Tag: Helicon

Published on

2025-07-29

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Techniques

River Rafting Design

Written by
Katrine Wind
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.

Let’s get right into the action! Literally. Because “River Rafting” is a larp design methodology to help catapult larpers into play without a slow start. The purpose of this design model is to help the players experience more moments of emotional impact as well as to increase intensity and meaningful experiences throughout the whole duration of the larp.

I am a strong believer in the idea that when we act, we experience. River Rafting design helps the players to act immediately. This article is a further development of the design concept of frontloading((The idea of frontloading appeared in my realm of design thoughts in 2016 when Alexander Bakkensen and I were designing the Danish larp Victorious which I later made an iteration of to become the international larp Spoils of War. It is a bespoke larp inspired by A Song of Ice and Fire, The Tudors and several other similar sources. I have also later tested and developed the concept further, based on the thoughts we had together back then. We talked about it in the 2018 version of the Danish roleplay convention Forum in the talk: “Toolbox of drama designers” which was repeated at Knudepunkt 2019.)) and covers pre-larp design, workshops and the pacing of the larp. It will explore how to do it intentionally and why designing for River Rafting can enhance the larp experience for your players. I will use perspectives from the three larps Spoils of War (Wind, 2018-), Daemon (Wind, 2021-) and Helicon (Pettersson and Wind, 2024-) to provide specific examples.

What are we trying to solve?

I have often noticed that most of the meaningful scenes on an individual level clump together at the end of a larp, but that the emotional impact of these often turns to disillusion when witnessing or participating in a cascade of dramatic scenes/deaths/reveals in the last hours. This phenomenon, Alexander Bakkensen has called “The Twilight Avalanche”. I usually feel too numb to react to yet another person screaming or crying by then.

This experience regularly contrasts with the first few hours of a larp involving mostly polite introductions and surface-level interactions like saying “greetings” and small talk for hours. In some cases, there is not a lot of emotional impact during the middle of the experience either, and often I don’t feel I have the tools to push the experience along as a player.

I think a number of design choices are supporting the slow start and place (too much) emphasis on the end of larps. One of these is if written character drama/conflicts/dilemmas are not very complex or have just one big scene in them. Another issue can be creating a setting that only provides an interesting framework late in the larp, or that builds up to a “Big Plot Ending”. This kind of ending is sometimes introduced late in the runtime, overshadowing previously built up character conflicts and tensions. It could be “end of the world”, “we are suddenly being invaded”, “we all have to die” etc. While such grand conclusions can be effective, they are not always consciously integrated into the rest of the larp’s structure. It can be frustrating as an individual player if such an ending isn’t tied meaningfully into the story of your character. A “big bang” finale can even leave players wondering what could have been if the larp had started with this level of intensity. In fact, the larp might have been a lot more interesting if it started with its ending as its beginning.

Furthermore, many players will, no matter the quality of the written setting and character, instinctively save the most interesting parts of a relation and the character until very late in a larp, playing towards a resolution only at the end unless you provide tools for them to do otherwise. We also miss the opportunity to help the players effectively use these tools to create early impact play this specific larp if workshops are not spent on practicing key mechanics and relationships. Often, on-location workshops will contain long briefings with repetition of the website instead. This approach means that players are not ready to get the full potential for emotional impact out of the written content right from the beginning. How they use the tools is up to the players, but if we don’t coach on how to unlock the usefulness of the mechanics in this specific larp, the players will spend a lot of the in-game time learning how to use the tools, or – worse – never use them at all.

Lastly, many larps have a pacing that structurally supports very few and late points of emotional impact with minimal structure and setup during the early and middle part. A slow start can make it harder to connect with the experience, relations and character early on.

All of these factors (low playability of characters/setting, poor practicing of mechanics and backloaded pacing) encourage players to save secrets or conflicts until the very last hours of the larp. Let us name this common combination of design choices the “Waterfall”((Not to be confused with the waterfall method in project management.)) method since it creates a slow start, a quiet flow of the boat on a broad river and a dramatic finish.

What we want instead of a waterfall is a more turbulent flow of the water within the themes of the larp. This doesn’t mean full intensity all the time. If we want many wavetops (experiences of emotional impact), we also need slower paced periods. But fluctuations are hard to achieve if you are already on a low point of pacing at the beginning of the larp, as this is also the time when you are practicing enacting the character in the setting and using the mechanics. If we don’t make the early rapids coming from pacing powerful enough for the players, there is a tendency that the larp experience itself will be backloaded.

What is River Rafting design?

River Rafting is a design philosophy that supports a turbulent flow of the larp experience with many opportunities of emotional impact from the beginning of the larp and throughout. I chose this term because river rafting starts slowly for a short time (pre-game and workshops) and then you hit a lot of rapids right away as well as during the rest of the trip (beginning of the larp until the end). We want to throw the boat around early and for the whole duration of the larp to offer an alternative to a Waterfall experience. If there are more rapids and more opportunities for movement, it is less important if some of it doesn’t result in a lot of impact.

In this maritime analogy, the larper’s experience of drama and emotional impact is the boat being moved. The characters, setting and mechanics are the paddles, life vests, ropes to other boats and other tools that the larper can use to make their own boat and the boats of others move at different paces down the river, and to create rapids for each other from many different angles at once. The workshops need to focus on teaching players to use these tools.

But since it takes time to learn to use the tools, early rapids must be created by providing a narrow river and intentionally plotted obstacles (frontloaded pacing/structure). Later, the river broadens and we design fewer obstacles to create rapids, but by then the players use the setting, characters and mechanics to make their own and each others’ boats move in a meaningful way.

Fig 1 – Illustration of River Rafting Design. Image by Katrine Wind.

As designers, we have three arenas where we can significantly influence the potential for emotional impact of our provided material: Highly playable characters/setting, mechanics and workshops, and pacing/structure.((I realise a lot of things influence a player’s experience: Co-player chemistry, off-game mood, room design, communication style of organisers and crew, feeling of safety, physical needs being met etc. But the focus of this article is purely on how to provide tools for the players to get the biggest emotional impact out of your writing and structure.))
What you want to achieve by this is to help the players get going right away, keep and vary intensity and take the interplay between the overall arc and the arc of the individual player into account.

So the three key elements of River Rafting design are:
1. Highly playable characters and setting: Focus on crafting characters and a setting that encourages immediate action. Emphasize extensive and complex character relations and highly playable dynamics. Please notice that I don’t say “long character backgrounds” or “as many pages of lore as possible”. It is about the volume and complexity of highly playable content.
2. Mechanics and workshops: Provide a few key mechanics for the players to create impact. Workshops should ideally quickly go from instructional briefings to a more tool based and practice heavy approach where players practice core mechanics of the larp, embrace important themes and actively play on character relationships early in the larp. Encourage the players to dive into conflicts and dynamics from the outset – and keep reminding them. Make a safe environment to help players to be brave. Additional workshops in act breaks can support this.
3. Early impact pacing: Start the larp with compelling events or tense scenarios, supported by a lot of designed structure and tense content in the very early parts of the larp.
Below is an illustration of how I perceive each design approach’s attempt to structurally influence emotional impact throughout the runtime of a larp.

Fig 2 – Emotional Impact Potential from the Design. Image by Katrine Wind.

The wavetops in River Rafting design don’t have to be at exactly these points of the larp. The later spikes symbolise how structured content and potentially mid-game workshops etc. can make extra rapids. However, the expectation is that the potential of provided content and structure to help create meaningful emotional impact is much less later in the larp because the players have practiced the characters, relations and mechanics and create the rapids themselves by then.

Please note that the illustration is not a visualisation of the individual player experience. Many players will experience climaxes at the end of the larp, and that is great. The point is also having a lot of potential emotional impacts earlier – the aim is to increase the volume and frequency, not just to move the curve.

I will go through the three different aspects of River Rafting design in detail and with examples below.

Setting and Characters

If you write a setting and characters for your players, you are already frontloading this part of the design to some degree. Well done! Sending out characters as well as facilitating workshops are the gentle start that can teach the players how to use the paddle and steer with the tools they have been given. This means that when you start the larp, the players are already in the water, can create movement in the boat and feel brave and ready to do so.

But what is necessary for a specifically River Rafting design is for you to provide an engaging setting right at the end of an interesting time which creates a setup and something to talk about. You also need complex, highly playable characters containing dilemmas that will lead to more drama while dealing with them. The intention is to provide all players with a springboard for their personal stories supported by an engaging narrative framework.

Spoils of War opens with this engaging setting; the interesting part to play is happening right now.((The idea for the setting was originally created together with Alexander Bakkensen for the Danish larps Victorious 1 and 2 in 2016 and 2017.)) We are at the very end of a brutal civil war. The characters have already experienced the horrors of it, but the emotional impact hasn’t fully hit them yet. The players know that their characters are either on the losing or the winning side, and that the war will end early in the larp. They don’t spend time playing the lead-up to the war or competing over who will win. Because all the characters will be in a state of turmoil with many options for the aftermath, the setting gives us something recent and impactful to play on right away. Furthermore, the characters contain complex relations with slights, dilemmas, heartbreaks, love, despair and uplifting camaraderie happening right now, combined with shared history from before the war.

Another example which illustrates the design principles regarding characters and setting is Helicon (Maria Pettersson and Katrine Wind, 2024).((Maria Pettersson and I had no conversations about the term River Rafting design in the design process of Helicon, and she cannot be held accountable for any of my theoretical descriptions of the perspective as I hadn’t conceptualised my design preferences in this way at the time. We completely agreed on the need for complex/highly playable characters and setting – and we have an equal part in the design of all aspects of Helicon itself. But the description of what I perceive we did when looking back and any criticism of the conceptualisation thereof is completely on my own account.)) Helicon is a larp about a group of artists, scientists and leaders who have captured the Muses of old to keep all of the inspiration in the world for themselves. The larp is based around dyadic play where the couple has a deep relation with each other. Some of the Muses want to be there or are even emotionally in power, and this setting of ambivalent slavery is relevant to every single player. It is significant and interesting to have Helicon play out at exactly this point of time in the setting, since it is time for the yearly binding ritual to keep the Muses caught.

To give plenty of content to play with on a character level, the humans (the Inspired) have fifteen years of complex history together. Also, the Muses are thousands of years old, they are all siblings and they have significant relationships with one another. As the Muses have been prisoners for fifteen years, there are also extensive relations across the two groups: Characters are lovers or ex-lovers; many of the Muses have stolen artists from each other over the years; some are currently best of friends with their captors etc. Thus, you have dilemmas all across the base of characters as well as with your dyadic partner.

A misinterpretation of the frontloading concept, in my opinion, is writing extensive characters but where the most interesting content is in the past (or in the future after the larp). Why would you write that a conflict or dilemma is already dealt with or easily resolved, unless it has led to an even more interesting conflict? We have to give players the opportunity to have the most meaningful experiences while they are in play. Therefore, I am not advocating for long characters. Instead, I recommend putting in a lot of playable content in the provided material no matter the length of the text. This could be complex, unresolved conflicts, established and significant relations, challenges to the character, dilemmas, goals etc.

A great way to help players be ready for River Rafting is providing the setting and character material a long time before the larp. That also entails the pacing structure and schedule as well as other forms of expectation management that helps them structure their own experience no matter which degree of transparency you want for what actually happens in the larp. For example: Do you expect the players to talk to co-players before the larp or will you allow time for that on location? Do they sleep off-game? What will they physically do with their bodies and spend their time on during this larp? When is a good time to take a break?

Workshops and Mechanics

Setting and characters take time to learn to use. I often find that organisers underestimate the value of structured time for people to talk with co-players about their relations during the workshop time as a means to enable players to use the material right away. If you provide a highly playable setting and characters, the players will do wonders for themselves to be ready to play intensely right from the outset of the larp, if they just have time to talk with each other. Talking about their relations and maybe even trying out flashback scenes is also practicing to use the written material before the larp instead of practicing and finding each other when the larp has already started. No matter how many online meetings you have for calibration before a larp, I find that players meeting each other just before the larp is where they have the best opportunity to find each other and create the trust it takes to play bravely together – and be ready to do so. This is more valuable for the emotional impact of their experience than more instructional briefing about the setting.

Furthermore, I suggest that you introduce one or a few core mechanics to support the experience you want the players to have, and to practice them during workshops. This enables the players with more tools to move their boat and the boat of others. Structured practice of the tools given to the players is an excellent way to help them get going from the start of the larp. If you don’t do this, most of your opportunity as a designer to meaningfully influence the emotional impact on the individual player experience (before the larp) will rely on just the characters and setting.

For the workshops, I encourage not providing information pieces and practicing mechanics until they are needed. If you have act breaks, and a tool is not used before act 3, then wait to provide this information until it is necessary. If you have a debriefing, don’t instruct about that at the beginning of the larp.

A mechanic that I use in several of the larps I am involved in is Dinner Warfare (Wind, 2024). It is a way of designing meaningful mealtime situations and using seating plans to create subtle but strong emotional pressure based on specific relations. But I introduce it differently for each larp depending on the purpose and importance of the tool. I use it extensively in Daemon and provide off-game instructions before the larp as well as an in-game alibi that has to do with classicism to stay in the seats of the horrible seating plan. It is a less prominent mechanic in other larps I am involved in and therefore not introduced as thoroughly.

Instruction and Coaching

As a larp runner you have to consider when to give instructions and when to let the players practice tools themselves in a more coaching style of leadership. While I strongly emphasize the value of the latter, there is no shame in being instructive: “You must use this mechanic in the game”. The coaching approach is letting players know that the rest is up to them: “You decide what to do within the framework”. This will help them be more comfortable using them from the beginning of the larp by practicing. A combination of the suggestions above is illustrated in Spoils of War. The players know before the larp which side has won or lost, but the characters don’t. The first night starts with the siege of the last standing castle. The losing side has been caught inside for three months but hasn’t quite given up yet. It is hard to start right in the middle of a siege and be ready to react to what it has been like being at a standstill for three months. Everybody is frustrated.

We try to explain it briefly at first and underline that the frustration is a specific mechanic for the very beginning of the larp (instruction), and then we lead the players into the game by making a “frustration workshop” where we play the same scene three times (coaching). First, it is at the beginning of the siege: The losing side has plenty of hope and food and the winning side is patient. Then we jump a month and the players are prompted to escalate how annoying it is being around the same people and that food is scarce. Finally, we play the same scene where three months have passed and everyone is desperate. The scenes only take about five minutes each, but it underlines the feeling we start the larp with. After the last scene, the intro song plays and the larp begins with this exact feeling of frustration. Almost right away there is an inspection of prisoners of war where the two sides meet, which means that the players are more ready to play the emotional rapid of seeing their loved ones but not being able to save them from imprisonment than if they just started cold.

It is almost impossible not to have some degree of briefing with instructions when you start the workshops, but I encourage going from instruction to coaching as soon as possible.

Mechanics take time to learn

In Daemon, the core vision is experiencing being two people who together portray one character. Daemon is inspired by the trilogy His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman (1995–2000) where humans live with their soul outside of their body in the form of an animal. Daemons are the expression of the inner lives of the characters and the human and daemon can’t move very far away from each other.

It might seem like an obvious mechanic that one player is portraying the human itself and the other is portraying the inner life of the character. But if I was mostly interested in the universe or characters of the books instead of the human-daemon relation, I could have decided mechanics-wise that the players just have a toy animal on their shoulder and then play in the setting. However, I wanted to make a larp where you could experience dyadic play in a way where you together portray one character.
The other core mechanic I chose to support the vision is that the player can’t go more than two meters from their dyadic partner the whole in-game playtime, which requires immense attention to what your partner is doing.

Dyadic play is a new way of larping for most people – and if they didn’t play Daemon before, they probably never had to play this physically close to another player for such a long time before. We also have to practice how the daemon player acts on a continuum from underlining and mirroring what the player of the human is portraying to showing what is really going on inside or between two humans when they interact. So in the workshop I explain briefly about the bond, and we then practice it extensively.

I have seen players struggle with the mechanics during Daemon despite extensively trying it out – my workshops were not enough. The players spent too much time worrying about the mechanics and moving too far away from each other/not mirroring enough instead of focussing on the character and what was happening around them. What has really helped in later iterations is saying to the players in the instructional part of the workshops right before the first act of Daemon that the first night will be clunky. I tell them that I realise that even though we have practiced the mechanic, we have to try it out during the first night before we know how we want to play it with our partner and in our dyad together towards others, and then we calibrate before act two. I find that verbally validating the fact that the key mechanic takes time to learn has made some larpers braver – especially when it is a tool not usually used in other larps. I have witnessed this bravery helping players to bring out interesting content from very early on in the larp in later runs of Daemon.

But if prewritten characters, setting, mechanics and workshops – no matter the quality – were enough to achieve rapids in the river in the beginning of the larp, more larps would feel like a River Rafting experience instead of feeling slow and backloaded.

For Daemon, the physical closeness is a good example of a mechanic that becomes much more impactful later in the larp when they have had time to get used to it. I often hear people forgetting right after the larp that they don’t have to stay within two metres of their dyadic partner anymore. But it is obvious that the players benefit from something else to create opportunities for emotional impact until the mechanics work for them and they have a feeling for their characters. What is lacking is a strategy for pacing. As mentioned before, I think that more larps would structurally support emotional impact early if they had a frontloaded pacing.

Pacing

As a designer, you have the best opportunity to provide a meaningful overall structure early in a larp. Later and by the end of the larp, most players will have been practicing, utilising and developing the character drama, setting and mechanics, making overall pacing and structured content much more irrelevant – or at worst – meaningless. By then, the main part of the emotional impact should come from the larpers themselves, the co-players and utilisation of the mechanics.

River Rafting design encourages establishing a high intensity starting point pacing-wise for the players to react to and talk about as well as more structured content in the first parts of the larp – to create “the narrow river and the first rapid”. Structured and intense openings help to actualise the tools and encourage players to take action early because their boat is already moving. We learn even more from our first actions in a larp than in the workshops about utilising the characters, setting and the mechanics. But if nothing pushes us to act, it is harder to convert this to meaningful experiences, and the emotional impact is also postponed.

The opening of the larp does not have to be the same for all players but should in general tie into the themes and core experiences as well as be relevant to the individuals.

It is not an original idea to start in mediās rēs. It is just not very prevalent in larp designs in my opinion. Or at least the opening scene is often not meaningful for the individuals or coherent with overarching themes, in the way the River Rafting design suggests.

This leads me to what I think really happens when “backloaded” pacing is the choice in so many larps following the Waterfall design model and why I don’t want to design like that.

Backloaded Pacing

Pacing in larps often mirrors the “Hollywood model” of storytelling.

The “we start slow and everything only climaxes in the end, and something even more interesting happens at the end of or after the larp” structure outlines schematically the progress of a classical “good story” split into (usually three) different acts. It makes sense that we consciously or otherwise use this structure in our medium: It’s how we usually see stories unfold in the content we consume.

Here are a few examples of the classical Hollywood model. I would argue that often larp pacings (not necessarily the individual experiences) will stop at the climax.

Fig 3 – Classical Narrative Arc (Hollywood Model) 3 Act structure

In video games, there are examples of a very similar pacing curve:

Fig 4 – Pacing Curve example for a Video Game. Images source: http://jorgenboge.wikidot.com/hollywood-model

I think the Hollywood model is fine. It can be a good way to tell a story – why else would so many pieces be structured like that? Movies, video games, plays etc. can benefit greatly from this approach, because when you have a predetermined outcome you can structure the whole experience around this pacing. However, at larps, pacing needs to accommodate the double-layered structure: The overall story arc and the individual character arcs. So you can’t make this structure work for a majority of the players just by making a larp end in a certain way or culminating everything in the overarching arc in the end.

Even for the pop culture pieces that start out in media res, my point would be that this rarely accounts for all individual characters – it’s mostly for the overall story. Because of the improvisational nature of larp, since we have so many moving pieces and because we care about every individual player’s experience, the backloaded pacing or Hollywood model is less applicable to larp if you want more emotional impact for the individual.

With River Rafting design, you can more easily design for the players to be hit by so many different waves and rapids on their path down the narrow river that they have had enough meaningful experiences along the way, so that it doesn’t matter if their ending is a waterfall, a whirlpool or a quiet stretch of river – none of the players will have their whole experience be dependent on the ending.

Daemon as a pacing example

Below is an example of how the pacing for the overall larp works for Daemon (Katrine Wind, 2021–). This is not the model of River Rafting pacing design. That can take a lot of different forms – this is just the general visualisation of the pacing in a larp with a lot of structure and planned events in the beginning more than in the end.

Fig 5 – Katrine Wind (2024): River Rafting Pacing Design for Daemon larp

In Daemon, the setting is the aftermath of a war where we have just killed God. The characters themselves are centered around themes like creating meaning, victory/defeat, grief/relief and building a new future. A lot of the characters are already gathered in the castle of one of the nobles on the winning side (facilitator character). The guests are there to celebrate the war heroes, mourn the fallen and exploit the opportunity created from the fall of a controlling theocracy to experiment with scientific projects that have up until now been illegal. But the theocratic power has thrown one last bomb of a biological weapon in the form of a powder that affects the bond between human and daemon (a core mechanic of the larp).

The opening scene creates a sense of urgency and immediate possibility for the players to take action, as enemies and people with complex relations to the guests originally invited for the celebration are evacuated to and quarantined in the castle. They have just been hit by the powder. These people are soldiers from the war, former fiancées, traitors and other people whose relations are significant, complex and problematic to the original guests. The scientists present immediately need to start working on helping those affected.

The next structured event comes almost right away when the hostess and an original guest continue to award medals to people who have killed family members of the newly arrived characters’ families. Very soon after this, everybody is thrown into an excruciating three course dinner where they have to endure each other but have a lot to talk about from the workshops, characters and starting scene. The social structures as well as the urgency of the powder situation force the adversaries to be around each other (see Dinner warfare, Wind 2024).

The peak in the third act is again a reflection on a Dinner Warfare scene, but it is disruptive in the pacing as the hostess creates a last, unhinged seating plan fuelled by a retaliation where she surrounds herself with other peoples’ daemons. They are placed almost too far away from their humans to make it physically uncomfortable to be at dinner and stay polite. For a larp to be designed for “frontloading” as part of River Rafting design, this would not be necessary as the concept focuses more on the first part of the larp, but the structured spike in intensity is a design choice for other reasons than overall pacing.

In the pacing overview from Daemon, you also find another tool. The act structure cuts up the pacing in three, and I choose to put in off-game breaks between the acts to allow more opportunities for me as a designer to add structured content in the beginning of act 2 as well as have more workshop time which enables me to make more rapids. I deem that it is not necessary with an intense start scene for the beginning of act 3, as the mechanics and characters drive the emotional impact almost solely by then.

For River Rafting design, you don’t have to have a quiet ending as a player. Don’t be fooled by the fizzling out of structured content in the third act of Daemon. This refers only to the larp pacing itself – for some players it will still be the most dramatic part of the larp.

But by not pressuring structured content into the end, in my experience, it will help avoid some of the “Twilight Avalanche.”

You can still facilitate a dramatic ending

Maria Pettersson and I decided to make a structured ending of Helicon (2024–) with focus on a highly dramatic situation, even though I still consider it a “frontloaded” larp which follows the principles of River Rafting design. We wanted to include a specific end scene where a choice is required, shifting certain dynamics. However, the key element for me that makes this ending meaningful for each individual is that they have influence over their own arc in relation to this scene. We also provide the tool that each player can be informed of the ending and the choice that they will face (transparency) during the final act break, or they can choose to be surprised.

However, I still consider the opening scene and structured content in the beginning of Helicon to be much more significant design aspects to the players’ experience of emotional impact as they set the tone of the larp and help the players to get into the characters and mechanics right away.

Fig 6 – Katrine Wind (2024): River Rafting pacing design for Helicon larp (larp designed with Maria Pettersson)

Already in the character descriptions, an intro scene is added where the players have to act on their relations. It is described how last night, the Muses tried to escape and failed. To establish the uneven power dynamic that is so central to the larp, Helicon begins with a ritualised, common punishment scene for this slight with each couple focussing on each other, and the significance of this intro scene is already emphasized in each individual character. Bowman describes this scene and its significance to kick off the larp in her article about Helicon (Bowman, 2024). Since ritualistic content is very important to the experience, we practise the rituals in the workshops. In this case, the Inspired have practiced this specific Punishment Ritual but the Muse players don’t know what is going to happen. All of the individuals and couples have a huge stake in this scene, no matter if the Muse was an instigator of the escape attempt or urged along by their siblings. Thus, the event is meaningful to each individual character (and hopefully player) when we start with high drama.

This is another point of River Rafting design. I don’t advocate just throwing in any action scene or dramatic beginning to kick off the larp in a frontloaded manner. The intro scene should emphasise the themes of the larp and be relevant to the players. Something can be meaningful and dramatic without being loud.

During the Larp

Once the larp is running, you obviously have to execute the plan for events and structure which can take a lot of work. You might even be able to make little adjustments in your design plan if you see a need for it during a pre-planned event. You learn a lot from rerunning larps, and there have been plenty of pacing events that have not worked as intended in larps I have been involved in.

Despite our intention to make Dinner Warfare a mechanic all the way through Helicon, Maria Pettersson and I decided during the first run to loosen our plan so the seating was only very tense for everyone on the first night. We had planned to do it for all three meals, but we decided for the two other in-game meals to just provide the opportunity for players off-game to wish for people to sit with or not sit with. We didn’t deem it necessary to place the rest of the players to create the most possible tension as other structured content was more impactful in the later part of the experience. Granting player wishes for seating plans is the most advanced version of Dinner Warfare, and we still deemed that the mechanic served a purpose enough to not scrap it completely even though we adjusted our plan.

Act changes with off-game breaks are your greatest chance of affecting the larp significantly as a designer later in the larp. Act break calibrations can for example be helpful to catapult the players into the new part of the larp. Many players will do this themselves with individual relations, act breaks or not, which is wonderful, but structuring time for it can be a helpful tool for some to ask something from the group. This works best in smaller or medium sized larps or in smaller groups.

For Daemon (28 players) and Spoils of War (58 players), I do a calibration round in each act break where I ask if anyone needs something generalized from the group. Either you say that you don’t need anything or you can for example ask for: “Could someone oppress me about my class” or “I need someone to have more quiet conversations with”. Then I will ask if someone can see themselves doing this, and usually some other players are happy to help provide this type of play. I specify that you should only raise your hand if you are really going to commit to it so the player asking actually gets what they need. Chances are that when I try to make people accountable and three raise their hand to help, at least one of them will actually cast the rope from their boat to their co-player’s.

You can also choose to provide a new workshop piece or a significant and possibly dramatic event in the beginning of a new act. In Daemon, act two starts with a cutting edge science presentation with shocking discoveries with all characters present. After this, there are spikes in the pacing but the larp includes less and less content that I design because the impact of the individual character arcs take over. I also signify this with my facilitator character being less and less important and prevalent to create pressure.

Final Remarks

River Rafting design can help create a more engaging and dynamic player experience from the very beginning of a larp with a higher chance of many moments of emotional impact instead of very few towards the end. By designing highly playable characters and setting, focussing workshops on practicing the tools you provide and designing your pacing for immediate action, you empower players to experience and create more emotional impact.

Whether you choose to put more content in the beginning of the experience or not, I encourage you to consider how pacing can shape your larp and communicate these design intentions to players. Even if you don’t want your larp to follow the River Rafting design methodology, you can help your players by making your choices clear. That will enable them to better structure their larp experience and engage with your vision more effectively.

Happy designing!

References

Bakkensen, Alexander, and Wind, Katrine, “Toolbox of the drama designers”, Forum convention, Denmark, 2018

Bowman, Sarah Lynne, “Helicon: An Epic Larp about Love, Beauty, and Brutality.” Nordiclarp.org, January 26 2024. https://nordiclarp.org/2024/01/26/helicon-an-epic-larp-about-love-beauty-and-brutality/

Wind, Katrine, “Dinner Warfare”, Nordiclarp.org, September 12 2024. https://nordiclarp.org/2024/09/12/dinner-warfare/

Ludography

Daemon (2021): Denmark, Belgium, USA, UK. Katrine Wind. Daemon.narrators.eu

Helicon (2024): Denmark. Maria Pettersson and Katrine Wind. Helicon.narrators.eu

Spoils of War (2019–2025). Denmark. Katrine Wind. Spoilsofwar.narrators.eu

Victorious 1 + 2 (2016–2017). Denmark. Alexander Bakkensen and Katrine Wind.

This article is republished from the Knutepunkt 2025 book. Please cite it as:
Wind, Katrine. 2025. “River Rafting Design.” In Anatomy of Larp Thoughts, a breathing corpus: Knutepunkt Conference 2025. Oslo. Fantasiforbundet.

Cover image: Helicon larp. Photo by Kai Simon Fredriksen.
Published on

2025-06-18

in

Theory

Together, Apart: Dyadic Play in Larp

Written by
Katrine Wind
Nordic larp thrives on intimacy. Whether through whispered conspiracies at a dinner table, a dramatic breakdown in an argument with a sibling or silent devastation in a lover’s embrace, the magic of larps often hinges on the connections between players. For me, relations between characters are at the core of what enables connection when it’s narratively driven and not purely based on player chemistry.

This article started as a reflection on why I design relations the way that I do. You may also already write relations. I hope this article serves as an inspiration piece for one of the very interesting ways to enable intense relations in a larp: dyadic play. In this framework, characters are designed in pairs and two people are locked into a singular dynamic which shapes the experience around them.

What is Dyadic Play?

Dyadic play is a larp design structure where two players embody characters deeply entangled with each other (Bowman, 2024). This pair can take many forms: lovers, enemies, siblings, rivals, or even two halves of the same character. Dyads are not always romantic; friendships, rivalries, and toxic dynamics are equally valid. For me, the defining element is that their narratives and/or experience are not just intertwined but interdependent.

The Inspired of Comedy, Christian Schönburg, and the Muse of Comedy Thalia at Helicon. Photo: Bjørn-Morten Gundersen.

Variations

Some larps, like Baphomet (2015), have used dyadic play to explore themes of marriage and partnership, ensuring that each player always has a deeply connected co-player. Delirium (2010) went even further by requiring five workshop days where pairs who signed up together built their shared culture, relationships, and character dynamics before stepping into the game itself.

Many blackbox larps and chamber larps have also used an intimate pairing where you could for example be a ghost of a deceased family member following the character around or the internal monologue of the person. In larps where one character exists in a liminal state – such as a ghost tethered to their living counterpart – this dual perspective also provides a unique means of influencing the external world without direct interaction.

Cecilia, the snake, and Professor Rowan McMillen at Daemon showing different sides of the professor. Photo: Bjørn-Morten Gundersen.

In Daemon (Wind, 2021-) I wanted to both push the dyadic design element to its extreme and detach it from the conventional themes of romance and sexuality. The dyadic structure forms the vision and the core of the experience by casting players as two facets of the same person: daemon and human. All other design choices tie to this vision of experiencing being two people who together play the whole character. The daemon, manifested in an animal form, embodies the human’s subconscious and deeper self: the soul. A key design priority for me was ensuring that both players were physically present within the diegesis and that communication between them remained fully audible and intelligible to all participants. This is coherent with the novel series that inspired the larp, His Dark Materials (Pullman 1995-2000).

Daemon also adds enforced physical proximity: players in a dyad can never be more than two meters apart. This heightens both the narrative tension and the interdependence between the two parts of the character. I added a further mechanic to enhance the complexity and special form of dyad by introducing a physical taboo — it is absolutely a transgression to touch another person’s daemon — making the dyad create even more narrative weight in the larp. I call this extreme form of dyadic play symbiotic which was also the term I used for years when describing the core mechanic of Daemon before I learned of the term dyadic.

A beautiful part of playing two aspects of the same character is the transformation of internal monologue into external dialogue both through conversation between human and daemon and externalised through the daemon’s actions. This mechanic particularly appeals to players like myself, who prefer collaborative, spoken roleplay over introspective play. Obviously, these aspects can exist within the same experience, but I have often felt alone and bored with too much time without verbal or non-verbal contact with other players, and the symbiotic dyad-mechanic ensures that this never happens.

Diegetically, the humans can hear everything the daemons are saying and vice-versa but we practice to not treat everything too literally. If two daemons are fighting on the floor while the humans are having a pointed but polite conversation, it is more a sign that the humans don’t like each other than the daemons actually wanting to kill each other. It is very hard to describe this subtlety in writing and it is always an intuitive understanding that has to be built with exercises before the larp and by practicing during the first hours of Daemon.

House of Craving. Photo: Martin Lindelien.

With this extreme form of dyadic structure, even moments of inactivity become opportunities for co-creation; if one player feels disconnected from the action, they still have a partner with whom to discuss their next move, react to the unfolding story, or voice their character’s internal dilemmas. Because of this complete interdependence, in Daemon I would never offer that you can sign up without a partner and I then cast people together; for me there needs to be a pre-existing agreement between the players and a firm wish to play together like this. In other dyadic larps, I do offer to connect people who don’t sign up together or even know each other.

The players are encouraged to talk about their dyadic relation beforehand and we workshop the dynamic at the location, doing connection enhancing eye contact exercises and using two-meter-long strings to explore proximity and connection. More about this later.

In Helicon (Wind and Pettersson, 2024-), we choose a version of a dyadic structure somewhere in the middle of the extremes and assign characters in pre-designed duos, exploring power imbalances, control, exploitation, and inspiration through enforced dynamics. Unlike the mutual relationships of a marriage in Baphomet, Helicon pairs players in a non-consensual pact — a human Inspired in a drug-like dependency with their enslaved Muse, mirroring themes of artistic obsession, addiction, and subjugation. We strive to create a deep narrative cohesion between the dyadic characters as they both represent the same artform/science/leadership type. Rituals reinforce the hierarchical bond, deepening the emotional weight of the connection. You could call it a co-embodied narrative. As Sarah Lynne Bowman describes in her analysis of the larp (Bowman, 2024), these relationships highlight the tension between devotion and control.

There can also be options for playing with something like this in a very close ensemble with more than two people. In Helicon, we have a triad where two Inspired siblings share a Muse. However, for the rest of the article, I will only describe this kind of dynamic as dyadic.

Prime minister of Britain and the Inspired of Politics, Percy Shaw, and his Muse of Politics, Kallistrate. Photo: Kai-Simon Frederiksen.

How to determine “how dyadic” you want your larp

The chart below shows Axes of Attachment and is intended to provide some clarity of how different larps work regarding character relations (see Figure 1). It attempts to provide a way you could think about how and why you design certain kinds of relations. It’s basically about seeing the larp as a room: how do you place the players inside of the room together with the mechanics, space, physical conditions, setting etc.?

Figure 1. The Axes of Attachment model charts intersections of relative degrees of relational interdependence and shared identities in dyadic play.

X-axis (Dependency → Independency): How much a character’s arc depends on their dyadic partner-character. This could be emotional, practical, physical, narrative, or social dependence. How dependent are you on the other person being present? How closely do we bind the characters and to how many (it doesn’t have to be two).

Y-axis (Shared identity/concept -> Individual identity/concept): How closely the characters are tied internally. How much are your characters the same being? For example, Daemon has two people playing one character, while Helicon has two distinct characters with connected fates and arts. So both are more “shared” than completely individual, but Daemon is more extreme.

All larps on the left side of the figure have in my opinion some kind of dyadic design.

Another example is House of Craving (Edland, Wilson, Jansen and Pedersen 2019-). On the first day, you are playing a character and then on the second day, the same character but as a ghost in the house who is very attached to your own living person’s story. As a ghost, you can affect your own human and the others more and more as the larp moves further, and since you have the same identity as the human, you have preferences as to what they should do — and try to push them there. You could call this dynamic parasitic more than symbiotic. But the reason why I chose to define it as slightly less shared than Daemon is that you are not playing the character together and you can still walk away from each other not having to share most specific scenes. They also don’t share a consciousness. There is also a very interesting dyad complexity in House of Craving in the fact that you are knit tightly together in smaller groups as humans where the experiences are actually dependent without you sharing an identity or concept.

The Inspired of Dance, Danielle Lafontaine, holding her Muse of Dance Terpsichore during a ritual at Helicon. Picture: Kai-Simon Frederiksen.

Interestingly, it has been hard to find examples that fit into the top right quadrant where you are relationally and narratively independent but share the same identity or concept. Gothic is a good example, however, as it has a form of shared concept and identity of the characters even though it isn’t designed specifically for dependency between two characters. The two are dependent as you have just played the poet the day before and then you play the servant of the same poet the day after. As lead designer Simon Brind notes in a personal conversation (2025): “The characters were written as reflections of the poet, looking at the flaws of the poets and playing them back in different ways. Byron’s servant – Tita – is everything that Byron wants to be for example.” Simon also mentions that there is a one way dependency from the poet to the servant later in the larp as the servant has influence over the fate of the poet. So in my purely analytical opinion, you share more of an identity in Gothic (also because of off-game affiliation to a character you just played yourself) than a dependency on the individual experience, which places this experience in the top right quadrant. And this is interesting, because maybe off-game factors can also make some play experiences dyadic. If you provide the option of signing up together with someone, and you offer a lot of dependency with mechanics and/or pre-designed character relations, you might not have shared identity and/or concepts, but you move the experience further to the left on the x-axis, getting it closer to dyadic play.

Most larps will be in the bottom right quadrant and not have any dyadic play in the design. That doesn’t mean that you can’t have intense relationships without dyadic play. The chart is just meant as a help to conceptualise which kinds of relations you provide in your larp.

You might be thinking, “But you can just write a dyadic relation yourself with a friend in a larp where you write your own characters.” Yes, you could and maybe you already have. You could get some kind of a dyadic experience even playing a larp with almost no pre-written ties between characters and nothing in the design to support it. You don’t even have to sign up together for it to be a dyadic experience. However, in this article, I am more interested in the design-heavy Nordic style of thinking through coherent design on many levels and creating a clearly communicated larp experience. So while I describe here a specific philosophy for designing relations in a whole larp, you can use these strategies as individual player preferences as well.

Lady Evelyn Wiltshire and her snow fox daemon Atlas at Daemon. Photo: Bjørn-Morten Gundersen.

The next part of the article shares the experiences I have made by adjusting my larps along the two axes in the chart. There are also some things I haven’t adjusted. So here are the vulnerabilities and what you win by engaging in dyadic character relation design.

The power of playing in pairs

Dyadic play is a purposeful design choice that serves multiple functions:

1. Guaranteed connection

Unlike most larps where relationships emerge organically or are written but dependent on player chemistry (Nøglebæk 2023), dyadic play ensures that each participant has a deeply connected co-player. This prevents isolation and guarantees intimate interaction throughout the larp. If there is an option to sign up together, you are also guaranteed to play closely with someone you really want to play with, which is devastatingly hard to be able to in lottery based larps.

2. Catering to specific themes

Certain themes — dependency, rivalry, obsession, or supernatural bonds — are, in my opinion, best explored through tightly structured relationships. Daemon exemplifies this by requiring players to act as two entities within the same being, forcing them into an intricate push-pull dynamic.

From Baphomet. Photo: Carl Nordblom

3. Physical and emotional presence

Dyadic play externalises internal struggles, turning them into performative, tangible elements in the diegesis depending on the degree of dependency on each other for the larp experience. In Daemon, the constant physical presence of one’s partner heightens the sense of being truly two minds in one body. Many players report that they accelerate their closeness with their co-player exponentially and that they quickly get used to the closeness. Even though the Muse has a bit more free range in Helicon, the Muse’s lack of autonomy and physical proximity required by the narrative — that Muses have to stay within 100 m of where their Inspired commands them to be — creates an embodied experience of control and restriction, which are core themes of that larp.

4. Built-in narrative depth

Pre-established relationships provide immediate emotional stakes. The weight of history between the characters and expectation add layers to every interaction, making the experience feel dramatic from the outset. Non-dyadic relations can do this as well but dyadic relations enhance the probability of it actually happening in practice at the larp.

5. Emotional safety

Navigating intimacy in larp can be complex. Dyadic play provides a structured framework where trust is central, making high-intensity scenes safer and potentially more rewarding. In the most extreme versions of dyadic relations like Daemon, you will always be at least four people when you have a conversation with another character and you will physically have experienced almost exactly the same scenes as your dyadic partner. This design makes it much easier to connect off-game over the more difficult aspects of your larp experience like an interaction with a co-player you didn’t like or feeling ostracized in the larp. Dyadic design might even make it a good experience for newer larpers as they will be able to lean on their dyadic partner and are never left alone.

6. High stakes drama

When your character’s fate is intertwined with another’s, every action becomes consequential. A betrayal isn’t just a plot beat — it’s devastating. A declaration of love isn’t just a moment — it’s a turning point. This goes for all kinds of dependencies; they are guaranteed to a higher degree with dyadic play.

7. Carrying the story together

You are not alone in developing and experiencing a narrative in dyadic play. When you run out of ideas, there is another person to carry the story onwards. The ghost version of you in House of Craving might push you as a human to do something in your story that you didn’t anticipate. The Daemon version allows an excellent excuse to portray an energetic or extroverted character even though you aren’t such a person off-game if your co-player is portraying it for both of you.

The Inspired of Dance, Danielle Lafontaine, trying to strangle her Muse of Dance Terpsichore during Helicon. Picture: Kai-Simon Frederiksen.

Challenges and potential pitfalls

1. The risk of isolation

The intensity of dyadic play can create an insular bubble. If the game world revolves too much around the pair, broader interactions may suffer. Daemon players, for example, may become so immersed in their internal struggle that they disengage from external narratives. It’s not often that I have seen it happen, but it is a potential issue to be aware of in dyadic play. This is more risky the more dependent the relation is. If the dyad does not have a fulfilling dynamic for both players, that can also be further isolating especially when witnessing other dyads highly engaged together in enjoyable play.

2. Strain in the sign-up process

If you have to sign up together, finding the right partner can be stressful. Some larps allow players to sign up together, while others assign partners based on casting. The latter requires trust in organizers to balance chemistry and compatibility of wishes for the experience. You also have to make sure that you agree on energy levels and that you are okay with the playstyle the other person wants.

3. Unequal Investment

Not all players engage at the same level with specific activities or themes. If one seeks deep psychological introspection while the other prefers a light dramatic arc, friction can arise. Establishing expectations beforehand is essential — much more so than if you are free to flow through the larp to engage with whatever you find the most interesting.

4. Limited Agency

Solo players can pivot their stories at will. Dyadic players, however, must consider their partner’s trajectory. This can feel restrictive if the dynamic doesn’t align with evolving personal goals. In a completely solo experience, you can be affected by other players, your own exhaustion, etc. But the other person’s tiredness is an immaterial factor. The characters are closer than other relations in the network. Several times during Daemon, the partner had to leave. What do you do? What are the rules?

Douglas Eden and his cat daemon Haze at the Belgian run produced by Sandy Bailley. Photo: Ork De Rooij.

5. Relationship Bleed

The depth of dyadic play can be emotionally overwhelming. The sustained investment in one relationship can lead to burnout if not managed well. Ironically, there can also be disappointment if you don’t have that close feeling with your play partner afterwards. Some of this can be attributed to relationship bleed in which aspects of social relationships bleed between player and character. Romantic bleed (Waern 2010; Harder 2018; Bowman and Hugaas 2021) is the most frequently discussed subtype (Bowman qtd. in Hugaas 2024). For example, some characters in both Daemon and Helicon are rewritten with pre-existing and complicated romantic entanglements that have the potential to enable romantic bleed.

Many dyadic larps, including Daemon, Helicon and House of Craving, integrate voluntary debriefing and aftercare to help players process their experiences.

6. Predators and safety

As with all larps where we try to be brave, safety is of the essence. Preventing predators from accessing such a vulnerable type of relation requires a strong safety set-up from the organisers as well as a responsible group of players (Rotvig and Wind 2019 in Wind 2019; Brown 2017a; 2017b). This is not any different from larps with sensitive themes in general but you have to be aware that the dyadic play design choice exposes players to specific risks of emotional impact, which can be taken advantage of by problematic people.

Making dyadic play work: Expectation management, mechanics and workshops

Designing an effective dyadic experience requires structured preparation, ensuring that players feel safe, engaged, and emotionally attuned to one another. Here are key methods I use to make it work.

1. Consider which kind of experience you would want the players to have with your dyadic design

There are different ways to create dyadic experiences. So consider what you actually want to design into. Is it:
- A shared physical experience?
- A shared narrative?
- An intensely interdependent emotional bond?
- A shared consciousness?
- All of the above? (Not always possible).
One or more of these factors may appeal more to you than others, so consider carefully what you design for.

2. Expectation management between the players before the larp

The Devil You Know. Photo: Daniel Andreasson.

One of the most critical steps in dyadic play is ensuring that both players are on the same page about their engagement levels. Besides communicating specifically that this is a larp with dyadic play and what that means, players should discuss a few specific things before signing up together or playing together in an organiser-determined dyadic relation:
- Emotional intensity comfort levels: Are both players interested in exploring deep emotional drama, or do they prefer lighter interactions?
- Scene preferences: What kind of interactions (conflict, care, degree dependence) are desired?
- Narrative flexibility: How much improvisation is expected versus structured interactions?
- Off-game communication plans: Establishing ways to check in during the game without breaking immersion on the level that both prefer.
- Energy levels: How do you usually function during a larp to have the best experience? There could also be health reasons for you needing breaks from the larp. Should your co-player be aware of these needs?
By clarifying expectations in advance, dyads can avoid misalignment that might disrupt immersion during play.

3. Mechanics to reinforce dyadic interaction

You can choose to implement a dyadic dynamic simply by writing a dependent narrative for the characters and possibly some degree of shared identity. However, some larps integrate mechanics that actively support the dyadic dynamic. It is a general design point of mine that mechanics provide more tools for the toolbox of the player to experience emotional impact from the written material (Wind, 2025). Here are some examples:
- Physical proximity rules: In Daemon, players must remain within a two meter radius, reinforcing their reliance on each other. In Helicon, Muses need to stay within 100 m. of where their Inspired commands them to be. This doesn’t create a physical proximity in the larp experience itself but it creates an experience of imprisonment.
- Shared resources or abilities: In Helicon, Muses can only give Inspiration to their own Inspired unless allowed otherwise, ensuring that their power remains tethered to the dyadic relationship.
- Same character identity: In House of Craving, as a ghost, you can affect your own human and the others more and more as the larp moves further, and since you are the same identity as the human, you have preferences as to what they should do — and try to push them there.
- Restricted autonomy: Preventing one character from making major decisions without the other’s involvement (e.g., Inspired in Helicon dictate where Muses can go).
From the larp Thyself. Photo: Kai-Simon Frederiksen.

4. Workshops to build trust and connection

I have a very strong sentiment that when we act (that is: do something), we experience. The ability to play in a dyadic way is emergent, so we have to just try to play in our dyads, and then our perception of the dynamic forms when we do it. For example, I stress at Daemon that we practice the first day and that it is okay if the dynamic is wonky. We have to try it out. Before play begins, workshops can help partners develop their dynamic and understand the expectations of their shared experience. Effective exercises include:
- Eye contact exercises: Building comfort with intimacy and presence. They really have to be longer than you think!
- Movement mirroring: Practicing responsiveness and fluidity in interactions.
- Physical boundaries training: Establishing safe ways to express physical connection or distance.
- Practicing the dyadic specific mechanics.
In Daemon, for example, players use a two-meter string during workshops to simulate the forced closeness of their characters, gradually adjusting to the physical restrictions of the play experience. In Helicon, we practice the core mechanic of taking/giving Inspiration in Helicon in the workshop by using a sash that is the representation of the transferral of Inspiration, which the players will also use during the larp.

5. Safety and debriefing measures

In general in many Nordic larps, we are offering people the opportunity to participate in an emotional extreme sport. Therefore, I think we have a responsibility to at least think of what we offer regarding emotional safety in general. But specifically for dyadic play I have found that it can touch a lot of people in an impactful way. Here are some suggestions for how you could handle it.

The witch and broken war hero Loviisa Raisanen and her peacock daemon Kaligas. Photo: Bjørn-Morten Gundersen.

Safety regime: I find we sometimes forget that the feeling of safety is not only important for its own sake. The right safety regime helps us feel brave; makes us less afraid to play on challenging themes. I often find that safety mechanics that are not designed or introduced in a good way are more restrictive, frustrating, and meaningless. They don’t create a good feeling about daring to make brave choices. Especially in Nordic larp, many people are very considerate and careful, and while you need safety measures, I often find it equally important to remind people that if you are worried about doing something, it is better to do it than not to do it, so you don’t regret it after the larp. The safety measures are just there to ensure that you know within which boundaries you can explore this larp experience. Feeling safe is particularly important for dyadic play to work. I do it by building what I call “The House of Bravery.”

In practice, I introduce this concept in one way or the other in all my larps by building the foundation of the house before the larp with the flagging process, transparency, expectation management, and an explicit code of conduct on the website. I also provide a floor of the house: “This is what you should at least be okay with” and the ceiling of the house: “This is the most you can encounter here.” I publish this on the website and then build on it during the safety workshop. In larps, experience designers often only actually provide a “ceiling” OR a “floor.” I have observed that the greatest houses of bravery are built when people feel more free because they know the whole boundary of the house. So just be considerate about which measures you put in place to create a sense of safety and be a bouncer to keep predators out of the house.

Structured debriefs: Facilitated discussions to reflect on the experience in order to address lingering discomfort can be a good way to get out of a very bleedy experience. I think that debriefs should mostly be voluntary, as you can easily feel out of place if you are not bleedy or didn’t have a mind blowing experience (Pedersen 2017). I realise that not all organisers want their participants to get out of the bleed but I think it is responsible to at least offer the tools if the players would like to. Then they can choose for themselves if they want to take the offer.

Buddy check-ins: Encouraging dyads to support each other after play, discussing what worked and what felt challenging. Specifically, I always ask players to check what their dyadic partner needs right after the larp and encourage them to try to find common ground. Some might want a lot of hugs, and others might want a shower and alone time. I also ask players to contact their partner in the next couple of days. Most will do so, but some are just completely over a larp right away and wouldn’t necessarily contact their co-player a few days after the larp. You can read more about after care needs in the article “Leaving the Magic Circle: Larp and Aftercare” by Anneli Friedner (2020) and other resources about how to deal with post-larp emotions.

After party: It is an organiser’s choice if you want to offer as much larping time as possible and running the event right until everyone has to leave the venue. I prefer to offer time for common off-game socialising after the larp — preferably with an extra night before leaving the venue. For dyadic partners, I have often found it beneficial for their experience of the whole event and for aftercare that time is provided for hanging out out of character after the larp ends.

Decompression exercises: Movement exercises, journaling, or lighthearted interactions to transition out of character. (Note: I never use any of these myself, but they are resources you can use).

Two connected dyads. The married human couple basically share two Muses. The Inspired of Music, Maximillian Stern holding his Muse Euterpe while Sophia Newton, the Inspired of Sculpure is being held by her Muse Athanasia at Helicon. Photo: Bjørn-Morten Gundersen.

Conclusion: The beauty of togetherness

For those willing to embrace the intensity of a dependent narrative, the rewards can be unforgettable. So, the next time you sign up for a larp, ask yourself: Who do you want to be — and who do you want to be with?

Dyadic play can offer a uniquely immersive experience using strong narrative tools, but it isn’t for everyone. Before committing, also ask yourself:
- Are you comfortable with emotional intensity and intimacy?
- Do you trust your partner (or trust the organisers to pair you well)?
- Are you okay with a storyline that depends heavily on someone else’s choices?
- Do you prefer restricted narratives, or do you like to explore more freely?
Dyadic play isn’t just about roleplaying with another person—it’s about exploring the fundamental truth that we are deeply influenced by our relationships. Whether soulmates, rivals, or two halves of a whole, these larps remind us that no one stands alone.

The two lovers, Lord Alistair Dormer and the commoner born star scientist Yosaphine Darling observe their daemons Luca and Ramchii showing what is going on beneath the facade of the humans. Photo: Bjørn-Morten Gundersen.

Bibliography

Bowman, Sarah Lynne. 2024. “Helicon: An Epic Larp about Love, Beauty, and Brutality.” Nordiclarp.org, January 26.

Brown, Maury. 2017. “19 Truths about Harassment, Missing Stairs, and Safety in Larp Communities”. Nordiclarp.org, March 14.

Brown, Maury. 2017. “The Consent and Community Safety Manifesto”. Nordiclarp.org, March 14.

Friedner, Anneli. 2020. “Leaving the Magic Circle: Larp and Aftercare”. Nordiclarp.org, April 15.

Hugaas, Kjell Hedgard. 2024. “Bleed and Identity: A Conceptual Model of Bleed and How Bleed-Out from Role-Playing Games Can Affect a Player’s Sense of Self.” International Journal of Role-Playing 15 (June): 9-35. https://doi.org/10.33063/ijrp.vi15.323

Nøglebæk, Oliver. 2023. “The 4 Cs of Larping Love”. Nordiclarp.org. November 15.

Pedersen, Troels Ken. 2018. “Tears and the New Norm”. Nordiclarp.org, February 13.

Rotvig, Klara, and Katrine Wind. 2019. “Tryghed.”Larping Out Loud podcast, March 29.

Wind, Katrine. 2025. “River Rafting Design.” In Anatomy of Larp Thoughts: A Breathing Corpus, edited by Nadja Lipsyc et al. Knutepunkt Conference 2025. Fantasiforbundet.

Ludography

BAPHOMET (2013-2019): Denmark, Linda Udby and Bjarke Pedersen.

Daemon (2021-2025): Denmark, Belgium, USA, UK. Katrine Wind. Daemon Larp

Gothic (2023, 2024): Denmark. Simon Brind, Anna Katrine Bønnelycke, Maria Østerby Elleby, Halfdan Keller Justesen, Laurie Penny, Martine Svanevik, and Sagalinn Tangen. Gothic Larp

Helicon (2024-2025): Denmark. Maria Pettersson and Katrine Wind. Helicon Larp

House of Craving (2019-2023): Denmark. Tor Kjetil Edland, Danny Wilson, Frida Sofie Jansen, and Bjarke Pedersen

Spoils of War (2019-2025). Denmark. Katrine Wind. Spoils of War

Cover photo: War hero Sgt. Theresa Williams and Nico, her antelope daemon. Photo by Bjørn-Morten Gundersen.
Published on

2024-09-12

in

Techniques

Dinner Warfare

Written by
Katrine Wind

Jesus did it. So why don’t you? Create drama during dinner, that is. Saying that one of your best friends will betray you while you are having your last meal is a pretty dramatic way to create pressure in an eating situation. The Danish Dogme 95 film The Celebration (1998) is another example of great drama happening at a dinner. Many of our favorite stories can make it work, so let’s do that in larp as well. We waste so much time eating during longer form larps. At least, that was my experience for a very long time, until I figured out a solution that worked for me both as a player and designer. Food and food design in larps is in and of itself an interesting subject. But more than the actual food, I very much enjoy larps that make something special of meal situations.

Examples of larps where specific meals have been well thought into the design are the last dinner at the Atropos larp Libertines (2019-2020) and the meals at House of Craving (2019-). At Libertines, the last meal is a culmination of building pressure within the group of characters, and it seems completely normalized that there isn’t any cutlery, plates or cups, and people are not properly dressed while the food is served so it becomes messy and very physical.

At House of Craving, meals become more and more absurd; some players portray a representation of “The House” (so your character doesn’t see these people) and they will move around the food and your cutlery in a haunting way, making you start to question why things are not in the places you put them. The further into the meals you get, you feel more and more like you are going insane while the House starts to interact more directly with you.

These examples contain wonderful scenes designed to enhance an atmosphere and specific actions that connect to the larps’ themes in their own way.

A way I most often utilize meals to become an actual Dinner Warfare situation, is by creating subtle but strong emotional pressure based on specific relations instead of mostly atmosphere in designing eating situations.

From Daemon (2023): Katrine Wind. Photo: Bjørn-Morten Vang Gundersen.

Dinner Warfare

Dinner Warfare is, primarily, a tool to design meal situations that contain emotional relevance for the players individually and, secondarily, a way of underlining the atmosphere and themes of the larp. As an organizer, I most often utilize Dinner Warfare to enhance conflict, but it can also be meaningful in positive relations between characters.

Putting each other under pressure as well as subtly poking in polite circumstances gives another dimension to a personal relation than when you are not forced to spend time together. It can both kickstart a conflict and help decide the pacing of a larp. This tool can also provide much longer scenes than usual. It’s not often that you get to spend hours together with the same characters at a larp, which has at least the potential to deeper and more layered conversations and therefore relations. In the best cases, this ignites embers that can burst into a fire later in the larp as well.

An important lesson in larp design is that we can’t teach everyone everything during workshops, but we can “train” our players and provide them with new player skills. A way of doing this regarding Dinner Warfare is simply stating that they have the obligation as players to sit in a place that is meaningful to your character and where it might create the most play during one or more meals. Putting the responsibility with the players is the first step on the “The table of Dinner Warfare.” If you want to take more responsibility as a designer, you can ensure organized meals, make seating plans or even dynamic seating plans.

Illustration of “The table of Dinner Warfare” by Iris van Blijderveen (2024).

Brief players and make organized meals

The table above (or figure as it rightfully is) makes it possible for anyone to point out that they want dinner warfare at their larp no matter their resources. If your players eat in-game, give them the responsibility to be meaningful. If you want to help them even further, you can make specific mealtimes. Then you ensure that they are all gathered and that they then have an easier time finding people to sit with that are meaningful. There you go — you already completed two courses on the “Table of Dinner Warfare.”

The next part of the article is about how you as a designer can enhance and help the players use this tool, if you want to do more.

Seating plan

A seating plan is essential in the Dinner Warfare concept if you as a designer want to heavily affect the pressure this tool can put in a larp. People who have problematic relations as well as terrible secrets together make very good Dinner Warfare seating partners. To actually utilize Dinner Warfare effectively as an organizer, you have to know the characters very well and I can imagine that it takes clear and strong (as well as well-written) relations. You have to have an idea of the intricacies of why it would be terrible for these two characters to be forced to eat a three course meal together.

A helpful set-up is a setting including very strong social norms like nobility adhering to old-timey table-manners or creating families with harsh social structures. In these settings, there is an expected air of at least surface-level civility. So while there might for example be a threat of violence, it is kept under wraps, leading to tension (and possibly even better scenes that couldn’t have been happening without these external circumstances).

It is important to have an alibi for why you have to stay in your seat and not leave the person you are put next to. This is something I often combine with some of the elements that Karijn van der Heij and I described in the article “Playing an Engaging Victim” (2020). In this article, we argue that it can be tempting for victim players to simply run away or physically hide from their oppressor, but with Dinner Warfare, you can actually provide both parties with an alibi to spend extensive time together.

In Spoils of War (2019-2024), I utilize this by having the winning and losing side of a war celebrate the sacred Feast of Life together: one day a year where you have to celebrate Life no matter the circumstances. Thus, the queen of the side that will lose the war later in the game will invite everybody who is in the siege camp outside into the castle for a long meal. The written characters are long and the relations complex, so the seating plan is made off-game by me, while in-game it is Her Majesty’s. Prisoners of war sit with their captors and the family that is desperate to have them back. Former lovers sit next to the one that broke their heart — you get the sentiment. The cultural and religious agreement that we don’t attack each other during a meal provides the alibi here.

The author creating a seating chart in Helicon Run 1 (2024): Katrine Wind and Maria Petterson. Photo: Anna Katrine Werge Bønnelycke.

Daemon

In my larp Daemon (2021), Dinner Warfare is a core design element. The larp is inspired by the His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman (1995-2000) where humans have their soul outside of their body in the form of an animal. Daemons are the expression of the inner lives of the characters and can either underline what the human players are portraying or show what is really going on between the two humans. In the larp, this is represented by two people playing the same character (human and daemon, respectively) and that they can’t go more than two meters from each other.

The larp takes place in the aftermath of a war in which many of the characters helped kill the God of this world. The characters have gathered at the mansion to celebrate the victory. But not everyone wants to be there. Not all of the heroes see themselves as that and because of a last attack from the losing side, even adversaries from the war have had to flee to this exact place. The war has brought together people from all classes. Class differences are an important part of the experience. Everybody present experiences the pressure of social norms because of the nobility present — and we kick that off very early into the game with a three course dinner.

In this particular setup, the hostess is setting the table and forces the seating arrangements on the guests. This is usually an organizer controlled character. A player can absolutely be the host in-game like in Spoils of War, but it is important to be willing to keep the pressure on the other players and have a lot of insight into the characters and relations as there are only 30 people in this larp. You also have to consider that it can be time consuming for a player the more responsibility they have, possibly taking them out of the game.

In-game enemies or problematic relations can be placed together because of malicious intent or unknowingly. For example, the hostess at Daemon purposefully doesn’t put her own sister at the high table because they have a conflict; instead she is placed with the lowest classes. This provides tension for all. The hostess’ greatest enemy, who she has always been very jealous of, is, on the other hand, placed beside her former fiancée who has publicly denounced her and had her put in house arrest.

Daemon (Belgium 2023): Katrine Wind. Photo: Ork De Rooij.

Another option is that the pressure is unintentional in-game but intentional off-game. An example of this is the high table, where the hostess Lady Philippa Blackett has placed her best friend Lord Richard Wiltshire, whom she has always dined with and who is a hero of the war and their daemons of course. The nobles are chummy, making others uncomfortable by familiarity, obvious privilege, and status. At that table is also placed Richard’s younger sister Evelyn, who was engaged to Philippa’s deceased brother. Richard and Philippa pity her, try to make her mourn as much as possible for the lost fiancée, and feel guilty for his death as a war hero. The last person at the table is Professor Rowan, whom Richard has been sponsoring for years. What Richard doesn’t know is that the professor has a long running affair with Evelyn, who doesn’t mourn her fiancée at all. The daemons of Evelyn and Rowan are placed next to each other. They will then play out the romance as subtly as they can under the dangerous attention of Philippa and Richard while the daemons often choose to telegraph more visibly the feelings that the humans are trying to keep quiet. I often find that transparency helps here — if the players know what is at stake between Evelyn and Rowan, it is easier to pick up the hints.

All of this emotional, meaningful drama can make it a very “pressure cooker”-like experience, which for some larps is completely fine. That the characters are not exploding on each other and mostly suffering internally while being prodded and provoked by the people they sit together with. If you want to avoid this atmosphere, you can choose to encourage a more rowdy atmosphere with e.g. toasts or speeches. This mostly works if it is briefed or workshopped; not many will make toasts if they aren’t suggested to do so.

Daemon (Belgium 2023): Katrine Wind. Photo: Ork De Rooij.

The last example from Daemon to create more pressure, is an element where the hostess wants to get the conversation going. By each seat, there is an envelope titled “A little game.” When the guests open it, there are really hard questions like: “How do you think you are going to die?” and “If you could change one thing about how you grew up, what would you change?” This makes it easier to start the conversations and everybody can see the inappropriateness of the questions — especially across classes. But no one can protest this early in the game because of polite society.

So, where religious and cultural norms offer the alibi in Spoils of War, class differences are the kicker in Daemon.

Player wishes

If you want to make it more difficult for yourself (why wouldn’t you? Organizing is so easy, right?), take player wishes into account. That is the last course on the “Dinner Warfare table”. If someone enjoys the Dinner Warfare situations, it can for some be interesting further into the game to have some influence over who it would make sense for their game to be placed next to. There might be someone that your character would want to avoid, but that would enhance your experience to be pressed by social norms to spend time with.

Helicon

For Helicon (2024) by myself and Maria Pettersson, a larp about the Muses of old being trapped by humans (the Inspired), class differences can’t be much of a pressure point for Dinner Warfare, as the Inspired are pretty much equal with a few exceptions. Class differences are utilized for other kinds of conflicts. Instead, we use traditions as an alibi for the seating plan (for play accounts of Helicon, see Bowman 2024; Nøglebæk 2024; Pettersson 2024).

The social dynamics in this larp are complex and layered and are utilized and enhanced by the Dinner Warfare by physically putting one’s Muse next to one’s ex-wife and love interests while the Muses are former lovers/close friends. The Muses are connected to their Inspired and can’t go more than 100 m away from them. The ritual of keeping them with the human will have to be renewed every year, making ritualistic content an important part of the design. The first ritual is directly followed by a three course dinner, so that there has just been a dramatic escape and punishment scene and then we go directly to the traditional welcome dinner. We also make the larp feel a bit like a time warp by making characters going back to the same dynamics over and over during the larp — and this doesn’t only include the seating plans.

We put people who have been divorced next to each other with the alibi that they used to sit like this 15 years ago, and if we change anything — even the seating — the sealing of the capture of the Muses might not work. With so much pressure, sometimes the atmosphere can be very serious, strained and quiet unless you workshop it not to be and give tools to change it.

Toasts are great tools for setting the mood and getting more active meal situations during Dinner Warfare but as mentioned earlier, people will not necessarily do that in-game unless encouraged. Maria Pettersson and I use a tool called “Please stand up” to overcome the possible hesitation. It is basically just the very known game “Never have I ever…” A character can at any point stand up and say: “Please stand up if…” and often it will be used to either celebrate good qualities in oneself or slander another character. An example could be: “Please stand up if you also hate your Muse.” This way the players can affect if the atmosphere should be more vicious, cruel, or maybe celebratory.

For this larp it is also much more beneficial that people can actually walk around and switch seats during the meals as they are all old friends, lovers, and enemies and dramatic interactions are encouraged.

Helicon (2024): Katrine Wind and Maria Pettersson. Photo: Bjørn-Morten Vang Gundersen.

Downsides to Dinner Warfare

Anecdotally, quite a lot of larpers have difficulty eating at larps. I don’t personally prefer for people to not have eaten at the larps I design, as I find hungry people in many situations to be worse larpers. The kind of pressure that Dinner Warfare provides can make it difficult for some to eat and I acknowledge that. One of the antidotes to that on my behalf, is making the dinners very long. If you have to sit for 2½ hours and are served three different courses, almost anyone will have eaten something at the end.

Serving the food buffet style takes away the pressure as well. When people have to get up to grab their choice of food, they will spend more time away from each other and experience relief of pressure. The disadvantage of serving by the plate or family style on the tables, which I would argue gives the best physical circumstances for Dinner Warfare, is that it takes a lot of extra effort from the kitchen and serving staff. Servers can also raise the cost of a larp, making it even more financially inaccessible. However, bearing these possible disadvantages in mind, I highly recommend Dinner Warfare as a design tool

In summary, meals don’t have to be empty design spaces in a larp or something you just have to get over and done with to get on with the real larp. Real larping can happen while eating. Bon appetit!

References

Bowman, Sarah Lynne. 2024. “Helicon: An Epic Larp about Love, Beauty, and Brutality.” Nordiclarp.org, January 26.

Nøglebæk, Oliver. 2024. “A Visit to Mount Helicon.” Nordic Larper, March 1.

Pettersson, Juhana. 2024. “Out of Nothing, Something.” Nordiclarp.org, April 25.

Wind, Katrine, and Karijn van der Heij. 2020. “Playing an Engaging Victim.” In What Do We Do When We Play? Solmukohta 2020, edited by edited by Eleanor Saitta, Johanna Koljonen, Jukka Särkijärvi, Anne Serup Grove, Pauliina Männistö, and Mia Makkonen, 244–53. Helsinki: Solmukohta.

Ludography

Daemon (2021): Denmark, Belgium, USA, UK. Katrine Wind.

Helicon (2024): Denmark. Maria Pettersson and Katrine Wind.

Spoils of War (2019-2024). Denmark. Katrine Wind.

Libertines (2019-2020): Denmark. Atropos and Julie Greip.

House of Craving (2019-2023): Denmark. Tor Kjetil Edland, Danny Wilson, Frida Sofie Jansen, and Bjarke Pedersen.

Cover photo: From Spoils of War (2022): Katrine Wind. Photo by Elvinas Rokas.
Published on

2024-04-25

in

Documentation

Out of Nothing, Something

Written by
Juhana Pettersson

The Muses of antiquity live on Mount Helicon (a mythological place, but also a real mountain in Greece). Perhaps because of this, the mountain’s name has come to symbolize creativity and inspiration. Helicon is also the name of a larp created by Maria Pettersson and Katrine Wind, run in Denmark for the first time in January, 2024.

The larp is about a group of friends who enacted a ritual in their student days, binding the Muses to themselves, granting themselves the genius to become superstars in their own fields. As their stars rise, they also deprive the world of inspiration, hogging it all. The binding of the Muses also means that these immortal beings have now become imprisoned into the service of mere mortals, individuals who may treat them kindly or badly depending on their whim.

In Helicon, the Inspired come together for an annual ritual strengthening the ritual of binding. They also want to spend a weekend together with the only people who really understand them, their fellow Inspired. After all, they’re the only ones to really know the secret of their success.

I played one of the two Inspired of Melpomene, the Muse of Tragedy. I was a war reporter while my sibling was a playwright, both of us feeding from the genius granted by the Muse.

Incidentally, Mt. Helicon is also where Narcissus looked at his own reflection in the water and saw his own beauty. This may be somewhat narcissistic of me but when I was playing Helicon (in the second run, in February 2024), I was quite taken by the creative invention and ability of our ensemble. There’s a specific kind of beauty in larp when the spontaneous emergence of each players’ actions collectively creates a wonderfully coherent whole.

Photo by Bjørn-Morten Gundersen.

Inspiration

The themes of Helicon make a certain amount of recursive self-commentary unavoidable. After all, if I play an Inspired of Tragedy, how likely is it that my character’s narrative arc bends toward an unhappy, perhaps even sad ending?

I didn’t plan it that way but that’s exactly what happened. Me and my sibling, both for our own reasons, found that following the genius of Tragedy was destroying us and we yearned to be free. In the case of my character, the toll of documenting the suffering caused by war all across the world was becoming too much and while I believed it to be my moral duty to continue the work, it was also breaking me apart.

Thus at the end, I begged for freedom even as many other Inspired sought to hold onto their Muses, the divine spirits granting them deathless genius. Of course, that plea was not heard. Instead, the Muse of Tragedy decided to keep us trapped in our self-inflicted hell. That was a choice made by the player of the Muse Melpomene, not something dictated by anything in the workshops or our characters. It was an example of a dramatically appropriate, satisfying arc emerging from our collective ensemble play, fueled and inspired by the design of the larp. Nobody planned it like that but it still happened.

There’s a trick to larp design that, when it works, looks like magic. You leave space for the spontaneous creativity of the players and they bring the larp’s core themes to life without explicit instruction or a script. If you’re an experienced larp designer, you probably know how to make this happen. This observation may even feel banal because it’s such a basic element of how larp works.

Indeed, the trick is an illusion. The designer knows that the magic of the larp flows from careful design work. When that work is done elegantly enough, play feels free and unconstrained, specific choices and themes flowing with seeming emergence and settling into just the right configuration for the themes of the larp to become manifest.

If you haven’t peeked behind the curtain and seen enough larp to know how this is done, you might ask questions like these:

How do the players know what to say?

How do they know to do the right things?

How can it work when everybody is playing spontaneously?

If you’ve played in a larp, you know the answer: It works the same as it does in real life. We all go through our days unrehearsed, whether in the context of everyday reality or a fictional event.

When the larp’s design works as intended, our improvisation and imagination has been prepped so that we together as an ensemble explore a shared creative space, producing desired types of scenes and interactions.

The Creative Ensemble

In their article Ensemble Play, Anni Tolvanen and Jamie MacDonald (2020) talk about larp as a creative ensemble similar to a band or an orchestra playing music together. To successfully participate in an ensemble, there’s one skill above all: Listening. You have to be able to listen to what’s going on in the ensemble to be able to participate in a meaningful and harmonious way.

Many of the most basic workshop exercises we commonly do in Nordic larps are very effective in building the ensemble. Even simple warm-ups teach us to understand each other as a group, to pay attention and to read our co-players and their desires. When we do a round of all the players in the workshop, with each describing what they need for their larp to be successful or what they’re worried about, we help each other to lift the whole ensemble.

Humans are social herd animals and we’re typically quite sensitive to the moods and shifts of the group. The larp ensemble uses this quality to its advantage, allowing us to support each other creatively and to bounce off each other’s ideas in an interesting way.

Taylor Montgomery. Photo by Bjørn-Morten Gundersen.

When this works for you in a larp, it feels like spontaneous play magically gives you what you need. One such moment for me in Helicon was in a flashback scene where our characters were discussing the idea of binding the Muses. A few believed while others, like me, went along for a lark. There was a somewhat silly, half-serious process for distributing who gets which muse, where I and another person ended up competing for the Muse of Tragedy.

The crowd called for both of us to show our “unhappy face”. We both did, to general laughter and merriment all around. Mine was judged better, so I got Tragedy and the other person got Comedy.

In the scene, this sequence emerged spontaneously, yet it had an immense impact on my larp. My character had made this life-altering choice without understanding the consequences or seriously considering the implications. In play, both my character and the character who got the Muse of Comedy were desperately unhappy, yet unable to change their course.

In the same scene, it turned out that there was one less Muse than there were friends in our group of students. The character of my sibling was a sensitive, sad soul, and he was left without a Muse. As a result, I offered: “Don’t worry, we’ll share the one I got!”

This was also something that emerged spontaneously, and led to meaningful play later. In each case, the magic is a combination of design choices priming us for certain themes (my character had an affair with the Muse of Comedy, guiding me to think of Comedy as the light in the darkness of an existence defined by Tragedy) and ensemble play where we each watch for what the others are going for and try to support it.

Profundity

The themes Helicon explores are almost a caricature of classical profundity: Immortality, art, creation, destiny, genius, responsibility, and so on. Making a larp focused on such themes is not easy, and Helicon does it through designed emergence. Instead of overtly designing scenes or metatechniques around philosophical discussion, the seeds are planted in the way the characters are written and the muses described.

The problem with many themes and subjects in larp is that to be able to successfully co-create (i.e. to participate fully in the larp), the players need to feel comfortable and empowered with the material. I explored this topic in my article The Necessary Zombie, where the titular zombie is the familiar and known element which the player can rely on, creatively speaking, while also exploring newer and more unfamiliar territory.

In the case of Helicon, the supernatural framework of mythology created this familiarity, helping participants to engage with more difficult themes.

When I read my character, I didn’t think I’d be able to use very much from my own life. The war reporter who had become something of a monster in his personal life, someone from an aristocratic background who used moral need to justify the captivity of his Muse, was a much more dramatic figure than a Finnish creative arts professional like me.

We were encouraged to bring examples of artworks or other creations to show during the larp. At first, I figured I’d bring photos from wars, dying children and so forth. After reviewing potential candidates, I quickly changed my mind. Not because of what other people would think, but because of how I suspected they’d push me out of the fiction. Around the time of the larp, war had been very much on my mind. I’d followed the crimes of the Israeli apartheid system for two decades and the ongoing genocide in Gaza felt very immediate. Something like that was too painful to bring to a larp.

Instead, I chose to use pictures by the famous war photographer Robert Capa. I avoided images of combat or the dead and the dying, focusing instead on images of people who had survived.

The author as Thomas Montgomery. Photo by Anni Tolvanen.

The character worked well for me because I’ve read a lot of books by war reporters over the years and had some idea of how to fake war talk, the way you do in a larp. For my character, the goal was to end all war by bringing its horrors to light through journalism. I talked about these topics a lot during the larp, because they were central to my character’s personality, flaws and philosophical outlook.

It was only afterwards that I realized that I’d used a lot of things I myself believe about war. I believe wars can end. I don’t believe war is an inherent part of the human experience. Nation states have to work hard at making propaganda to dehumanize the enemy to the point that people are willing to murder them at scale. I’m essentially an optimist when it comes to the human spirit, and this optimism makes me believe that war is one of the great evils of human existence and must be opposed everywhere and always. We must resist the narratives that make us believe that somehow, this time mass murder is justified.

It felt strange to realize that I’d used pieces of myself in the character after all, because in many ways the character was not someone I’d aspire to be.

Vintage

At one point, the players gathered together for a group photo. First all together, and then a photo with only the Inspired. As we were posing, the Muse players were lounging about, waiting for their Muses-only photo.

We were at the venue’s gorgeous dining hall, with its classical decor and Greek-style statues. Looking around, seeing three, four, five Muses hanging about in poses of casual repose, I caught myself thinking that of course this is what a place haunted by the Muses would look like. These are the Muses, children of Zeus.

We were off-game but the casually gorgeous visuals and the easy panache displayed by the players of the Muses made it feel plausible anyway.

The larp is set in “the vintage era”, a vague thematic milieu used by several other larps as well, such as Baphomet (2015). The vintage era is perhaps from the 1890’s to the 1940’s, allowing for both glamorous costuming and ignoring modern communications technology such as cell phones.

Different larps use the concept in their own ways but in Helicon, what was particularly important was the deliberate, purposeful vagueness of the setting which makes it impossible to discuss external details. We barely know which country we’re in (the U.K.), and things like politics, technology or current events are shrouded in fog.

This has the result that discussions naturally move towards in-game events or the big, broad themes suggested by the larp’s central conceit: art, philosophy, immortality, morality, creativity, often connected to in-game events in surprisingly concrete ways.

The Inspired don’t age, the blessings of the Muses keeping them forever young. For some, this meant an eternity to spend in pursuit of their creative genius. Since I was a war reporter, from my point of view, it meant endless years watching people die. The subject may have been lofty but the relevance was still immediate.

The deliberate haziness of the vintage era means we can’t discuss the price of bread or the latest political scandal so instead we’re forced to tackle the fundamental meaning of the creative arts. Nobody is pushing us to talk about profundities. It just occurs naturally as a result of the setup and the way the setting has been framed.

Helicon had the thematic precision of a classic five-player Fastaval scenario, keeping it unusually tight despite its larger player base. The vintage era is a good example of a design choice keeping the focus subtly constrained: It has the effect of guiding conversation, but discreetly, without making a thing of it. This in part creates the illusion where the desired play and themes emerge seemingly of their own volition.

Photo by Bjørn-Morten Gundersen.

Champagne Flute Logistics

When a larp has a strong ensemble, its social nuances become easier to read. This was my experience at Helicon: It was easier to grasp when it was okay to join a scene and when to butt out, what characters I’d interacted with only a little were feeling on the other side of a room or what kind of actions would best support the play of someone else.

Similarly, I felt supported by the other players in the sense that it felt like they could read what was going on with my character and support it in turn. Because of this, I had moments when the larp’s emergent action spontaneously served up just what I needed for my character’s journey.

As the larp was building up to its final climactic scenes, we were participating in a collective ritual. It involved ambrosia, the nectar of the gods, portrayed by elderflower cordial in a champagne flute. Appropriately filled glasses were discreetly placed around the ritual space so that you could pick one up when you needed it.

I was standing with my back to a piece of antique furniture with several of the glasses. When the time came, I realized I and a nearby co-player should do a bit of discreet distribution duty to keep the ritual running. Similarly, later in the same ritual, as I was kneeling on the floor in the throes of poignant emotion, I also took a couple of glasses from nearby players and placed them out of the way so we wouldn’t accidentally break them.

These were simple, automatic acts. We all do these things when we participate in a larp. We’re deep in our own drama, but if there’s a chance to discreetly facilitate someone else’s drama in some small way, we do it. We hold a door so that someone can storm off dramatically or pick up a cool hat that fell off from a co-player’s head in a fight scene and make sure it’s not damaged.

I find certain joy from being able to do something like this, something small to help things along, because it speaks to the power of the ensemble to keep the collective larp experience functioning as beautifully as possible. Because we all do these things for each other, the experience is that much better for all of us.

Through the magic of ensemble play and careful, elegant design, we feel that we’re acting freely in the moment and yet we experience coherent, meaningful play. When it works, it feels like we as players have been inspired by the Muses.

Disclosure: I’m married to one of Helicon’s two designers, Maria Pettersson.

Helicon

Designers: Katrine Wind and Maria Pettersson, Narrators, Inc.

Participation Fee: €630

Players: 29

Second Run: February 16-18, 2024

Location: Broholm Castle, Gudme, Denmark

Music: Anni Tolvanen

Photography: Bjørn-Morten Vang Gundersen, Anni Tolvanen

Safety: Klara Rotvig

Website: Katrine Kavli

Graphics: Maria Manner

Sparring and Ideas: Emil Greve, Elina Gouliou, and Markus Montola

Character Writing Assistance: Søren Hjorth

Website Proofreading: Malk Williams

Ludography

Baphomet (2015): Bjarke Pedersen and Linda Udby. Denmark.

Helicon (2024): Maria Pettersson and Katrine Wind. Denmark.

Bibliography

Juhana Pettersson (2011): The Necessary Zombie. In Claus Raasted (ed.). Talk Larp. Denmark; Knudepunkt 2011.

Anni Tolvanen and James Lórien Macdonald (2020): Ensemble Play. In Eleanor Saitta, Johanna Koljonen, Jukka Särkijärvi, Anne Serup Grove, Pauliina Männistö, & Mia Makkonen (eds.). What Do We Do When We Play? Helsinki; Solmukohta 2020.

Cover photo: Image by Bjørn-Morten Gundersen. Photo had been cropped.