thing only added for guiding the game. I took my first pill with tense expectation; it felt fun in the same way as opening a lottery ticket does. Sugar! My second pill, a few hours later, was taken with palpable anxiety and clenched stomach. Salt. Instinctively, I tried to deny the taste up until the capsule broke and the entire dosage fell out on my tongue. As I had decided not to play sick prior to the game, this was a surprising turn for me that, thanks to its quite physical instruction, really gave me the entire journey from denial to despair – and death. I can definitely see this technique being used in other situations where a “higher power” randomly decides the outcome of characters.
The Mental Steps
For a larp with such heavy themes as Hinterland’s, pre- and post- work is important. On Friday, there were mandatory workshops focused on character identity and physical play, as well as a measure of relation building. Afterward, a few of us discussed the lack of more psychological play in workshops. Today, physical play gets more and more incorporated in most larps, including a pre-set basic level of it. Even at larps where the focus is not on physical violence, it usually gets a disproportionate amount of time during workshops. Techniques for psychological oppression, on the other hand, are scarcely represented in instructions and exercises despite the fact that they offer great depth for characters and relations. During Hinterland, which was a low-speed larp as opposed to an action larp, more psychological play between characters would have fit perfectly.
After the larp, a mandatory longer debrief was held for all participants. The motivation that even if you yourself don’t need a debrief, you’ve been part of someone else’s story that might need debriefing, was spot-on to me. My view of the debrief techniques was that they emanated from the thought that one had had a very strong experience during the larp and that one had to return step by step. This didn’t suit everyone, but better to originate with those who need it most than least. On the other hand, several participants felt stressed by having to stay while they themselves were not comfortable with the debrief methods. That might have been remedied by presenting more info on this before the larp, and a more structured organization of the clean-up that followed after debrief. To be able to start fiddling with things gives a sense of doing something relevant and not just waiting.
The function of “debrief buddies” becomes more frequent in relation to larps nowadays, and is a technique I appreciate. Many along with me find it hard to tell how they were affected immediately after the larp ends, and the worst bleed often appears a few days later. To have a check-up booked with someone who was there is something I find sensible and is a safety aspect I welcome. However, I’m not sure that I think that debrief buddies should be appointed randomly, as they were here, considering that the mission is to handle heavier reactions (which means a kind of exposure). On my part, I’d like to have someone I at least interacted with during the larp, in order to have a sense of who the other person is in our common context.
Effects After the Game
It’s fascinating how much you can let yourself be affected during just one weekend. It helps, of course, to be mentally prepared, to go with the idea of experiencing vulnerability and harsh living conditions. Still, many reactions turned out surprisingly strong afterwards, especially when it came to food and property.
When you’ve been on your knees in the gravel picking up seeds of rice fallen out of the raiders’ stolen goods, when you’ve gone to sleep with a piece of a curtain as a blanket, when you’ve lost everything you owned and realize that the most important item was the broken bottle you used for water… Then, other perspectives suddenly become apparent in our off-game Sweden.
I see how the gas station screams at me with hundreds of labels and items, how the servings at the restaurant are enormous and how we throw away that which could have fed lots of people for days. I realize how many things I own that have no value when it comes to survival. And how safe we are, really, in this society we were lucky enough to arrive in. I’m ashamed by the privilege of being able to “pretend” to suffer and live rough during a short while, just to return to my own reality without persecution, war, and hate.
And at the same time, I’m eternally grateful for all the insights I gain, because that makes me better, makes me be better as a person in a world where resources really are too few and far between. I think that for each person who goes through a larp like Hinterland, the level of understanding in the world increases a little. And that, dear fellow larpers, is huge.
Hinterland
Credits: Main designers and producers were Olle Nyman, Sebastian Utbult & Erik Stormark, for Berättelsefrämjandet. Co-produced by Karin Edman & Simon Svensson, with the help of Andreas Sigfridsson, Helen Stark and Ida Eberg. Date: May 8–10, 2015 & May 22–24, 2015 Location: Private land (abandoned 19th century farm) near Kopparberg, Sweden Length: 40 hours of play, 3–4 hours of workshop (per run) Players: 83 (max 50 per run) + NPCs Budget: ~€7,000 (Proceeds were donated to Ingen människa är illegal/No One is Illegal) Participation Fee: €50–€250 (depending on income), €80 for a standard ticket Game Mechanics: Honor System, playing to lose, safewords, pre-larp workshop, act structure, blank-firing firearms & blank weapons, meta-techniques (opt in). Website:http://beratta.org/hinterland Trailer:
Cover photo: Players scraping up spilled rice from the ground (play, Olle Nyman). Other photos by Sebastian Utbult and Olle Nyman.
Hinterland was a Swedish post-apocalyptic larp about refugees and disease. It was language-neutral, in effect meaning that people did their best to switch to whichever language was most inclusive for the players present in any given scene. What follows is my personal take as a player on some aspects of its design, and in particular on the way it used real weapons and real physical misery.
The raiders have left, taking most of our scavenged food and blankets with them. Now a group is checking everyone for Rosen (“The Rose”, the deadly infectious disease spreading among the refugees). I’m slowly removing my stinking shirt and jacket when I see it, the tell-tale symptom: a bleeding rash on my stomach. God, please, no…
Physical Misery
Hinterland was pretty hardcore. In it, players took on the roles of exhausted refugees in a post-nuclear war, plague-ridden Sweden for 48 hours. They could not bring any food with them, and organizers provided very little. Even this was partly taken from them by NPC raiders, along with most of their blankets (temperatures dropped to about 5°C at night). Characters then fought over what was left, stealing anything unguarded.
Organizers encouraged those who felt that digging for one meal a day and shivering in their dirty rags wasn’t hardcore enough to “play to lose harder,” for example by finding an excuse to sleep in a leaky barn instead of staying in the main house. As a result, many players were actually cold, hungry and tired.
This was of course the whole point, as I perceive that one of Hinterland’s aims was to make participants experience the life of a refugee for two days. This facet of the larp was akin to agendas of other games, such as Last Will (where you can play a slave) or Just a Little Lovin’ (where you can play a gay person). Even though the organizers more or less explicitly stated their objective (in particular during the debrief discussion topics), one didn’t have to engage in political discussion around the larp to enjoy it. Personally though, I found it a pretty cool and effective way of getting the point across.
But back to the misery! So how do you get people to play along so far into hardcore-land? The trick, I feel, is the presence of a safety net: if at any time, a player felt they had had enough (too cold, hungry, stressed), they could just head off to a designated off-game area for a meal and warm bed. Apart from a few caffeine-addicts, no one actually made use of this possibility on the run I attended (the larp was played twice). But knowing it was there made many of us feel safe when “playing to lose our food” or stealing someone’s blanket.
The system is not foolproof, of course. Just like safety words, all sorts of things can still go wrong. But I personally found the safety-net approach to hardcore misery to be simple and effective. Not only did people agree to get pushed into something closer – if naturally not equivalent – to what a refugee might experience, but it also created an improved framework for dramatic play. Things which are powerful topics for conflictual scenes, but are in many larps not to be messed with (especially not all at the same time), were fair game here, knowing yourself and the other player had this safety net to fall back on: getting thrown out of the only warm place to sleep, hiding a can of rice while others are hungry, etc.
As I stumble towards the barn, coughing blood, I notice the sign planted in the middle of the road. On the torn-off plank, the moonlight reveals crude letters hastily drawn in charcoal: ROSEN. All I can do is stand there and stare at it, shivering in my dirty blanket.
So, No Boffer Weapons, Huh?
Most weapons used by the characters were knives or tools, such as old pitchforks for example. Real, sharp ones, that is, not the boffer versions. This made for a very immersive experience; after all, nothing looks more like a rusty blade or a metal club than the actual thing.
Of course, this meant that anything beyond threats was almost impossible, for safety reasons. Armed fighting needed to be very carefully planned, and even then, it was limited to things like “a deadly stab in the back.” This, in turn, meant that weapons in Hinterland were more a way to control or influence people and situations than actual fighting tools, thus serving the larp’s narrativist agenda. It might seem surprising, but when properly workshopped, real knives mean more drama.
It’s been some time since I’ve traded our last scraps of food for painkillers. People are leaving, saying goodbye, while someone strokes my hair. Dying bodies lie crumpled on the ground. Enya, how I wish you were here… I’m floating away…
Conclusion
Having a safety net allows players to “go harder”. This can be interesting for its own sake. It’s also a smart design move for larps that rely on getting participants out of their comfort zone to make a political point. Hinterland is a prime example of this, making people experience some of the hardships faced by refugees.
The other main design lesson for me here was the use of real weapons. While initially surprising, it’s a great way of shifting a larp’s focus from actual fighting to drama; with the added bonus of looking good.
Hinterland
Credits: Main designers and producers were Olle Nyman, Sebastian Utbult & Erik Stormark, for Berättelsefrämjandet. Co-produced by Karin Edman & Simon Svensson, with the help of Andreas Sigfridsson, Helen Stark and Ida Eberg. Date: May 8–10, 2015 & May 22–24, 2015 Location: Private land (abandoned 19th century farm) near Kopparberg, Sweden Length: 40 hours of play, 3–4 hours of workshop (per run) Players: 83 (max 50 per run) + NPCs Budget: ~€7,000 (Proceeds were donated to Ingen människa är illegal/No One is Illegal) Participation Fee: €50–€250 (depending on income), €80 for a standard ticket Game Mechanics: Honor System, playing to lose, safewords, pre-larp workshop, act structure, blank-firing firearms & blank weapons, meta-techniques (opt in). Website:http://beratta.org/hinterland
Cover photo: Bandits raid the refugee camp (play, Sebastian Utbult).
Ropecon is a Finnish roleplaying game convention. It’s also been something that’s been a part of my life for twenty years now.
It was first organized in 1994, but I missed the initial years. I’m pretty sure my first Ropecon was 1996. I was sixteen and had just discovered Werewolf: the Apocalypse. I had made a character I figured was real badass, and wanted to play it in a game.
Dipoli is a conference center in Espoo, Finland. It has been home to Ropecon from 1998, but now was the last year. Next time, it’s going to be at Messukeskus, or Helsinki Fair Centre.
For me, Dipoli was “the new Ropecon venue” for maybe ten years, because the first ones I attended had been at another place. The building has come to define the event with its labyrinthine interior and plentiful greenery outside. The event is usually held at the end of July, but this time it was last weekend.
My Ropecon experiences tend to be defined by the program items I go there to hold, and this year was no different. We started on Friday with Mike Pohjola by doing a presentation about Baltic Warriors, the larp campaign we’re organizing this summer. This is something I’ve done a number of years: Go to Ropecon to talk about my latest things.
I got downright sentimental later when we went to drink outside with a few friends. We headed to the end of a pier down at the waterfront, because I wanted to stand there one more time. I’ve published or helped to publish five books at Ropecon, and after the book publishing presentations, we’ve had a little champagne to celebrate at the pier. This time we didn’t have a book, but it was still nice to go there anyway.
On Saturday night, I held a presentation called Larpin rajoilla, the Limits of Larp, with Maria Pettersson. Our idea was simply to see what are all the places larp has gone to, geographically, socially, within the human body. It was one of the most fun presentations I’ve ever worked on, and seemed to go down well.
Here’s the Argentinean video about Hitler and Vampire larp we used:
On Sunday, we walked around the con area with Maria. It felt nostalgic to think about all the things that had happened there, the larps we’ve run, the books we’ve published, the presentations, the parties, the games and the conversations.
Ropecon will go on, but I suspect that at least for the next ten years, it will feel like its at “the new venue”.
Cover photo: The view at the entrance on Sunday. Photo by Juhana Pettersson.
Helsinki in the 1920’s: urbanization, the admiring gaze towards Europe; jazz and lipstick, daring women entering the public sphere; a country divided by the bitter civil war in 1918; prohibition and the tsunami of illegal alcohol and booze-related crimes. The perfect setting for a larp, and as Niina had published two novels set in the same milieu a reasonable amount of research was already done.
Helsinki as a city and a state of mind was a central theme in Tonnin stiflat (Thousand Mark Shoes). Therefore we decided to make the most of it and play in the streets. Helsinki has, of course, changed in 100 years, but especially in the city center plenty of old architecture, cafés, restaurants and parks still remain or have the same atmosphere as in the twenties. The omnipresent modernity cannot be avoided, though, so we focused the game to areas with the most suitable architecture and atmosphere. However, playing in Tonnin stiflat certainly demanded selective attention and active disregarding of a lot of surrounding anachronisms.
Stories
One of the main stories was, of course, bootlegging. Two leagues competed over clients and deals, and the plot thickened in the first game as the other boss was arrested and her right hand woman accidentally shot by a police officer.
This was pre-planned to create a power vacuum for other characters to fill. The arrest and the death also launched several smaller plots.
The civil war fought soon after the declaration of independence from Russia has effects even now, let alone only ten years later. Consequently, politics were present also in Tonnin stiflat and many characters had conflicts dating back to the civil war.
The stain of communism sat hard on the defeated – those who survived prison camps, diseases and hunger. The communist workers in Tonnin stiflat were hard working, sick and poor, but strong in their ideology. Their actions crossed with the security police, which resulted in one of the most violent scenes in the game.
The twenties can also be seen as a stage for art, obliquities and the decadent. Paris, for a few characters, glittered as a paradise full of drugs, luxury, art and love. This kind of life also had its reverse side of addiction, abuse, venereal disease and general not-being-in-the-paradise, a constant longing for something better. The young painter gave herself to her godfather’s use in exchange for money and art education, and sat finally by his bed when syphilis devoured him into painful death. The conservative teacher struggled with hopeless love and a death in his past, and the only escape was suicide.
Murder is part of the noir genre, and where there is murder, there is revenge. As death in larp easily becomes a short term curiosity and is soon forgotten, every death in the game was initiated or authorised by us. An apothecary found dead, triggered the detective’s game, and the death of the bootlegger caused her sweetheart and friends to seek revenge. Both cases were solved in their own way in the last game.
Characters
The 18 characters were written iteratively in collaboration. After the casting, the core concepts of the characters were written into full characters by us, and after the pregame workshop and players’ own additions and changes, the final version of the character was written. The players had a big responsibility in fleshing out their character and in specifying relations to other characters. In-depth personal histories etc. were also up to the players to develop, while we focused on the functional core of the character.
The players were chosen from the roughly 70 registrants. The casting was made on the basis of mainly two things: player’s enrolment info including her (or his) wishes and capabilities, and our aim to avoid conservative gender stereotypes.
The core character concepts were gender neutral, and players could also choose their character’s sex. Our principle – and our only explicit anachronism – was that gender should not limit the characters’ actions or possibilities in any way. To name a few, the cynical private detective was female and the luxury-yearning prostitute male, the heroic bootlegger was male but as smuggling bosses we had powerful queens, not kings. In the end, we were quite happy with the casting as players’ wishes and our vision aligned nicely.
It was also possible to enroll as supporting cast. The supporting cast of roughly 40 was the most central and multifaceted tool used in the game. Their task was to create preplanned scenes, enliven character histories, bring in new plots, surprises and information, be found dead or die in the hands of the characters, perform music and dance, etc. A supporting role could last the whole season and develop in different ways, or it could be a ten-minute scene with only one player in it. The supporting cast were instructed carefully for each scene they appeared in so they knew their purpose and the aim of the scene. They acted as instructed or improvised to the desired direction.
Design
The design in Tonnin stiflat aimed towards high precision experience design. The idea was to provide individually tailored experience for each player. This required a different set of tools than e.g. larps relying on brute force designed sandbox or 360-illusion. The small number of players enabled us to do precision work that would not have been possible in a larger larp without significant increase in resources.
The central design goal of S tifl at was high resolution social interaction between dramatically interesting yet realistically portrayed characters. For this we wanted a strong emphasis on power structures and relations between characters. It was essential that all plots and storylines would somehow concretely materialize during the game-play. The characters were forced to make choices that had consequences inside the game, and those choices would ultimately form a unique story arc for each character and climax in the third episode.
Most of the design tools used were tools that increase control over the larp. However it was of utmost importance that they were utilized in a manner that does not sacrifice what we consider the essence of roleplaying – immersion, action in character, high definition social interaction between characters and meaningful decision making that has consequences in the larp. Indeed, by increasing control and stepping away from purely open sandbox playing, we aimed at enabling those features and providing solid structures to support them.
Tools
Tonnin stiflat utilized a selected set of tools to enable gameplay that elicits the type of player experience we were after. Our toolset included pre-game workshopping, iterative character creation, supporting cast, pre-planned scenes, meta instructions, custom debriefing methods, reporting and multi directional feedback, etc. Preplanned and scheduled scenes were one of the defining design features of Stiflat.
In their written briefs before the game the players had a schedule for the game and typically from two to five different pre-planned scenes. The scenes varied significantly in duration, the amount preparations and supporting cast involved, and the degree of fateplay involved. These were designed in order to guide the storylines, dramatic structures and geographic locations of the players so that all players would have game that is meaningful, full but not too full – of action, where their wishes are fulfilled, and that would provide maximum support for character interaction and dynamics.
We also tried to schedule sufficient time for free flowing playing so that the prescheduled scenes would not dominate the larp entirely and that the players wouldn’t feel that they have no agency in the game.
Different types of meta instructions were also used in directing the players to act in a desired manner, to explicate interaction possibilities, and to enable interimmersion and the support of other players’ character concepts. These were always given well in advance so that the required steering would feel more natural. All characters had a weakness and a strength that was known to all players (“X is willing to do anything for money and luxury”, or “It is very easy to open up and discuss private matters with Y”). Also from episode to episode, we had varying meta instructions to direct the play and encourage certain interactions (e.g. “Accuse X of apothecary’s murder”, “Pay attention to Y’s mood”, “Recount how tough it is to be a private detective to the bartender”). We designed all meta instructions to activate, enable, and drive things forward instead of disabling or blocking anything.
In Retrospect
…this really was one of the best games I ever been to, and I don’t how to thank you so that it would convey the message.Technically this was very well conducted: railroading, scenes, the use of supporting cast and the whole structure of the game was all fantastic – I have never been in a game that would have been so much built for my character and that had such a clear story arc and still have so much everything else going on around you at the same time.
Player
This game showed me I can feel uncertainty, anxiety, guilt, comradeship, desperation and love in a refreshing way when larping. Not many games elicit these feelings.
Player
Looking back at Tonnin stiflat: Season One, we can say that we succeeded in what we set out to achieve. Not everything went 100% as planned and there is always room to improve, but overall we are very satisfied. We managed to share our vision with players, and players took it as their own and played in a terrific ensemble.
We are especially happy that the character interaction was as nuanced, immersive, powerful, and multi-faceted as we hoped it would be. We managed to build structures that gave meaning to different twists in the story and to the decisions characters had to make.
Also most storylines manifested as concrete action in the game, and they were brought to conclusion at the end of the season. All this was made possible by the smooth collaboration between all participants.
In retrospect, three games in three months was too tight schedule. The original idea was to design all three games before the start of the season, but it was soon clear that if we wanted players to contribute and decide what their characters do between the games, we can’t really design beyond the first game that much.
We also somewhat failed at communicating what is useful and actionable input regarding character’s actions and plans between the games. Yet, especially in the second game where we had the most input from the players, we ended up putting up too much content in the game and in result too little time for free play was left.
Among lessons learned are also how it is nearly impossible to arrange “coincidences” in street larp with any degree of certainty, how violence tends to escalate to rather extreme despite all efforts to the contrary, and how having both players and supporting cast can backfire when utilizing team spirit enhancing techniques.
Now that season one is finished, we are left with the option to stop here or to continue in one way or another. All the main storylines are finished, so whatever season two will be about, it will be something new and different.
Tonnin stiflat: Season One
Credits: Niina Niskanen (setting, background materials, characters, storylines, drama and interaction design, workshops, props), Simo Järvelä (characters, storylines, drama and interaction design, game mechanics, workshops, props), Tuomas Puikkonen (photography) Date: 16 August, 11 October & 22 November, 2014 Location: Helsinki, Finland Length: 8-9 hours each Players: 16 players, and 40 supporting cast Budget: €2,500 Participation Fee: €50 per game Game Mechanics: Supporting cast, meta instructions, preplanned scenes, workshops Website:http://tonninstiflatlarp.wordpress.com/
Once upon a time – actually, at GenCon 2014 in Indianapolis, USA – several of us discovered a design problem for live freeform games. For the last five years, the independent role-playing game scene here in North America has run an expanding series of crowdsourced events under the banner of Games on Demand. Players show up shortly before the convention slot, choose an available game from a menu, and then sit down with the event facilitator to play. This year, we introduced Larps on Demand, a branch of Games on Demand with its own room at Origins and GenCon, and that is where we encountered our problem.
The problem is as follows: GenCon and Origins are both massive conventions full of interesting things and people to see. As such, few attendees want to make intensive four-hour time commitments in this context, and thus we watched as the two-hour Larps on Demand events filled up, while the four-hour events did not and were cancelled. In response, facilitators began to split their four-hour events in two, and running larps in public spaces to attract visibility.
In our post-GenCon debrief, we decided that established live freeform games that lasted two hours such as J. Tuomas Harviainen’s The Tribunal required too many players, whereas a flexible game like Håken Lid and Ole Peder Giæver’s The Hirelings required too much time, and Lizzie Stark’s The Curse required intimate space that was at a premium in a large convention setting. What were we to do?
Thus the Golden Cobra Challenge for October 2014 was born. We would solve this live freeform problem by considering it as a set of design constraints in itself. Scrappy pervasive freeforms were what we needed. Therefore, the game submissions had to:
Be playable from start to finish in two hours or less, facilitated by people who were not the designer him/herself.
Be playable by a variable but small number of participants, ideally a wide range like 2–8.
Be playable in a public space, like an open lounge in a busy hallway.
Optional: Use the ingredients Chord, Light, Solution, Bear and Minute.
We advertised it as a “friendly contest open to anyone interested in writing and playing freeform games,” and even provided a much-utilized mentor program for freeform designers who wanted to bounce their ideas off a partner. We would award prizes in categories corresponding with our design needs: Most Convention- Ready, Most Appealing to Newcomers, Cleverest Design, and Game We’re Most Eager to Play. That being said, the prize for each category was that the game would be run at least once at Metatopia in November 2014.
II. The Baddest-Ass Snakes in the Jungle
What came of it? Over 50 freeform submissions poured in from around the world, addressing the design constraints with verve and creativity. Designers and theorists once again debated definitions of “freeform”, while others saw fit to troll the contest with unmarked submissions (e.g. Vampire Death Party by A. Nohn Knee-Mus). As the judges volunteering our time, we could only scramble to keep up with the breadth of entries submitted by experienced and novice designers alike. In fact, the contest itself served as a sort of “permission and validation engine” for people who did not consider themselves designers – even for those beset with imposter syndrome – to create live freeforms.
New designers were most welcome. As Wendy Gorman, co-designer (with David Hertz and Heather Silsbee) of Still Life, commented:
I was shocked and delighted [by winning a Golden Cobra], and could not have been more pleased to see something of mine played by people who are well respected in the field of game design, especially since I am not a game designer, and have never considered that I could become one.
Two hours, a public space, and a flexible player number meant that a short set of easy-to-communicate rules proved the best design strategy. Because few veteran designers had much experience in addressing the constraints, the playing field proved more level than in other RPG design contests. After all, we preferred to cultivate a broad community that would produce more games, rather than promoting exclusivity and competition among creators. Mentoring during the contest and rewarding the winning designs with actual play appeared the best ways to nurture such a community of play.
The hard-selected winners of the contest came from a pool of the weird, wacky and dramatic. Some entries in this pool included Active Shooter by Tim Hutchings, a serious freeform dealing with the school shooter phenomenon; Snow by Agata Lubańska, about an explosive family situation in a snowed-in car; Keymaster by J Li, a ritual of creating fictional identities; and If I Were President by James Stuart, which enacts a surreal presidential debate in the far future. Contest winners often adhered closest to the given constraints. Still Life, a game about relationships between rocks, positions players as inanimate objects being moved around by elemental forces in a public space.
Group Date by Sara Williamson embraces chaos, with the same date between two people being played out simultaneously by multiple groups. Glitch Iteration by Jackson Tegu explores fragmented computer memory and has players directly experience their surroundings as unstable simulations. Finally, Unheroes by Joanna Piancastelli deals with a group of superheroes who have altered reality to cover up a terrible mistake and must now make a critical decision. Many of the games would perform well in busy GenCon hallways in Indianapolis, as they did in the Metatopia hall.
III. The Golden Cobra Hand Signal
Live freeform in the United States has a history of being behind closed doors and opaque for newcomers. The Golden Cobra Challenge sought to amend that culture and, at the very least, create a stable of new games to try out at Games on Demand in GenCon 2015 and other conventions. But what it also produced – besides innovative new sets of rules and role-playing scenarios – was a quasi-new social phenomenon: role-players out in public playing games designed for public interference. Emerging from Metatopia, the Golden Cobra Hand Signal – putting one’s elbow in one’s hand and forming a snake face with the other hand – lets others know that, while you may be out in a park or hallway, you are actually also in the middle of playing a game and a role.
Games like Still Life encourage outsiders to affect and interact with these players, but the outside world may still not necessarily understand what they are doing. As these drop-in-friendly live freeforms spread and mutate, we hope to see more of these arcane gestures coming to a convention near you.
Atlantis is a small town in Washington, USA. It’s surrounded by woods, has no phone line, and the mail service works poorly. The only way to come there is by the railway, and the train is the only way to leave. The ticket office is closed, and the quizzical Conductor (somewhat resembling O. G. Grant) won’t let you on the train without a golden ticket. Sometimes a swirling mist comes from the forest, people not hasty enough to hide in their homes and caught by the mist on the streets get ill, or die. But that is not a problem – as everybody who comes to Atlantis is already dead.
Characters of our larp didn’t notice their death, and all of them decided to board a train to Atlantis for some reason. Some were escaping something, others were looking for a place to start a new life. Some were just traveling without a particular destination. They thought they got a shiny golden ticket to Atlantis in the moment when they actually died. We asked players to fabulate how their characters got their tickets. Their choices varied from trivial; “bought at the ticket office” to strange; “found in a dead man’s belongings” or unlikely; “someone forgot it on a cafe table”. We wrote how the character really died based on these stories. For example, the man who thought he had won the ticket playing poker was actually shot by the loser in a poker game.
Our players didn’t know that their characters actually died in “reality”. Their characters thought they just moved to a new place, having decided to change something in their life. Having come to Atlantis at the beginning of the larp, they did what any of us would do if we were them – looked for accommodation and jobs, got settled, talked, danced, drank…
Participants still had to find out that their characters were already dead – either by dying in-game, or after the game from game masters.
Inspiration
Ticket to Atlantis was a synergy of music, electronics, Stephen King’s despairing nostalgia about the lost 60’s and the question of what is death and what lies beyond.
Using music as a meta-technique, as a building block of a larp in one way or another, has been a trend in Russian larps for the last five years.
Our design team gathered three years ago to create a fully music-based larp House where the world sounds… (2012) based on a Russian bestseller novel House where… (2009) by Mariam Petrosyan. We were so fascinated with how our “musical engine” worked, that we decided to definitely do something more with it.
In House portable MP3 players were used, and the participants had to switch their musical tracks manually, according to specific rules. But in the following year Moscow electronics-for-larp engineers from Ostranna CG made a step forward, so for Ticket to Atlantis we were able to use custom made electronic devices that could switch music tracks automatically, depending on where the player was and what other players were around.
We read Hearts in Atlantis and are fond of this book. Music is extremely important for its characters, for the atmosphere, and for the book as a whole. Having our experience in creating and participating in music-based larps the idea of making Atlantis into a larp was pretty obvious.
In the team, we are all in our 20’s or 30’s. We heard about the 60’s, Stephen King’s Atlantis, we read about the epoch, we watched movies, we felt that anguish at the 60’s King writes about, and we regret we weren’t there. We are afraid of the 60’s because we know what they did to people.
Inspirational pieces: Stephen King’s Hearts inAtlantis (mostly second half), Interstate 60 (2002), Twin Peaks (1990), Across the Universe (2007), Hair (1979), Platoon (1986)
Hearts in Atlantis is not about the 60’s, it’s about people who survived the 60’s, and are still somehow connected to them. And so was our larp.
Ultimately, we wanted to talk about death. Death is a thing that’s frightening yet marvelous; marvelously frightening. One is afraid to die, and to deal with that fear, to live with that fear, one has to talk about it. That was our idea. But such talk is not easy, and not many people are ready for this talk right away. So we decided to talk about death without naming it. We decided to ask some questions and find some answers before saying what we were talking about out loud.
Afterdeath
We wanted the players to find out what was going on during the larp. It was possible when they died – from a knife, or bullet, sudden illness or a touch of mist. So in-game death was the major instrument here.
Those who died went out-of-character to a special designated place just outside the playground. What they found there was a room with walls covered with 1970 newspapers from all corners of the USA, with obituaries in them of all the characters with circumstances of their death; photos and short biographical accounts. In that moment they understood at least that what just happened was definitely not death in the usual sense.
After taking one’s time in the newspaper room, overwhelmed players went to another room representing a train car, and an NPC representing a random, semi-real fellow passenger, almost an inner voice, talked to them for some time while the wheels rattled, helping to sort out what happened and to embrace the new state of mind.
In most cases it wasn’t a fully in-game talk, but rather a conversation of two people (each of them just slightly covered by their roles) about life and death.
We tried to make it as comfortable for players as possible and used this communication, besides other, to find out if the player wanted to play on. And to play on was not so easy – as the train was heading back to Atlantis, and player stepped off the train on the same station, in the same role, with all the character’s memory intact.
The only thing that changed was character’s name, confusing and arousing suspicions in fellow citizens. Special Dark Secret rules prevented the returning characters from discussing the fact that everybody in town were already dead, and forcing them to deny the idea that they had been in the town before and not just recently arrived by train.
We never considered Atlantis as Hell, or Heaven, or Purgatory, and avoided religious rhetoric altogether. We thought of it as of a place where some people went after they died, just because that was the place they needed to go to sort out what they really needed to sort out, but hadn’t had a chance to while living.
We refused to judge characters in any manner on purpose. According to our idea, Atlantis consisted of common beliefs of people who came there. They thought it was normal for money to exist and to be dollars – and hence there were dollars.
They wanted to have a lot of money – and hence the salary for one hour’s work was a thousand dollars. They had subconscious fears – and hence there was the fearful mist (represented by NPCs in silver gowns and masks, bearing smoke flares).
They had an inner demand for order and the habit of having a job – and hence the town had a Selective Service System office, paying good money for sorting the forms of draftees (with their name, age, color, family, children, job, education etc.) to decide who would go to Vietnam and who would stay in the rear. Grave ethical disputes sometimes arose over these essentially faceless papers.
We tried hard to create the fundamentals; the core of each player’s game, not of some events but of their character, and insisted on players creating characters as elaborate and interesting as possible. Besides other issues we asked players to take note of Important People who changed their character’s life in the past or just sunk deep in their minds, and of an Important Item that once meant a lot to a character (like a handgun that misfired at a suicide attempt), but were lost long ago.
For each character we looked for similarities, “reflections” of their important people in other characters and used the “music engine” to suggest feelings similar to those they had had towards their Important People to occur when they met the corresponding characters.
One could leave Atlantis – by finding the right person who could give them a ticket to a departing train and saying the right words to him – essentially stating that one had had enough of this town and was ready to move on. The train would take them away – ending the larp for the player and taking the character… who knows where, but definitely to some place where they needed to be.
The Music Engine
In larps designed using a technique that we call “the music engine” music mostly doesn’t exist for the character. It serves like a personal soundtrack to the player’s experience, and suggests character’s emotional state.
While creating the characters, players sent us a number of musical tracks, and specified for each track what emotions this music evoked in them. Or, in other words, what music should play when the character was in that particular emotional state.
We used such emotions as happiness, sadness, joy, fear, interest, anticipation, despair and so on. For Ticket to Atlantis, we created a list of 80 emotions that thus could be provided with special soundtracks, and the number of music tracks players sent us varied from 50 (when a participant used just one track for some of the emotions) to 500 (multiple tracks for each supported emotion).
All the player’s music and information on emotions was put into an electronic device we call Armlet, that players wore on their wrist. This device played music like a portable MP3 player into the participant’s ears via earphones so a player had a continuous soundtrack for their larp.
The earphones had to be picked and adjusted carefully beforehand so that player’s ears could endure many hours of continuous use and players could listen to the music and perceive the surrounding sounds in the same time.
Armlet is an STM32-micro controller (the same kind that is used in modern “smart watches”) based device with a screen, some buttons, digital audio playback chip, standard earphones jack and digital radio chip for data exchange in range of up to 30 meters. Other devices of similar design but simpler, with no screen, etc. (we call them Beacons) were placed around the playground marking specific in-game locations.
All the devices were constantly exchanging data packets, and thus each player’s Armlet knew where the player was (by receiving data packets from Beacons) and what other players were around (by receiving data packets from other Armlets), and who was closer (judging by radio signal strength). Using this information and information on emotion-to-music relations specified by the player, Armlet chose what music to play. Reacting on characters that were reflections of one’s Important People was the most notable case.
The critical point that makes this approach completely different from every other way the music is used in Russian larps is:
Organizers didn’t choose music for the larp and didn’t have to rely on if it would trigger the desirable emotions in the players. Instead, the music is chosen by players for themselves according to their own musical taste and emotional reactions. The electronic device maps the emotions (specified by organizers for different situations) to the particular player’s music, thus creating for players their own, special, unique soundtrack that pulls exactly the right strings in the right moments.
In some situations instead of music a player could hear a voice describing their feelings or giving them imperative instructions. It was used for drug effects and in case of a character’s in-game death. Drugs were represented by tiny electronic “pills” connected to Armlet, and lack of a pill in case of addiction caused continuous playing of a special addiction track that forced out all other music for hours, until a new pill was obtained.
The player’s ability to influence the device directly was very limited and rarely needed, thus most of the time player could just listen to the music. A player could only specify (using Armlet keypad) a limited number of intentions (like going to kill someone), and Armlet reacted, for example, waiting for some time (representing the character psyching herself) and then playing a special music track (that a player specifically chose for killing), and while the music was playing the character could actually kill – hence the combat rules.
Passing one of the earphones to another player was treated as empathy, a desire to share one’s feelings with another person. However, different people naturally feel different emotions while listening to the same music. This pretty well represented the chasm of human misunderstanding. Sex was represented by taking some of the clothes off and dancing while sharing earphones and listening to one of the players’ special sex music.
Most other rules of the larp (like rules for representing brawls) was also based on some special tracks that could be played by Armlet at some particular time or as a result of player’s interaction with Armlet.
The Forest
Atlantis is surrounded by woods and we made the forest a mystical place, accessible at night only, much similar to the Black/ White Lodge in Twin Peaks. There were gazebos there, depicting typical locations in a typical American expression of that epoch – boy scout tent, movie theatre, perfect housewife’s living room, Vietnam bush trench and so on.
In those places there were Important Items of the characters. Having another character’s Important Item could give you enormous (and definitely not kind) power over that character, but you could bring only one object from the woods so you had to choose whether to take your own item or someone else’s.
The woods had a special soundtrack, and gazebos were connected by trails made of LEDs (essentially Beacons) that reacted to Armlet presence by lighting up before a character, and going off behind them, and one only could walk from one LED to another. Different trails reacted to different characters, so each character had to find their own way in the woods.
Perspectives
Though created in Russia with little to no awareness about Nordic larps, the game seems to follow the Nordic tradition pretty closely. It lasted without interruption for 38 hours, and it used some meta-techniques like music as an instrument for influencing player to affect characters. Of course, Armlets and earphones didn’t exist in-game, a train car was symbolically represented by a room with properly arranged chairs, and NPCs in gray were only representations of swirls of mist, but mostly what you saw in the game was what your character saw. Moreover the larp was psychologically challenging and made participants face some existential issues.
It was our second larp using the Music Engine. In general, it used the same paradigm as our House where the World Sounds… (2012) though the technique was almost fully automated, creating a personal context-based soundtrack for each player, reducing player’s interference to minimum.
There have been something like 5 – 10 music-based larps in Russia, the trend appeared around the beginning of 2010’s, though games besides the two mentioned above used completely different approaches to using music.
Another important game that must be mentioned here is Saint Summer (Moscow region, June 2014). Based on Hair, Jesus Christ Superstar, Across the Universe and The Wall and created by our friends completely independently of Ticket to Atlantis, that rock-musical larp explored the 60’s at their peak – with sex, drugs, rock’n’roll and Vietnam war.
From a musical point of view, it was a complete opposite to Ticket to Atlantis – it used a stage, loudspeakers and hit music to set the pitch and drive the action of the whole game from one extreme to another. Set a few years before Ticket to Atlantis and held three months before, it served as a prequel for a number of players who participated in both projects, some of them playing the same characters.
Reactions
We were doing what we called “a kind larp about the good”, though it was neither simple to do nor easy to play. It appeared to be a larp about realizing some simple yet important things. One of our players, talking to an NPC on a “train” after his character died, said that besides his own death, he was much more disappointed with the fact that all other the nice and wonderful people he met in Atlantis were in fact dead.
The fact that they were dead made them less valuable to him. Well, we tried to convey the idea that death is a choice. Some people die by their own choice long before their actual death, and some continue living even after they die. Our characters had no real cause to consider themselves dead except the fact itself, presented to them in the way of obituary. They could live on, the only thing they needed was the courage to live on. Death has no power over those not afraid to live.
We should say that in the end, after a larp that definitely was not easy; even really difficult, after some reconciliation with themselves, most players came to feel what they called “warm aftertaste”. And we felt a lot of joy after reading reports about the larp settling down in heads and hearts, people giving up pain and struggle and moving on with joy. It was very warming to hear something like “It wasn’t a larp about death. It was a game about life and about the absence of death”. We are very thankful to our players for saying that and helping us to believe it’s true. We end with some quotes from reports:
Atlantis was a larp about life that looks like death to those who gave way to fear. I don’t know if I overcame my fear. But I know that this larp made me touch the most frightful fear in my life, fear that pursues me all my life.
Oleg ‘Luterian’ Lutin, player
During the larp I faced all my hidden fears: the fear of loneliness, the fear of losing the sense of living, loosing the anchor, losing my place in the world. Sometimes this fear raised up to panic, when the Mist appeared and my head was full of Toccata and Fugue in D minor that scared me in my childhood. When my character was killed in the middle of the larp I suffered from the character’s death much less than from my inner player’s fears.
Olga ‘Vorobeyka’ Vorobyeva, player
For me it was a larp of life and one’s place in it. It was about you really can put off the question of whether you should get back to depressing past or start something new, over and over again. Or you can admit there’s no longer you for that past and change your life. Hopefully, to the better.
Alexander ‘Eden’ Raev
For me it was a larp, like someone said, about death that becomes life when you feel love. It was a larp about love and loved ones. I recalled why it is so important to love, why is it pleasing and what does it mean to have someone important by your side. And I recalled that there’s no death.
I work as a larp producer in the Baltic Warriors project, and first game of our summer season was played last Saturday in Tallinn. It’s quite intimidating to go another country to do a game there. I had never even played in an Estonian larp, but it seemed to go well.
This summer, we’re doing a series of seven Baltic Warriors games, each in a different country. In each game, the subject is eutrophication and other environmental disasters afflicting the Baltic Sea. The zombies are there to remind us that while we talk, the situation is steadily getting worse.
We had the distinct advantage of having a really cool venue, the ice breaker Suur Tõll, now a museum. It was almost too spectacular: It was easy to imagine a much bigger, much longer game taking place there.
The larp, like all Baltic Warriors games, was divided into two parts: Politics and zombie action. During the political part, characters come together to talk about a given issue that’s being voted upon in the parliament.
After the debate has gone for a few hours, the zombies attack. In this case, two viking zombies shambled forth from the hold of the ship, attacking the living. The museum was open to normal visitors during this time, and it was fun to see how they reacted to the screaming and gurgling that was going on.
After this, we have Baltic Warriors games in St Petersburg, Gdansk, Kiel, Copenhagen, Stockholm and Helsinki. It will be fun to see how they change depending on the players, the local issues, the venue, and other matters.
Cover photo: The Estonian producer of Baltic Warriors, Aapo Reitask, as a viking zombie. Ingame-photo by Juhana Pettersson.
2013 and 2014 may be remembered as the conception of the Nordic blockbuster larp. Two ambitious larps – The Monitor Celestra in Sweden and College of Wizardry in Poland – succeeded in attracting an unprecedented level of international attention from media and players. They did so, in part, by advertising their inspiration from established fictional worlds with large fan followings (Battlestar Galactica and Harry Potter respectively), and by the choice of spectacular and eye-grabbing locations: a naval destroyer turned spaceship, and a castle made into a wizarding college.
Both productions were created by large teams: Celestra boasted a team of 85 people, while College of Wizardry had a team of 20 organizers and helpers, plus 33 NPC players. Although they were partially run by professional larpmakers, they were both nonprofit games((While none of the CoW organizers got paid for their efforts, some Celestra organizers got a small payment.)). A ticket to College of Wizardry cost €180 and a ticket to Celestra twice as much, but they both provided players with room and board, as well as some costuming, yielding good value for money. The 32-hour Celestra was run three times for a total of 389 players, with plans for remakes. College of Wizardry, capitalizing on the success of the initial 138-player run, sold out tickets to the 2015 re-run in minutes.
However, this is not a story about production. Neither massive production teams, enthusiastic players, nor spectacular locations are by themselves enough to create a successful larp((As many participants of the spectacular art festival / forgepttable larp Futuredrome (2002) are probably aware.)). This is a story about the design model the Celestra team happened upon in their effort to produce a large larp on a rushed schedule – a model that mixed recent innovations from experimental and progressive Nordic larps back into the tried-and-true approach we will call brute force design. This is a story of how that model was further refined at College of Wizardry, and about how these larps may even set the new norm in how to create action-packed fast-paced larp entertainment for mature audiences.
Brute Force Design
Before the progressive Nordic tradition of larp, there was brute force design. Nobody, of course, called it that – they called it “organizing larp”. We are proposing this name retroactively to describe an approach to designing larps that we often encountered in our own scenes the 90s, and still recognize in many of the larps produced in other traditions.
At a typical brute force larp, designers will use a plethora of techniques to drive conflict and mystery, such as:
Characters are split into groups with conflicting agendas (orcs want to kill elves)
There are subgroups inside groups (the elvish general wants to attack head-first to show bravery, while the king favors a stealthy approach)
There are power hierarchies (the general commands the officers who command the soldiers)
There are secrets, which players can discover, hoard, and trade (the general is a traitor plotting to kill the king)
There are puzzles that can be solved (assemble a torn-up treasure map)
Run-time game mastering is conducted by triggering events, introducing surprises, and inserting messenger characters (an NPC scout enters the tent of the king, informing that a horde of undead is approaching the camp)
The key characteristic of brute force isn’t that it uses any one of the techniques in this list, but that it uses a lot of them simultaneously.
Rather than the less is more approach common in the last decade of Nordic larp design, the brute designer will embrace quantity over quality and insist that, in fact, more is more. The results of that are unpredictable and chaotic, but seldom boring. Some of the conflicts and puzzles might be completely forgotten, while others command center-stage. The larp exemplified above might end in a battle of four armies, the discovery of an ancient treasure, an elvish civil war, or all of these at the same time.
In addition to the philosophy of more is more, a typical brute force design combines the diegetic social structure of colliding power hierarchies, and the dramatic structure built around discovery of hidden narrative, with the assumption that players will play to win.
Colliding Power Hierarchies
In a power hierarchy, the higher ranks have the right to command the lower ranks, and expect their orders – within limits – to be followed. Power hierarchies are overt: everyone knows who the boss is. Both these features distinguish power hierarchies from more subtle status hierarchies typically ignored by brute force designers, which describe who is socially dominant, who is allocated more attention, and whose voice is more respected.
Power hierarchies make for easy role-playing. Neither the givers nor receivers of orders should be in any doubt as to how to perform their character’s social role. They also come with clear affordances for dramatic tension: the potential for rebellion is implicit in every tyranny, and every weak leader invites intrigue for succession.
To make things more interesting, though, the brute designer will rarely settle for just one power hierarchy. Instead, games are built around the contested relationships of multiple groups. The simplest possible collision is between two hierarchies pursuing mutually exclusive goals: both the orcs and the elves are looking for the ring of power, but only one side can have it.
More complex collisions happen when characters are given allegiance to more than one hierarchy (i.e. both family and close friends), or when some allegiances are secret and aim to subvert the visible hierarchy.
These collisions serve to furnish the larp with conflict, but they also provide characters with dramatic choices: to serve country or ideology, friend or family.
Discovery of Hidden Narrative
Brute force designs will usually distribute clues and puzzle pieces throughout the game, but they aim to be more than simple treasure hunts. The clues spread through character backgrounds and introduced by NPCs will often combine to reveal back story, the diegetic myths of the past that preceded the larp, and that often impart important further clues on how to win it; for example, by revealing the true motivations of other characters. Buried items combine to form game-changing weapons, or devices that reveal even more of the backstory.
In this way, the larp designer tries to fit the players’ experiences into a larger diegetic narrative, one that began long before the larp, and which is meant to give the unfolding of the larp meaning in the context of that larger narrative.
Playing to Win
The structures of colliding hierarchies and puzzle – solving implicitly invite participants to play to win. After all, outside of roleplaying, puzzles are usually meant to be solved and games about conflict are usually played for the thrill and challenge of seeking victory.
When the brute designer can assume that players will try to reach their goals within a limited set of strategic choices, their behaviour becomes comparatively easy to give direction: the designer only needs to dictate goals and rewards for each individual or group, thereby defining what constitutes “winning” for them, and manage their resources and strategic alternatives.
Playing to win, which is the core of gamism (see Kim 1998), usually requires the players to compromise between roleplay and gameplay. A player may try to achieve a coherent and true-to-genre portrayal of their character, complete with personal flaws that would hinder the character in conflicts of the larp. But the moment the player faces a strategically important decision, those flaws and attitudes are often discarded in order to achieve victory.
Ups and Downs of Brute Force
Playing to win is the default expectation of most people approaching a game, while power hierarchies make for the clearest possible social roles and relationships, and the existence of secret hierarchies and solvable puzzles match Hollywood genres such as the murder mystery, the spy story, and the supernatural thriller. For this reason, brute force larps tend to be easy to play and require little explanation.
The brute force approach easily brings about a string of great scenes and powerful moments for the players.
It is also resilient against mistakes; a malfunctioning plot will be overtaken by a functional one. Finally, the sheer amount of content – more is more – usually leaves each player with plenty of options for what to do next.
The key word, though, is “usually”: the chaos of brute force design provides no guarantees – of anything. And implicit in the model are also a number of dangers.
First of all, players in a brute force larp easily get overrun by a plot train. Secretly digging for treasure in the forest? Too bad. The elves just attacked, and the forest is the battleground. Adrenaline-pumped and ready to fight the final battle?
A pity; the generals just declared a truce in order to to pursue the hunt for hidden treasure. The emergent narrative of one group can easily disable the play of another group; crisis and conflict in particular trump subtler themes.
With power hierarchies comes the risk of plot monopolization: the characters at the top, if they play their cards strategically and sensibly, tend to sniff out and take control of the business of their underlings. Plot for the underlings is tricky to begin with: two kings are easier to write than twenty soldiers, and the designer’s attention – biased by a lifetime of exposure to film and literature – is often attracted to the former.
With the atmosphere of secrecy that hidden narrative and potential traitors tend to produce, the monopolized plots tend to become opaque, known only to leaders and their trusted advisors. At their worst, brute force designs provide great entertainment for the handful of players with high-ranking characters, at the expense of all the other players.
As mentioned, playing to win often leads players to sacrifice character coherence when encountering strategic choices. Increasing the number of plots further fragments the experience: the fisherman’s wife no longer has a function when the larp turns to battle against the orcs.
When overrun by a competing plot train, the player will need to reinterpret their character as someone different, someone who actually has a role to play in the plot. Brute force larps, while they often yield memorable scenes, also generate moments of frustration as players need to internally renegotiate their characters while steering((See The Art of Steering by Montola, Stenros & Saitta in The Knudepunkt 2015 Companion Book.)) around plots and colliding allegiances.
Players do not always accept such compromises. At any given brute force larp of the 1990s, you would find individuals who approached the larp with other ideals than playing to win, culminating in manifestoes such as Dogma 99 (Fatland & Wingård 1999) and the Manifesto of the Turku School (Pohjola 2000) that confronted gamist play from different perspectives.
Dogma 99 prohibited backstory, secrecy, main plots, main characters and “superficial” action – in other words: hidden narrative and colliding hierarchies. The Turku Manifesto insisted that players should approach roleplaying with no other goal than to immerse in character, dispensing with goals such as playing to win, and implied that a coherent and selfconsistent simulation, free of narrative direction, should be the goal of larp designers.
Subsequent innovations in the Nordic larp discourse have served to emphasize, facilitate, and focus on those other ideals, from perfectly coherent simulation to faithfulness to the genre and narrative arcs.
These newer arthaus larps have emphasized relationships over conflict, implicit status over explicit power, life in the trenches over the adrenaline of the battlefield. They have evolved techniques such as workshopping, blackbox scenes and inner monologues to broaden the expression and to help players develop characters deeper.
Some have surrounded their players with a fully immersive 360° illusion (Koljonen 2007) made of impeccable physical representations and simulated access to outside world, while others have done away with physical illusion entirely and used empty rooms with stage lights, symbolic props and non-diegetic music.
Surveying the state of the Nordic larp discourse at 2012, it appears that brute force had fallen entirely out of fashion in this progressive scene.
Brute Force in The Monitor Celestra
The Monitor Celestra was a larp set in the world of Battlestar Galactica. It was played on the Halland-class destroyer HMS Småland, built in 1951. The game was created around the vision of playing space drama within a beautiful self-enclosed environment of 360° illusion in the spirit of the classic Swedish larps Carolus Rex (1999) and Hamlet (2002).
The organizers went to great lengths turning the museum ship into a decommissioned Monitor-class vessel commandeered for military use in the aftermath of the fall of the Twelve Colonies of Kobol. Most notably, the larp featured a system of control terminals for navigating through the galaxy, communicating with other vessels, and fighting space battles.
During the first act, the Celestra found herself stranded in deep space, separated – perhaps irrevocably – from the remainder of humanity, pursued by the vast firepower of the enemy Cylons, with onboard society deeply fractured.
At the first glance, the Celestra design bears resemblance to a typical brute force larp. Celestra featured at least a dozen colliding power hierarchies ranging from Colonial Navy to the civilian crew of the vessel, from the Vergis corporation to organized crime factions. The larp was set in the immediate aftermath of the destruction of human civilization, so which of these hierarchies would command the allegiance of any one character was anyone’s guess.
The game masters had prepared surprises, such as Cylon infiltrators, and occasionally brought in non-player characters to stir the pot. There were hidden narratives to be discovered by piecing together clues and asking NPCs the right questions.
For example, the players could figure out the origin story of the three Cylon models, determining whether they were friend or enemy, and learn to understand the holographic ghosts that haunted the ship. Clearly, the philosophy of more is more was at work.
However, The Monitor Celestra added several elements to the concoction. While not all design choices worked out equally well, we can discern a new model of larp design in the combination of the ones that did.
While these additions were mostly triedand- true design solutions, the way they fit together and complemented each other was new and unique, with the potential to improve significantly on the brute force design model.
Playing to Lose
Most importantly, the Celestra team subverted the brute force tradition by insisting that all participants play to lose. The players were instructed in detail on how to avoid winning the larp, and were obliged to follow that instruction: in fact The Monitor Celestra Briefing document distributed to players proclaimed that “playing to win is for asshats anyway”.
Although Celestra may have been the first Nordic larp to explicitly tell players to play to lose, the idea goes back at least to Keith Johnstone’s (1979) work on improvisational theatre. At previous Nordic larps focused on oppression or tragedy, such as Hamlet, the necessity of playing to lose did not need to be articulated: these larps did not make any sense if approached with a gamist mentality.
Celestra also subverted gamism at its holy of holies, with gun rules emphasizing responsibility and drama over fairness and challenge:
A gun controls a room until another gun is pulled. […] The rule is simple: they get what they want, whereupon the gun is holstered or otherwise removed from play. It’s the responsibility of the whole room involved to play up the lethality of the situation […] When the gun wielder has gotten what she wanted, it is her responsibility to get the gun out of play – by running away (good luck with that), holstering the gun, dropping it and surrendering, or stand down in some other way […] You can never stop someone brandishing a gun from getting what she wants, except by pulling another gun. The second gun now trumps the first.
The Monitor Celestra Briefing
Breaking Up Plot Monopoly
In addition to asking that participants play to lose, Celestra featured widespread player duties((In Celestra they were called “out of character duties”, but we chose to simplify the expression.)). The scientist characters were instructed to share secrets late in the game for dramatic impact, or to introduce other characters to HoloBand equipment used to create diegetic black box scenes in the style of the Caprica TV series.
Civilian journalists were instructed to gather information, to keep everyone posted, and to activate civilians by providing them with news to play on. Corporate middle management had player duties to keep the game dynamic by repeatedly gaining the trust of one of the factions and then switching sides or staging coups.
Most of the player duties served to break up plot monopolies and emphasized playing to lose: to have characters reveal secrets they strategically should have kept to themselves, to involve and inform others of their agendas and back story.
While in a typical brute force larp, power hierarchies end up serving the players on the top, Celestra sought to make them serve the players at the bottom. The tops of the hierarchies received extensive player duties, encouraging them to funnel plot downwards in the hierarchy and make choices leading to better roleplay, rather than making strategically smart decisions.
Being a cog in the machine provides the player with a social role and game content, even when it means running errands or monitoring a comms terminal. By building an elaborate 360° illusion, with technology simulating a fully functional spaceship, such tasks could be set up to give nominally bottom-tier characters agency and relevance.
Being in charge of the comms terminal meant that the messenger could withhold or sell crucial information, and the engineers in the reactor could shut off power to other parts of the ship at a whim. Even when they chose to obey orders to the letter, these characters were exercising agency.
In terms of play experience, though, not all errands are equal. Especially in the first run, some players noticed that tasks such as standing guard alone made for poor play experience.
Playing a leader in this kind of an environment and guiding the experience of subordinates is akin to game mastering without the overview that the actual game masters enjoy: highly dependent not just on player skill set but also on the information provided by the organizers. In the second run leaders were instructed to make people always work in pairs.
Especially after this change, the players at the bottom of the hierarchy had better experiences of Celestra than the players left entirely outside one: It was much better to play a crewman in the engine room than a refugee without a place.
The Power of Established World Material
In brute force games, players sometimes have an incoherent understanding of how to behave in the game. This pertains to things such as acting style (should every sentence uttered by elf queens sound like a fateful prophecy) and to diegetic culture (how should an elf scout salute his queen).
Being based on two television shows, Celestra got both the acting style and the diegetic culture almost for free – very few changes were made to the established world material, so everyone could have an equal understanding on how the world worked. Both players and designers drew on the characteristic narrative patterns of Galactica, such as the ever-present conflict between civilian and military leadership.
Another way of controlling players’ stylistic choices is through employing an act structure. An act structure, inspired by theatrical storytelling, divides a larp into temporal chunks with explicitly different play style instructions and even conflict rules. Act structures and player duties have been used in some form in Nordic larps since the late 90s((At least since Moirais Vev, organized by Eirik Fatland and others, in Norway, in 1997. )), but Celestra may have been the first to combine these with brute force design elements.
The four acts took the game from collaboration against the common Cylon enemy to space exploration, internal conflict, and finally the critical moments that would decide the fates of the Celestra and everyone inside. In the fashion of the 2002 larp Hamlet, player characters could only die in the last act – and indeed, the conflicts inside the ship escalated steadily so that characters dropped like flies in the final hours.
The Celestra Model and The Monitor Celestra
Celestra went a long way in reworking brute force design. By using established world material and slicing the larp into acts with clear purpose, player confusion was reduced and the risk of plot trains going stray was lowered. By asking participants to play to lose and distributing player duties, the tendency towards plot monopolization could be counteracted.
A thorough and technology-assisted 360° illusion made the world more coherent, gave agency to the lower rungs of the hierarchies, and made the Celestra a spectacular aesthetic journey.
In short, this was the secret sauce of The Monitor Celestra:
Brute force + play to lose + player duties + act structure + 360° illusion + established world material.
We’ll call this The Celestra model, although it should be noted that this is the model we, as critics and participants, discern in the functional and mutually dependent parts of the design. For example, some techniques employed in Celestra have been intentionally omitted: the larp featured phantom players, diegeticblackbox scenes and verbally roleplayed Viper battles, which were not essential to the overall structure discussed in here. Thus it is not necessarily the model conceived of by the design team.
How did it work? Amongst the Celestra participants we find those who, two years after the event, cherish the time spent on the Småland as the greatest cultural experience of their life. But we also find players who left in rage and frustration long before the game had ended, and are still certain that was the right decision((Eirik Fatland played a Vergis corporation scientist, Markus Montola played the faction leader of the Colonial Navy. Due to the complexity of the larp, these vantage points only covered a fraction of the game: As Montola headed one hierarchy and Fatland was subject to another, the experience of not being a part of one remains underrepresented in this text. Both authors played in the second run of the game.)).
While these extremes are both unusual outcomes of a larp, they are not contradictory: a larp design may work differently for different players, depending on many factors such as the character they play, their personal preferences in larp design, their personal preparation and so on.
The players celebrating the larp, who are in the majority, will remember it as an important milestone in Nordic larp history – in terms of costuming, scenography, gameplay, technology and design – and as an action-packed, adventurous and emotional journey in an interactive 360° environment.
However, the critical voices are also clear. Some of the worst experiences were had by players who attended the first run, and were caused by errors that were fixed – in part due to constructive feedback from those players – for the second run. But there were also negative experiences reported at the second and third runs.
The impressive complexity of the design, with dependencies between collapsing hierarchies, individuals, and computer systems, made the game very fragile. For example, in the first run the seemingly minor problem of a lack of an instruction manual for the systems – one document amongst hundreds – had game-ruining consequences for many players.
In the second run of the game, it was very hard for players to distinguish fact from fiction in the rumour mill going on inside the game, and solidly determine whether Cylons had actually infected the onboard computers or not. Replicating the clockwork operation of a full battleship with complicated social roles, social groupings and spatial designs was an amazing experience when it worked, but it was highly vulnerable to the disruptive chaos of a brute force design.
While recognizing this, we think it is equally important to recognize that Celestra is celebrated as a major achievement and life-changing event by many players. That many of its production and design choices, such as the unsurpassed quality of organizer-provided costuming or the interaction with mysterious phantoms, were executed perfectly. And that by daring to innovate on such a large scale, The Monitor Celestra set the stage for future larps that could iron out the kinks in its groundbreaking approach.
Robust Adventure in College of Wizardry
College of Wizardry was a larp inspired by the Harry Potter fiction, played in the 13th century Czocha castle in southwestern Poland. The game ran uninterrupted for 52 hours, portraying the first days of the school year at the Czocha College of Witchcraft and Wizardry. The game was a combination of school routines (teaching classes, pranking other Houses to lose points, snitching about pranksters) and adventure (sneaking around the basement, fighting Death Eaters, handing out detention for such activities), culminating in a grand opening ball.
In the spirit of the 360° illusion, the Czocha castle served as a perfect environment for this game: not only is Zamek Czocha a fully furnished castle, but it is also a remarkably Potteresque one: it features a cellar for Potions classes, a tower for Divination, a dungeon for Defence Against the Dark Arts, and large dining halls for common dinners. It even comes with secret passages hidden behind bookshelves and panels. To perfect the illusion, the organizers handed out robes and ties that were the required parts of the school uniform, while the players brought in loads of small props, such as notebooks, trinkets, and wands with LEDs to light the tunnels.
Even with no physical combat, CoW was a larp for all senses, where you actually drank wine with frat boys in the common room, actually wrote an essay with a faux quill, and actually sneaked quietly in order to avoid janitors after curfew((Players’ contribution to the larp was considerable: for example, Liselle Angelique Krog Awwal made more than a thousand props for the game, Christopher Sandberg organized the professor players to produce a 200-page schoolbook, and Staffan Rosenberg created the Potions laboratory with hundreds of ingredients, tools and recipes. As player-created content was integrated to organizer materials, it is not easy to retrospectively say which parts were in the game “by design”, and which ones should be considered “player contributions” external to the design itself.)).
According to Claus Raasted, the figurehead of College of Wizardry, some of the design was directly inspired by The Monitor Celestra:
The school setting made it especially easy to utilize this [kind of design]. Teacher/student interaction, house rivalries, bloodline conflicts, former school cliques, junior/sophomore/senior conflicts, etc. The list goes on and on, and all of these structures were good at producing emergent narrative and interesting stories. If you weren’t interested in doing one specific area of play, there were always five more you could dive into.
Claus Raasted, personal communication
Since the organizers knew they would have an international and varied audience, College of Wizardry was intentionally designed to be hard to break: according to Raasted, a key component was to disconnect game design from character design, which gave the organizers a lot of flexibility. Once you have a fully functional school larp with all the appropriate structures in place, the larp is going to work regardless of individual students and teachers((In Celestra, a similar approach was used in the sense that many character descriptions spent vast majority of text to describe the social structures and out of character function of the character, and very few paragraphs on descriptions of personality, or personal goals. As a major difference, CoW explicitly permitted players to radically work on their characters.)).
The academic schedule was a perfect example of a design element that was hard to break. No matter what kind of a student or professor your character was, for most of the time the school schedule answered the question of what to do in the game.
Lectures, meals, and club meetings would largely proceed no matter what else happened. Good work catching that Azkaban escapee, ten points for your House, now attend your Divination class before you lose them. The academic schedule interwoven with an act structure((Unlike most games with act structures, CoW was played continuously. Diegetic events signified act changes.)) provided both game content and an arc of escalation and de-escalation, which worked well as a broader framework for emergent stories. Due to the laissezfaire attitude towards characters, the solid backbone of established world material, and everyone playing to lose, College of Wizardry could adopt a strict policy of your character not ours, a policy which would break most games, but made this one more robust:
The first rule of characters for College of Wizardry is that you can change the character if you don’t like it. […] If the character is a troublemaker with a heart of gold, but you’d rather play a cowardly snitch who’s obsessed with the rules, then we’ll change it. The only thing it needs is ideas from you on what you’d rather play instead, and together we’ll make it work.
College of Wizardry player instructions
This allowed the organizers to max out player agency: players were explicitly instructed that changes pertaining to diegetic facts were allowed even while the game was running. The message was clear: you traveled all the way to Czocha for a 52- hour larp; if it doesn’t work for you, change it. And if you can’t change it yourself, the game masters will help you.
The hard to break principle also showed up in other areas of the game. As staff players were given player duties, if perhaps not as explicitly as in Celestra, the students were liberated to do whatever they liked, as the carefully cast professors would eventually contain any player-created crisis.
The magic system was made hard to break by basing it on the principle of playing to lose: whenever a spell was cast on a character, the target player would ultimately decide the effects of the spell, meaning that student duels would always end in one of the players choosing to lose.
The only exceptions were that no-one could die before the final act, and that the staff would always win magical conflicts with students. While Celestra had a main plotline to resolve that players were able to impact and to a certain extent break, CoW eschewed one altogether.
The staff players adopted even more practices to open up student play. For instance, the organizers suggested that the professors should accept every excuse to skip class, which provided the student players the freedom to swap classes, to go adventuring, or even to take a much-needed nap.
While in Celestra most characters belonged to power hierarchies, in College of Wizardry, every player character was a part of them. In that sense, the equation was very simple as the game only featured three kinds of player characters: students, professors, and a very few members of the janitorial staff((While the Celestra had very few non-player characters, College of Wizardry had a cadre of them, ranging from ever-present ghosts and visiting Aurors to monsters residing in the nearby forest. The nonplayer experiences are excluded from this analysis, since there was no uniform NPC experience due to the difference of those roles.)). Even the characters who did not belong to secret societies or student Houses were a part of the broader school hierarchy. This structure largely eliminated the outsider caste, giving everyone a part in the community. Indeed, according to the evaluation survey it appears that College of Wizardry worked best for the students, then for the professors, and worst for the less integrated janitorial staff.
The power hierarchy was also very wide and interchangeable: While the ship hierarchies of Celestra could only have one captain and one first mate at the top tiers, the professors were largely interchangeable in the school hierarchy. This took some pressure off their players, lessened the need to find a particular player during the game, and mitigated the risk of a central player being unable to play.
The College of Wizardry design was made possible very much due to the genre and the fiction of the game: the topsy-turvy Harry Potter fiction is forgiving and easygoing, practically the very opposite of the military and naval hierarchies of Celestra. It does not matter if a professor appears a little silly when leaving alchemical ingredients to be easily stolen, or when accepting a spurious excuse for not showing up for class.
Indeed, several professors played to lose by drinking a potion that made everything appear wonderful to them – even the fact that their wonderfully talented students conjured up spirits of the dead and dabbled in unforgivable curses. By removing themselves from the conflict equation, they provided play for people below them in the power hierarchy – such as the group of Auror students left to deal with the issue((The Design Document instructed the staff to stay on the sidelines during the grand opening ball when conflicts started to escalate. However, they were not offered a ready solution on how to do this, and it is debatable whether this instruction was intended as a binding dictate or merely a helpful suggestion.)).
This design, combined with the brilliant 360° illusion of the Czocha castle and the very significant contributions of several players, made the players give the larp rave reviews. Out of the 112 respondents to the evaluation survey, 91% totally or somewhat agreed with the statement “I had a great game”, and an astounding 74%((Players attending their first larp were excluded from this figure.)) of the respondents agreed with “College of Wizardry was my best larp ever”.
The implication of these overwhelmingly positive numbers is not that this was a perfect larp, but that by building on the Celestra, CoW discovered a formula for blockbuster larp: a brute force larp of adventure and escapism, guaranteed to win popular appreciation. The jury is out on whether the new formula can be applied outside the world of Harry Potter, as the disorganized fictional setting of young adult Bildungsroman was an essential part of making it hard to break.
The next, clear step towards improving the formula will be the addition of workshops for character relationships and group dynamics. Indeed, even though the Celestra was already criticized for leaving social relationship development to players’ own internet discussions, College of Wizardry still used the same approach. As a result, the majority of players responding to the evaluation survey expressed their desire for on-site character relationship workshops before the game.
Both of these games would have greatly benefited from just a few hours spent efficiently building relationships and dynamics, and indeed the CoW team will utilize them in the second run of the game.
The Terrific, Terrible Blockbuster Formula
From the late 90s onwards, larp in the Nordic countries (and, increasingly, internationally) has undergone a revolutionary pace of development. By rejecting brute force designs in favour of structural and stylistic innovation, larpwrights have shown that larp can deal with complex and mature themes – from the fraught psychology of intimate relationships to the politics of the Cold War and the social dynamics of the AIDS crisis. The Celestra model combines the traditional brute force larp with inventions from arthaus larp to great effect – perhaps a bit like the Hollywood blockbuster appropriated techniques from popular vaudeville theater and from experimentalists such as Sergei Eisenstein or Fritz Lang. In other words: this is a blockbuster formula for Nordic larp.
The attempts of Celestra and CoW to deal with contemporary politics, such as nationalism and discrimination, were peripheral compared to the action-packed, sometimes thrilling and sometimes comedic events generated by the brute structure. In this regard, these larps were faithful to Battlestar Galactica and Harry Potter that inspired them. While even action movies can find the time to portray compressed emotional and romantic content, in blockbuster larps intimate and serene moments are always in danger of being hit by a stray plot. There might be an unsolvable problem in how to serve the bottom ranks of power hierarchies with enough brute game content without pushing the leaders to steer constantly with both hands full of plot.
While the formula can be improved with techniques such as character relationship workshops, some problems are likely to prove unsolvable: most importantly, the chaotic arrival of competing plot trains is likely to plague these games in the long run.
These risks are inseparable from the sense of action and agency produced by such designs, and must be accepted as such by players and organizers. After all, the blockbuster formula is a formula for an action movie or an HBO drama, not a formula for an accurate documentary or a subtly nuanced performance.
Acknowledgements
A number of players and organizers of The Monitor Celestra and College of Wizardry gave their opinion on this paper prior to publication. Although we did not follow all their suggestions, those discussions significantly improved this text. Above all, however, we are grateful to the teams that organized these two larps.
Ludography
Carolus Rex (1999): Karim Muammar and Martin Ericsson (game design), Tomas Walch and Henrik Summanen (production and dramaturgy), Emma Wieslander (writing), Mathias Larsson, Erik Stormark and Daniel Krauklis (runtime logistics help). Norrköping, Sweden.
College of Wizardry (2014): Szymon “Boruta” Boruta, Dracan Dembinski, Freja Gyldenstrøm, Agnieszka “Linka” Hawryluk- Boruta, Agata “Świstak” Lubańska, Charles Bo Nielsen, Aleksandra Hedere Ososińska, Ida Pawłowicz, Claus Raasted, Dorota Kalina Trojanowska and Mikołaj Wicher, with a team of around 15 helpers. Rollespilsfabrikken and Liveform. Lesna, Poland. http://www.cowlarp.com/
Futuredrome (2002): The Story Lab, Riksteatern, Fabel, Oroboros. Kinnekulle, Sweden.
Hamlet (2002): Martin Ericsson, Christopher Sandberg, Anna Eriksson, Martin Brodén, with a large team. Interaktiva Uppsättningar and riksteatern JAM. Stockholm, Sweden.
Moirais Vev (1997): Eirik Fatland, Lars Wingård, Erlend Eidsem Hansen, Karen Winther, Martin Bull-Gundersen, Andreas Kolle.
Koljonen, J. (2007): Eye-Witness to the Illusion. An Essay on the Impossibility of 360° Role-Playing. In Donnis, J., Gade, M. & Thorup, L. (2007): Lifelike.
Fatland, E. & Wingård, L. (1999): Dogma 99. A Programme for the Liberation of LARP. In Gade, M., Thorup, L. & Sander, M. (eds.) (2003): As Larp Grows Up.
Pohjola, M. (2000): The Manifesto of the Turku School. In Gade, M., Thorup, L. & Sander, M. (eds.) (2003): As Larp Grows Up.
Cover photo: Part of the crew of The Monitor Celestra before the start of the first run, by Johannes Axner, is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. Other photos by Johannes Axner from The Monitor Celestra (first run) and College of Wizardry (first run).
Let me tell you about how you can game master yourself in a larp.
In a tabletop role-playing game it’s easy for the actual game master to work on pacing and theme and mood and so on, because she sees the whole group pretty much all the time, knows what’s happening where, and controls the entire environment.
In a larp that’s much more difficult. You might have run-time game masters, but they probably won’t be able to focus on all the players at the same time. They have to take care of the big picture, the main plot lines, the secret NPCs arriving in time.
So who’s there to take care of your pacing and theme and mood in a larp? That’s right. No one, but you.
Before I tell you about how you can game master yourself, let me tell you about my character.
I was playing in Sweden, and decided to play only in Finnish. None of the Swedes would understand me, and I would rely on my limited Swedish skills to get what they’re saying. There were a few other Finns in the game, and I could communicate with them, and they could communicate with the others in English or Swedish if they wanted to. But to make things interesting for myself and others, I’d decided to speak only Finnish.
The game was Moira, a modern-day fairy tale with different sorts of gnomes, trolls and elves from Scandinavian mythology. Faerie courts, Aesir and Vanir, the weavers of fate, changelings, humans no longer believing in the supernatural and so on and so on. There were five mundane modern-day humans in the game, who had been captured in the land of the fairy folk, and their disbelief soon turned to awe and later maybe into fear.
I was one of the vittra, who were sort of the nobility of Nordic critters. There were about a dozen vittra in the game, all mad as hatters, and we had frequent meetings and discussions and debates. Everyone else spoke Swedish, I spoke Finnish, and everyone nodded as if they understood what I was saying. Occasionally Johanna Koljonen, the only vittra who could understand me, repeated some of my comments in Swedish, if she felt it would serve her interests.
Martin Ericsson was playing one of the humans, a surfer dude clad in bicycle attire, and I started tormenting him for my own pleasure. He didn’t believe in faeries, and wanted me to show him around. I explained things to him, in Finnish. He didn’t understand a word, but I kept explaining. He challenged me and confronted me and attacked me, but I would remain mysterious and inexplicable.
The game went on, and eventually Martin’s character saw too many strange and wonderful things to remain skeptical. He started losing his mind, and I tormented him to make things worse. At one point I stole his bicycle helmet, and that seemed to be the tipping point. He went over the border, and realized everything he’d believed in was false.
Martin’s character started searching for answers, and I kept talking to him in Finnish. If nothing else, he at least wanted his helmet back. He was desperate. Towards the very end of the three-day game, he begged of me to tell him what was going on, to help him, to protect him, to give him back his helmet. He would do anything. Anything! Anything? I asked in Finnish. Anything, he swore in Swedish.
That’s when I spoke my only line in Swedish. I smiled, and looked deep into his eyes. “Dyrka mig”, I said. Worship me.
He fell on his knees and bowed his head. My character had gone from zero worshipers to one, and his from a skeptic to a believer. An hour or two after this transformation the game was over.
Years later sitting in a bus in the suburbs of Stockholm, I talked with Martin about larp. I claimed I never thought about the dramaturgy or any external factors like that when playing in a larp. I was in character, and only did what the character would do.
“In that case you must be really, really lucky,” Martin said. For him such great scenes as our final one in Moira, only come through focusing on the drama of the events.
We discussed our views, and I admitted I probably created quite dramatic characters so that I could focus on the drama while staying true to the character.
Of course, the character wouldn’t know when the game is about to end, and when is the perfect moment for final farewells or the romantic first kiss. That’s all me.
We came to the realization that one must be one’s own game master in a larp. When the game is running, the game master won’t have time to guide us into playing the themes or the moods or the plots or the drama we want. We have to do it ourselves.
Whenever we see interesting developments that will enhance our story, our experience and our character immersion, we have to jump at the chance to engage with them. Otherwise we’re not doing anyone any favors.
In a larp you should be your own game master and help your own character immersion by building a better game for yourself.
This article was originally published in the Knudepunkt 2011 companion book Talk Larp – Provocative Writings from KP2011. All photos from Moira and provided by the author. Center of cover photo as well as photo 1, 2 & 4 are by Karin Tidbeck. If you are the copyright owner of the other photos, please contact us.
The door shut and he was gone. At that moment, Evžénie forgot his rank. But she would never forget his short moustache waving over her, how the lips under it were feverishly mumbling something in that repulsive language. How he snorted when he humped. She slid down to the floor. Her back against the wall, she lighted a cigarette and again read the letter with a brief and clear instruction. She spilled the powder from the little vial to the General’s glass. Was he the same man with whom she slept that night? Evžénie did not know that. Everything blurred together, she saw everything through a fog…
Salon Moravia was the first larp in Czechia organised for women only. A total of 40 players attended, and according to their ratings on the Czech and Slovak larp database, it was the best chamber larp in the Czechia and Slovakia.
It was a scripted narrative dramatic game set during World War II. The players could experience the ambiance of an exclusive brothel, the difficult role of women, and the burden of that historic era. Each player could influence the story by a series of decisions.
Salon Moravia had a detective plot which was the primary focus in the first two runs, but we gradually de-emphasized it. Starting from the third run, we included more political, national and social plots. We also emphasized the terror of inhumane actions. The conflicts among the players characters and between the characters and NPCs were expanded, concentrated and more strongly intertwined wherever player feedback showed us any weak spots.
In six (seven in case of the last two runs) approximately one-hour-long chapters, we followed the characters through six years of the duration of World War II in Czechoslovakia, and we gradually transformed the mood in the brothel using inputs (from NPCs and letters to characters).
We started out with an impression of luxury, carelessness and light flirting mood of the 1930’s and gradually tightened the mood by the gradual disappearance of Jewish and Czech characters and the appearance of German soldiers during the occupation, and by messages from the characters’ relatives about events in the country.
The diversity of Salon Moravia‘s employees reflected the diversity of the inhabitants of the Czechoslovak Republic at that time, including their nationalities (Czech, German, Slovak, Jewish), education (from illiterate to higher education and even business experience), social position (poor village girls as well as ladies originating from upstanding urban families), and even political ideas (from complete disinterest to excitement for the ideas of national socialism or communism).
I really thought that their killing of one of us would be the worst that could happen… And then I saw another girl on the verge of collapsing to the ground… her face… I came to her and asked what was wrong. She handed me the letter and the attached yellow Jewish star. My mouth went dry. No. Not again. I cannot bear to lose another girl. I cannot let it happen. I quickly wiped her tears, took the letter, and told her: “Come with me. It won’t happen again. We won’t hear another shot from behind a closed door spelling death. This time, it will be different.
Before the Game
The format was inspired by the lack of similar games around us and the apparent shallowness of female characters in various games we had played. We wanted to challenge ourselves to create believable, interesting and strong female characters.
We assigned the prepared roles according to a questionnaire wherein the players marked preferred types of experience, their comfort limits concerning intimacy and violence. They also prioritised preferred characters, marked interest in key game topics (romantics, violence, rape, betrayal, collaboration, death). According to feedback it would be preferable to update the comfort limits just before the game.
After selecting our players we would actively continue to work with them online. We had a dedicated Facebook group for each run and in the months and weeks before the game we would discuss any issues concerning the game itself, their clothing (which they had to arrange themselves), make-up, hair styling, etc. A useful technique for verifying the players’ engagedness in the pre-game online activities was asking them to “like” it to confirm that they had read and acknowledged it.
In the entire game we strived to create a 360° illusion of authenticity, but we did not maintain historic accuracy; our aim was only to represent the ambiance of the era. We therefore focused on selecting the right location and supplied a lot of material to the game: paper money, uniforms, handwritten letters, photos, and various other items. In all possible extent we also modified the locations to minimise modern features (although we were obviously limited to reversible changes).
We decided not to use Ars Amandi or any other representation of eroticism to keep our game as technique-less as possible.
Our solution was simple and relied on our NPC players’ responsibility. As a player would approach her intimacy limit, she could use the safe word “decadence” (selected so that it would not disturb the game). One could also encourage her partner to be more courageous using another key word. We used a similar technique for alcohol – when ordering a drink the players could order “as usual” to get water. This technique was inspired by the Skoro Rassvet larp.
After the second run we also modified and expanded most characters focusing on their political and nationalist ideas. Before each run we expanded the NPC team from the original six to the final thirteen people who represented more than twenty characters. We also added a new expendable player character to further tighten the mood in the game by killing her off after about a third of the game. This deeply impacted the other players as this “cuckoo” player would register, engage in pre-game activities and played the first third as one them.
The players much appreciated our selection and management of the NPC players. We always chose people people we knew personally to be responsible, which was necessary to make sure that no NPC would surpass any player’s comfort level. Most of them were even willing to shave mid-game to better separate the different NPCs they portrayed.
We designed the conclusion by escalating all plots before the arrival of looting revolutionary militia and Soviet soldiers who punished virtually the entire staff of the brothel for collaboration with the Germans. This punishment was deliberately inadequate and unfair to drive forward the point of injustice and randomness of certain historic events. The game ended with us turning off the lights mid-scene, and one of us would read aloud the outros for all the player characters and major NPCs, reflecting the players’ choices.
Tears… tears everywhere. How many girls did I have to console? How many trickles flowing down their cheeks did I have to wipe? I had to pretend everything was alright and that it would end soon… But it won’t. I realised that after that Kraut led me downstairs, humiliated me and took me roughly and violently. We are all collaborant whores. Nothing more, our pride, honour and conscience, everything gone.
I see his face in front of me, feel his hands taking me and hear his voice talking to me. Does it make it any better that I did it for her so that she has enough money for her baby girl? I doubt it. I fall to the floor, pulling my hair with one hand and helplessly slapping the wall with the other. One of the girls appears. She pushed a glass in my hand and she said precisely what I always said.”It’s going to be alright.” Does she know that it never will?
The post-game responses were generally very favourable, while providing us with useful feedback especially in the first two runs. We realised that people were expecting a more mature and terrifying game than we initially envisioned. Some of the players were also very creative and provided us with post-game stories from the characters’ perspective, initiated an after-party a few weeks later and even filmed video confessions. We would like to provide some space for the players’ own comments from the Czech and Slovak larp database.
The game is very well thought-out. For the entire time I felt my decisions are my own, that I can choose and that nothing in the organisation manipulates me, and even so they could steer my story where they needed. As much as I can tell each player’s story was full and intensive, everyone was a main character with enough to do, and each experienced their own burdens.
The NPCs were crucial for this, there were more of them than players, and most played several roles over time, which was expressed by very different costumes and roleplaying. Most conflicts in game therefore were not between the players, but occurred due to the need to respond to external inputs (speeches in the radio, letters and NPC plots) which nevertheless felt very natural.
Katerina Midori, player
…I salute the organisers because in this topic I am quite sensitive to excessive tear-jerking and historic lapses, and I encountered none of that here. In contrast, most big topics in the game were presented in a very believable manner and not black-and-white, which I appreciated a lot. For me was tense, dramatic, well-escalated and full of strong emotions. I would like to give extra praise to the NPCs – the gentlemen were awesome and perfect…
Mivka, player
Before the first run I was a little worried about characters designed without prepared relations and clearly defined goals, but it was a pleasant surprise how such “incomplete” characters developed directly in-game under the pressure of external inputs. Each character has scenes prepared just for her which I really appreciated.
Lujza, player
Salon Moravia
Credits: Radim Bondy, Veronika Bondyová, Jan Fiala, Blanka Hanzlová, Sära Komasová, Anežka Müller Date: November 17, 2012; February 02, 2013; November 16, 2013 and November 22, 2014 Location: Brno, Czech Republic (and Slavkov u Brna for the last run) Length: 6 – 7 hours + one hour pre-game workshop Players: 10 players, 6-13 NPCs Budget: €1,000 Participation Fee: €17 per player (average) Game Mechanics: Minimal, only safe words for intimity, violence and alcohol. Website:http://www.pojd.name/salon
Cover photo: “If you don’t tell, take a good look in the mirror so you remember what you looked like.” (Play, Michal Kovář). Other photos by Michal Kovář, Jiří Dukát and Michal Kára.
Thus begins Berättelsefrämjandet’s Hinterland, the most recent larp of the Solnedgång campaign. I participated in the second run of two, together with 45 other larpers who also decided that a “hardcore sandbox larp in a post-apocalyptic setting” was just right (although that might sound intimidating, several first time larpers participated and reportedly had a blast). However, I’d rather like to create the new category called “survival larp,” and label Hinterland as that.
During the larp, there was indeed some sneaking and stealing, but I think it could have been expanded even further. One culprit turned out to be, somewhat surprisingly, the Swedish freedom to roam. It was clear that this part of Swedish culture provides us with knowledge and access to food at all times without us considering it as special, something that one of the foreign participants noted in wonder:
While it can be really hard as an organizer to let players be “bored” during a larp, this was crucial to the Hinterland experience. Long periods of downtime and a low-speed larp in general offered both opportunities for processing, fine-tuned play and internal misery. Also, downtime made the action-filled elements much stronger as they became a sudden contrast to the low pace. A few occurrences of NPC groups (Non-Player Characters) appeared to stir the player pot, where the example of raiders has been mentioned above and others were the national forces or neighbouring farmers.
A large part of the larp circulated around the deadly disease Rosen. To determine who was infected during the course of the weekend, the organizers had created a system of “disease pills”. At run 2, we got three pills each to be taken continuously on Saturday. If the pill contained sugar, we were healthy, but if it contained salt, we had been infected. It was up to us as players to determine how fast we wanted to act out the passage of the disease and if we wanted our characters to die on Sunday. According to the organizers, 10 out of the 46 participants were randomly selected for infection, and I was one of them.
After the larp, a mandatory longer debrief was held for all participants. The motivation that even if you yourself don’t need a debrief, you’ve been part of someone else’s story that might need debriefing, was spot-on to me. My view of the debrief techniques was that they emanated from the thought that one had had a very strong experience during the larp and that one had to return step by step. This didn’t suit everyone, but better to originate with those who need it most than least. On the other hand, several participants felt stressed by having to stay while they themselves were not comfortable with the debrief methods. That might have been remedied by presenting more info on this before the larp, and a more structured organization of the clean-up that followed after debrief. To be able to start fiddling with things gives a sense of doing something relevant and not just waiting.
It’s fascinating how much you can let yourself be affected during just one weekend. It helps, of course, to be mentally prepared, to go with the idea of experiencing vulnerability and harsh living conditions. Still, many reactions turned out surprisingly strong afterwards, especially when it came to food and property.
Dipoli is a conference center in Espoo, Finland. It has been home to Ropecon from 1998, but now was the last year. Next time, it’s going to be at Messukeskus, or Helsinki Fair Centre.
In their written briefs before the game the players had a schedule for the game and typically from two to five different pre-planned scenes. The scenes varied significantly in duration, the amount preparations and supporting cast involved, and the degree of fateplay involved. These were designed in order to guide the storylines, dramatic structures and geographic locations of the players so that all players would have game that is meaningful, full but not too full – of action, where their wishes are fulfilled, and that would provide maximum support for character interaction and dynamics.
In House portable MP3 players were used, and the participants had to switch their musical tracks manually, according to specific rules. But in the following year Moscow electronics-for-larp engineers from Ostranna CG made a step forward, so for Ticket to Atlantis we were able to use custom made electronic devices that could switch music tracks automatically, depending on where the player was and what other players were around.
They wanted to have a lot of money – and hence the salary for one hour’s work was a thousand dollars. They had subconscious fears – and hence there was the fearful mist (represented by NPCs in silver gowns and masks, bearing smoke flares).
All the player’s music and information on emotions was put into an electronic device we call Armlet, that players wore on their wrist. This device played music like a portable MP3 player into the participant’s ears via earphones so a player had a continuous soundtrack for their larp.
In those places there were Important Items of the characters. Having another character’s Important Item could give you enormous (and definitely not kind) power over that character, but you could bring only one object from the woods so you had to choose whether to take your own item or someone else’s.
There have been something like 5 – 10 music-based larps in Russia, the trend appeared around the beginning of 2010’s, though games besides the two mentioned above used completely different approaches to using music.
I work as a larp producer in the 
We had the distinct advantage of having a really cool venue, the ice breaker Suur Tõll, now a museum. It was almost too spectacular: It was easy to imagine a much bigger, much longer game taking place there.
