Nordic Larp

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  • Experiencing Art from Within

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    Experiencing Art from Within

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    Editorial note: This article was originally published in the Knutepunkt 2025 book Anatomy of Larp Thoughts, a breathing corpus. It has been reprinted from there with the editors’ and authors’ permission. It has not been edited by Nordiclarp.org.

    In my larp Hyvät museovieraat (Eng. Dear Museum Visitors), artworks came alive and possessed the bodies of the participants. I designed the larp for Amos Rex, one of the three big art museums in Helsinki, Finland. I ran it twice at their exhibition Musta tuntuu, toistaiseksi (I Feel, for Now), which presented artworks from their collections. It was a scalable larp that could accommodate at most 50 players, and tickets were sold online on a first-come-first-served basis. Players included both experienced larpers and newcomers. The larp was run when the museum was closed, so there were no spectators and players had privacy.

    Amos Rex profiles as a “young” museum. For example, they have featured exhibitions by teamLab, Hans Op de Beeck, Ryoji Ikeda, and other artists who create immersive installations – sometimes like alternative visual realities that you experience from the inside. Amos Rex has also held Game Amos seminars about game art. No wonder, then, that they also wished to have a larp in their repertoire.

    I could have used the exhibition as merely a venue where some events happened to play out, but I did not want that, I wanted my larp to be in dialogue with the exhibition. Neither did I want the larp to be just one art piece among others in the exhibition. I wanted the larp to be about the exhibition, and I wanted the participants to be in constant interaction with the artworks as they played.

    The game scholar Jaakko Stenros pointed out to me that I was doing in reverse something that artists like Brody Condon and Adam James have been involved with. Whereas they make art objects (such as a film) out of a larp, I made a larp out of an exhibition of art objects. Each player used one artwork as a basis for creating a character that would then possess the player’s body during the larp. The idea was that the artworks were living creatures with personalities of their own. In the beginning of the larp, they would take over museumgoers’ bodies: Each player walked into the exhibition as themselves, stopped in front of their artwork, and let it take control of their body (or, in other words, began playing the artwork-character). Thus, there was a pervasive element, and the players became the artworks.

    Design philosophy from the blackbox tradition

    For the Amos Rex museum, the larp was a way to draw in new audiences that might revisit the museum on other occasions. At the same time, we were showcasing larp as a form of expression to people with no previous experience of it. When a larp is advertised on the social media channels of a large museum, it attracts people from outside the larp community.

    I aimed for a beginner-friendly design and for a larp that would be easy to access: Participants needed to be able to walk in without preparing beforehand. Dropouts and no shows were common at museum events, so I went for a scalable larp. It could not be too long; it had to be something that could be played in one evening after work. As no preparations, short duration and scalability are common in Nordic blackbox larps, I applied several design innovations from that tradition.

    I aimed to fit the larp in 4 hours (which is the typical length of a larp slot at blackbox festivals). We ended up with a 2-hour workshop and about 2 hours of play. As in many blackbox larps, most of the design effort went into the workshop. I began the workshop with a guided meditation that introduced players to the themes of the larp. Then, there was a warmup designed to help them play artworks physically, and finally, we created characters and relationships.

    Newcomers can find it difficult to come up with things to do in a larp. It becomes easier if there are experienced larpers present, whose example the beginners can follow. This is called herd competence (Lundqvist 2015). To achieve herd competence, we aimed for half of our participants to have some previous larp experience. There were two ticket categories, one for beginners and another for experienced larpers.

    In the fiction of the larp, Amos Rex was a museum where artworks came alive and possessed the bodies of visitors every now and then, and the guides knew about it. It was their job to advise paintings, sculptures and other pieces of art who were confused in their newly acquired human bodies. Most of the guides were played by actual museum guides, and we had a lot of fun together brainstorming “nighttime personalities” for them in preparation for the larp. Participants could always consult these museum guides – either in-game or off-game – if they felt at loss during the larp and did not know what to do.

    Goals and Rituals

    Clear (and perhaps even slightly gamist (see Edwards 2001, Bøckman 2003) goals are often helpful for first-time larpers. When players focus on a goal, it is easier to come up with things to do, and they don’t get bored. Goals generate action that helps structure playtime.

    Another possibility to make a larp beginner-friendly is to have a lot of pre-planned events to which the players can react. Since Hyvät museovieraat involved exploring a large exhibition space, planned events didn’t feel practical, and I decided to go for goal-oriented play. Moreover, I wanted to give players who so wished the possibility to just freely delve in the museum space and concentrate on interactions, and in a larp it is easier to ignore goals than planned events.

    The goal for some characters was to stay in the body of a visitor, leave the museum, and become a human (the players got to decide for themselves whether their characters wanted this). To achieve this, an artwork had to perform a ritual that attached it permanently to the body, and it needed help from two other artworks. However, these assistants would have to give up the possibility of performing the ritual for themselves and thus give up on their hope of becoming human!

    Keiken (2023-2024): Spirit Systems of Soft Knowing ༊*·˚. Photo: Niclas Warius / Amos Rex.
    Keiken (2023-2024): Spirit Systems of Soft Knowing ༊*·˚. Photo: Niclas Warius / Amos Rex.

    Museum guides instructed characters on how to perform the rituals, which meant we did not need to use workshop time on practicing them. Experiential artworks were used as ritual sites. One of these was Spirit Systems of Soft Knowing ༊*·˚ (2023–2024), a science-fiction style installation by the artist collective Keiken (see photo above). It is a glowing, shell-like space curtained off from the rest of the exhibition, where visitors lie down on soft pods with a vibrating silicone womb on their abdomen, listening to the installation’s soundscape through headphones (see Amos Rex 2024). In the ritual, the group of three artworks – one who wished to stay in a human body and two helpers – would occupy one of the pods.

    Characters could also have other objectives. Some of them wished to continue their existence as artworks somewhere else than in this particular museum. Others wanted to prevent another character from escaping the museum so as not to be separated from them. Players came up with these goals in guided workshop exercises. Sometimes the outcomes could be quite drastic: one painting hated its maker and wanted somebody else to escape the museum and kill the artist.

    Characters who went for the ritual option faced the challenge of persuading two other artworks to assist. One way to do this was to offer deals. An artwork could promise to do a favor for another one once it was outside the museum. The characters could trust each other’s word on it since the ritual would bind them to it. Kalervo Palsa’s painting Itseriittoisuus (1978; Eng. Self-sufficiency, see cover photo) desired to be hung on display in a meeting room of the Confederation of Finnish Industries, a lobby group and major wielder of economic power. It helped another painting in the ritual on the condition that the escapee would convince the Confederation to purchase it from the museum.

    Emotions and inter-character drama

    Unlike many collection exhibitions, I Feel, For Now did not present artworks chronologically or arrange them based on art movements. Instead, the art pieces were organized thematically, with a focus on the emotions they expressed (in the curators’ opinion). Five major themes had emerged this way: Beneath the Surface, Memory Games, A Moment of Extasy, Emotional Language and Carried Away by the Senses.

    Since the exhibition was about emotions, I hoped the larp could be about them too. Moreover, I wanted to incorporate the main themes of the exhibition in the larp. So I decided that the curators’ theme groups would determine who could help a given artwork in the ritual.

    All the characters were artworks from either the Beneath the Surface part of the exhibition or the Memory Games part or A Moment of Extasy part. The emotional life of an artwork was more limited than that of a human. Thus, in the ritual, an artwork who wanted to stay in a human body had to absorb the whole spectrum of human emotions. This meant that an artwork who was labeled under Beneath the Surface (which usually meant that they had dark, hidden emotions) needed the playful childlike emotions embodied by the Memory Games artworks and the feelings of almost religious ecstasy from A Moment of Extasy. Each ritual group would contain artworks from three different theme groups, and in the ritual, the two helpers would donate part of their own emotional landscape to the character who was going to become human.

    To create emotional drama, I wanted to make the decision to leave or stay in the museum hard. Either way, the character would have to make a sacrifice – to let go of something. One obvious design choice was to divide the characters into tight-knit groups that would split during the larp.

    In the workshop, we divided the characters into groups of about five. These artworks had been displayed close to each other in the exhibition, and their group dynamics resembled that of a family. We workshopped the details with the players and instructed them to create both negative and positive relations within the group. These groups would eventually break apart when some members would stay in the museum and others leave.

    Physicality

    Physicality was another thing to be considered in the design process. There is a social script for a museum space: a mode of behavior to which you tend to instinctively fall back when you enter an exhibition. In an art museum, people are likely to slowly wander around looking at the objects and talk in low voices. One of the goals with Hyvät museovieraat was to break the script and encourage people to behave in ways you don’t usually see in a museum. For this to succeed, it was crucial that there were no outsiders in the museum during the larp.

    The rules of the museum constrained the possibilities for physicality. For example, running is not allowed in the exhibition space, and there are other limitations in place to ensure the safety of the artworks. Moreover, intense physical touch was ruled out since the larp was in the official program of the museum and tickets were sold online on a first-come-first-served basis. Participants could touch each other on hands and arms and hug each other after asking for permission.

    However, nothing stopped players from e.g. crawling on the floor or moving their bodies in unexpected, non-human ways. A museum representative mentioned this at the beginning of the workshop when explaining the museum rules. During the workshop, I encouraged participants to explore new ways of moving that could suit their characters. The players warmed up for the larp with an exercise where they looked at different artworks and then tried to move the way the artwork would move if it were a living being.

    In the character creation exercise, participants chose an artwork from a given area in the exhibition, and we would then broadcast from the museum PA system a list of questions that helped them create the character. There were questions about the character’s personality and goals, as well as questions that inspired the participants to look at the artwork in new ways. Some questions guided them to think about movement, such as the following:

    When you take over the human body, how do you move it? How does this movement convey your true essence? Take a few steps and try out this way to move.

    The first run of the larp became surprisingly physical and emotional, given that it was such a short larp. One participant kept his hands behind his back all the time since a character in the artwork lacked arms. People crawled on the floor and screamed at each other. There was emotional drama, and players cried. I hadn’t expected it to be so intense and wondered where the emotions came from. Maybe it was the artworks that inspired people’s play.

    On the other hand, the second run seemed much less physical and emotional. In the end, every player group makes a different larp.

    Art pedagogy

    Ultimately, Hyvät museovieraat was a way to experience art in a new fashion. The participants concentrated on one artwork and went quite deeply into it – often the way you immerse in a larp character. Thus, it was like looking at the artwork from inside.

    Melanie Orenius, who works as a curator of education at Amos Rex, brought an art pedagogical angle to the larp. She formulated character creation questions that had to do with the size of the artwork or the technique used to create it. These questions guided the participants to pay attention to details they might have otherwise ignored. For example, one question was:

    “Think about the colors in the artwork. Is there a tinge that dominates it, and is it tranquilizing or energizing? What do the colors tell you about the character?”

    The questions also discussed how art is displayed and went into deeper inquiries about its worth. Part of the PA announcement went:

    “Dear artworks. You are part of the collections of Amos Rex. But did anyone ask your permission for it?

    Would you rather be in another museum, in a public space, or in somebody’s – maybe your own – home? How valuable do you feel you are, and what determines your value?”

    When we were workshopping the small family-like groups, players looked at each other’s artworks when creating relationships. One group spontaneously came up with the idea of checking the years when the artworks were made and created a seniority hierarchy based on them: The older artworks would treat the younger ones like children or little siblings.

    Curation and display became major topics during the larp. Many artworks wished to be moved to another place in the exhibition. In the second run, there was even a discussion about what would happen to the artworks who stayed in the museum once the exhibition ended. When I told them, in the role of a museum guide, that they would be moved into a storage space, it created an uproar.

    Artworks who permanently took over a human body had to find a place to store the human spirit (that of the players) – a suitable artwork in the exhibition. At the end of the larp, everybody filled in details about their artwork (either the one they played, or the one they stored their human into) on a small form with questions like the name of the artwork, how it should be cared for, and how it should be displayed.

    Many players left these little pieces of paper in the museum, and they were archived. It was fun to read them afterward. One participant renamed her artwork – a stylistic, acrylic neon sculpture of a pig – The Plexiglass Queen and wrote that champagne should always be served in front of it. Another one wrote that his artwork should not be displayed at all: curtains should be drawn in front of it.

    Radical interpretations

    During the larp each participant held the interpretative authority on what their artwork-character was truly about. There were no introductions to the exhibition or its artworks beforehand. It was the participants who decided how exactly to transform the artworks into characters.

    This meant that there were some unorthodox and unusual interpretations. For example, one participant found their artwork ugly – a horrible sum of mistakes that just wanted to be destroyed and to destroy the artist who had made it. Based on the feedback, some participants found others’ ways of seeing the artwork shocking.

    How a larp turns out always depends on the ensemble of players. A group of curators and critics would probably have played Hyvät museovieraat differently. Maybe their interpretations of the art would have carried more weight and been better justified. However, some motivations for the larp came from the field of audience development, where guides and curators who do interactive tours wish they could get visitors to be bolder about expressing their thoughts on the art.

    The larp functioned as a platform for exactly this. Most people who look at art are not art professionals, and they always make their own readings and judgments on the art. They just don’t usually express them to people within the art world. The new and radical thing about the larp was that it served as a forum to voice those thoughts and play with them.

    Other reflections

    All in all, Hyvät museovieraat got good scores on the participant feedback forms. Originally, the larp was to be run only once, but a rerun was scheduled because of the positive feedback. However, the larp probably wasn’t as beginner-friendly as it looked on paper – even experienced larpers reported that it was not an easy larp.

    In some sense, I knew this all along, deep down. Shortness and no preparation requirements lower the threshold for newcomers to participate in the larp, but they don’t make it easy to play. First-time larpers often need clear instructions and struggle when they have to come up with stuff themselves. They are not sure what is possible, and they wonder what they are supposed to do. It is often more difficult to make your own character than to play a pre-written one. Furthermore, it is definitely easier to throw yourself into something familiar than to start creating characters and relationships out of artworks that might not have obvious connections to each other. There are a myriad of ways to turn an artwork into a larp character, even with guiding questions, and that very freedom makes it difficult.

    However, we got positive feedback also from newcomers who had great experiences. Many of them also created beautiful play. Creating content for Hyvät museovieraat lay heavily on the players, but I don’t see any other way in which we could have made this larp. If the goal is to engage participants with art, you have to do it on their own terms, with no readymade interpretations and easy-to-apply formulae.

    Hyvät museovieraat (Eng. Dear Museum Visitors)

    Location: Amos Rex art museum, Helsinki
    Runs: May 21th and August 20th, 2024.
    Duration: 4 hours
    Number of participants: scalable, at most 50
    Admission fee: 30 / 15 euros
    Design: Kaisa Kangas (larp design) and Melanie Orenius (art education)
    Producer: Sanja Kulomaa

    Special thanks: Syksy Räsänen, Dare Talvitie, Bjarke Pedersen, Halden Pfearsen, Miles Lizak.

    Bibliography

    Amos Rex. Keiken: Spirit Systems of Soft Knowing ༊*·˚. 2024. https://amosrex.fi/en/collections/keiken/ (last accessed Nov 29, 2024).

    Bøckman, Petter. “The Three Way Model”. In As Larp Grows Up – Theory and Methods in Larp, eds. Morten Gade, Line Thorup and Mikkel Sander. Projektgruppen KP03. 2003.

    Edwards, Ron. 2001. “GNS and Other Matters of Role-Playing Theory, Chapter 2” The Forge, October 14, 2001. http://www.indie-rpgs.com/articles/3/ (last accessed Jan 26, 2025)

    Lundqvist, Miriam. “Making Mandatory Larps for Non-players”. Nordic Larp Talks 2015. Copenhagen. https://nordiclarptalks.org/tag/miriam-lundqvist/ (last accessed Jan 26, 2025)

    This article is republished from the Knutepunkt 2025 book. Please cite it as:
    Kangas, Kaisa. 2025. “Experiencing Art from Within.” In Anatomy of Larp Thoughts, a breathing corpus: Knutepunkt Conference 2025. Oslo. Fantasiforbundet.

    Cover image: Kalervo Palsa (1978): Itseriittoisuus (Eng. Self-Sufficiency). Photo: Stella Ojala / Amos Rex.

  • Seeds of Hope: How to Intertwine Larp and Ecological Activism

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    Seeds of Hope: How to Intertwine Larp and Ecological Activism

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    What could we bring into larp from the climate crisis and what can we take home that could have an actual influence on how we act to mitigate the disaster we are living in?

    I awoke late to ecological conscience, relatively speaking. Despite all the available information about climate change, I felt pushed to action only after the scorching summers from 2017 onward. At that point I became interested in ecoactivist groups and started speaking out about the climate catastrophe as well as including it in my poetry. Contemporaneously ecological themes were taking root in the Finnish larping scene. The first ecologically themed larp I played in was Ennen vedenpaisumusta (Finland 2019, Eng. Before the Deluge). The larp designed by Minna and Mikko Heimola was a story about a Christian ecotheological present-day community; the members were seeking a way to live in balance with the ecosystem and exploring what it would be like to extricate themselves from modern society and modern ways of thinking. Many characters had plot lines that placed them in contrast to the society they had left behind, and everyone had to make their peace with the separation of their past lives from the new way of life they had chosen to be a part of.

    The general aim of the community was to decrease individual value and egoistic ideals and consequently to strengthen the ties between community members and the ties that connect humans to other beings. My character Halma had already gone to great lengths to change her mindset and aimed toward a kind of dissolving of her sense of self as an individual human being, up to and including rejecting the use of words “I” and “mine”. The community we brought into being was vibrant and the location of the game, a remote country villa with expansive woods, fields and seashore in the vicinity supported the themes seamlessly. We as players were responsible for the care of a small herd of sheep for the duration of the larp, and there were beehives in the yard for honey. The characters had no particular antagonism toward the wider society, but nevertheless set themselves clearly apart from it. They were planning sustainable and self-sufficient ways of energy and food production. The group had an independent set of rules for self-government that relied on altruistic ethics based on religious beliefs.

    Ennen vedenpaisumusta (2021): caring for sheep. Photo by Mikko Heimola. Ennen vedenpaisumusta (2021): caring for sheep. Photo by Mikko Heimola.

    What made the experience so particular to me was the implicit, calm acceptance that the characters would not be able to make a huge difference in the world as a whole; but that by resolutely living differently they could make our shared home a little bit healthier, despite not turning the global tide of destruction. That not having the final key to everything was no reason to stop doing what good they could.

    This is essential.

    A year later I started in the larp campaign Kaski (Finland 2021 –, Eng. Swidden). Kaski is a three-part series, in which two larps have been played and one remains in the future. In the co-creative larp, facilitated by the creator of the campaign Maiju Tarpila, the players have significantly built and influenced the fiction, milieu and characters in discussions, workshops and short ingame scenes preceding the larps. The end result reflects the ecological attitudes, thoughts and values of the players in a major way. The stated aim of Kaski is to explore the eco crisis and find methods to manage the manifold emotions that arise from the darkening times we are living in; and also, importantly, to ask what kind of action could result from the possible conclusions the participants arrive at.

    The first part, Roihu (Torch) centered around a group of eco activists preparing for an action against a forest industry company. For three days we planned the action, discussed its moral and ethical legitimacy, disagreed, argued, came to agreement and grieved the necessity of having to take direct action at all. The personal histories and interrelationships of the activists heavily affected the process and provided the backdrop for the community. Compared to Ennen vedenpaisumusta, where I felt the direction of change was inward, toward the community itself, in Roihu the aim of the characters was very much to incite the world surrounding them to change. This also affected the lessons I took home from each larp.

    In Roihu, real-life activist methods were brought into the planning by characters experienced in the field. What to consider if you want to climb up a high building, how to plan a subvertising campaign. Where to put your phone while you are planning an illegal action so that it can’t be used to tap you. Based on the pre-game workshops in which we had pooled all our player knowledge on these subjects, my older character Sini was able to instruct the overeager youngsters in the dangers of being underprepared. As a player I was not at all familiar with the topic. The youngsters’ questions were sobering: What to do if you are taken by the police, how to treat facial burns from tear gas, what to look out for when blocking a street? Using this real world information in-game felt serious and grim, while at the same time world-weary Sini had gone through these things innumerable times already.

    During the preparations for the first Kaski game, members of the Finnish Extinction Rebellion got attacked by the police during a nonviolent street block. We all read about it in the news. A person in the Kaski co-creation group was involved and injured. Due to our prolonged focus on activist themes we players were shocked and devastated to see the fiction play out in front of us, as it were. For me it brought home the realism of the situation: the themes we would be covering in the larp were harsh.

    Climate change is here, it’s happening, and we can’t escape from it. Our society isn’t taking the necessary action to mitigate the effects of the change, and those who try to raise awareness are persecuted. From then on it would be increasingly difficult to close my eyes or look away from these things.

    After a lengthy preparation phase in which we had planned and fleshed out our community in several workshops, the larp was played, late in August of 2021 (coincidentally in the same location as Ennen vedenpaisumusta). It was very good. Coming out from it I felt changed, as can happen after any particularly poignant experience. As a larp, Roihu was excellent, with devoted, skilled players who paid particular attention to the cohesion of the community. This time however, the warm but transient glow of post-high feelings gave rise to something different and more permanent. Immediately after the larp we were contextualizing our experience as a group, when in a polite and casual side note some players extended everyone an invitation to come join Extinction Rebellion, which they already were a part of. I usually make a point of not making far-reaching decisions right after a larp, when my head is still full of fumes from the game, but this time I overruled my habit and decided to accept the invitation.

    Since then I’ve participated in a number of road blocks, demonstrations, flash mobs and other types of protests. Stepping from the curb into a blocked street for the first time was electrifying. It felt like my hair stood on end. At the same time I felt strong echoes from what Sini had been doing her whole adult life. I was such a newcomer to the scene, while she had seen and done so much. In a very concrete way I was following where she’d already been and finding courage from having portrayed her. The threshold had been lowered by my imaginary experiences.

    While this is undeniably larper naivetë, imagining you have an actual grasp of real world situations after merely having played them, at the same time it’s still taking action for something I believe in, action which may have effects in the real world, spurred by the ingame fiction.

    Ecological larps, as well as other larps that deal with the current ills of the world, are exceptional in that they can be so tightly enmeshed with the prevailing reality as to have actual, concrete influence for good, by how players are changed during them. Whether the players purposely use their participation to accelerate their existing sympathies or whether they arrive at new convictions unbidden as a consequence of their experience, the changes can be real and long-lasting.

    The second part of the Kaski campaign, Tuhka (Finland, 2021, Eng. Ash) was situated in a near future when ecological destruction had rendered large parts of Finland uninhabitable. The characters were a different group from those in Roihu, but thematically part of the same chain of events. In the fiction, cities were struggling, infrastructure had collapsed and small rebel communities called Beacons were hanging on by their fingertips in remote areas, trying to incite action against the system, which even while collapsing was still perpetrating crimes against its citizens as well as the ecosystem. We portrayed inhabitants of the Seventh Beacon, a ragtag company of survivors ranging from radio technicians and soldiers to sea captains and students. My character Sarka was a Buddhist mystic trying to find universal connections in a world that was changed beyond recognition and was in the process of shaking humans off its back.

    Kaski: Tuhka (2022): Sarka didn’t wear shoes. Photo by the author. Kaski: Tuhka (2022): Sarka didn’t wear shoes. Photo by the author.

    The Seventh was an impossible home, a temporary haven in a darkening landscape. We practiced living differently, making conscious choices that would take us on a new course, away from the society that had driven itself off the cliff. We argued vehemently over what kind of roles would be needed in the new world we hoped would come in time. We came to agree that not everyone had to be a fighter; some could focus on gardening, some on building solace and maintaining connections. We found that to share a touch, a song, a breath, could be enough to fan a fluttering hope. Even though we were not able to stop the catastrophic change, we could survive and adapt. After the larp, this felt like an enduring truth.

    Because larp is embodied, the insights that are reached can be personally real to players. They can carry over as something more than what we usually call bleed.

    Taking part in ecological activism after having played it is exciting. It feels like entering the fictional glamour our characters were in the middle of. Going back to playing ecological activism after having engaged in it for real is eerie. The larps can take you to dystopic vistas that lie at the end of the road our society is currently traveling, and the experiences of character and player mingle until they seem somehow parts of a single continuum. The interweaving of character and player mindsets can produce odd feelings, particularly concerning hope. Only hindsight will show whether the real-life road blocks, mass demonstrations and other actions will have changed anything; whether I’ll have been a part of something historic.

    Working toward change, as a player as well as in-character, feels gratifying, feels like accomplishing something. In the fiction of the Kaski campaign what the characters did wasn’t enough, they failed in reversing the direction of the change. The Tuhka characters were living in the middle of the devastation the earlier generation had left them. The only option they had remaining, besides giving up, was adaptation. Any hope that the previous activists may have fostered had evaporated, it was a luxury the people of the Seventh Beacon could not afford, so they continued onward without it.

    My experiences in these games have been tangible enough to produce a glimmer of a vision of what it would be like to strive towards these communities in real life. Immersing into these mind-scapes, I’ve felt such sorrow for the atrocities we as a species have committed, but also joy: if a small group of players can imagine ways of living differently profoundly enough to make them come alive for the space of a few days, it will not be impossible for us as a society to find our way there when we finally must.

    (I say when).

    I think there’s going to be a crash.

    In the work of trying to mitigate it we need goals that are both realistic and reassuring. We need to believe that there are good times ahead, and that despite, or even because of, all the comforts we will have to give up, there are lovely things awaiting us. But they might look very different from our current idea of comfort and loveliness.

    Some things I’ve come to realize and accept as a result of participating in ecological larps and concurrent ecological activism: There are no easy solutions. If there were, the problems would have been solved already. I’ve learned that activists are not some other people somewhere else, with a complete dislike and disregard for the way people around them are living. Activism can begin in the middle of everyday life, with small choices, small acts of daring. It can stem from deep love and deep sorrow, a thorn in your side, a persistent discomfort that can only be alleviated through acting for what you love.

    I’ve realized that authority need not always be obeyed. That by engaging in civil disobedience I did not suddenly become a hardened criminal, an immoral person. That sometimes the most moral thing you can do is disobey.

    There is no consensus of the best way to go forward, of the scale of the changes that need to be made. The crises are an interlinked web of vicious problems which may not be resolved in our lifetime, or ever. The downhill may continue until the landscape is unrecognizable. There might not be any hope that we can salvage our present way of life.

    But there will still be beauty and joy. After letting go of hope, the work still continues. Making food, fixing radios. Sowing seeds, picking berries. If there are ruins, we will live in ruins and make our gardens there.

    Ludography

    Ennen vedenpaisumusta (2019): Finland. Minna Heimola, Mikko Heimola.

    Kaski: Roihu (2021): Finland. Maiju Tarpila.

    Kaski: Tuhka (2022): Finland. Maiju Tarpila.

    This article has been reprinted with permission from the Solmukohta 2024 book. Please cite as:

    Leppä, Elli. 2024. “Seeds of Hope: How to Intertwine Larp and Ecological Activism.” In Liminal Encounters: Evolving Discourse in Nordic and Nordic Inspired Larp, edited by Kaisa Kangas, Jonne Arjoranta, and Ruska Kevätkoski. Helsinki, Finland: Ropecon ry.

  • Odysseus: In Search of a Clockwork Larp

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    Odysseus: In Search of a Clockwork Larp

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    Odysseus (Finland 2019) was an ambitious attempt to create a fully functioning spaceship in the spirit of the TV series Battlestar Galactica. The dream was to create a sense of a perfectly working spaceship, where every aspect of the ship would have a part to play in the collective success and failure of the crew. The Odysseus had 104 characters onboard, running the ship in shifts for 48 hours. The larp aimed for a high-fidelity illusion of being on a spaceship, full with interactivity, scenography, sound and light to create a plausible feel of being inside an episode of a space opera.

    Played in the Torpparinmäki school in Helsinki, Odysseus was about making every aspect of a space opera into playable content: bridge crew fighting space battles, landing parties exploring planets, fighter pilots engaging enemies in combat, med bay patching up injured soldiers, science lab solving mysteries, and engineering crew keeping the bird in the air.

    Odysseus pursued the dream of a clockwork larp. Clockwork larp is a larp where characters work on diverse and sequential interdependent tasks that feed into each other, forming loops that progress the story and the dynamics of the larp.

    The beauty of a clockwork is in the immersive sensation that comes from dozens of players working together to overcome a challenge. Your job might be tedious in itself, but as your performance impacts everyone, it becomes imbued with meaning and significance. When an injured soldier comes to the medical station, she arrives with actual historical details on where, how, and why she got hit, and all those details are shared by all her comrades. As a medic, you are just patching up a soldier, but if you do your work badly, it might lead to dramatic repercussions further down the line.

    A properly interdependent clockwork is a fragile device. For every task to matter, every task needs to matter. Every wheel and spring must be doing its job or the gears grind to a halt. The characters must be reasonably successful in their tasks. The players must be reasonably timely. The larp technology must work smoothly. The marines must be on board when the cruiser jumps. If something goes wrong, the entire larp might be in danger of falling apart.

    While naval vessels and space stations are the obvious themes, any larp requiring coordinated success of diverse character groups can approach the aesthetics and face the challenges of a clockwork. To understand whether you should think about a larp as a clockwork is all about interdependence and fragility. If there are multiple player groups performing multiple tasks that could completely ruin the larp, it might be valuable to think about the larp in terms of clockwork design. In this paper I seek to describe how Odysseus approached the central clockwork-related design problems. This is not a review of Odysseus as a whole, but an attempt to distill the essential elements of its successful execution of the clockwork aesthetics.

    The Odysseus Engine

    The ESS Odysseus is a starship escaping a devastating attack on her home planet. As in the Battlestar Galactica TV-series that inspired the larp, the only hope is to find a safe haven by following an ancient path through the stars. In order to succeed, the crew must fend off relentless enemy attacks, deploy landing parties to collect long-lost artefacts, and decipher clues to discover the way to safety.

    The Odysseus clockwork loop (Figure 1) starts with the ship escaping combat with a hyperspace jump, and landing in the relative safety of a new star system. After the jump, the medics and the engineers have to take care of injured crew members and damaged machinery. At the same time, the scientists and the bridge crew use scanners to figure out which planet to visit next.

    The clockwork loop of Odysseus
    Figure 1: The clockwork loop of Odysseus. Ground missions were only done during every other loop, giving scientists more time to figure out the artefacts while traveling. Each revolution took about 2 hours and 47 minutes to complete. Jump drive cooldown requirements prevented players from rushing the loop, and the pursuing enemies prevented players from slowing it down. The clockwork loop was sequential, not simultaneous, so there were always some character groups off-duty and others hard at work: the scientists, for instance, had no clockwork duties during the marine ground missions.

    Then, the marines are deployed to the planet, with a mission to obtain ancient artefacts for the scientists. During the ground mission, they encounter enemies and other dangers (see Figure 2), and thus need to have their injuries treated by the medics. While this happens, the pursuing enemy fleet unerringly catches up with the Odysseus, prompting a space battle between the ship, its fighter craft, and the enemy fleet.

    Marines and pilots often ended up in combat situations on their planetary missions. When they returned, the stories of their heroic deeds fueled play onboard. (Photo: Santtu Pajukanta)
    Figure 2: Marines and pilots often ended up in combat situations on their planetary missions. When they returned, the stories of their heroic deeds fueled play onboard. (Photo: Santtu Pajukanta)

    The fight lasts until the scientists researching the artefacts figure out the next star system to visit, at which point the engineers prepare the jump engine and the bridge officers perform another hyperspace jump to safety. As the Odysseus escapes to a new star system, the loop starts over, and it is time to take care of injured crew members and damaged machinery.

    Every other loop was a ground mission loop, where a landing party was deployed to recover artefacts, and every other loop was a more relaxed waypoint en route towards the next ground mission. While Odysseus was traveling, the scientists studied the artefacts further and determined where to land in the next star system to find more artefacts.

    Odysseus was played, in shifts, for 48 hours straight. More than half of the players were awake at any time to run the ship (see below). During the larp, the Odysseus went through 16 clockwork loops, which included 6 larger and 3 smaller operations for the marines.

    Odysseus Crew

    Out of the 104 players, 60–70 were playing the characters directly involved in the clockwork operations of the larp. As the crew worked in two shifts, approximately the following amount of characters were on shift at any time:

    • 6 bridge officers, who commanded the Odysseus in space battles
    • 5 fighter pilots launched to space to defend the Odysseus
    • 6 marines ready to be deployed to the Finnish woods on ground missions, plus the officers managing their equipment
    • 4 engineers operating the jump engines and generators, as well as repairing the ship by physical actions such as replacing fuses
    • 4 science lab personnel who studied alien artefacts recovered from planets
    • 4 med bay staff to patch up sick and injured characters

    The remaining 30–40 characters were not directly involved with the clockwork operation, and mostly slept at night and played during the day:

    • 9 political leaders who engaged in political play with the accompanying civilian NPC fleet
    • 14 Velian refugees, survivors of a mysterious colony, rescued early in the larp
    • 27 other civilians, such as refugees, journalists and clergy

    These numbers do not add up for many reasons. Primarily, the crew consisted of two shifts, supported by a reserve of “Ghost Shift” crew who joined the clockwork when needed. Some characters were always on shift. Some characters belonged in multiple groups. All in all, this is the author’s rough estimate informed by the organiser team.

    All the while the clockwork was relentlessly grinding onwards, the Odysseus runtime gamemaster team was throwing spanners in the works: Enemy boarding parties attacking the Odysseus, marines getting mysterious parasite infections on planetside missions, critical resources running out, and so on and so on. As the escaping Odysseus was accompanied by a flotilla of civilian vessels, the politician players had to figure out political issues and conflicts relating to the entire fleet.

    As the journey of the Odysseus progressed through the clockwork loops, the various plotlines of the larp advanced as well. Characters and groups brought an endless amount of plot twists to the mix, from small personal plots to grand revelations. Often it felt like none of the clockwork revolutions were played out cleanly, as there were always some twists to accompany them. Sometimes you picked up a group of refugee players, sometimes you hosted a group of NPC visitors from the civilian fleet for a political summit. Sometimes there were massive space battles, and sometimes the crew had to take various precautions to prevent disease from spreading onboard.

    Small Cogs in the Large Machine

    It is not a simple task to ensure that all players understand what is happening in a larp. However, in a clockwork design it is almost mandatory: when your ship gets shot, or performs a hyperspace jump, or receives visitors from another vessel, this needs to be obvious to everyone on board. This is not an easy task, even when a substantial amount of computers, lights, and loudspeakers can be used to do the job.

    Some earlier larps going for clockwork aesthetics discovered magnificent pre-existing larp locations: The Monitor Celestra (Sweden, 2013; see Karlsson 2013) was played in the crammed steel corridors of the HMS Småland, and Lotka-Volterra (Sweden, 2018) took place in a large underground bomb shelter near Uppsala. These gorgeous locations came with fundamental downsides: they were labyrinthine, they were difficult for rigging all the cables and gear, they were impossible for wireless connectivity, and they heavily limited the time the organizing teams could spend on-site before and after the larp.

    Odysseus rented a convenient modern building in Helsinki for six weeks. Before the first run, the team spent three weeks on site, transforming a school into a spaceship with sets, lights, audio, ICT systems and more. They laid down six kilometres of cable, installed 34 loudspeakers, and rigged dozens and dozens of lights. This was a very expensive solution in terms of workload, but it provided the team a controlled, dry, warm, safe environment where they could spend a lot of time before the larp to set things up. This was possible because Odysseus had a huge organiser team, with some 160 people credited on the game’s website.

    All the main systems of the ship were connected to semi-automated light and sound systems, creating a powerful illusion of being actually on a spaceship. Klaxons screamed, jump engines boomed, fuses blew, screens blinked, all coordinated with sound, light, and smoke. The technological infrastructure created not only a convincing illusion, but also a critical communication medium that ensured that everyone understood the state of the Odysseus, and allowed the game masters to direct the larp. One clever design choice was that whenever the Odysseus performed a jump, all her computer systems went momentarily offline, with all monitors everywhere only displaying static. Together with all the other audiovisual cues, this ensured that even deeply engaged players had to take a pause and register that a new clockwork loop had begun.

    The big main hall was the central communication medium of the larp. All essential crew functions had an easy visual access to the lobby, and as it also served as a bar and a restaurant, civilians spent a lot of time there. Consequently, as all visual and auditory information was clear in the lobby, it was clear everywhere in the larp. In this picture, an enemy boarding party has just penetrated the Odysseus and an indoors firefight is about to start – in the central lobby. (Photo: Santtu Pajukanta)
    Figure 3: The big main hall was the central communication medium of the larp. All essential crew functions had an easy visual access to the lobby, and as it also served as a bar and a restaurant, civilians spent a lot of time there. Consequently, as all visual and auditory information was clear in the lobby, it was clear everywhere in the larp. In this picture, an enemy boarding party has just penetrated the Odysseus and an indoors firefight is about to start – in the central lobby. (Photo: Santtu Pajukanta)

    In a clear contrast to the maze-like corridors of the Celestra, the Odysseus team intentionally designed all the spaces to be inclusive, open, and accessible (Makkonen 2019). Almost all the facilities were placed around a large, open main lobby, which served as the primary channel of audio and light information: Even if your work area did not have lights or loudspeakers for a red alert, you could not miss it when it took over the main areas. Most rooms had windows to the main lobby, so everyone could see what was happening (see Figure 3). Areas like the bridge and the med bay were separated with a glass wall, allowing anyone to see all the action (see Figure 4). The brig was adjacent to the security room, and designed to allow prisoners to “incidentally” see the entire play area through surveillance cameras.

    The Odysseus bridge and Empty Epsilon -driven command screens portrayed through a glass wall from an adjacent corridor. All important areas were positioned behind glass walls from the main hall, allowing the crew to focus on their tasks while still being easy to observe from the outside. At times crowds would gather outside the bridge during a space combat, or outside the medlab during a dangerous surgery. (Photo: Santtu Pajukanta)
    Figure 4: The Odysseus bridge and Empty Epsilon -driven command screens portrayed through a glass wall from an adjacent corridor. All important areas were positioned behind glass walls from the main hall, allowing the crew to focus on their tasks while still being easy to observe from the outside. At times crowds would gather outside the bridge during a space combat, or outside the medlab during a dangerous surgery. (Photo: Santtu Pajukanta)

    The ship was not a backdrop in Odysseus: it was a relentless force controlling your play at all times. Depending on whether you were on shift or not, a red alert could be a startling backdrop to an intimate moment, or a rough shake-up pulling you back to combat. If you chose to sleep in the in-game berthing area, you probably noticed every single jump and red alert.

    Running on Rails

    Odysseus was a larp about a military vessel in a crisis situation. The majority of characters were members of a military hierarchy, and as the crisis was acute for the full duration of the larp, civilian characters did not have much say on the big picture. Thus, the larp’s themes would be better characterised by discipline than by agency, and the Odysseus team took a very negative stance on individual players choosing their own styles of play. This tight design was adopted as a perceived necessity for a clockwork larp: since the aesthetic was portraying interdependent characters working in unison, there was limited room for anyone getting out of line.

    The larp is designed to be a tunnel not a sandbox, so although you have many decisions you can do completely independently there are [a] few elements we hope that you follow as it gives you most to play with. We have tried to also give your characters ingame reasons to do this. So if you get a distress signal, go and save those in need! … The game relies rather heavily on solving the puzzles and completing the following land mission in timely manner, so this should be supported from the top as well. … This is not a game to be hacked, won or overachieved (Odysseus play instructions, 2019).

    It was important that every clockwork character did their part with a reasonable amount of success and in a timely manner. This was non-negotiable, as the organisers had scheduled the full larp with a 15-minute timetable.

    The primary strategy for this was to make sure that all the key characters were suitable for keeping the train on the rails. As in many Finnish larps, character descriptions were long and detailed, containing the most important relationships, personality, agendas, personal history et cetera, and these character writeouts were written to create the everyday heroes the larp needed. I played the chief scientist, who was intentionally established to be a fair but demanding leader – precisely what was necessary to run the lab in a way that would get the artefact puzzles solved in time. According to the organisers, this micro-level design was used in other leader characters as well, in order to minimise the chances of, for example, the captain going rogue and rebelling against the fleet command.

    As an additional strategy, players were given explicit responsibilities. For instance, the organisers provided the marine officers with specific instructions on which characters to send on particular ground missions. This allowed organisers to distribute planetary missions evenly, and ensured that particular characters would be on missions related to their personal plots.

    The organisers actively sought to avoid player boredom, as bored players frequently make their own fun in ways that could be disastrous to the overall working of the clockwork. According to the main organiser Laura Kröger, one reason why the larp had tons of action, secrets, revelations and plotlines was to keep players busy, specifically in order to avoid emergence of disruptive plots such as unplanned mutinies or unwanted larp democracy.

    The last line of defence was brutal old-school railroading. If the scientists failed to solve a puzzle in time, one of them would get a whisper in the ear from a game master. If a bridge officer plotted incorrect coordinates into the jump engine, the ship AI would double-check and reject them. If the ship was about to explode, the onboard AI would suggest heroic last-second shenanigans to engineers who could miraculously save the ship, often at the cost of ending up in the med bay. Railroading was necessary, because Odysseus had no contingency plans for players ending up exploring incorrect planets.

    Although a lot of larpers shun this kind of railroading, this probably did not harm most players’ experiences of the larp. In terms of agency, the enforced hierarchy of a naval setting concentrates all decision-making power to very few characters in any case. For a player of a junior engineer it matters little whether the route of the Odysseus was planned by the admiral or by the game organisers, as the setting forces most characters to follow orders anyway. The organisers also worked hard to ensure that the players had reasonable in-character reasons to follow along their plots. Similarly, offering a miraculous feat to an engineer or a critical tip to a scientist might detract from one player’s experience, but at the same time allow the clockwork to keep on ticking for the hundred other players.

    Ideally, of course, this kind of a larp would weave a story of natural successes and failures, incorporating important decisions made by the players. However, the workload of creating even a single path through the larp was massive, so it seems unfeasible to create all the redundant content that would be required for a branching narrative – let alone one where players could freely explore the galaxy.

    In comparison, The Monitor Celestra team also realised the fragility of a clockwork machine when faced with diverse playstyles. Just like Odysseus, the Celestra organisers explicitly gave the players of key characters various responsibilities to keep the game running. While the Odysseus key playstyle message was play along – check the distress signals, solve the puzzles – the Celestra key message was play to lose against other players, play to win against outside enemies.

    The Celestra still allowed a lot more freedom to players. The main thing that was explicitly forbidden was covert sabotage: clockwork play is challenging even on a good day, and it is practically impossible to keep an eye on everyone working in various duties. I remember trying to command a space battle while the engine room was staging a strike, preventing us from maneuvering or shooting. Although such a scenario might work perfectly on the silver screen, no larp space battle is long enough to accommodate negotiations over working conditions. The Celestra was also hijacked by a lone gunman at some point, creating an experience where all agency was transferred from everyone onboard to one player for a moment, until the crisis was resolved.

    This genre of larp is not resilient against larphacking, sabotage, popular uprisings, or larp democracy. All clockwork larps have to make their peace with some amounts of railroading. They have to clearly specify supported styles of play, and to figure out how to restrain player agency in order to keep flying. I believe there is no other way.

    Turning the Gears

    Clockwork design depends on in-game work, and designing a labour-intense larp has its own challenges (see Jones, Koulu & Torner 2016). The work needs to be interesting, there needs to be enough of it, and there must not be too much work. Finally, the labour should support character play, instead of taking attention away from it.

    The Odysseus clockwork was designed to be sequential, rather than simultaneous. None of the clockwork functions required more than half-a-dozen players contributing simultaneously, which made it easier to get the crew in stations and to focus on the tasks. The characters were split into two main shifts, with a third shift consisting of reserve characters that could relieve characters that were on shift, or jump into action if crew members were missing. As the larp lasted for 48 intense hours, exhaustion became a part of the play: some jobs needed to be done, regardless of whether the players fancied doing them at the moment. Although working in character was a central pleasure of the larp, there were definitely some occasions where tired players genuinely wanted to avoid their shifts. Personally, for me it is hard to stay in character when exhausted, so there is always a danger of robotically doing my job without really larping while doing so.

    Designing diegetic work is a difficult multidisciplinary design task that connects larp design, digital game design, scenography, engineering and other hard skills. If you want to create a handheld HANSCA scanner (see Figure 5) that relays information between engineers, medics, scientists and game masters, you have to interface with the tech systems to get it working, with plot design to add content, with props to make sure they can be properly scanned, and so forth. As this kind of task requires many people to accomplish, it becomes complex and time-consuming.

    HANSCA handheld scanners combined off-the-shelf Android phones with custom software. In the initial plans, they would have been used a lot by scientists, engineers, and medics to read RFID tags and provide information for the game mastering systems. In the actual runs they were primarily used by engineers. (Photo: Santtu Pajukanta)
    Figure 5: HANSCA handheld scanners combined off-the-shelf Android phones with custom software. In the initial plans, they would have been used a lot by scientists, engineers, and medics to read RFID tags and provide information for the game mastering systems. In the actual runs they were primarily used by engineers. (Photo: Santtu Pajukanta)

    Bridge officers, fighter pilots, engineers and marines had close-to-indexical((See e.g. Stenros & al. (2024) in this volume for more on symbols, icons and indices.)) jobs, meaning that the player tasks were very closely aligned with the character tasks. For example the bridge officers and pilots were actually fighting the enemies with Empty Epsilon combat simulator, the engineers were mechanically changing fuses (see Figure 6) and fiddling with the jump drives, and the marines were physically shooting aliens with nerf guns.

    Engineer changing a fuse. The game masters could blow fuses around the ship to represent damage to the Odysseus. Blown fuses could have further physical consequences, such as screens going black until they were fixed. (Photo: Santtu Pajukanta)
    Figure 6: Engineer changing a fuse. The game masters could blow fuses around the ship to represent damage to the Odysseus. Blown fuses could have further physical consequences, such as screens going black until they were fixed. (Photo: Santtu Pajukanta)

    The medical staff sometimes reverted to iconic work, where you pretend to do something in a way that looks and sounds right, but you are not actually doing the work itself. For instance, they acted out performing surgeries. Often the injuries and ailments were well-propped to improve the experience of medical treatment.

    The scientist work often felt symbolic. Deciphering the ancient artefacts to figure out the path of the Odysseus was done through puzzles which resembled escape room puzzles. Although they were fairly well designed, it was at times hard to explain why some ancient folks used a geometry puzzle to encrypt stellar coordinates.

    Designing the difficulty level of diegetic teamwork is not easy. You might end up with players who have no idea of what they should be doing on a spaceship bridge, or – like I did in one run of Celestra – you may end up with a professional naval officer who can both run the show and teach others at the same time. In Odysseus, at least some bridge crews mitigated the risk of incompetence by practicing space combat with Empty Epsilon before the larp. This is of course possible only if you can play the simulator online in advance.

    The gold standard of labour in clockwork larp is work that consists of tasks that uphold the 360° illusion (see Koljonen 2007) perfectly, while having a difficulty level easy enough to allow players to role-play while barely succeeding. Ideally, the tasks should enable narrative granularity: binary success/failure tasks do not produce the most interesting narrative inputs down the line in the clockwork. Similarly, symbolic tasks can be hard to turn into social content – if Odysseus would have literally expected scientists to solve sudokus, it would have been very hard to narrativise success and failure in that task to create social play.

    As Celestra before, Odysseus included a lot of characters without clockwork tasks, such as refugees, civilian administration, religious leaders, and politicians. The risk is that regardless of the quality of the game content created for those characters, they may feel left out from an experience centered around the clockwork. This risk is connected to player expectations, for instance if players sign up to experience a clockwork, but end up cast as civilians.

    Odysseus sought to alleviate this by creating tons of important plot content for civilian characters. Based on the quantitative evaluation in a post-larp player survey, this was a mixed success. In general, the players of civilian characters did state that they had a great larp, but the players of military characters were still quite a bit happier with their experiences.

    The Invisible Machine

    Behind the scenes, another fragile and interdependent machine was ticking away: The organiser team was busy at work. They were setting up space battles with Empty Epsilon, answering characters’ messages to the civilian fleet, prepping antagonists for the land missions, deploying artefacts in the woods to be soon retrieved by the marines, shuttling marine players from the main location to the planetside play areas, answering endless queries from medics, scientists and engineers on behalf of the ship’s AI… and much more. At any time there were a couple of dozen organisers at work.

    The runtime game mastering was based on a pre-planned schedule, where everything was broken down to 15 minute slots. This allowed the game masters to adapt their plans based on the status of the larp. For instance, if the Odysseus was planned to suffer an unexpected glitch during a jump that would damage the ship, but the ship was already heavily damaged by the enemy fire, the event could be skipped or postponed. Or if the Odysseus had enjoyed smooth sailing for a while, the game masters could trigger a larger and more dangerous space battle. According to Laura Kröger, the team had many backup plans for various scenarios in which the larp would have been derailed.

    Although much of the technology was automated, the light, audio and code had to be manually operated whenever the Odysseus performed a jump – every 2 hours 47 minutes, around the clock. As the organiser team had no capacity to train substitute game masters to run the larp, there was very little redundancy available. For example, Kröger herself had to be woken up to orchestrate every jump, and she was also the person directing all runtime game mastering, meaning that team members had to consult her on details constantly.

    There were numerous indispensable organisers who would have been very hard to replace on a quick schedule. While the in-game machine only had to run for 48 hours, the organiser side also had to operate smoothly through all the phases leading into the larp and taking place after it.

    Where possible, the Odysseus team mitigated technology risk by using off-the-shelf hardware and software. Lights and audio are relatively easy to operate frictionlessly if organisers are professionals who can use the same tools they use in their daily work, and Empty Epsilon is a reasonably stable piece of space combat software. With the more ambitious custom tools, like the HANSCA hand scanners, custom-programmed Android phones that were intended to relay scan data to game masters, minor glitches and problems were frequent – but they were still more robust than any custom wireless hardware I have ever seen in larp. Half a dozen professional programmers spent more than six months on building and integrating the various systems used in the larp. The larp had some 20 different IT systems running, including a custom backend, engineer repair system, the datahub used for ingame emails, the warp engines, airlock doors, surveillance cameras, info screens, and so on (see Hautala 2020 and Santala & Juustila 2019 for details).

    It is a small miracle that everything worked out pretty well in all three runs, and it is trivial to imagine incidents that would have been extremely detrimental to the play experience: main organiser falling ill, or a key piece of technology breaking down, as simplest examples. It is far from certain that the larp could have recovered from such an incident at all.

    Although the Odysseus team successfully pulled it off, anyone planning a clockwork larp should consider whether the dangerous and difficult aesthetic is truly worth the effort and the risk. Unless the point is to deliberately create the sensation of a fragile and interdependent system, there are easier ways to provide players with intense experiences of challenging labour. Succeeding and failing together does not require interdependence, and working in parallel can also be an equally great generator of social play.

    A Fragile Contraption

    The art of running a clockwork larp is largely an art of not failing. In principle, you only have to design meaningful interdependent jobs, build the architecture and the IT systems to allow proper communication, and fuel the system with events and plots to keep it running. But in practice the operation of the clockwork machine is fraught with existential risks: players can fail in their tasks, technology can break, bored larpers can start a mutiny, or someone can simply walk to the bridge with a gun and hijack the entire ship.

    The Odysseus team successfully mitigated these risks. They established a railroading playstyle before the sign-up to eliminate larp democracy and to stop random rebels and saboteurs. They ensured that players succeeded in diegetic tasks by creating necessary fallbacks to sustain the clockwork. They spent a lot of time building the larp on-site, to ensure that all the IT systems running the game worked. They designed a space that facilitated communication, and augmented it with light and audio, to create a shared understanding of what was going on in the larp. They avoided dangerous player boredom by firehosing the characters with action and plots day and night. And they had a lot of luck in that none of the critical personnel or technology risks actualised.

    Running a clockwork larp is a fool’s errand, because the very point of a clockwork is interdependence, and the very point of a larp is agency. The Odysseus team invested a massive amount of skilled labour to take this paradox head-on. While they had to accept some design tradeoffs to make it work, they ultimately prevailed, and crafted a beautiful 360° illusion of a spaceship ticking with clockwork magic.

    Odysseus info

    Credits: Laura Kröger, Sanna Hautala, Antti Kumpulainen, and a team of over 160 volunteers. Illusia ry. Full credits
    Date: 27-30 June, 4-7 July & 9-12 July, 2019
    Location: Torpparinmäki Comprehensive School, Helsinki
    Playtime: 48 hours
    Players: 104
    Budget: € 85,000 (three runs total)
    Participation fee: €200; sponsor tickets €300

    Bibliography

    Sanna Hautala (2020): Odysseus – A story about survival (using GIS). ref. December 26th 2023

    Katherine Castiello Jones, Sanna Koulu and Evan Torner (2016): Playing at Work. In Larp Politics, edited by Kaisa Kangas, Mika Loponen and Jukka Särkijärvi. Solmukohta.

    Petter Karlsson (2013): The Monitor Celestra – A Battlestar Galactica inspired frakkin’ spaceship larp. ref. December 26th 2023

    Johanna Koljonen (2007): Eye-Witness to the Illusion. An Essay on the Impossibility of 360° Role-Playing. In Lifelike, edited by Jesper Donnis, Morten Gade and Line Thorup. Knudepunkt.

    Mia Makkonen (2019): Spatial Design in Larps: Case Odysseus. Ropecon 2019.  ref. December 26th 2023

    Essi Santala and Sampo Juustila (2019): Odysseus – Where Code Meets Light and Sound. Ropecon 2019.  ref. December 26th 2023

    Jaakko Stenros, Eleanor Saitta and Markus Montola (2024): The General Problem of Indexicality in Larp Design. In Liminal Encounters: Evolving Discourse in Nordic and Nordic Inspired Larp, edited by Kaisa Kangas, Jonne Arjoranta, and Ruska Kevätkoski. Helsinki, Finland: Ropecon ry.

    Ludography

    Lotka-Volterra (2018): Sweden. Olle Nyman, Simon Svensson, Andreas Amsvartner and Sebastian Utbult. Berättelsefrämjandet, Ariadnes Red Thread & Atropos. Full credits ref. December 26th 2023

    The Monitor Celestra (2013): Sweden. Alternatliv, Bardo and Berättelsefrämjandet. Full credits ref. December 26th 2023

    Odysseus (2019): Finland.

    This article has been reprinted with permission from the Solmukohta 2024 book. Please cite as:

    Montola, Markus. 2024. “Odysseus: In Search of a Clockwork Larp.” In Liminal Encounters: Evolving Discourse in Nordic and Nordic Inspired Larp, edited by Kaisa Kangas, Jonne Arjoranta, and Ruska Kevätkoski. Helsinki, Finland: Ropecon ry.

    Cover photo:The hangar bay and the smaller ships were built with less fidelity for a 360° illusion, as the smaller vessels were built from fabrics. The 3 fighter craft, on left, were used in the space battles during the larp. The diplomat vessel ESS Starcaller, in the middle, could only be repaired in time to participate in the final mission. (Photo: Santtu Pajukanta)

  • Possibilities of Historical Larp: Court of Justice in 17th-century Finland

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    Possibilities of Historical Larp: Court of Justice in 17th-century Finland

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    Introduction

    Talvikäräjät (Finland 2022, eng. Winter Ting) was a larp set in an imaginary village in Western Finland in the 1660s. It was designed as a part of my research project bearing the same name, where I studied the use of history in larp. The larp aimed high in authenticity: the game design was based on authentic court cases and on the most recent research on 17th-century court practices. In this article I present how we, the larpwrights, used history in game design. I will also discuss historical authenticity and how the lessons from Talvikäräjät could benefit the community for historical larp.

    Historical larp and reenactment

    Historical larp shares its roots with historical reenactment. Historical reenactment as a hobby emerged in Finland in the 1990s, and it was inspired by international practices, like the Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA, in Finland Suomen keskiaikaseura). Many Finnish reenactors were active also in the newborn larp scene, and vice versa. Differences between these hobbies were not always clear, and the traditions had many similarities. (see Harviainen et al. 2018; Stenros & Montola 2010; Harviainen 2011; Salomonsen 2003; Mochocki 2021)

    Later, both hobbies grew and became more distinct. During the 2000s, both also received academic interest. In Finland, academic studies of reenactment have concentrated on material culture (Sundman 2020; Vartiainen 2010), and the study of larp has gotten more attention than reenactment (on larp studies in Finland, see Stenros & Harviainen 2011). Internationally, the academic focus has been on reenactment rather than historical larp. Historical games have been studied, but academic interest in them has mostly been on digital games (Mochocki 2021, 7). Michał Mochocki’s Role-play as a Heritage Practice (2021) is the first monograph concentrating on historical larp.

    Unfortunately, larp is usually seen as less authentic or more fantasy-like than reenactment (see, e.g., Agnew et al. 2020, 3). One of the main goals of the Talvikäräjät project was to bring together these different traditions and show how historical larp is and can be reenactment. However, it is important to remember that there are many styles of historical larp: some are more fantasy- or alternative history -oriented, and not all larps set in the past aim for historical authenticity (on different historical role-playing genres or categories, see Mochocki 2021, 93–95).

    Historical larp is a reenactment practice, although larp and reenactment are usually discussed as distinct hobbies. If a larp attempts “to copy the past” (Agnew et al. 2020, 2), it is, by definition, historical reenactment. In practice, however, reenacting and larping are two different activities: to put it quite roughly, larpers play a character in the context of larp, and reenactors are being themselves during reenactment. Reenactors can have an alter ego or depict a social role in their reenactment, but these reenactment personas are usually much lighter than larp characters (Mochocki 2021, 16, 33–35, 75; Harviainen 2011).

    Key differences between historical reenactment and historical larp can be found in game design and in the narrative. Larp tells a story formed in the game by its participants, but if a reenactment tells a story, it is usually scripted and does not encourage individual play. Most reenactors only depict a social role and are not actively playing a character in their reenacting, whereas character play is an important feature in larp. J. Tuomas Harviainen has noted that reenactment and larping have many similarities, and their essential difference is in the naming and framing of the action rather than in their nature. (ibid.)

    It must be noted that any presentation of history is an approximation. A historical larp cannot grasp all aspects of the past: this is not a lack but a feature of all historical presentations. Artistic presentations of the past are not academic contributions, and they should not be treated as such. Since a historical presentation cannot include or ”get right” all historical features, the important questions are: what kind of choices were made in the design process, what kind of history is depicted, and how is it depicted. Presentations of the past can and should be discussed also on their historical accuracy and how they relate to academic understanding of historical phenomena, but low-level “is it authentic or not”-dualism fails to see how a work of art depicts people and cultures of the past, their motivations, and historical processes. It is important to recognize that the presentation of the past is an active choice, and these choices contribute to our understanding of the past as well as the present. (see also Mochocki 2021, 7, and Chapman 2016, 6–11.)

    Talvikäräjät research project

    The idea to study historical larp stemmed from my own experiences in historical reenactment, larp, and academic research. I participated in my first larp in 2002, and a couple of years later started also with historical reenactment. In 2006 I began studying history, which eventually led to doctoral studies and gaining my PhD in 2020. All this time, I participated in various larps, including historical, and was involved in designing them. I also reenacted Finnish Iron Age, Middle Ages, and early 17th century, and dabbled in some other periods as well.

    During my PhD, I noticed how my sources, 17th-century Finnish court records, could provide a good setting for a larp. First I thought about designing the larp as a hobby, but then I also found out about the growing academic interest in reenactment practices and historical games. The study of historical games had concentrated on digital games, and reenactment studies seemed to exclude historical role-play as mere fantasy. A research project started to form, and luckily, I was able to secure funding from the Finnish Cultural Foundation in 2021.  The project was conducted in the Game Studies Lab in Tampere University, and I would like to take this opportunity to thank all my colleagues there for their valuable comments and encouragement.

    The grant covered one year’s work, to design a historical larp and to do research on Finnish historical larps. By designing a larp based on my historical research, I wanted to examine how academic research could be turned into creative work. The research part, which took place after the larp, involved a questionnaire for Talvikäräjät participants about their experiences both in the larp and in other historical larps as well. I also did interviews with larpwrights who are or have been active in organizing historical larps in Finland. The academic results of the study are still under publication, but it would seem that larp is an excellent tool for reenacting some aspects of the past which are harder to grasp with other forms of reenactment. In larp, there is a difference between the player and the character, which enables playing with social dynamics and power. It is also possible to design religious or magical experiences and encounters, which would have been an integral part of worldviews in many past cultures.

    In this article, I describe the design process and the outcome of the historical larp, also named Talvikäräjät, designed in the research project. I will also reflect how the lessons learned in Talvikäräjät could help others design and/or play historical larps. I’m aware that similar grants are very hard to get, and being both historian and larper is quite rare in Finland. I’m certain, however, that having experience in academic research, historical reenactment, and larp, can give unique insight and can help both lay and academic discussions on historical larp and experiencing the past.

    Designing the larp

    As mentioned, the early modern court of justice seemed already at the beginning to be a good setting for a larp. In the past decades, academic research (Österberg 1987 being one of the pioneers) has highlighted the role of 17th-century rural lower courts as social arenas where various power structures and strategies interact, and everyone is, in principle, able to join and follow the proceedings. In Sweden, which present-day Finland was a part of from the Middle Ages until 1809, lower court gatherings stemmed from prehistoric practices of coming together to decide on common affairs and settle various disputes. During the early modern period (ca. 1500–1800), these prehistoric court gatherings (sw. tinget, fi. käräjät) slowly changed into modern courts of justice, when the role of local communities and their leaders was diminished, and the role of professional judges and unified practices was increased. The 17th century was the turning point, since the local community still played an active part in the court, but the crown wanted to unify legal practices and demanded very detailed records from local courts. Nowadays, these lower court records provide valuable information, not only about judicial proceedings, but also of everyday life, social relationships, and cultural practices in 17th-century countryside. (Andersson 1998, Toivo 2008, Taussi Sjöberg 1996, Miettinen R 2019)

    Contemporary research has highlighted the role of various power structures and different voices and strategies in the court gatherings of 17th-century Finland (Toivo 2008 & 2016, Miettinen R 2019; for Sweden, Andersson 1998, Taussi Sjöberg 1996), so these were taken as leading features for game design in Talvikäräjät. Early modern proceedings relied heavily on oral testimonies, where the practices of remembering, storytelling, and interpreting played an important role. Thus, the main themes of the larp were memory, power, and community. Stylistically the larp was a court drama with systemic injustice and occasional absurdities.

    The production of Talvikäräjät larp began in Spring 2021, as soon as I was granted funding. Firstly, I gathered a group of larp organizers with whom I had previously designed historical larps. We discussed my role as a grant researcher, but since other organizers were volunteers, the production was very similar to our previous larp projects. I would act as the main organizer and be responsible for the overview and historical accuracy: I could just use more time and resources than the average volunteer organizer. Other organizers chose their roles in story and character design and taking care of the practicalities.

    We designed an imaginary village set in the Satakunta region in Western Finland in 1666. This year was chosen because the year before, ecclesiastical courts were merged into rural lower courts, which made it possible to include more varied cases in the larp. The mid-17th century also belonged more clearly in the transition period than the late 17th century, which also saw the emergence of witch trials and a new church law in 1686. Satakunta was chosen because the sources for my dissertation were from there. I wanted to highlight the centrality of the region, and not to have to explain cultural practices with peripheral location. In the village, there lived 35 player characters, who belonged to different families and groups, and had various amounts of social and economic capital. The larp was run at a weekend, and the event lasted from Friday evening to Saturday night.

    The court proceedings

    The court gathering was designed according to historical examples: the local community would gather to a session with many different cases. On Friday evening, we played different scenes which were connected to the cases discussed later in court. The aim was to give players the experience of being there, rather than only reminiscing about something that was written in their character profile. We also wanted to simulate the process of memory-making and remembering. These scenes took place in various timelines, and after the scenes, the game was paused for the night. On Saturday, the game was played linearly from the opening of the court until closure and punishments, with some in-game breaks for playing, socializing, and eating. Historically, court gatherings could last several days and not everyone would be so actively engaged in so many hearings, so the larp proceeding could be described as compressed reality.

    Talvikäräjät ingame, photo by Karo Suominen
    Talvikäräjät ingame, photo by Karo Suominen

    Some contemporary judicial practices were included because they supported the role of communal decision-making. Historically, twelve local farmers would act as lay members of the court (sw. nämbdeman, fi. lautamies). They would help the judge, inform them on local circumstances, and vote in unclear proceedings. For the sake of power balance among the characters, the number of lay members was reduced to five: almost all land-owning male characters acted as lay members of the court and decided on cases involving one another. The owner of the richest farm acted as a local officer, sheriff (sw. länsman, fi. nimismies), who historically helped to organize the court gathering and had various tasks in local administration. Contrary to later periods, 17th-century sheriffs were elected among the locals to a position of trust, and only later did the post become a public office. In the larp, the sheriff also had personal storylines with his family, and he was torn in several directions in the local community.

    With unclear proceedings, a practice of communal oath was used both historically and in-game. The accused could swear that they were not guilty, and if they could get enough people to take the oath with them, the judge could declare them innocent. Historically, the number of required co-oaths was usually eleven, but we lowered it to two. Thus, if some members of the local community believed the accused to be innocent, or not deserving a legal punishment for their actions, they could free them. This proved to be a very fruitful and dramatic opportunity in the game.

    The judge was a non-player character, which was designed to lead the game forward and press legal solutions to the cases, but simultaneously support gameplay and the role of individual and communal decision-making. Also, when choosing authentic court cases for the larp, we preferred complex cases without clear solutions, or cases where the characters’ choices played an important role. Although the law stated a clear punishment for every crime, every character could influence the outcome. Would they testify against their neighbor, friend, or relative? Could they embellish their account, explain that they had not seen properly, say that they didn’t remember – or, more straightforwardly, lie? What outcome did they prefer? The testimonies and the verdict were then written down by a non-player scribe, resulting in an in-game court record.

    Usually in Finnish larps, where characters and plots are pre-designed by the organizers, a lot of time and energy is used in cross-checking. In a game where different experiences and memories are part of the gameplay, the stories don’t need to be as coherent, and they can also change during the game. This also happened when some characters declared that some events went completely different than how they were played in the Friday scenes, simulating the formation of memories and reinterpretation of previous events, or twisting the truth.

    Most of the cases were serious, but we also included potentially funny or absurd cases. When the priest was asked whether he was drunk during a sermon, or when the innkeeper was accused of selling drinks on a holy day’s eve, many players saw the hearings as humorous, and we can’t really claim it to be unhistorical. People of the past also had their quirky sense of humor. Another severe but absurd case dealt with two farmers, the owner of a wealthy freehold estate and a new settler, who, during a very drunken evening, had agreed to switch farms. This was, of course, for the settler a possibility to expand his possessions and raise in social position, but a disaster for the estate owner and his family. The estate owner tried to explain the switch as a drunken joke and eventually bribed the settler out of his claims. In the original case the court deemed the switch unlawful, since the settler had previously agreed to make the new farmstead profitable in exchange for tax reductions (the original case is discussed in Finnish in Lares 2020, 179).

    Some cases were criminal, but some were disputes that the characters could settle in court. We hadn’t scripted any outcomes, only the requirements for conviction if they were proved in court. All court cases had some effect on the participants’ life or place in the community: some were disgraceful or made the accused look ridiculous or incompetent, some outcomes or punishments hit hard physically and economically, and even death sentences were possible, although the characters ended up avoiding them.

    We chose to leave out court cases involving witchcraft. This was also communicated to players before the registration began. We felt that witchcraft cases would draw too much attention from other cases. Since there are many prejudices and popular opinions about 17th-century witch hunts, playing witchcraft proceedings in an authentic manner would require a lot of background information and a different kind of game design. This could be done later in another larp (see, e.g. The Witch Experience (UK 2022)), but for Talvikäräjät, we decided to concentrate on other aspects of early modern society.

    Going beyond historical records

    When we had decided the cases that we wanted to include, the design team started to build a social network around the cases. Although historically plausible, it would be boring for a character to be a random witness in just one case: so we made all characters involved in several cases as plaintiffs, defendants, witnesses, or in close connection to them, feeling the weight of possible outcomes.

    Although historical sources are our only way of gaining knowledge about the past, they also affect the image that we form. Many early modern historical records concentrate on land-owning men and the elite, leaving out other groups in the society. In 17th-century court records, however, many groups who are not visible in other sources, are present. Women, children, workers, landless, and the poor are involved in various court proceedings, since everyone could, in practice, bring their case to the court and testify on their own behalf. Sometimes the head of the family would plead the case, but not always. (Miettinen R 2019, Miettinen T 2012, Toivo 1998, Andersson 1998, Taussi Sjöberg 1996)

    Although the larp was based on authentic court cases, we wanted to reimagine what the community around official records would look like. In the past decades, a lot of research has been done about the various groups in the early modern countryside (see previous note), and we could lean on that in character design.

    Talvikäräjät ingame, photo by Karo Suominen
    Talvikäräjät ingame, photo by Karo Suominen

    Most of the characters belonged in a family who owned a bigger or smaller farmstead. Some had taken service in them. There were also soldiers of the Crown who were originally recruited from the countryside, some even from the village where the larp was set, and who were commonly stationed in the farmsteads during a period of peace. Some characters were outcasts: not belonging in any land-owning family, and getting their living in various legal and illegal activities. The new settler, who was mentioned earlier, had gotten himself and his servant an abandoned farm, and they worked hard to make it profitable and to raise their social standing. In addition to family ties, all characters belonged to a social group and had friends, if only just a few. Court records are written to document proceedings, but alongside that, they describe various cultural practices and networks. With close reading, they can reveal friendship networks and sociability (Lares 2020, 275, 289–293), which we wanted to include in the larp as well. Thus, all characters had various amounts of social, cultural, and economic capital and power, which they could utilize in their gameplay and find the best possible solution for their cases, if the character or the player wanted to do so.

    One historical phenomenon which has mostly escaped court records is same-sex couples. How could they have existed in the 17th-century countryside? Early modern court proceedings about male sex are sparse, and they usually involve violence and abuse. A typical male couple would probably be something different, so, in Talvikäräjät, the previously-mentioned new settler and his farmhand were also lovers. There was also a female couple consisting of two unmarried young women looking for a solution to live together. The meaning of these same-sex couples was not to put into history something that has not been there, but rather to imagine how an undoubtedly historical phenomenon of same-sex love could be present in the early modern countryside. Same-sex love and affection was not understood in the period as romantic but rather as friendship. (For later examples in Finnish folklore, see Pohjola-Vilkuna 1995.)

    Gameplay

    The larp was played at the beginning of March 2022. The whole design process was overshadowed by the Covid-19 pandemic, but luckily in February, the restrictions were gradually lifted, and we didn’t have to postpone the game. We had, however, advised players not to come if they were feeling sick, and some late cancellations did happen. The Russian attack on Ukraine also resulted in a couple of cancellations, since some participants felt too shocked to play. However, we were very happy that we were able to cover the late cancellations and run the larp as planned.

    The structure of the game worked very well, and the schedule for court hearings led the game forward. Many cases were dealt quite fast, because the players had been advised to discuss their cases in-game before their scheduled hearing, and thus the characters only presented a shared story to the judge. In some cases, the accusations and testimonies were saved for the court hearing, which led to a longer proceeding. Although it was optional for other characters to follow court proceedings where they were not involved, many chose to sit in the room and listen to other cases.

    Friday’s scenes received a lot of compliments from players, since they were an easy way to provide a lifelike experience rather than reading about past events. Some scenes worked better than others, and in hindsight, their design could have been given more attention. Players could choose whether they participated in the Friday scenes, which resulted in some uncertainties about which scenes could be played. Splitting players into groups which would begin on Friday or Saturday, or making pre-played scenes mandatory for all, might have solved the problem. For some scenes, the played-out scene formed too strong a basis for what had really happened, which limited individual perceptions and the possibilities for later reimagining. In some scenes, such as a tavern fight between soldiers that was based on an authentic description and rehearsed beforehand, the witnesses did not know what they were seeing and were thus given more space for interpretation and organic memory-making. Pre-played scenes worked best when concerning intentions and individual actions: what was said and done, what was meant by it, and how it was interpreted by others.

    Although we had not scripted any outcomes for the court cases, most of them went as we had anticipated. The characters were usually reluctant to push for severe punishments, and wanted to find solutions that would suit the most. Families and friends defended and protected their own, which resulted in concentration of power and partial exclusion of the outcasts. Similar processes have been present in historical court cases. In many proceedings, the outcome was the same both in the historical example and in the larp.

    The last cases of the day dealt with the aforementioned tavern fight and a theft. The tavern fight, which was planned and rehearsed beforehand, resulted in the death of one of the soldiers, who was played by one of the larpwrights. In contemporary judicial practice, manslaughter was punishable by death, but if the victim’s family would agree to financial compensation or the act was done in self-defense, the punishment would be a fine. The characters who had seen the fight chose to testify that the dead soldier was known to be extremely violent, and the soldier who had given him the final blow had done it in self-defense. Thus, the soldier was not sentenced to death but was given a severe fine, which locals helped him to pay.

    The suspected theft was not solved before the court hearing, and the injured party accused an old soldier with quite loose evidence. Since the accused had been seen with an unusual amount of money which he could not convincingly explain, the judge ordered the soldier to swear his innocence with two co-swearers. He asked his fellow soldiers and old friends to take the oath with him, but none were willing to do so. Therefore, he was sentenced to cover the stolen money and pay a fine, which he could not afford, so the fine was converted into corporal punishment. The old soldier had in fact stolen the money, but he did not confess nor was his conviction based on evidence: only his reputation and his place as an outcast. For many players, this was a defining moment about systemic injustice and the cruelty of judicial practice, which they reflected in the after-larp questionnaire.

    A similar thing happened with two poor sisters, who were given fines for selling drinks illegally but could not pay for them. The sisters could not get anyone to pay their fines, although most local men had been drinking in their cottage, so their fines were also converted to whiplashes. After the whipping, shortly before the end of game, one family offered to take the sisters’ children into their custody, because members of the family had fathered both children. The children did not have to live in poverty anymore, but the price was that they were separated from their mothers. This also highlighted social and economic injustices.

    Aftermath

    The themes of the Talvikäräjät larp, memory, power, and community, were present in the gameplay and produced the most touching experiences which were described in the questionnaire after the larp. Systemic injustice and different economic possibilities led to dramatic outcomes, which were supported by contemporary court practices. The feeling of being an in- or outsider in the community was present.

    Talvikäräjät ingame, photo by Karo Suominen
    Talvikäräjät ingame, photo by Karo Suominen

    Many larp designers know that players are usually drawn towards democracy and compromise and are reluctant to push towards conflict. This might not be a lack but a feature of human sociability. Playing oppression and inequality might teach us how these processes work and are kept up also in our world, and might help in dismantling them. In Talvikäräjät, communality and the avoidance of conflicts led to injustice and systemic oppression, when some people were not seen as equal members of the community.

    When designing historical larp, or making other source-based work of art, it is no surprise that the outcome resembles the source. Following modern-day historical research, Talvikäräjät highlighted the role of reputation, community, and wealth in early modern society. We managed to create a multivocal community with various needs and hopes, some of which were met in various manners.  Some of the accused escaped a sentence with the help of powerful friends and their own status in the community, and although some received blows to their reputation, it did not affect their position. Economic inequality became an important theme, since some characters could pay their fines or get somebody else to pay them, while others had no choice but to receive corporal punishment.

    In addition to historical content, we also wanted to explore how court drama would work in a larp and how to get the cases tangible and meaningful for players. Some cases would have benefitted from a pre-played scene. For example, in one case the court had to decide whether a local farmer had killed himself or if his death had been an accident. Suicide was illegal in 17th-century Sweden, and suiciders were not given a Christian burial, so conviction would affect the handling of the body and bring shame onto the deceased and their family (on early modern suicides, see Miettinen 2019). A scene with the deceased could have helped with family dynamics and in making the possible conviction and following shame more tangible.

    As mentioned earlier, the pre-played scenes were really beneficial for some storylines, but for some they limited the possibilities for remembering. In hindsight, the role, meaning, and script of these scenes could have been given more attention. But, altogether, the structure with pre-played scenes on Friday and court gathering on Saturday with predetermined slots for cases and breaks worked surprisingly well. Some players mentioned in the after-larp questionnaire that following others’ cases was a bit boring, and they zoned out or became sore from sitting; but many specified that this just added to their immersion and gave a much-needed break from playing their own storylines. We designers occasionally worried whether players were bored or if they had enough playable content. However, many players later convinced us that they had very much enjoyed following others’ hearings and seeing how their friends and relatives managed.

    When using historical sources for game design, it would be beneficial not only to start from those, but also at the middle of the process return to sources. After the game, we realized that some storylines had drifted quite far from the originals, or that the originals had some points that were lost in the process. At the same time, this evolution is the result of a creative process, and helped us to create something unique.

    Conclusion

    I would like to encourage designers of historical larps to trust their sources and to read updated research on the subjects they are interested in. Contemporary historical research, which highlights multivocality and intersectional approaches, social and cultural history, history of emotions and experiences, and the processes behind communal decision-making can be an enormous help in the design process and can bring up themes already suitable for larp. They also help in seeing behind the sources and building the game world. There is no need to include everything from the past, and it is sufficient to choose the themes one is most interested in. This will also help the players in their preparation for the larp.

    In historical larp, we can experience historical phenomena and activities. Gamifying history requires historical knowledge and, at some point, imagination beyond it. Historical knowledge puts the sources into their context and helps to create a world around them. When a larp, or any other work of art, is designed based on historical sources and research, it adds to its authenticity and makes it historical reenactment. Authenticity is not just about material culture but also about actions, experiences, and mentalities: and larp is a good tool for reenacting those.

    Although historical larp cannot make us fully understand what people of the past experienced, it might give us a glimpse. Larp is very suitable for playing multivocal communities and many-sided storylines, and these features are easily utilized in historical larp design as well. Larp enables players to reenact historical processes and mentalities which might be contrary to modern beliefs because of the distinction between the player and the character. This is also something that makes larp an unique form of reenactment: the ability to simultaneously reenact individual characters and the community formed by them.

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    Ludography

    Talvikäräjät (2022): Finland. Jenni Lares (main organiser), Mari Lehtoruusu, Ira Nykänen, Laura Väisänen, Arttu Ahava, Maria von Hertzen, Minna Heimola, Mikko Heimola, Konsta Nikkanen, Karo Suominen, and Tomi Gröndal. Harmaasudet (Greywolves).

    The Witch Experience (2022): UK. Ragnhild Ljosland.

    This article has been reprinted with permission from the Solmukohta 2024 book. Please cite as:

    Lares, Jenni. 2024. “Possibilities of Historical Larp: Court of Justice in 17th-century Finland.” In Liminal Encounters: Evolving Discourse in Nordic and Nordic Inspired Larp, edited by Kaisa Kangas, Jonne Arjoranta, and Ruska Kevätkoski. Helsinki, Finland: Ropecon ry.

    Cover photo: Talvikäräjät ingame, photo by Karo Suominen.

  • Freak Show, an Autopsy

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    Freak Show, an Autopsy

    Written by

    Coroner

    Nina Teerilahti, art director and main organizer

    Body

    Freak Show, a larp held in an abandoned amusement park in Finland. The larp told the story of the last freak show and explored otherness through a romantic gothic horror setting. The participants played a family of outcasts and freaks who struggled to survive in a hostile world. The story ended with the devil coming to take them all to perform for him forever.

    Time of Death

    2017-09-18 between 19:00 and 22:00.

    Inception

    We crawled through a small gap in the fence. Suddenly we were outside everything: law, society and all things normal. There was no one to define us, judge us or get offended by our existence. I saw the thrill and joy ignite in his eyes. It was freedom. We ran and laughed. The twilight in the run down, abandoned amusement park seeped with tragedy, magic and wonder. But the deeper we ventured between the forgotten, deteriorating buildings the sadder we felt. Laughter changed into a sense of longing and lost memories. It seemed like the place was telling us that the terrible price of true freedom is always abandonment. The moment moved me deeply. It resonated with a hidden truth, and I knew I had to share it.

    Birth

    So much has been done, exclaimed the soul of Frankenstein―more, far more, will I achieve; treading in the steps already marked, I will pioneer a new way, explore unknown powers, and unfold to the world the deepest mysteries of creation.

    Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

    Breaking into Wasalandia with my friend started the Freak Show larp project in November 2016. I felt a manic need to create a way to share the experience, a feverish drive that reminded me of Victor Frankenstein and his quest to create life.

    After the initial spark the concept of the last freak show and a deal with the devil emerged over a few weeks. I contacted the owner of the ruins. He agreed to have an event at the site and gave me the conditions and a rough budget. In the end of the month I had nothing but an idea and nine months to make it happen. It was madness. I made rough project plans and budget sketches and decided it was worth a shot. I could not guarantee that my creation would not be a monster, a shadow to hunt me until all eternity, but if enough people wanted to take this chance with me, why not. Fearless ventures into the unknown are my specialty.

    After the publication of the idea, the Freak Show larp raised discord in social media. The project was thought to be disrespectful and insulting because of its subject. The reaction was as if we were robbing graves and bringing dead bodies back to life, and I did feel as driven to follow this path as doctor Frankenstein did. My goal with the Freak Show, as with all my art projects, was to make the world just a tiny bit better, take away some fear and add some compassion.

    Our ability to create the event without being insensitive or even hurtful was mistrusted. It was publicly demanded that our crew should have members of the minority about which we were creating a larp. As creators we were pressured to out our connection to being a freak and our experience of otherness to justify creating the story of Freak Show. Demanding organizers to lose their privacy is cruel. We did not agree.

    It was also demanded that our representations of this minority should be realistic. Larps aren’t real or realistic. Reality doesn’t have a limited duration and safety rules. Believing that larps could give you a realistic experience is insulting towards the people who experience the real thing. The intent of the larp matters far more than the level of realism achieved.

    Creating public pressure towards stories of minorities in larp will make the visibility and status of minorities worse. The fear of being offensive should not become crippling. It will end up pushing the already marginalised people even deeper into the margin.

    Seeing how much fear just the idea of a freak show larp ignited, I think the project was important. Living through stories will increase understanding and compassion, and if we want to move the limits of normal into more humane positions, we need to tell stories of people that are outside normal. We can’t let fear or public pressure stop us. If I am wrong and my passion is insane, my creations will surely hunt me down, just like they did Frankenstein.

    Freak Show larp documentation drawing by Aarni Korpela.
    Freak Show larp documentation drawing by Aarni Korpela.

    Brains

    Who shall conceive the horrors of my secret toil as I dabbled among the unhallowed damps of the grave or tortured the living animal to animate the lifeless clay?

    Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

    I gathered an international crew to create the Freak Show together with me by posting ads on larp forums on Facebook. The budget was tight, so I could only pick five people. Out of 13 applicants I chose Alessandro Giovannucci, Dominika Cembala, Martin Olsson, Morgan Kollin and Simon Brind based on what they wrote to me about their skills, motivation and experience. I included one inexperienced crew member as I always want to give someone the opportunity to learn and grow.

    Long distance work with a crew of varied backgrounds and nationalities was like sailing an unfamiliar ship in unexpected weather. At times it was hard to understand what works and what doesn’t, and why. For me, the biggest challenge to overcome was to get every crew member to communicate about their problems so that they could be solved. We had so many different working and communication cultures, that mixing them and building a new functional one was difficult, a process that continued throughout the project.

    One of the best decisions I made was to have a video call meeting every week throughout the whole project. As we had such varied ideas about how to work together or create a larp and could never meet physically, this face to face contact was essential to run the project.

    During the nine months of production there were miscommunications, surprising life events and lack of motivation. On the other hand, there was pure creative joy, enthusiasm and strength in combining varied skills and backgrounds. Whenever we had a crisis or a problem to solve, our diversity was a clear asset. Whenever we needed cumbersome things actually done in time, our lack of face to face contact was a problem. A multinational long distance crew is great for designing and not so great for actually getting the work done.

    I set three design guidelines for the project:

    • Does it create play or enhance immersion? If not, don’t do it.
    • Does it give players tools to explore the themes? If not, don’t do it.
    • Treat characters and the subject of being a freak with respect and dignity.

    These guidelines helped us focus on the right things. In the end we were happy to notice that almost everything we created for the event actually came into play. What we did affected the player’s experience directly, there was no work done in vain.

    Skin

    His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black and owing; his teeth of pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, … his shrivelled complexion and straight black lips.

    Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

    The practicalities of the event were almost completely decided for us by the owner of the site. We had strict limitations and high costs. In many cases this meant that we had to do something badly or not do the event at all. For example we had to buy food from the owner and it had to be served at his hotel at certain times, not at the site, which was far from ideal.

    The site itself was an actual ruin and under the bombardment of vandals, the current and the new owners and multinational companies connected to the deal that was negotiated in the meantime. Over half a year, large structures, furniture, windows, doors and even staircases disappeared, electricity and water became unavailable where they should’ve been and some areas got into far more rapid decay than anticipated. The site was out of control. We had to accept that, even though much of the extreme situations came as a surprise, such as one of the largest usable inside spaces being totally covered in a thick layer of soap, courtesy of vandals.

    The ruin of Wasalandia would never be a safe game site by any standards, but this project was for sensible adults who could take responsibility for themselves. There were dangerous materials and places. In exchange, we had the freedom to rearrange and actually build things. The site was vast and filled with buildings and random items. It was overwhelming. In this larp real, actual exploration and building was a major part of the game and the players enjoyed it immensely.

    From a player perspective the abandoned Wasalandia and the actual circus tent with its sound and lighting equipment were half the game. The players did actually build different usable spaces during the game and practised and performed in a real circus tent. The atmosphere of the site and tent was intense and the struggles to create a new home for the Freak Show and the joy of finding usable items and furniture were real.

    The magical wonderland the players managed to create in the ruins during the game blew us all away. For example, the players got the wheel of fortune and lights working in a building that was supposed to not be usable, built a space with red lights and roses for intimate burlesque shows, found a full clown costume and built a cathedral in an old restaurant. Using the site in any way we could imagine was truly a unique opportunity and experience.

    Muscles

    “I was dependent on none and related to none. The path of my departure was free, and there was none to lament my annihilation. My person was hideous and my stature gigantic. What did this mean? Who was I? What was I? Whence did I come? What was my destination? These questions continually recurred, but I was unable to solve them.” ― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

    Our greatest success in the Freak Show was getting the players we had. They were very motivated, amazingly talented and created a beautiful story and experience. Getting great players was not pure coincidence.

    We designed the application process to search for motivation and capability to create with us. We were not interested in any other qualities like age, gender, experience or country of origin. We knew that in the timeframe and resources we had, we could not create everything but were heavily dependant on players creating their own game for themselves. This game would be a sandbox, a chance to play what you create towards a fixed ending.

    We designed a blind casting, where you applied to a certain character. The characters were described with a few inspirational sentences and the player was to develop the character further and send us a short text about it.

    After the signup closed all crew members voted for each application and the highest scores got in. It was easy to pick the most creative and motivated sounding applications. Many of them moved us or made us inspired and excited. The applications were also a great starting point to develop the characters further with the players.

    Heart

    I shall commit my thoughts to paper, it is true; but that is a poor medium for the communication of feeling. I desire the company of a man who could sympathize with me, whose eyes would reply to mine.

    Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

    In creating anything I find motivation the key factor. Everything else follows with more or less work, but without motivation nothing happens. In the Freak Show we focused on creating the players motivation to create an experience that would inspire and move them. This is why we chose to create characters together with players in a discussion.

    The character creation video calls with players were one of the most amazing experiences in the project. At it’s best they were enthusiastic brainstorming, player and writer driving each other on and creating an amazing story and person together. With this discussion and letting the player affect everything each character became an amazing piece of art and far better than any writer could have created on their own. The player’s motivation to play the characters that had been handcrafted to fulfil their wishes was high, which of course affected the larp immensely. Motivated and enthusiastic players create magic.

    Lungs

    Anguish and despair had penetrated into the core of my heart; I bore a hell within me, which nothing could extinguish.

    Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

    The themes of Freak Show were otherness and being an outcast. They were born from that first moment of inspiration. As outcasts the freaks had magic and freedom, but the price was terrible and they were slowly perishing, just like the ruins of Wasalandia.

    Every character was a freak or an outcast, some visibly, others in other ways. There was deformity, mental illness, physical and mental disability, unaccepted love and sexuality, passion or power and unforgivable crimes. Otherness was woven into all characters, all had a strong reason to choose the hard life of an outcast and all characters had different emotional responses and coping mechanisms. These together created a network of viewpoints to explore the themes inside the game.

    The players who played on a very physical otherness, like the conjoined twins, and thus felt the otherness in a very concrete way, may have gotten the most intense experience. Some of the others had a harder time connecting to the themes, as the family of freaks was very accepting and this made them feel quite normal. Having more interaction with normal people who treated them as freaks and outcasts would have benefited the game.

    Eyes

    I see by your eagerness, and the wonder and hope which your eyes express, my friend, that you expect to be informed of the secret with which I am acquainted. That cannot be.

    Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

    I feel that photos never truly capture a larp, they are pale shadows compared to the experience. Larps are mandalas, made as perfect as they can be with extreme effort and then suddenly gone forever. All larp reproductions are flawed and lack the original essence, the true beauty that made the experience remarkable.

    At its best, larp photography gives us tools to remember. At its worst larp photography gives us tools to gather validation in social media on the expense of the actual experience. I did not want photos of the Freak Show for two reasons: because I wanted to protect our players from the social media outrage caused by the subject of the game and because I did not want the need for good photos to take away from the focus of playing.

    We used a group of artists to document the Freak Show larp by drawing. The artists were woven into the world by making them a meta-technique to represent the feeling of the end of times. In the game world the artists were watcher spirits that came to document the events when all is ending. They had black shroud costumes that hid their features. Whenever a watcher spirit stopped to draw a player, the player felt the gaze of God or the Devil on them. The watcher spirits were present for the last eight hours of the larp.

    The watcher spirits worked pretty well. The situation was very challenging for the artists and at times overwhelming for the players, but all in all it was a good experience for both. In my opinion the drawings captured the mood of the game in a beautiful way. Fleeting impressions with heavy interpretation fit the Freak Show better than photographs. The unusual documentation method also gave the players a feeling that the event was something very special and unique, which added to the magic of the experience.

    Cause of Death

    ‘But soon’, he cried, with sad and solemn enthusiasm, ‘I shall die, and what I now feel be no longer felt. Soon these burning miseries will be extinct. I shall ascend my funeral pyre triumphantly, and exult in the agony of the torturing ames. The light of that conflagration will fade away; my ashes will be swept into the sea by the winds. My spirit will sleep in peace, or if it thinks, it will not surely think thus. Farewell.’

    Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

    We rented a circus tent from a real small Finnish circus for the Freak Show. The day before the game I was watching them erect it. An old carnie, the tent master, was having a smoke and chatting with me as the Moroccan brothers were setting up the support beams. “It feels funny to have real circus people around as we are just going to pretend to be a circus for a while.” I said. The tent master inhaled smoke and looked at me in the eyes suddenly very serious, almost moved. Something shined behind the old man’s grey eyes. “I don’t think it’s funny at all. You are not just playing.” I was confused, but moved. He struck a chord. The tent master looked at the slowly rising tent that he had travelled with for decades. “That the idea of circus has inspired you to do this, that is truly beautiful.” I held back tears. The old carnie smiled and took another drag.

    I agree. What we did that weekend was truly beautiful. As all tragic, life-changing beauty, it also had to die to preserve its magic. The beauty of a larp dies as soon as it is born, leaving only echoes, vibrant after images that soon start to fade. It can’t exist in any other way.

    Re-animation

    The Freak Show gave birth to lasting friendships, deep realizations, life-changing experiences, amazing artwork and beauty. Four people took tattoos after the event to always remember it. Can I take credit for these achievements? No. I did not make them. Would all of this have happened without me? No.

    As a larp creator I see myself as a person who makes things possible. With the Freak Show, I think I made important experiences possible for several people. To me that is worth all the work, stress, trouble, critique and even hate I received for doing this project. I am satisfied that I took the chance and leapt into the unknown.

    Will the Freak Show be re-animated? Perhaps, in another time and country, in a different abandoned place seeping with tragedy. If you know just the place, have the needed tools to bring a beautiful monster to life and want to take this journey with me, I’m open to suggestions. My passion to create false lives is still burning.

    Freak Show larp documentation drawing by Kaspar Tamsalu.
    Freak Show larp documentation drawing by Kaspar Tamsalu.

    Links

    Freak Show larp website: http://martinolsson.github.io/freakshowlarp

    Freak Show documentation drawings: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B6zJauE8ICngUk1pRHhFNWQ4aVE?usp=sharing

    This article is part of Re-Shuffling the Deck, the companion journal for Knutepunkt 2018.

    All articles from the companion can be found on the Knutpunkt 2018 category.

    Cover image: Freak Show larp documentation drawing by Andrei Kedrin.

  • Let’s Talk Freak Show

    Published on

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    Let’s Talk Freak Show

    Written by

    An honest, possibly scrambled, and very emotional review and critique.

    Trigger warning: Contains coarse language and depictions of violent acts.

    In September 15-17, 2017, I attended the larp Freakshow by Nina Teerilahti, Alessandro Giovannucci, Dominika Cembala, Martin Olsson, Morgan Kollin, and Simon Brind. The larp was held in Vaasa, Finland.

    Pre-game painting of Charlie “Edge” by Aarni Korpela.

    This was a larp about Otherness. About what it means to be different inside a community where different becomes the new normal. We were a travelling freakshow consisting of real freaks and “carny” folk. We had conjoined twins, a bearded lady, a birdman, an albino, a mermaid… and there was a lot of supernatural stuff going on. Actual magic. An alien queen, the Paraca, who had been worshipped like a Goddess by an indigenous tribe in Peru many years ago. And an immortal badass — yours truly — spiced up our experience quite well.

    What caught my attention very early on was the prospect of playing on a real life abandoned amusement park. And we did. It was grand; it was eerie. We had a huge circus tent and a lot of run-down places to explore. Of course, off-game we had to be very careful, since there had been actual destruction and chaos on the site. Most of the garbage laying around were not props, although there were a lot of easter eggs to be found. I loved this little touch; we could find plush animals, clothes, photographs, letters, and even in-game money just casually scattered over the huge site. This led to something happening in the game that I would not have expected or even dreamed of.

    Five minutes into the game, the hermaphrodite Vic came up to me, holding a small teddy bear in a clown costume. They gave me the teddy bear. I named them Fuckface. And from that moment on, my character carried Fuckface around everywhere, introduced them to everyone, and even held a baptism for them on Sunday. It gave me so much unexpected play and hilarity. I loved it and I’m very sad that Fuckface was gone on Sunday evening when everything ended. Haven’t seen the little fucker since.

    leather bound person standing in front of a freakshow poster
    Pre-game painting of Vic by Aarni Korpela.

    But let’s start from the beginning. How did I end up there?

    In a larp group on Facebook, I noticed the trailer and website for Freakshow and I was immediately intrigued. I read the brief character descriptions and fell in love. I wanted to see them come alive. I wanted to be them. On the website, there were really short summaries of who the characters are, their powers, their dilemmas. Interested players would then have to sign up and fill in a form, providing information about how they felt they could fulfill the role they chose. I’ve never seen this method before, but I found it interesting, although it fed into my anxiety quite a bit.

    After a while of contemplating, I decided to actually sign up, although I knew there could be issues arising from me possibly starting a new job exactly around that time.

    drawing of bearded man with feathers
    Drawing of Birdie by Vira Takinada.

    At first, I was in love with the character called Birdie. They were described as a dark, tortured soul, suffering from feathers growing on their body and seeking relief in drugs, which they would take but also distribute.

    But there were already three people who had applied for that role, so I chose to refrain from it and rethink my choice.

    Then, I stumbled upon Zombie. Zombie, the undead, was described to be a person who is numb to any form of touch or physical pain, with a full-body skeleton tattoo to stretch that point. But on the inside, they are very much alive and have a great deal of feelings.

    painting of an undead woman with face tattoos and piercings
    Pre-game painting of Zombie by Aarni Korpela.

    In the application, we were asked to describe what we were going to do with the role, and I said that I would not do the huge tattoo for various reasons. One of those reasons was that I have a bunch of colorful tattoos myself and I didn’t see myself capable of pulling something like that off, having to cover my own ink and then creating something of that scale. I was sure I wouldn’t get the part, because I basically shut down a major design idea. Also, the prospects of having six people who have never even met me evaluate my “worthiness” of playing a certain role bothered me for quite a while. Who are these people? What gives them the right to judge me based on what I wrote on a form based on what I wrote in a language that is not my first, not even my second language?

    I took issue with wording like “evaluating,” because that for me added pressure to the situation, and I’m very perceptive to pressure.

    But I got the part. I was ecstatic to say the least. I got to play Zombie the Undead. I had a Hangout session with my character designer. All of the players were assigned one of the GMs to help us create our characters and their background stories. Yet again, this was something I had never encountered in a larp before and I found it fascinating. For me, it went very smoothly, beautifully. We created something intense. Something real, despite all the supernatural that was going on within the concept. It was actually me who created this story of Zombie being immortal when subjected to physical violence. Not even a bullet to the head could kill her. This led to a frustration within the character — a frustration with herself, with death, with the world. Ultimately, it led to her decision never to kill a person. Because why would she grant anybody the satisfaction of dying when she can’t? “Fuck em, I’m not helping.”

    Painting of a person in long red coat and tutu
    Painting of Rocky by Vira Takinada.

    I made connections with a handful of players way before the game and I am forever grateful for those friendships that grew out of this process. They made my experience all the more magical.

    During preparations, I set Zombie up to be a reckless, loud mouthed danger to society and first and foremost: herself. She would blindly run into any kind of fight or even harm herself deliberately to prove a point. Also, I described her to be kind of a comic relief, to stretch the point of her being illiterate and thoughtless.

    When the date of the larp came closer, my anxiety started to take hold of me again. I have that, it happens. I thought things like… what if nobody likes me? What if nobody enjoys my kind of play. What if they find me to be annoying or unapproachable or just unworthy of their time? What if I do everything wrong? What if I don’t do enough? What if I cannot provide them with good play, which I so desperately want to do more than anything else?

    And then I went there. And it was wonderful. It was an atmosphere of immediate love, support, and understanding. Family. I got to know people in the Helsinki airport and the bus from Helsinki to Vaasa. We talked about what we could do with our characters. We tried to catch each other’s vibes to find out how to approach each other in- and off-game. I liked that. I needed that. After the game, I received beautiful feedback, saying that my portrayal of Zombie made her seem like an actual person, not like a one trick pony caricature with no depth. I hold this compliment very dear to my heart.

    person with goggles looking at a crystal ball
    Painting of Ilmarinen by Toon Vugts.

    In the workshops before the larp, I feel that one thing was missing. Beforehand in the Facebook group, we had established “shared memories,” which were situations in which we could choose to have our characters participate and show the others how everyone would react to them. I think it would have been very beneficial to the game if we had repeated at least some of the shared memories, just to refresh common knowledge within the group. This practice could be helpful for other games that use this method as well.

    There is one shared memory in particular I feel the group should have refreshed: What does your character do when the big bad police come? Do they hide? Do they approach? Because the police did indeed show up at the site. And Zombie, who I had established to be a fucker-upper of the everything, could approach them without anyone batting an eye. In the shared memory, I had written that Zombie wouldn’t hide from the police, but needs to BE HIDDEN from them, which meant physical removal of her from the sight of the police. But nobody remembered that and everybody was so overly nice and considerate of everybody’s game, so nothing happened in that direction. And when a local (NPC) priest showed up, I even took it up a notch and was the first one to greet him and “show him around,” spewing typical Zombie bullshit while at it, and in the end, making that poor Reverend very, very uncomfortable by showing off what the Zombie do.

    person with long red hair and blue scales
    Pre-game painting of Scales by Aarni Korpela.

    Being nice and considerate is not a bad thing. At all. I just think that the overall niceness and the uncertainty about physical boundaries amongst players (and NPCs) prevented some intense play which would have totally been possible and necessary. Maybe it would have been beneficial to do an overall round of “Who is okay with physically intense play, being touched, grabbed, held, etc.” at the workshops, so that we would have gained an overview and more certainty. Because my personal physical boundaries are at an estimated radius of -1. Grab me. Do it. Meanwhile, others need more space and/or are easily intimidated, which is absolutely fine and to be respected. So yes, more clarification on that would have helped.

    The meals were something that didn’t give me much play, personally. I was very out of it for the most part. I felt confused and also I was forced to stop scenes, because we needed to go to the restaurant, which was about 1km away and we had to walk there. It felt unnatural to me, to see these people who just ten minutes before were arguing, crying, doing rituals or what have you, stand in line for lasagna in a cantine. I personally lost scenes, because we were interrupted by someone telling us to come to dinner or lunch. A set timeframe for meals and an open invitation to go and have the meals when it actually fit into play organically would have been better for me. Especially since we were instructed to be completely in-game for the meals as well.

    Painting of Ophelia by Vira Takinada.

    One thing that fascinated me from the first time it was announced was that there will be no photos of the game. Only drawings. A group of phenomenal artists was invited to come to the game and draw us. On Saturday evening, they played NPC town folk who came to the sideshow. That was really cool and I enjoyed them a lot. They gave my character a push towards a kind of inner development I would’ve never expected. Other players brought up the point that the town folk should have played in a more antagonistic manner, which does make sense. But I think this played into the issue of everyone being too nice in- and off-game, so there was no escalation at the sideshows except for the police threatening Big Sister. But that was in her “office,” pretty secluded and out of sight for the people who were doing the sideshows, so most of us had none of that play.

    On Sunday, the real action for the artists started. They were playing “watcher spirits,” wearing black veils, walking around the site and drawing us. We were instructed to see them as an invitation for an inner (or outer) monologue and to feel the presence of either God or the Devil. A sense of impending doom. A very neat idea, of course. But in the actual game, it was a bit much. There were 11 watcher spirits roaming around the whole day and I felt that the players were not willing or able to play 8 hours worth of depression. That one of the spirits came up to me and hugged me in-game added to my confusion as to what to play on here, but I later on learned that they weren’t supposed to touch us and the person playing the spirit just thought I looked so sad. Which I was. I mean, Zombie was. And it’s totally fine, I had a fun story to tell off-game and chose to not play on it in-game. Overall, I think a lot of us were overwhelmed by the amount of dark creatures watching us and also we felt that we needed to play on constantly growing despair and misery. That was a bit much. I made the decision for my character to try and get people in a good mood again and it kinda worked out in the end.

    Later on I had the pleasure of meeting the artists off-game and talk to them. It was glorious and I adore them all to bits.

    woman smoking, man in tophat, and clown
    Drawing of Charlie (top), Tick (left), and Yin (right) by Kaspar Tamsalu.

    At the game itself, I had a blast. I have this thing where I very quickly create catchphrases for my character once I start playing them. This is a sign of me really being in there. So apart from calling everybody “motherfuckers” or just plain “fuckers,” Zombie had a choice of catchphrases and I really punched in the point of her being illiterate. She couldn’t read, write, count, or even read a clock. She approached someone to ask them what the money that she had just been given was worth. It was a fiver. It was big money. She also started to title everybody with “the.” The Rocky. The Scales. The Charlie. The Mabel. It was kind of a unique thing for her and her way of speaking and I highly enjoyed it.

    Very quickly, I found Zombie to be a character who was incredibly — and inexplicably — trusted within the freakshow family. She could approach any group at any time and would’ve been told what’s going on. She learned secrets, theories, and a whole bunch of nonsense she then took and spread all over the place. “Have you heard?” was one of the most spoken sentences.

    This trust that I received cemented Zombie’s loyalty towards what she perceived to be her family. She called Big Sister — the second owner of the Norman Sister’s Freakshow — “Momma”; she referred to Atlas — the strongman who now worked as the janitor for the show and had a marriage-esque relationship with Big Sister — as “Daddy.” This started out as an off-game joke. I just took it and ran with it. It worked out beautifully and gave me so much emotional play.

    bald man with a triangle on his forehead and tarot cards
    Pre-game painting of Oracle by Aarni Korpela.

    Zombie cried. She was angry. Frustrated. Hurt. Desperate. Hopeless. Sad. It was a pleasure to play. She was a pleasure to play. The triggering moment for Zombie’s crying happened on Sunday morning. It was truly a sight to behold: Zombie leaning on the Oracle — who was stone-faced like always — and sobbing desperately in grief and anger. The Oracle was a character who could see the future, but had no power to influence it in any way. He firmly believed that nobody could escape fate. Zombie got into an argument with him over the death of Hope, the teenage son of the Freakshow owner, Little Sister. Hope was bludgeoned by townsfolk on Saturday night and the whole group was to discover his body at the gates of the amusement park on Sunday morning. No character was unfazed by this. Everyone of us had some kind of reaction and started their own way of mourning.

    Also, Zombie’s story of not having killed anyone came full circle. I made sure everybody knew this for a fact, as well as the reason for it. Zombie even said it to the police officer who kind of interrogated her. “Nah, I haven’t killed nobody.” And the Oracle said, “Yet.”

    At the last performance, Zombie and the Paraca planned to outsmart the Gods with a human sacrifice that won’t die. They wanted to perform a protection ritual to benefit the show and save them all. Because Zombie was known to be immortal to some extent, the two of them agreed to sacrifice her on stage. But of course, that plan failed horribly.The Paraca noticed that the ritual wouldn’t work without anyone actually dying and begged Zombie — who she had stabbed and partially gutted with a knife right before as part of the ritual — to kill her.

    Painting of Paraca by Vira Takinada.

    “Don’t make me. Please don’t make me. I can’t. Don’t make me. Don’t make me.”

    “Do it for the family!”

    Zombie turned her face towards the audience in the circus tent.

    “I love you.”

    And stabbed the Paraca in the heart.

    After that, Zombie was eventually taken off stage and given a blanket… and sat somewhere on the side. That led to me not being able to enjoy the ending fully, because my perspective didn’t allow it. That’s something I regret dearly. But everything happened quickly, so I guess it slipped all of our minds to seat the Zombie and her gut — a piece of intestine I made for the show and carried around with me after being sliced open in game — somewhere more convenient.

    A pale woman posing with their hands in her pockets.
    Painting of Zombie by Vira Takinada.

    I want to end this review by elaborating on something that I said during the debrief:

    I learned from Zombie to let people love me. Because I usually don’t. I tend to try and be strong for everybody yet push people away when it would be my turn to show vulnerability. Zombie was loved. She had a family. She also had to learn to let people in and let them care about her. That is something Jasmin needs as well. I thank you all for this experience. For the enlightenment. For giving me a good giggle when we were told at the debrief to find a character we hated, to talk the experience over with them… and I actually stood there alone for a minute because there was no real hate for Zombie.

    Thank you for everything.

    For the baptism of The Fuckface Charlielover von Ballsack I, the teddybear in a clown costume. That fucker got his soul saved.

    And I bid you all goodbye.

    Fuck-cerely yours,

    Grace Boleyn, Zombie the Undead

    Cover Photo: Painting of the Freakshow larp set by Toon Vugts. Image has been cropped.

  • Playing the Stories of Others

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    Playing the Stories of Others

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    Larps that treat social issues often aim to create empathy for real people who live in circumstances different from ours by putting us in their shoes. One example is provided by games where players from privileged backgrounds take on the roles of characters from a marginalised group, or experience situations where they are in a marginalised position.

    In the Norwegian larp Europa (Fatland and Tanke et al., 2001), the Nordic countries mirrored the former Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, and Nordic players spent a week as asylum seekers in a reception centre in a fictitious Balkan country. Another Norwegian larp, Just a Little Lovin’ (Edland and Grasmo, 2011), treats the spreading of HIV in the New York gay community in the 1980’s. Various runs of the game gave many players an idea on what it is to be HIV positive and raised consciousness about queer issues. Killed in the Name of Honor (Samad, Kharroub and Samamreh, 2013), organised by three Palestinian women, was set in a matriarchal culture where young men could face a honour killing if they didn’t adhere to the sexual mores of the community. In the Palestinian-Finnish larp Halat hisar (AbdulKarim, Arouri and Kangas et al., 2013 & 2016), we created an alternative reality where Finland lived under an apartheid regime and occupation similar to real world Palestine (see e.g. Kangas, 2014a and Pettersson, 2014a).

    2013 run of Halat hisar. (Play, Tuomas Puikkonen) 2013 run of Halat hisar. (Play, Tuomas Puikkonen)

    While Killed in the Name of Honor reversed gender roles, Halat hisar turned geopolitical power relations upside down. In the game world, Northern Europe was a conflict zone full of dictatorships, and Arab countries were rich and influential. Finnish players became oppressed people living under occupation, and Palestinians portrayed privileged foreigners. Such a role reversal is in a sense a form of cultural exchange, and it makes for illuminating post-game reflections, which I will discuss in more detail later.

    However, the stories we live in larp are filtered through our real-life selves. In the end, our unconscious reactions and interpretations of events are based on real-life experience. We have been socialised to certain roles and positions of which we are not even fully aware. Therefore it’s difficult to consciously set them aside.

    A good example is Mad About the Boy (Edland, Raaum and Lindahl, 2010), a game designed for women. It is set in a post-apocalyptic world where a mysterious disease has killed all men. The characters belong to three-woman family units hoping to get selected into a government-run artificial insemination program. The applicants go through the last stage of the process at a secret forest location where three government officials, a politician, a physician, and a psychologist, observe and evaluate their behaviour.

    In 2015, a Swedish team made a male version of the game, It’s a Man’s World (Gissén, 2015). It preserved most of the original scenario while switching the genders. Thus, there were, for example, artificial wombs instead of an insemination program. The game became completely different from the original. According to Sandqvist (2016), male players found the basic setting uninteresting: a situation where you are under surveillance and the only way to succeed is to be as perfect as possible. The female players of Mad About the Boy, however, found it easier to relate to such a situation because they had real-life experiences of being under pressure in a patriarchal society.

    Although larp is an excellent vehicle for creating strong emotions, it cannot replicate other people’s experiences. Halat hisar doesn’t teach a Nordic person how it really feels to live under occupation. However, role reversal can shed light on unexplored aspects of ourselves, power structures and our roles in them. In this article, I discuss this based on my experience of having been one of the organisers of Halat hisar in both runs of the game.

    Contextualisation

    Games where people from privileged groups play those who are in a marginalised position rightfully raise concerns of being disrespectful. One concern is that such games, especially if emotionally strong, could create a false sense of sharing the experience of marginalised people. One way to avoid this is to properly contextualise the game. When the contextualisation happens in dialogue with the group whose stories are played out in the game, it can spark fruitful reflection.

    The German organisation Waldritter e.V. runs refugee-themed educational larps with the aim of preventing racism and creating a culture of acceptance. The games end with a moderated discussion. A Syrian refugee took part in one game, sharing his personal story of the journey to Germany (Steinbach, 2016). In the debrief of the 2015 Denmark run of Just a Little Lovin’, HIV, AIDS, and cancer, important topics of the game, were contextualised. Each run of the game has had queer participants, and the 2015 Denmark run also had a cancer survivor.

    Mohamad Rabah designed the debrief for the 2016 run of Halat hisar to include dialogue between international and Palestinian participants. First, the players went through exercises that aimed to detach them from the game experience, such as guided meditation and the like. After that, there was a facilitated discussion in small groups with a Palestinian in each group. The Finnish and international players could ask the Palestinians about their real life experiences and thus put the game events into context. We had a rule that you could ask anything but the discussion would stay in the debrief group—you would not share its contents with outsiders.

    Several participants found this eye opening. A Finnish journalist who participated in the 2016 run wrote in the newspaper Helsingin Sanomat:

    When the game ended, there was a debriefing. As one part of it we were divided into small groups, each of which had a Palestinian player as a part of the group. We could ask them about the game and the reality of Palestine.

    I was naive and thought that the game, as most fiction, was built on exaggerated real-life events.

    The truth in Palestine, however, is worse than the game. In the protests at Birzeit University have seen much more than one student casualty.

    The worst thing was the realisation that after the larp the Palestinian players had to return to their everyday lives, where the game and it’s happenings were a reality.

    I cannot claim that I’d understand what they had to go through. But when I read the news about Palestinians suffering, the human tragedy behind them seems a bit more real.

    Jussi Ahlroth, 2016

    Another Finnish player said that Halat hisar didn’t allow her to understand how it feels to be oppressed, but it did make her realise what it means to be privileged. A Finn can choose whether to take part in the struggle against the occupation of Palestine, but a Palestinian cannot. The larp caused her to reflect on how privilege can be problematic even when combined with good intentions. She said this motivated her to use her privilege to make space for others instead of taking it for herself.

    The Normal and the Abnormal

    2013 run of Halat hisar. (Play, Tuomas Puikkonen) 2013 run of Halat hisar. (Play, Tuomas Puikkonen)

    In international mainstream media, stories about Palestinians are often told from the point of view of foreign journalists or Israelis. Even when the coverage is sympathetic to Palestinians, it does not often let Palestinians narrate their own stories, portraying Palestinians only as victims, as if that was the sum of their existence.

    While this can build empathy for Palestinians, it also makes Palestinians into objects instead of subjects—”others”, rather than us. We begin to expect that someone who is part of us tells the Palestinian story, as if Palestinians couldn’t do it themselves. This affects our attitudes toward Palestinians, and makes us less interested in their personal experiences. One of the goals of Halat hisar is to break this illusion by bringing Palestinians and internationals to play together. After all, in the minds of larpers, others don’t larp.

    However, based on post-game reflections and feedback, Palestinian players themselves also received new insights from the game. In the role reversal of Halat hisar, Palestinians play characters from the rich and democratic Arab League (compared to the EU in the game materials)—journalists, activists, human right workers, etc. Because the game events are close to home, some Palestinian players have found it hard to stay in character (Musleh, 2015). On the other hand, portraying foreign journalists and other internationals allows them to channel their own experiences into useful game material (Pettersson 2014b, Hamouri 2015). Some Palestinian players have also seen their own situation in a new light through the game. One of them described his experience in the 2013 run:

    Sometimes when you’re living in a unique situation, you stop perceiving things that are happening around you and to you as abnormal, you become part of a social blend that is neither natural nor normal. But when you step outside and watch your life as a third party, that is when you’re shocked by the reality that you have been part of most of your life.

    Zeid Khalil, Life under Occupation, 2014

    Oppression is not just about laws and practices nor the physical violence used to enforce them, but also about everyday social dynamics. There are the roles of the oppressed and the oppressors and—certainly in the case of Palestine—various outsider roles. In this hierarchy, those who are oppressed have less power and privileges. When you have lived your whole life in a situation of oppression, things like restrictions of movement, humiliating checkpoint searches and condescending behaviour from foreigners may feel normal.

    In the game, the privileged background of Finnish players created a social environment with dynamics different from those of real-world Palestine. After all, a feeling of normalcy is hard to establish in larps, and no amount of workshopping can equal a lifetime of socialisation. To Finnish players, the game events are unexpected and shocking, and their in-game behaviour occasionally reflects this. For example, a player could be induced to radically change their character’s opinions after encountering violence by soldiers, even though it would be routine for the character. In a sense, the players react in a normal way to abnormal situations.

    The fact that Finnish characters sometimes behave differently than the Palestinian players would do provides fruitful material for the post-game discussion. A Palestinian player from the 2013 run even found the experience empowering:

    For example before this larp, I would have not cut any conversation or expressed any anger in my real life while discussing the Palestinian-Israeli conflict with a foreigner, even if I felt insulted. In the larp I was playing a role of a foreigner and by default I was insulting a Finnish student by trying to “own” her suffering when discussing the Finnish-Uralian conflict. The character I was talking to in that moment screamed at me and cut the conversation. In reflecting on this incident in my real life, I always have the choice to continue speaking with some annoying foreigner, but I have never chosen not to speak with them. This incident made me re-think about a space of choice in deciding with whom to discuss this PalestinianIsraeli conflict with from the people I meet in my life.

    Majd Hamouri, Birth of Larp in the Arab World, 2015

    To the Finnish player, this kind of appropriation wasn’t a routine part of life. She instinctively recognised its abnormality and felt entitled to stand up against it. However, it’s not unusual for internationals visiting Palestine to put themselves in the centre and concentrate on how painful it is for them to see what is happening without considering how Palestinians perceive their statements.

    A Militarised Society

    Like any cultural exchange, a larp where you switch places with others makes you see yourself, your own culture and your own society in a different way. To me as an organiser of Halat hisar, one of the illuminating things has been the military action in the game.

    Before the game, some of the Palestinian participants were worried that the soldiers wouldn’t be portrayed realistically enough. After all, our soldier extras were Finns who don’t live every day under military occupation. Moreover, our extras had never been to Palestine to witness the behaviour of Israeli soldiers. Before the first run of Halat hisar, I was also a bit concerned about this.

    However, you don’t learn to act like a soldier by watching soldiers, but through practice. In the end, portraying a soldier comes down to things like posture, movement, and certain kind of efficiency. Military training has the same basics everywhere. In Finland, there is no shortage of people who have undergone it.

    Most of our soldier extras came from a group of airsoft military simulation enthusiasts. They did not have previous larp experience but all of them had completed military service, and some had been on UN peacekeeping missions. If anything, they were sometimes too professional, considering that most Israeli soldiers serving on the Occupied West Bank are teenage conscripts. We also had a few experienced larpers playing soldiers to add some of the petty oppression and humiliation emblematic of military occupation.

    In both runs, the extras surprised the players by how soldier-like they were. This made me reflect on what a militarized society we Finns live in. In Finland, military service is mandatory for men, and voluntary for women.((It is possible for men to do a community service instead for reasons of conscience. However, a complete refusal will lead to a prison sentence of about six months. Nevertheless, it is relatively easy to get exempt on the grounds of physical or mental health.)) As of 2013, almost 80 percent of Finnish males of at least 30 years of age had completed the military service. (Purokuru, 2013)

    2013 run of Halat hisar. (Play, Tuomas Puikkonen) 2013 run of Halat hisar. (Play, Tuomas Puikkonen)

    Palestinians, on the other hand, don’t have this systemic military training of half the population. Armed resistance to the occupation is secretive and selective in nature, not something everybody is expected to participate in. Thus, it probably doesn’t occur to the Palestinian participants that acting like a soldier comes naturally to many Finns.

    This also reflects different attitudes in our societies about the idea of using violence to resist a hostile army. In Finland, it’s taken for granted that enemy soldiers crossing onto Finnish soil will be shot and killed. A person who questions this idea is not taken seriously in the political mainstream. Even when people advocate reducing military expenses or removing the mandatory service, they don’t promote non-violence in the face of an invasion.

    In Palestine, the relation between violent and non-violent resistance to military occupation is a major topic of debate. For example, Mahmoud Abbas, the acting president of the Palestinian Authority, has repeatedly condemned all violent resistance, even though the armed wing of Fatah, his party, practices it. In addition, the leader of the Palestinian National Initiative party, Mustafa Barghouti, who won 19 percent of the vote in the 2005 presidential election, actively promotes non-violent resistance. (Rassbach, 2012)

    Moreover, the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization), the official representative of the Palestinian people, renounced violence when signing the Oslo Accords in the early 1990s, although various Palestinian groups have kept using violence. For comparison, the ANC (African National Congress) never abandoned the principle of violent resistance, not even during the negotiations to end apartheid in South Africa. It is also difficult to imagine such a statement from the Finnish government. But why should arguments for non-violence be more outlandish in Finland, living in peace, than in Palestine, which is under daily attacks?

    Cultural Exchange

    I have previously toyed with the idea of larp as experimental anthropology (Kangas, 2014b; 2015). A game that reverses the roles of players from two different cultural or social categories can also be seen as a playful attempt to study culture. In a sense, it is a form of cultural exchange. This aspect is heightened when the game has a contextualising debrief where participants from the two groups share their experiences.

    Culture is often narrowly thought of as something connected to a geographical area, as in the statement, culture is different in Palestine and Finland. Usually, language plays an important role, too; for example, English-speaking countries seem like a connected cultural area, and language minorities within a country are perceived as having their own culture. However, there are cultural spheres inside a country or a language area, and they are sometimes determined by social positions. For example, we can speak of male culture or working class culture. These cultures frequently extend over the borders of national culture and connect people more strongly than it does—we may feel that we have more in common with people who share our educational background than with people who speak the same language.

    In a sense, everybody played their own culture in Halat hisar. Although the political situation of Finland was modelled on Palestine, Finns didn’t try to replicate for example, the ways family relations work in Palestine. The culture in occupied Finland was based on real life Finnish culture, and Palestinian players created the culture of the rich and democratic Arab world. And yet, there were changes. The geopolitical power relations were altered; the roles of the global north and south switched. Arab characters were privileged, and under the occupation, Finns were deprived of their basic human rights.

    One interesting aspect of the game was the interaction between characters from these two worlds. It was sometimes different from real-life communication between Palestinians and foreigners. This is no surprise, since the roles were reversed, and we unconsciously react based on the socio-cultural positions that we have grown used to.

    Reflecting on this after the game can make us question our social roles and positions. It raises the question of to what extent our cultural and social patterns are determined by power politics. How would they change if we were put into a more or less fortunate position in the world than the one we are in right now? Killed in the Name of Honor did the same experiment by reversing gender roles. It would also be interesting to reverse class hierarchies this way in larp.

    In my Nordic Larp Talk on experimental anthropology (Kangas, 2015), I argued that larp can’t really teach us how it is to live in e.g. a hunter-gatherer society, but it can give us valuable perspectives into our own culture. Similarly, playing the stories of others doesn’t make us feel the same way they do or give us the same experiences they have had. However, together with a proper post-game contextualisation, doing so can help us understand their situation better, and build solidarity. At the same time, playing out the stories of others can reveal something about ourselves and make us see our social environments and positions in a new light.

    2013 run of Halat hisar. (Play, Tuomas Puikkonen) 2013 run of Halat hisar. (Play, Tuomas Puikkonen)

    Bibliography

    This article was initially published in Once Upon a Nordic Larp… Twenty Years of Playing Stories published as a journal for Knutepunkt 2017 and edited by Martine Svanevik, Linn Carin Andreassen, Simon Brind, Elin Nilsen, and Grethe Sofie Bulterud Strand.

    Cover photo: 2016 run of Halat hisar. (Play, Tuomas Puikkonen). Other photos by Tuomas Puikkonen.

  • End of the Line: White Wolf’s First Official Nordic-Style Larp

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    End of the Line: White Wolf’s First Official Nordic-Style Larp

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    The desperation of tomorrow fuels the joy of today. Self-destructive choices don’t seem so bad when there’s no future.

    from the End of the Line introduction document

    End of the Line is the first official Nordic larp under the One World of Darkness produced by White Wolf and Odyssé since the intellectual property was purchased by Paradox Entertainment in October 2015. While the owner Tobias Andersson Sjogren and creative lead Martin Elricsson have announced that they do not plan to alter significantly most of the existing games or associated production companies, they do plan to create a One World of Darkness under which all of the existing content falls.((UlissesSpiele, “Tenebrae Noctis: White Wolf – One World of Darkness (uncut, audio repaired),” YouTube, last modified Dec. 15, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlA6LKUNDWs&list=PLYW0RCU4vh23ZoQC26d8D0O-zvMDrGlQn)) Additionally, they plan to run Nordic-style larp events, which differ significantly from the way traditional Vampire larps are played. These larps are meant to exist in addition to the other larp experiences available, rather than replace them or compete with them in any way. This article will cover the first larp from these official events, entitled End of the Line, which took place in Helsinki, Finland on March 7, 2016 for six hours.((Jussi Ahlroth, “Blood and Close Contact in Illegal Raves — Vampire Larp Played in Helsinki,” HS, last modified Mar. 9, 2016, http://www.hs.fi/kulttuuri/a1457497605103#)) Bjarke Pedersen, Juhana Pettersson, and Martin Elricsson created the larp, running it in the week leading up to the Nordic larp conference, Solmukohta.

    Martin Ericsson, Lead Storyteller for White Wolf. Photo by Tuomas Puikkonen. Martin Elricsson, Lead Storyteller for White Wolf. Photo by Tuomas Puikkonen.

    End of the Line took place in an abandoned mental asylum in central Helsinki.((For a complete photo album, see Tuomas Puikkonen, “End of the Line (larp),” Flicker, last accessed Mar. 17, 2016, https://www.flickr.com/photos/darkismus/sets/72157665084152550)) While the main building was used for briefings, preparation, and off-game facilities, the play space was a multi-storiedbuilding off to the side of the hospital that recently housed squatters. The organizers and volunteers spent a considerable amount of time preparing the space for play, making it relatively clean and safe considering its recent inhabitants. Bonuses of the space included an abundance of gorgeous graffiti and an upstairs loft, which the organizers turned into a rave club. This rave felt authentic thanks to ongoing music provided by the Suicide Club, as well as fantastic lighting, visuals, and scenography by Marcus Engstrand, Anders Davén, and Aleksander Nikulin.

    Lighting, Sound, and Scenography

    Lighting and sound were integrated into the larp design. The first and last fifteen minutes of the larp were spent in a communal rave “workshop,” in which we all slowly glided in- and out-of-character through dance. This technique proved especially useful in enhancing the visceral physicality that was central to the intention of the larp, as discussed in more detail below; we were encouraged from the beginning to inhabit our bodies rather than view the larp as an intellectual or strategic experience. While many of us admitted to feeling uncomfortable dancing under normal circumstances, our characters regularly frequented these types of underground raves. Therefore, the technique helped put us in the mindset of a group of lowlifes coming together for a shared, not-quite-legal experience.

    The Suicide Club kept the dance party going throughout the larp. Photo by Tuomas Puikkonen.
    The Suicide Club kept the dance party going throughout the larp. Photo by Tuomas Puikkonen.

    In terms of the lighting, the larp was organized in three acts according to colors, which each represented a specific theme. Red represented Lust/Passion, Green represented Selfishness/Envy, and Blue represented Control/Power. As we transitioned into these phases, which all lasted 1.5-2 hours, we were encouraged to direct our play toward these general themes. However, the colors themselves were only visible from the dance floor, which made it difficult to assess when the themes were active without revisiting the upstairs. Still, having a general idea of the narrative arc toward which we should push helped guide play.

    Color was also used in the three meta rooms, sometimes called blackbox rooms in the Nordic scene. As with the Acts, the three rooms were themed and colored Red, Green, and Blue. In these rooms, players could enact flashbacks or hypothetical futures, although we could use the rooms for whatever we chose. In practice, this ambiguity led to some confusion as to whether or not scenes happening in these rooms were transpiring in real time, especially since the Red room featured an eye level hole in the wall through which players could watch. Despite this ambiguity, having experienced both the Red and Green rooms, the themes definitely contributed to the types of play enacted within them.

    Traditional Vampire Themes, Setting, and Mechanics

    Outdoor shot of the location of the larp, which took place at an abandoned asylum in Helsinki, Finland. The Blue, Green, and Red rooms are visible. Photo by Tuomas Puikkonen.
    Outdoor shot of the location of the larp, which took place at an abandoned asylum in Helsinki, Finland. The Blue, Green, and Red rooms are visible. Photo by Tuomas Puikkonen.

    This larp was functionally different than any Vampire game I have played in the past. As an active participant in both Mind’s Eye Society and troupe games from approx. 1997 to 2010, as well as a researcher who has studied conflict and bleed in White Wolf games, I found this larp appealing to try precisely because we would experience events differently.((Sarah Lynne Bowman, “Social Conflict in Role-playing Communities: An Exploratory Qualitative Study,” International Journal of Role-Playing 4, 2013, pp.17-18. http://www.ijrp.subcultures.nl/wp-content/issue4/IJRPissue4bowman.pdf)) Below is a breakdown of the primary differences I noticed in the design and play of this larp as opposed to traditional Camarilla-based Vampire games.

    Most Vampire games center upon the events during and surrounding the vampiric court. The premise of the game is that a secret cadre of immortal creatures who feed on human blood are running the city through a variety of forms of influence, both supernatural and social. For example, a vampire may have control over the Opera House because they have used their supernatural powers to make the owner fall in love with them, which affords them a certain amount of Influence. Similarly, a vampire may have control over a gang in the area or own an underground club where other denizens of the World of Darkness frequent for feeding, seduction, or secret meetings. In general, very few of the humans involved in these exchanges have any idea that vampires exist, as they might become angry and hunt them. Thus, vampires must remain secret and preserve a concept called The Masquerade in order to pretend to be human and avoid detection. Court is one of the only places where vampires can openly show their nature, although they are expected to follow certain social conventions that resemble Renaissance courtier politics as described in Machiavelli’s The Prince. Breaches of the Masquerade are kept to a minimum, as they may result in punishment or death by the reigning ruler.

    A Ventrue and another vampire consult one another in a private corner. Photo by Tuomas Hakkarainen.
    A Ventrue and another vampire consult one another in a private corner. Photo by Tuomas Hakkarainen.

    Since the majority of play happens at court, while gaining these forms of external Influence may take place through role-play, they are represented most often through mechanical abstractions on a character sheet, e.g. Street 2, High Society 1, Herd 3, etc. Players can use these types of Influence to enact some sort of advantage through interaction with the Storyteller. For example, vampires generally attend court having fed upon humans beforehand, which may be represented by their scores in Herd, Manipulation, or Seduction. Feeding allows some mechanical advantages in terms of use of powers, while lack of feeding can lead to dire consequences in terms of loss of control of the beastial nature of the vampire character. In other words, some vampires have an inherent advantage over others in the seductive feeding part of the game, whereas other characters may excel at having Street level contacts that give them access to drugs, gangs, or information that may become useful in play. As mentioned before, this Influence system usually comes into play most often during downtime actions between games or while interacting with a plot through the Storyteller. For example, a player might ask, “I have Street 2. Do I know anyone involved in this gang associated with this plot?” The Storyteller may choose to embody that non player-character (NPC) briefly or simply deliver information gained from that Influence.

    While influence actions often take place during downtime in conventional Vampire larps, the players embodied interactions between vampires, street thugs, and feeding victims during End of the Line. Photo by Tuomas Hakkarainen.
    While influence actions often take place during downtime in conventional Vampire larps, the players embodied interactions between vampires, street thugs, and feeding victims during End of the Line. Photo by Tuomas Hakkarainen.

    Similarly, all sexual, violent, or supernatural activities generally take place off-game or through mechanical interventions such as rock-paper-scissors. For example, if a character tries to seduce another, they may role-play out the dialogue leading up to the attempt, then use rock-paper-scissors to resolve whether or not the seduction was successful. Depending on the comfort level of the participants, they may verbally describe what follows or “fade to black,” but actual physical touch is discouraged in violent, sexual, or supernatural contexts. Players may mime the feeding of blood, but are not encouraged to actually bite one another. A character may direct a slow punch toward another character for dramatic effect, but these actions are rarely meant to feel or look real. Indeed, in the official larp rules for the game, the writers imposed a no-touch rule from the beginning. This rule served many purposes, notably making players feel more comfortable engaging in edgy content and reassuring mainstream authorities that no “real” feeding, sex, or violence was occurring. Depending of the comfort level of the play group, these rules are sometimes bent, but the larp system as is features a large amount of abstracted rules to arbitrate these activities. For example, if combat breaks out in a group with several characters present, each person in the area must declare their actions, which can sometimes take hours to resolve due to the multiple tests involved.

    End of the Line flipped the script on traditional Vampire role-playing in many ways, at least as represented by the official rules. Instead of taking place at court surrounded by vampires, the game setting was an underground party. I should note that some Vampire larps do take place in semi-public settings such as nightclubs amongst non-larpers where characters attempt to maintain the Masquerade. Thus, this article should be viewed through my experience with these games, which overwhelmingly took place in private homes or reserved public spaces and focused upon court politics.

    In short, my experience of End of the Line was that we role-played out the activities usually handled before game or through game mechanics. As mortals, we embodied those Street and Herd contacts normally represented numerically or briefly embodied as NPCs by Storytellers. We physically played out biting, seduction, brawl, drug use, and partying. While some Camarilla politics took place behind the scenes – Ventrue, Brujah, Toreador, and Malkavians were present – I was able to play the larp as a mortal mostly unaware of these secret conversations and fully feel engaged. Another theme was that at various points of the larp, each of us would feel equally predator and prey. For my character, at least, I felt quite empowered as my drug dealer hipster mortal; sometimes, I was the seductress or corrupter rather than the prey, as was written into my character.

    Vampiric feeding and Discipline use sometimes took place in the open, despite the Masquerade rule. Photo by Tuomas Puikkonen.
    Vampiric feeding and Discipline use sometimes took place in the open, despite the Masquerade rule. Photo by Tuomas Puikkonen.

    To clear up potential miscommunication from the outset, no real blood drinking or drug use was present in this larp. Fake drugs consisted of sugar and calcium pills. Fake blood was made of water, powdered sugar, cocoa powder, cornstarch, and red dye. Alcohol was served in small amounts. No fake guns or knives were permitted. Physical fights were permitted with negotiation of intensity, but fighting in general was discouraged in order to preserve the “all is love” rave atmosphere. Sexuality was negotiated ahead of time and was represented by activities ranging from verbal descriptions to dry humping and making out. Players could bite one another, but should do so slowly with clear visual signs of advance facing the front of their victim. Players could tap out of any scene that made them feel uncomfortable.

    Themes, Setting, and Mechanics

    In End of the Line, the activities that are usually relegated to mechanical representations were enacted physically. The larp did feature some mechanics – actually, a large amount by Nordic standards – but those mechanics often involved physicality. One of Martin Elricsson’s goals in introducing the Nordic style of larp to the larger White Wolf community was to steer away from the “talking heads” larps. In other words, one goal of End of the Line was “show, don’t tell.” Thus, the mechanics were designed as guides toward enacting the physical aspects of play in a consensual way agreed upon by the group, as well as means to conceptualize the character’s goals and typical behaviors. Also, the game featured pre-written characters, which is not usual for Vampire campaign play, but sometimes happens in traditional convention one-shots. Players were asked to fill out a short questionnaire on the type of play desired, as well as email a picture for casting to the organizers. Characters were given at least three ties with other characters and at least two larger subcultural groups to which they belonged.

    A millionaire hanger-on; my character’s girlfriend; me as drug dealer and party organizer Carolina Kaita; and my in-game best friend. All three ties in my character sheet worked well for me in the larp. Photo by Tuomas Puikkonen.
    A millionaire hanger-on; my character’s girlfriend; me as drug dealer and party organizer Carolina Kaita; and my in-game best friend. All three ties in my character sheet worked well for me in the larp. Photo by Tuomas Puikkonen.

    Some additional descriptions of the themes and mechanics present in End of the Line:

    Play for What Is Interesting

    Vampire is promoted as “a game of personal horror” that explores the trauma of losing one’s humanity to one’s increasingly beastial nature. However, because the mechanics of the game are focused upon leveling and win conditions for challenges, play often becomes more about what has colloquially been called “superheroes with fangs.” White Wolf designers such as Eddy Webb have encouraged the concept of Playing to Lose,((Onyx Path Publishing, “Playing to Lose — Atlanta By Night 2012,” YouTube, last modified Dec. 3, 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hrkGTnYjbuM)) in which allowing your character to have some sort of failure can lead to more dramatic scenes, although the impact of long-term play and character investment sometimes make this style of play difficult. Nordic larps, on the other hand, often feature one-shot, intensely immersive experiences where Playing to Lose((“Playing to Lose,” Nordiclarp.org, last modified on May 29, 2014, http://nordiclarp.org/wiki/Playing_to_Lose)) is a normative part of the play culture.

    In the briefing for End of the Line, Bjarke Pedersen suggested we Play for What Is Interesting, or Play for Drama, as losing is not always the most accurate description of this style of play. This direction allowed me to feel enabled to have a surprise, in-character engagement and marriage in the middle of the Vampire larp, as it made sense based upon the way play unfolded, but would not normally be classified as “losing.”((For additional photos of the larp, including the engagement and wedding, see Singen Sternenreise, “End of the Line: A White Wolf Larp,” in Exposure, last modified Mar. 15. 2016, https://singen.exposure.co/end-of-the-line)) Of course, my new wife was turned into a vampire thirty minutes later without consulting me, so loss happened regardless, which added more interest to the larp for me. Ultimately, the one-shot format and the fact that the characters were all written to be terrible people allowed for greater alibi,((Sarah Lynne Bowman, “Bleed: The Spillover Between Player and Character,” Nordiclarp.org, last modified Mar. 3, 2015, http://nordiclarp.org/2015/03/02/bleed-the-spillover-between-player-and-character/)) meaning that I did not have to feel terribly emotionally connected to my character or responsible for her unethical actions.

    Play for What Is Interesting gave participants permission to take the story in whatever direction they found thematically appropriate. Photo by Tuomas Puikkonen.
    Play for What Is Interesting gave participants permission to take the story in whatever direction they found thematically appropriate. Photo by Tuomas Puikkonen.

    Masquerade

    Out of around 66 players, only one third were vampires. The rest of the characters were mortals or ghouls, i.e. servants of vampires. As players, we were not aware of who was playing each group and were encouraged to keep this information secret. In this way, the game was — in a meta sense — about enacting the Masquerade, but also about breaking it, as we were encouraged to do with abandon. Unlike traditional Camarilla Vampire games where breaches of the Masquerade are considered treasonous and often punishable by final death, in this game, we were encouraged to play the weaknesses of mortals and immortals alike. When breaches of the Masquerade occurred, mortals were instructed to view them as “drugs gone bad,” “abuse,” or “people pretending to be vampires,” rather than escalating to “vampires exist!” This guideline helped us preserve the Masquerade theme of the game without the larp breaking down.

    As a mortal character, I was fed upon once, offered the chance to become immortal, and proffered fake blood to drink from a wrist while in a dazed state, which I eventually declined in favor of asking my girlfriend to marry me. As directed, I played only having a vague recollection of this scene as a “weird drug experience” that let me “see my future,” as the events transpired in the Green meta room.

    A potential breach of the Masquerade. The organizers encouraged players to act with greater abandon than in a traditional Vampire larp. Photo by Tuomas Puikkonen.
    A potential breach of the Masquerade. The organizers encouraged players to act with greater abandon than in a traditional Vampire larp. Photo by Tuomas Puikkonen.

    Stats

    Characters were given three base stats that had absolutely no mechanical effect, but rather served as guides to role-play. Some players found these stats pointless, although I thought they preserved the original feel of the character sheet while not limiting my character’s agency. My stats were Using People 3, Cruelty 3, and Jaded 1. Each of us had custom stats based upon the design of the character.

    Vampires also had supernatural abilities such as Presence, Obfuscate, Fortitude, Potence, and Celerity, although the disciplines were significantly pared down from the original rules. Presence worked by placing a hand gently on the back of someone’s neck and saying, “You really, really want to do X.” Some examples are “You really, really feel in love with me” or “You really, really want to leave now.” The character under these effects chose how to interpret the command, but was expected to follow it for 10 minutes with no after-effects or memory. Disciplines worked on other vampires as well. From what I understand, Celerity and Potence merely added a bonus to Brawl. Interesting, vampires also could only use certain Disciplines if they fed upon characters that had specific emotional states. For example, “feeding from a forgotten, lonely or homeless person fuels Obfuscate,” while “drinking deep from someone that lusts or loves fuels Presence.”

    A player uses the “You really, really....” mechanic for Presence by placing his hand on the back of another participant’s neck to indicate supernatural persuasion. Photo by Tuomas Puikkonen.
    A player uses the “You really, really….” mechanic for Presence by placing his hand on the back of another participant’s neck to indicate supernatural persuasion. Photo by Tuomas Puikkonen.

    Brawl allowed for a mechanical representation of who would win in a fight if winning was desirable. While some players might choose to simply lose, Brawl stats were compared by flashing the number to one another, then discussing how the fight would play out before enacting it. While fighting was discouraged in the overall setting, I did see some fights break out that looked quite physical, as is the norm in many Nordic larps. Players could negotiate how close to real violence they wished to get, from miming to close-to-real physical strength.

    Scents

    Players were instructed to spray themselves with one of three scents at the start of game: coconut, citrus, or floral. These scents were appealing to vampires in that order from highest to lowest, which most of us did not know until the end. This mechanic was an interesting way to integrate multiple senses into the larp, although practically speaking, it was sometimes difficult to tell who smelled like what scent in close quarters.

    Feeding

    The feeding mechanic involved the vampire squirting fake blood into their mouth, biting the player with varying degrees of intensity, and licking the wound to heal it. Similarly, players could squirt blood on their wrists or neck and allow players to feed on them, which was experienced as ecstatic by all parties. Similar to the Presence mechanic, the effects of the blood lasted for ten minutes and resulted in feeling dazed and confused about what happened, at least for mortals.

    Feeding scene in the Blue room. Photo by Tuomas Puikkonen.
    Feeding scene in the Blue room. Photo by Tuomas Puikkonen.

    Players were instructed to do all feeding slowly and from the front, although a couple of us experienced being bit and having our neck sucked hard as a surprise from behind while in the process of a slow scene. As the tap-out mechanic puts the onus on the recipient to opt-out if uncomfortable, such a practice led in our cases to feeling uncomfortable with these scenes, as tapping-out at that point would have been too late. However, several of the vampires asked for consent before biting and made sure to act slowly and visibly, which seemed to work well in most contexts. Additional workshopping of the mechanics before the game would have helped everyone feel more comfortable about the expectations ahead of time, as I will discuss in a later section.

    Sexuality

    As mentioned above, the sexuality rules were the most variable and also, in some ways, the most vague. Sex could be played through activities ranging from narratively explaining what happens to dry humping and making out based upon the comfort level of the participants. While nudity was possible, I did not personally witness much in the rooms in which I frequented. Hypothetically, real sex was possible, though not encouraged explicitly by the organizers.

    Physical intimacy was negotiated between players based on individual comfort levels. Photo by Tuomas Puikkonen.
    Physical intimacy was negotiated between players based on individual comfort levels. Photo by Tuomas Puikkonen.

    Dance

    Players were encouraged to dance through the intro and outro scenes and the DJs played throughout the larp. One interesting metatechnique involved dancing. If a player was looking for interaction, they could enter the dance floor and attempt to engage in eye contact with another player, inviting a scene between the characters. While I did not use this technique often, other players reported it working seamlessly. Also, being able to dance when not engaged in role-play was a nice release for some players.

    The dance floor played rave music throughout the night. Locking eyes on the dance floor was a metatechnique for starting a scene with a new person. Photo by Tuomas Puikkonen.
    The dance floor played rave music throughout the night. Locking eyes on the dance floor was a metatechnique for starting a scene with a new person. Photo by Tuomas Puikkonen.

    Death or Embrace

    Players could determine if and when they wanted to die. A character could be fed upon multiple times with no negative consequences except those the player choose to role-play. Some characters were offered the opportunity to become vampires – i.e. the Embrace — which they would role-play out. I witnessed one character undergo this transformation, role-playing out the proceeding hunger and traumatic delirium post-Embrace quite convincingly. A couple of characters died during the game, with one playing a corpse in the closet for at least thirty minutes at the end of the larp.

    Alibi and Agency

    The characters in End of the Line were all written to be horrible people, regardless of their status as mortals, ghouls, or vampires. These characters represented the lowlifes of the streets and underground culture. As stated by organizer Martin Elricsson during a pre-game briefing, each character would experience being both predator and prey at some point. My character was specifically written to be a sociopathic hipster party organizer and drug dealer who sometimes messed with people because she was bored. Fortunately, this character was quite similar to my long-running Vampire character in her early days, so she was an easy default for me to inhabit. Other players reported having a more difficult time enacting the darker parts of their character’s nature.

    What this design produced is a sense that all people have their inner monster and that vampires are merely a supernatural expression of that inhumanity, a theme that I have always felt was central to Vampire and often overlooked in traditional play. We do not need to look far in actual humanity to see the Beastial nature within us, nor do we need to invent supernaturally creative ways to be cruel and selfish. The metaphor of feeding and domination is useful to play out in this circumstance, but in reality, is no different than how people treat one another emotionally in their darker moments. For more information on this concept, depth psychologist Whitney Strix Beltrán has academically explored this expression of the players’ inner Shadow through Vampire and other games.((Whitney Strix Beltrán, “Shadow Work: A Jungian Perspective on the Underside of Live Action Role-Play in the United States,” in The Wyrd Con Companion Book 2013, edited by Sarah Lynne Bowman and Aaron Vanek (Los Angeles, CA: Wyrd Con, 2013), 94-101. https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1793415/WCCB13.pdf)) As one of the players, Bob Wilson, summarized for World of Darkness News, “Emotionally, people manipulated, lied, and did all the other terrible things people do to each other.”((Harlequin, “‘End of the Line’ LARP Interview,” World of Darkness News, last modified on Mar. 16, 2016, http://www.worldofdarkness.news/Home/TabId/56/ArtMID/497/userid/2/ArticleID/15/End-of-the-Line-LARP-interview.aspx))

    Characters in End of the Line often embodied some of the worst parts of human nature, whether vampire or mortal. Photo by Tuomas Puikkonen.
    Characters in End of the Line often embodied some of the worst parts of human nature, whether vampire or mortal. Photo by Tuomas Puikkonen.

    Some of the mortal players did find themselves lacking sufficient agency toward the end of the game, although we were instructed to make our own role-play scenes, also known as “bringing your own basket” to the picnic. One of the problems in traditional Vampire larp is the structural inequalities built into the game, where higher-level players with more status get more access to secret meetings, powers, plots, etc. While the beginning of End of the Line featured an equilibrium of play between mortals and supernatural characters, by the end of the larp, player-characters not involved with secret Camarilla meetings or getting Embraced as vampires sometimes felt excluded from play, as is often experienced by Neonates in traditional Vampire larp. Perhaps adding some sort of element to engage the still-mortal toward the end would help these players maintain engagement and their sense of agency, such as dealing with a police raid or some other type of plot.

    Consent, Workshopping, and Debriefing

    As mentioned above, the main opt-out mechanic of the larp was tapping-out. This mechanic places the onus on the person receiving the action to be cognizant enough of their own experience to remember to tap-out, to be comfortable enough with their co-players to not feel shamed for not being “hardcore” enough, etc. The organizers did a good job of trying to alleviate concerns around consent in the pre-game social media groups, assuring us that we could exit any scene without repercussion and that actions such as feeding would happen slowly, from the front, and with plenty of opportunity to tap-out. In practice, this rule was not always followed.

    In my view, both the aggressor and the recipient should be equally responsible for consent in a scene. Briefly stopping play to check in with another player or negotiate the degree of intensity may cause a short break in immersion, but offers the net gain of allowing players the sense that their personal boundaries are important and will be respected by the other players. This comfort level can often lead to greater intensity if trust is established.

    Because of the lack of space in the main building and time constraints, we were only given a thirty minute briefing rather than the usual workshopping often associated with Nordic larps.((The Workshop Handbook, Workshophandbook.com, last accessed Mar. 17, 2016, https://workshophandbook.wordpress.com/)) Similarly, we were not offered a chance for structured debriefing,((Sarah Lynne Bowman, “Returning to the Real World: Debriefing After Role-playing Games,” Nordiclarp.org, last modified Dec. 8, 2014, http://nordiclarp.org/2014/12/08/debrief-returning-to-the-real-world/)) as the organizers needed to clean the site and close it to the players. Some players convened for an after-party off-site, but I was unable to attend due to a conference in the morning.

    Organizer Bjarke Pedersen running the pre-game briefing. Space and time constraints made extensive workshopping infeasible. Photo by Tuomas Puikkonen.
    Organizer Bjarke Pedersen running the pre-game briefing. Space and time constraints made extensive workshopping infeasible. Photo by Tuomas Puikkonen.

    I believe that when playing with physically intimate scenes that feature feeding, violence, and sexuality, workshopping serves many important purposes. It helps players build trust before inhabiting their characters; offers opportunities to model and practice the mechanics; and opens up opportunities for players in their assigned groups to negotiate boundaries. We did some of these activities in our small groups over email, but recognizing each other at the venue was sometimes difficult and not everyone in the larp communicated boundaries beforehand. While I respect the fact that logistics for such an event can be difficult, one thing I learned from the Nordic larp Just a Little Lovin’ was the importance of off-game negotiation and workshopping in facilitating the ability to play intimacy more safely.((Sarah Lynne Bowman, “Love, Sex, Death, and Liminality: Ritual in Just a Little Lovin’,” Nordiclarp.org, last modified July 13, 2015, http://nordiclarp.org/2015/07/13/love-sex-death-and-liminality-ritual-in-just-a-little-lovin/)) Additionally, Just a Little Lovin’ featured clear negotiation before sexual scenes and ritualized this play in a way that allowed player input to influence the scene, not just character desires. This practice cut down on ambiguity.

    Similarly, debriefing is important when processing the events that happen in such a game. While some individual players felt comfortable speaking informally after the game, a structured debrief – perhaps in small groups – would have allowed people the chance to de-role and speak seriously about their experience. I especially would have appreciated a structured opportunity to speak with the individuals with whom I had intimate scenes, insulted, or threatened in-character. I do think such debriefing sessions should be offered by organizers, but I also think they should be optional for individuals who wish to take part. It was difficult for some players inexperienced with Nordic larp and/or Vampire to transition quickly back to their daily consciousness and not perceive themselves or others as predators, an issue that can be ameliorated in part with a debrief.

    The organizers of the larp plan to adjust the next run according to these critiques, with greater variability of options for physical play, negotiation between players, workshopping, and debriefing. In essence, this run showed excellent proof of concept with refinements that should and will be made for future iterations.

    The Future of White Wolf and Nordic-style Vampire Larp

    The Helsinki run of End of the Line is just the first of several events planned for the next two years. The organizing team plans to rerun a version of this larp at the Grand Masquerade in New Orleans in September 2016.((“The Grand Masquerade,” Masqueradebynight, last retrieved on Mar. 17, 2016, http://www.masqueradebynight.com/)) Potential players should note that based upon feedback, the above-mentioned mechanics and structure may change in the next iteration. Interested players can subscribe to the End of the Line mailing list here. Additionally, this team plans to run Enlightenment in Blood as a pervasive larp spanning many locations in Berlin in 2017 as a part of a multi-day World of Darkness festival.((“World of Darkness Berlin 2017: Enlightenment in Blood,” Enlightenmentinblood.com, last retrieved on Mar. 17, 2016, http://www.enlightenmentinblood.com/))

    Finally, Liveform and Rollespilsfabrikken plan to run a White Wolf-endorsed larp called Convention of Thorns between October 27-30, 2016.((“White Wolf Presents Convention of Thorns,” Cotlarp.com, last retrieved on Mar. 17, 2016, http://www.cotlarp.com/)) This larp will provide an alternate history account of the famous 15th century event in White Wolf history in which the Camarilla organizing body was formed. Notably, this historical larp will take place in a Polish castle and will focus upon interactions between vampires of various power levels, from Neonate to Methuselah. While some of the mechanics will resemble those from End of the Line, the two productions will offer different takes on the genre. In short, World of Darkness players interested in trying Nordic-style larps have several options coming soon.

    To summarize, these larps are not intended to replace or alter existing Vampire larps, but rather to add additional experiences for players interested in this style. The physicality of the Nordic approach will likely not appeal to certain players, which is understandable. For potential players unused this style, I suggest fully reviewing the content of this article and other documentation before signing up for one of these games in order to understand the expectations of the play culture. I also suggest being clear from the outset with yourself and your co-players about your boundaries via email or other forms of communication. Players should feel enabled to negotiate those limits before, during, and after play and tap-out of any scene that makes them uncomfortable. In my view, physical play in larp is certainly possible — indeed, some of the organizers of End of the Line started role-playing in traditional Vampire larps before exploring other forms of embodiment — but should be done with careful consideration of the off-game needs of other players.

    End of the Line

    Participation Fee: €25
    Players: 66
    Date: March 7, 2016, 6 hours
    Location: Helsinki, Finland
    Created by: Bjarke Pedersen, Juhana Pettersson & Martin Elricsson
    Production: José Jácome & Mikko Pervilä
    Characters: Elin Nilsen, Jørn Slemdal & Mika Loponen
    Decor: Marcus Engstrand, Anders Davén & Aleksander Nikulin
    Documentation: Tuomas Hakkarainen, Tuomas Puikkonen, Julius Konttinen & Joona Pettersson
    Catering: Kasper Larson & Aarne Saarinen
    Production assistants: Outi Mussalo, Tia Carolina Ihalainen, James Knowlden, Bob Wilson, Irrette Cziezerski, Jukka Seppänen & Ville-Eemeli Miettinen
    Featuring: Suicide Club (Gabriella Holmström & Ossian Reynolds)
    Produced by: White Wolf Publishing and Odyssé with Solmukohta and Inside Job Agency

    Cover photo: Part-larp, part-rave, End of the Line provided a unique and authentic World of Darkness experience, in game photo by Tuomas Puikkonen. Other photos by Tuomas Puikkonen.

  • Nordic Larp Talks Helsinki 2016

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    Nordic Larp Talks Helsinki 2016

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    Nordic Larp Talks is a series of short, entertaining, thought-provoking and mind-boggling lectures about projects and ideas from the tradition of Nordic Larp.

    This year Nordic Larp Talks will be hosted in Helsinki, Tuesday March 8th at 19:00 and you are of course more than welcome to join us!

    The event will be held at Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architechture (often called “Taik”, Hämeentie 135 C, Helsinki, on the 8th floor which is located about 20 min away from the central station by bus. The evening will be hosted by writer and radio & television host Johanna Koljonen.

    Free admission. Doors opens at 18:30.

    PROGRAM
    19.00 – 21.00 Tuesday March 8th at Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture , Hämeentie 135 C, 8th Floor. The programme will start at 19.00 sharp.

    SPEAKERS
    To be announced shortly!

    Nordic Larp Talks Helsinki 2016 is produced by Inside Job Agency in connection with Solmukohta 2016 and A Week in Finland.

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  • Ship Ahoy! Mark your calendar for Solmukohta 2016!

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    Ship Ahoy! Mark your calendar for Solmukohta 2016!

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    On Wednesday the 9th to Monday the 14th of March 2016 it’s once again time for the international roleplaying conference Solmukohta. The conference often known as Knutepunkt is this year in Finland and therefore goes by it’s Finnish name Solmukohta for 2016.

    This Solmukohta will be truly Baltic as the location is a Tallink Silja cruise ship. It takes off from Helsinki in Finland on Wednesday afternoon the 9th of March and the hosts the last night of A Week in Finland. The “A Week” tradition has for many years been a nice way to extend your conference experience and often gives a nice peek into the local role-playing scene of the hosting country.

    The actual conference starts on Thursday afternoon as the cruise ship sails from Stockholm and ends on Sunday afternoon in Helsinki.

    The name Solmukohta is Finnish and means “a meeting point”. In Norway the event is called Knutepunkt, in Sweden Knutpunkt and in Denmark Knudepunkt. This meeting point – melting pot for ideas and inspiration – was first organized in 1997. It has been playing a vital role in establishing the Nordic roleplaying identity and in establishing the concept of “Nordic larp” as an unique approach to live action roleplaying.
    From the Solmukohta website

    You can also read more about the previous Knutepunkt-conferences at the Nordic Larp Wiki.

    We had a chance to speak a bit with Massi Hannula Thorhauge who is of the two main organizers of Solmukohta 2016.

    Massi presenting at the Nordic Larp Talks 2015 in Copenhagen Photo: Mathias Kure Massi presenting at the Nordic Larp Talks 2015. Photo: Mathias Kure

    Hey Massi! Could you present team behind next years Solmukohta?

    As it’s the Finnish Solmukohta, we go with a small team again. We aim to transparency and internationality, which I personally think is shown in the choices of the organizers.

    As a main organizer couple me and Mikko Pervilä have a vast experience in Nordic and international convention organizing. Mikko was the main organizer of Solmukohta 2004, and takes the main responsibility of all the technical matters of the convention with the title Technical director. I, go by the title Artistic Director and take the main responsibility of the communication and content of the event. We let our team to drive with their great ideas and organizational skills and help to keep the package intact.

    Program team in 2016 are two experienced larp designers and organizers Hannu Niemi and Olli Lönnberg. They have already put the wheels turning, and set the call for program due October 2015. You might have seen them in KPs before, Hannu playing his guitar in the parties and Olli taking notes in every possible program item he just could partake.

    Solmu-Economy is in hands of the most experienced convention economist in Denmark, possible the Nordics, but as I am bit bias to brag about my husband’s skills, I would just say, that you cannot get better person for this job. David Thorhauge has experience since the mid 90’s on organizing roleplaying conventions from Fastaval to Knudepunkts in Denmark.

    Information at the venue, or Finnformation, KP/SK goers already met in Denmark 2015. Maiju Ruusunen has long time experience in working Ropecon TSInfo and Solmukohta infos. If you’ve met her, you know, she won’t rest before she has solved your problem. Maiju is joined by Zacharias Holmberg, the head of the board of Fenno-Swedish roleplaying association Eloria and larp designer from the Swedish speaking part of Finland. Zacharia’s calm voice and attitude makes problems vanish, and his vast language skills within the Nordics makes him the perfect partner for Maiju in the Finnformation. We hope to fill out the Info desks with finlandsvenska larpers to make them more visible in the Nordic scene.

    What would be Solmukohta without A Week in Finland? This time it has been given into hands of our Portuguese addition, José Jacomé, or as we call him “the guy who gets sh*it done”. Last summer he took groups of Nordic larpers around Portugal and you might know him from his Zombie Walk events in Helsinki. He knows what you want to do in Helsinki, even the things that we Finns would not think about. With his large network José is going to create a fantastic week of venues, events and parties, I have no doubt.

    And we of course have Solum-books! This year two, which seems to become the standard. The editors team is three great Finnish academics and role-players Mika Loponen, Jukka Särkijärvi and Kaisa Kangas. Mika is Solmukohta veteran, and organized events such as Ropecon and Finncon as the main organizer or as a part of the main organizer team. He knows what’s going on in the scene. Jukka, or you might now him as NiTe, is known from his internationally famous roleplaying blog “Worlds in a Handful of Dice”, where he keeps us all updated on what’s happening in the roleplaying scene world wide. Kaisa was designing the political larp Halat hisar in 2013 in Finland, and her takes on Nordic laps she visit all around the Nordic countries are widely read. The Call for Articles will come out in September 2015, and you can read more about the book themes on our website.

    See the faces of the team and contact details herehe full team on the website.

    Do have any general themes or aims with conference?

    The theme for the 2016 Solmukohta is “Reality check”. This is the 20th Solmukohta/KP and we want to stop, take a deep breath and see what we have created. Where has this small gathering of same minded people taken us in less than 20 years? And we want to look into the future, and think where is this, culture and community we have created, taking us.

    We have grown up. We don’t run around schools in elf ears and cloaks made of shiny spandex (though, that’s fun occasionally too). We want quality and drive ourselves towards even grander achievements. This is why we, the team, want to organize Solmukohta as professionally as we can. We want the Nordic Larp scene to concentrate exchanging ideas, creating together and networking without practical worries.

    There will be some nostalgia, some traditional SK/KP program, socializing, parties, meet-up and so on. The program will explore all the mentioned above and beyond.

    And finally the give question… Why on a boat?

    Why not? I mean, we have been as scene talking about Solmukohta on a boat for more than a decade now. If I am not wrong, someone even looked into it at some point. And to be honest, as a conference venue, it is great, and for networking and socializing the spaces and venues are excellent. It will be bit different, but in my honest opinion more “traditional” Solmukohta than we saw in Denmark 2015.

    Also, I get to wear a cool captain’s hat, which is a reason by itself.

    Thank you Massi, we are looking forward to March!

    Don't miss out on scenic views like this one!
    Don’t miss out on scenic views like this one!

    Want more info about Solmukohta 2016?

    Contact the organizers at info@solmukohta.org

    or via other channels:

    Solmukohta website: solmukohta.org
    Solmukohta 2016 Twitter @solmukohta2016
    Solmukohta 2016 Facebook fb.com/solmukohta2016
    Solmukohta 2016 official hashtag: #solmukohta2016
    Solmukohta 2016 Laivforum: http://laivforum.net/forums/knutepunkt.14/

    See more Solmukohta updates here: http://solmukohta.org/index.php/Main/Updates