Nordic Larp

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  • Dinner Warfare

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    Dinner Warfare

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    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.

    Photo of two characters, one with animal ears seated far away with arms folded while the other speaks.
    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.

    Drawing of a dinner table with notes reading: dynamic seating plan, seating plan, organized meals, and brief players
    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. 

    Photo of person in white clothes sitting on the floor of a dining room writing.
    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. 

    Photo of a character confronting another character over a dinner table.
    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.

    Photo of a person holding another person at a dinner table 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.

    People in fancy clothes standing up to confront on another at a dinner party 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. 

  • The Interaction Engine

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    The Interaction Engine

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    I am lying on the big double bed in the middle of the living room, all clad in white. A glass of whisky in hand and Ray-Ban Aviators on to conceal where I am looking. The memorial for Lena who committed suicide earlier that year, is ongoing. Her widower Wilhelm is giving a tear-ridden speech about how wonderful a wife and mother Lena was.

    House-Wilhelm, a ghost-character portraying both the House they are in and a previous incarnation of Wilhelm, is forcing the fingers of his son down his own throat, trying to throw up as a comment to the speech given by his human counterpart. In between, he screams that Lena was never supportive of him and that he hopes she burns in hell. None of the human characters react to this. They can not see or hear the twelve House-ghosts that are in the room with them.

    The ghosts, on the other hand, applaud Ghost-Wilhelm’s effort to throw up and laugh scornfully when he fails. He falls sobbing to the floor in front of his human counterpart while repeating “I am sorry, Lena!” over and over.

    The human characters step over him and go to get coffee and cake in the adjoining room. This scene will repeat itself in new and equally exciting ways for the next seven days when the human characters will be absorbed into the house by midnight and become the House-ghosts for the new family that will come to stay in the house.

    What I((Although the article has two authors, it is written from Bjarke Pedersen’s perspective.)) just described is a scene from the erotic horror larp House of Craving (Denmark 2019). I was there playing one of the House-ghosts as a non-player character. The larp was created by Danny Meyer Wilson, Tor Kjetil Edland, Frida Sofie Jansen and myself. Eighteen runs have been played since the premiere, and the original freeform (Længslernes Hus, 2017) has run countless times since its premiere at Fastaval in Denmark. The larp runs for eight days straight, with twelve new participants arriving each day, reiterating the story lived by the characters. On the first day, you play as the family who has come to spend time at a haunted house. Around midnight, your character is absorbed into the House, and the next day, you play a House-ghost version of your character.

    Each run is uniquely different but feels much the same. The structure of the larp is based around a few repeating fate play scenes each day that gather people together. One of them is a memorial service for Lena, the mother who has committed suicide. The fate play scenes and the ending for both the Family and the House characters are predetermined. Everything else is created by the participants on the fly, together as an ensemble. There are no quests and little connected narrative or story per se. The participants are encouraged to prepare as little as possible besides reading the larp materials and getting their costumes. The larp becomes better without preparation. With less preparation, there will be fewer assumptions about what the larp will be, and the participants are better equipped to react in the moment.

    This works because the larp is designed around what I call an interaction engine. The interaction engine is a specific type of larp design where the primary focus is on enhancing playability by ensuring that every action generates new possibilities and emotional impact. Other larp design styles may foreground structured narratives, fighting simulations, or realism, for example. These can exist in engine-driven games, but they are always in the background. The main focus in an engine larp is on what creates interactions between participants. Specifically, interactions that intensify the larp experience – the aim is not to create intensity for the sake of it, but intensity that moves both the individual and the ensemble experience in the direction of the themes of the larp. This way, the journey through the experience by the player will be way more dynamic than a plot or narrative written months before the participants arrive at the location. Scenes and experiences that players create themselves on the fly will fit better into their context and into what they want to experience.

    The interaction engine will help the players create engaging interactions that are both emotionally and physically intense, and that always lead to more interactions rather than fewer. The goal is to get the players to connect with the themes of the larp in as many ways as possible, so their actions resonate with not only their own dreams and desires but also with their cultural identity, experiences in their own lives, and how they see themselves.

    I came to this design method out of frustration. Early on in my design career, I realized that a big part of the work that my team or I had done was never used. If it was a plot or story, then the players went in another direction than I anticipated. Or if it was character relations, then the chemistry of the players was off, or the relationship was not something that was interesting for the people involved. All the hard work creating what I felt was good content for the larp, was wasted time I could have used on other aspects of the larp.

    The most scarce resource you have in larp is the organizers’ time, closely followed by the participants’ time. When a large part of the material created for the larp is not used, you have wasted both. What I realized was that to create the best possible larp and not waste time, you need to let go of the narrative control and hand it over to the participants. Instead of controlling their narrative journey in great detail, an interaction engine guides the players to understand what the themes they are supposed to explore are, and the chosen larp mechanics help them to do that in the best available way. You could say that an interaction engine larp controls the emotional arc of the character’s story, rather than the narrative arc.

    When you design a larp, you often start working on the parts that are the most exciting to you. While this can be rewarding and motivating, the design of an Interaction Engine larp needs to begin with laying down a core foundation that must form the basis of all your future decisions. In an engine design approach, you have to start with the theme or themes for your larp. You then map out the actions that your participants can do that support the exploration of those themes from as many angles as you can think of. By actions, I mean very specifically the things that the players actually will be doing during the larp. What verbs describe the actions in the best possible way? For House of Craving, some of the verbs are flirting, controlling others, lounging, and masturbating.

    These actions define the focus of your larp. All other design choices should be made to support them. If you want flirting, then flirting needs to be front and centre in the workshop, to be sure people trust each other and are comfortable with each other – and even more trust and comfort are needed when it comes to masturbation. For House of Craving, we had a masturbation mechanic that included clear jelly dildos as penis replacements, and we workshopped it extensively before the larp. The ghost-penises as they were fondly called by the players, could be used by the players no matter their character’s gender. We also instructed the players to always bring a ghost-character with them if they went to their room to masturbate. The actions we wanted to see were supported by the mechanics of the larp and the workshop design, helping the players play with otherwise private and intimate actions that are very difficult to do without support from the design.

    There are larps with themes where an interaction engine is probably not the best fit. You need the themes to be focused on emotional and relational actions for the interaction engine to truly shine. An example of a larp where an interaction engine would be less ideal could be a larp centred around detail-oriented and rules-heavy diplomacy, where the actions have to follow a predetermined structure to achieve connection to the themes.

    Building a larp around an engine demands that all elements, from scenography and food to characters, relations, and motivations, are aligned toward the themes and actions of the larp. Everything else should be removed from the design. When done well, this makes the theme of the larp accessible and playable for all. The player does not have to be at the right place at the right time to access the important plot – they can create access for themselves at any given time by being in the setting and engaging with the design and mechanics.

    When designing a larp this way, any main plot steps into the background and the potential for meaningful encounters between characters is brought to the foreground. When all the verbs or potential actions available to the players are clearly defined and understood, the players can choose the ones that make the most sense to them at any given time. If the participants understand the themes, and it is clear how the verbs connect to the themes, all the participants are able to steer their experiences in the same direction, each individually choosing the best possible path for themselves.

    The larp mechanics allow the participants to push their actions (described by the verbs) beyond what is possible without mechanics. Moreover, the mechanics make it easier and faster for the participants to take the actions described by the verbs. Thus, the mechanics work as tools to create or support powerful moments. Giving participants the responsibility and trust to follow their own desires (through the lens of their characters’ motivations) as to what to explore gives room for their imaginations to shine. Given space, they will tell far more gripping stories than you as a designer can ever create for them.((To be clear, gripping and meaningful are not always the same thing – engine-driven larps do away with a lot in the pursuit of engagement. That said, in my experience more games have failed because the players have been disengaged than because the deeper meaning of the larp did not resonate deeply enough in the lives of the players.))

    This, of course, demands a lot from the players. A high level of herd competence is required for the engine to run smoothly. With less experienced players, more workshop time is needed for a smooth larp experience. The extra workshop time should primarily be used to create trust within the ensemble and to help individual players calibrate with the norms of the ensemble. Another use for it is to ensure that the players understand what they are personally comfortable with and what they are interested in experiencing.

    Juhana Pettersson writes in his excellent article Engines of Desire:

    “When I conceptualize the process of larp design, I see it as working with the players to give them the desires required by the design and help them get in touch with their own desires so they can use them to drive action. When a player does something they’ve always wanted to do, they bring energy and power to the larp. You can see it in the way people play, carry themselves, speak, act. It’s a powerful thing and generates so much meaning.” (Pettersson 2021)

    The most important thing for an engine-based larp is to create a space where the participants feel safe and seen and where they feel they have the possibility to explore and engage with the themes of the larp without fear of being ridiculed or having their boundaries breached. In this mind-space, the participants feel empowered, with all possibilities open for them to choose. Many of my participants have told me that being in this space feels both overwhelming and totally safe. In these moments, larp can be transformative. You learn something new about both yourself and the world when you dare to step up to the edge of your safe interaction space and into unknown territory.

    That the participant feels like they have all possibilities open to choose from is of course an illusion created by well-crafted larp and participation design. This design starts way before the participants arrive on site.

    “Everything is a designable surface” is the mantra for all of my design work. It was coined by Johanna Koljonen (2019), and it means that all the design decisions you make or that are made for you by e.g. time or monetary constraints, a protected historical location, or anything else beyond your control, will have an impact on the success of your larp. For instance, if the temperature in a room is a few degrees too cold the characters will not take their coats off or sit still for very long, and your well-planned physical boudoir interaction space goes out the window – as happened in a 2018 run of Inside Hamlet.

    As a designer, you literally need to think of everything – or, more practically, you need to accept that you are responsible for all aspects of the larp even if they are out of your control. At any given moment when designing or running a larp you should ask yourself the question “What are the consequences of making this decision and not another one?”

    Use the themes you have set for your larp as a guide. If all of your decisions are aligned to support the themes, you are well on your way to creating an interaction engine larp.

    But what is the interaction engine? Can you point at it? Just like a real engine, an interaction engine is made of hundreds of parts (which we don’t have room to describe exhaustively), and no one part can be said to be the whole thing. To start identifying the core of your engine, ask yourself the following question: “What is the main part of the design that drives participants to actions that are connected to the themes of the larp?”

    The answer to this question is the core of the engine, and you should put your design effort here to support this part of the design in as many ways as possible. The more time and energy you use here, the easier your design decisions will be.

    To be able to answer the question above, you need to analyze the themes of your larp and describe them in detail – an example will follow below. With your themes locked down, you then need to figure out what design elements will most efficiently drive your participants to perform actions that connect directly to those themes. This is the core of your interaction engine.

    Once you have the core of the interaction, you need to iterate through all aspects of the design with your themes and the core engine in mind. This means looking at your larp mechanics, your set and spatial design, costume guidelines, your workshop structure, how food is served, the website, participant communication, and everything else. All of these should be focused on supporting the themes and the core engine to drive participants to take actions during the larp that explore the themes in the ways that you think will be most worthwhile. As you make new decisions about different parts of the larp, you need to continually cross-reference with all the other decisions you have made to ensure that you do not make choices in one place that push players toward an action that you have made harder for them in another place.

    As you are doing this, you may identify actions that your design pushes participants to do that are not connected to the themes of the larp. In a few specific cases, these might feel necessary to make the larp feel coherent to some players, allowing them to access the rest of the game, but this is rare, and almost without exception you should remove them from your larp. If you do not, these actions will feel disconnected from the rest of the larp and be uninteresting to engage with for your participants and may lead to participants falling out of play or being confused about the things that they should be doing.

    For example, if you are making a larp about a decadent court and some of the characters are guards designed to stand still and guard the court, then you will have a group of characters that are not able to engage with the themes of the larp. At Inside Hamlet, we solved this challenge by making the royal guard more like celebrities that the members of the court wanted to become or to bed. These celebrity guards did not need to stand guard at all.

    An Example: PAN

    PAN (Denmark 2013) is an example of an engine-based larp. A group of couples from various walks of life are at a couple’s therapy workshop retreat run by a new-age husband and wife. Over the course of a weekend, the participants go through various exercises trying to save or improve their relationships. In one of the more new-age exercises, the workshop leader does a seance, trying to connect with people from the other side. This fails spectacularly when the Great God Pan enters our reality and possesses her. Pan then starts to jump from person to person over the next few days until all notions of reality and identity are stripped from the characters and all characters are willingly destroyed.

    The themes of PAN are an exploration of self-actualization in a couple structure, what ethics, morality, and being civilized actually mean, and what happens when this is stripped away. What is then left of a person’s humanity? Some of the actions that are connected to the themes are possessing, indulging, taking control, losing control, being shameful, being fearful, exploring the self, and destroying your relationship, among others.

    The core of the engine in PAN is the possession mechanic. The Great God Pan is symbolized by a necklace. The necklace is only visible to participants, not their characters. Wearing the necklace, and seeing someone else wearing it, both have specific interaction scripts.

    When you are wearing the necklace, you become possessed by Pan and must pursue your biggest basic needs as soon as possible – if you are hungry you must eat and if you are horny you must find release. Pan does not care for what is proper or in good taste.

    If you see someone wearing the necklace, your character will ignore everything around themselves, and the possessed person becomes the single most interesting thing in the world. You will do anything at all to get their attention, to have them see you, touch you.

    This leads to mayhem. The necklace leaves broken and embarrassed characters in its wake, with each possession adding a new and different layer of emotional chaos to the characters impacted by it. Every possession is unique, driven by what the participant wearing the necklace wants and desires from the larp at that moment. The agency goes both ways, too – if a participant around the possessed doesn’t find their desires in the interactions around the necklace, that participant leaves the room and pursues play somewhere else.

    The only planned scenes in the larp are the seance where Pan enters the world and the ending where everyone follows the god into oblivion. All scenes that arise because the necklace travels from participant to participant are unscripted. They evolve and change in each iteration like a beautiful fractal pattern. This way, the participants tell stories that we the designers never could imagine in our wildest dreams.

    Conclusion

    Creating a larp designed around an interaction engine demands more design work at the beginning of the process, but it pays off later by giving you a guiding light for every decision you make. When you identify the core themes and verbs for your larp it helps you focus on the actions and larp mechanics you should be designing, leading your participants to do engaging and coherent things together.

    Finally, this essay includes some of the questions you can ask yourself to help you design an interaction engine larp. As an example, I will in the next section answer some of the relevant questions for my larp PAN. Please add your own questions to the list as you work with this design style:

    • What are the core themes of your larp idea?
    • How would you describe each theme in such a way that every participant will be able to understand it?
    • Why these themes and not other ones?
    • What actions explore the theme? How many different types of actions can be used to do so?
    • Are there any actions currently in the larp design which do not connect to the themes? Can they be removed?
    • How can you support the core actions by planning secondary actions around them?
    • Are the core actions accessible to all characters and participants? If not, why?
    • What affordances in the design, site, mechanics, characters, or costumes are required to make those actions possible and legible to participants?
    • How can you design all aspects of the physical space to support the actions that you want and make them desirable to participants?
    • How can you shape the use of time, either the participants’ time on site or before the larp or the structure of time inside the larp, to support those actions?
    • What communication strategy will best support the interaction engine?

    The origins of PAN

    The design of PAN began when my co-designer Linda Udby and I were sitting and complaining that there were no larps to sign up to that we were interested in. After some time we ended with a conclusion that I can highly recommend: we decided to make our own damn larp!

    I was really interested in exploring the, at the time, new idea that you need an alibi to be able to play a larp that is intense and outside your comfort zone, and that you can design such an alibi. We wanted to make something quick and dirty that would not take a year to design and produce nor require endless preparation from the participants. This restricted what kind of larp we could make in many ways. For example, we needed a location that we could use as it is without having to build or dress.

    I had just read the gothic horror story The Great God Pan (Machen 1890) and was fascinated with the idea that there was merely a thin veil protecting us from a reality so alien that seeing it would shatter our morals and beliefs and drive us insane. With these restrictions and ideas, we came up with the core idea for PAN. The larp is set in the present day since this choice made it easier for us to find a location and to produce the larp and easier for the participants to find costumes. We chose a summer house as the location. The number of characters in the larp was decided based on the number of beds at that summer house.

    Back in 2012 when we designed PAN, I would have answered the (relevant) design questions from the previous section as follows (as far as I can remember).

    What are the core themes of your larp idea?
    Exploration of self-actualization in a couple structure; what ethics, morality, and being civilized actually mean, and what happens when this is stripped away.

    How would you describe each theme in such a way that every participant will be able to understand it?
    The experience of PAN will take your character through working on your relationship in a new age therapy weekend in a group with people you have never met. Suddenly you will be face to face with a god that will slowly strip you of everything you know. You will end up betraying yourself and your partner in the most heinous and terrible ways.

    Why these themes and not other ones?
    They fit this specific larp very well, they are themes that I am very interested in right now, and they will expand my knowledge of designing and running larps. Moreover, the themes can be explored within the time and production restrictions we have set.

    What actions explore the theme? How many different types of actions can be used to do so?
    The actions available are grouped into two different categories. The first is a group of actions that are connected to the self-actualisation and therapy part. Here the verbs are going to be: engage with therapy, argue, expose shame and lust, meditate, perform relationships, help others to open up, etc. The second group of actions are the ones that the god forces upon the participants via the game mechanics and instructions on what to do when possessed or seeing someone who is possessed. Here the verbs are indulge, scream in terror, give in to lust, and abuse others and yourself.

    How can you support the core actions by planning secondary actions around them?
    Since the larp was so small (8–12 players), there was little room for secondary actions. Each couple in the larp had their own story that had some secondary actions embedded. It was not a priority to make this consistent across all characters during the design process (the larp would be better for it, though).

    What affordances in the design, site, mechanics, characters, or costumes are required to make those actions possible and legible to participants?
    To play PAN, you had to agree to play the larp in a very physical style, and you needed to understand that you are not in control of the character’s journey. Even if the ending of the larp was predetermined, neither the participant nor we the designers were in control of what would happen during the larp. This was due to the chaotic narrative the possession mechanic enforced on the larp.

    How can you design all aspects of the physical space to support the actions that you want and make them desirable to participants?
    The location needed to be open and small, with few places to hide and be private. We needed to be able to hear where the participants were and where the participant that was currently possessed by Pan was moving.

    How can you shape the use of time, either the participants’ time on site or before the larp or the structure of time inside the larp, to support those actions?
    The biggest challenge in a larp like PAN is to make the participants feel safe enough to fully engage in the actions the larp is aiming for. This is why we decided to use more time in the workshop to create trust amongst the participants than in many other larps. It also meant a quite harsh casting process. You needed to sign up with the person you would play partner with. We did this to make sure that there would be trust between the players of couples already right from the beginning.. The whole ensemble was chosen based on a signup form where you had to motivate why you wanted to participate.

    What communication strategy will best support the interaction engine?
    We had a simple website with enough information to understand what the larp was about and what was required from the participants. We deliberately avoided creating hype around the larp, since we wanted to make sure that only people who were truly interested in the themes and actions would sign up.

    Bibliography

    Arthur Machen (1890): The Great God Pan. Whirlwind magazine.

    Johanna Koljonen (2019): An Introduction to Bespoke Larp Design. In Larp Design: Creating Role-Play Experiences, edited by Johanna Koljonen & al. Kopenhagen: Landsforeningen Bifrost (Knudepunkt 2019), p. 25–29.

    Juhana Pettersson (2021): Engines of Desire in Engines of Desire: Larp As the Art of Experience, p 247. Pohjoismaisen roolipelaamisen seura.

    Ludography

    Inside Hamlet (2015): Denmark. Participation|Design|Agency

    Pan (2013): Denmark. Linda Udby & Bjarke Pedersen.

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

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

    Pedersen,Bjarke & Eleanor Saitta. 2024. “The Interaction Engine.” In Liminal Encounters: Evolving Discourse in Nordic and Nordic Inspired Larp, edited by Kaisa Kangas, Jonne Arjoranta, and Ruska Kevätkoski. Helsinki, Finland: Ropecon ry.

    Cover photo: Photo by Hoover Tung on Unsplash

  • Searching for Meaning in House of Craving

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    Searching for Meaning in House of Craving

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    In the past decade there has been an upsurge of sensual content in larps, brought to spotlight by international productions such as Just a Little Lovin’ (Norway 2011), Inside Hamlet (Denmark 2015), Baphomet (Denmark 2018), and others. With this focus, the sensual has at times eclipsed the intellectual, and House of Craving (Denmark 2019) provides an example.

    The larp has a trim structure. Twelve characters are friends and family who retire to a newly inherited summer house for a few relaxed days. Unknown to them, the house is self-aware, and evokes twelve ghosts to control the characters. The ghosts vicariously play out carnal desires and delicate disappointments through the humans for a few hours, until their personalities are broken and the house absorbs the humans into itself, remaking them into ghosts.

    On the next day, the same human characters freshly arrive into the house again, portrayed by new players. The previous characters continue as ghosts of who they were, locked into repetition, haunted by echoes of life, and driven by regret. Their players now embody the manipulative house, as the ghosts try to make good their lives through the humans, before facing final passage into darkness.

    The ghost players are dressed in white, and their characters are wholly invisible to the humans. They can take hold of and move human players and objects. The humans can only initiate interaction with the ghosts by treating them as objects of the house, or as participants in their masturbation fantasies.

    With six consecutive runs, the players (first and last set aside) get to experience the same day and the same characters twice: first from the point of view of the victimised humans, then as the shattered ghosts. It is a clever composition that, for me, tapped into the l’esprit de l’escalier of larp: regret born from realising too late what I should have said and remorse over how I should have played. In the House of Craving this self-reflection is sublimated into the emotive mechanism of the ghosts who revisit their lives, hopelessly trying to repair the fragments.

    The instrumentalisation of the humans also has a slapdash side to it, as the ghosts exploit them for instinctive ends. In a set-piece scene, the ghosts interject themselves into human affairs for the first time over formal lunch. My run featured a competition of ghosts over which human could eat the fastest when food is stuffed into its unwilling mouth.

    The scene highlights how House of Craving used physical play to depict the horror of being manipulated, being violated, the horror of taking actions that are not your own, whether in the course of eating or sex. The small group of characters makes for an intimate game, and the larp earned its place in the self-described genre of erotic horror.

    Although the larp sported a surfeit of sex, there was also some gravitas in the proceedings. The human characters were rather shallow in personality and interest, and the ghosts had more substance to highlight very human horrors. The ghosts enter the larp in a fractured state, and there is something frightfully moving in their sterile replay of old scenes, reaching out for closure and meeting only the encroaching dissolution of memory and sense.

    Compared to the setup for erotica, the existential horror sadly received little attention in the game materials and the workshop. The designers – Danny Meyer Wilson, Tor Kjetil Edland, and Bjarke Pedersen – instructed the players that the larp is ”mainly designed to be an entertainingly horrible experience. A premise for this, is that we all agree that we are doing this for the fun of it, and that it isn’t more serious than that.”

    These words curtail and contextualise the erotic elements in the larp to build a safe environment, but they also speak of an abridgment of ambition. There is no shame in entertainment, but House of Craving had material for a more meaningful enterprise.

    Especially when playing as a human, the sexual content often felt like an end unto itself, too unmoored from things of import to have the impact it deserved. Existential horror can enhance erotic elements, providing context and counterpoise and turning them from the default mode of play into meaningful trespasses. More than that, looking not only into the body but also at a wider context could make for a more intellectually satisfying engagement.

    For example, if the new family are real people, does that mean that the ghosts’ memories of last night are false, and the ghosts are echoes of people yet alive? Or do the ghosts remember true, and the family are only untamed memories of the recent dead? If the player takes their character down this road, they will soon run into the edge of the narrative set by the organisers. There is a limit to how far players can inject meaning into a larp designed just for fun.

    The problem is that the setting has been manufactured as a vehicle for social dynamics and an alibi for physical interaction, not as something to stimulate the intellect or support reflection. The casually instrumental approach to setting may be a counter-reaction to old-fashioned plot-centred writing, but the pendulum swings both ways. Superficiality of story invites the haunting question of meaning: what is it that the designers want to convey?

    Building a setting with intellectual depth that players can seriously engage with is hardly a new idea, but it has rarely been artfully mixed with the strong bodily experience design seen in larps like House of Craving. Inside Hamlet attempted this, although, as I have written elsewhere (Räsänen 2016), not with unreserved success.

    In contrast, Just a Little Lovin’ provides an example of a robust design in this regard (with quite a different take on physicality). One reason for the effectiveness and lasting impact of that larp is, I would argue, the balance between its physical, social, and intellectual elements. The design approaches the themes of friendship, desire, and fear of death from multiple points of view, and the game facilitates exploration in any direction: not with a set of answers to be discovered, but with a full-bodied setting to interact with and reflect on.

    One critic characterised the author Yukio Mishima’s lesser stories as “fine gems roughly polished”, a comparison that also encapsulates my feelings about House of Craving. There is untapped potential for more multi-faceted work, more comprehensive immersion that would not sacrifice meaning on the altar of sensation.

    Bibliography

    Syksy Räsänen (2016): “These but the trappings and the suits of woe”: tragedy and politics in Inside Hamlet. In Larp Politics: Systems, Theory, and Gender in Action, edited by Kaisa Kangas, Mika Loponen, and Jukka Särkijärvi. Ropecon ry.

    Ludography

    Baphomet (2018): Denmark. Linda Udby and Bjarke Pedersen. Participation Design Agency.

    House of Craving (2019): Denmark. Danny Meyer Wilson, Tor Kjetil Edland, Frida Sofie Jansen & Bjarke Pedersen. Participation Design Agency.

    Danny Meyer Wilson, Tor Kjetil Edland, Frida Sofie Jansen & Bjarke Pedersen.

    Inside Hamlet (2015): Denmark. Martin Elricsson, Bjarke Pedersen et al. Odyssé.

    Just a Little Lovin’ (2011): Norway. Tor Kjetil Edland and Hanne Grasmo.

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

    Räsänen, Syksy. 2024. “Searching for Meaning in House of Craving.” In Liminal Encounters: Evolving Discourse in Nordic and Nordic Inspired Larp, edited by Kaisa Kangas, Jonne Arjoranta, and Ruska Kevätkoski. Helsinki, Finland: Ropecon ry.

    Cover image: Photo by Nick Magwood from Pixabay

  • A Trip Beyond the House of Craving

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    A Trip Beyond the House of Craving

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    (Originally written July 10, 2019).

    PLUS ONE, n. (+) The drug is quite certainly active. The chronology can be determined with some accuracy, but the nature of the drug’s effects are not yet apparent.((Shulgin and Shulgin 1990.))

    For some larps it is easy to write about the experience in a way that will make sense to those who were not there. I can describe the events of the larp as a narrative, perhaps focussing on some of the significant set piece moments of the experience, and this will enable others to get a sense of what happened because of a shared context and shared experiences. Even for non-larpers we can explain some of the things that happened in a way that will persuade them to say, ‘That sounds amazing!’ Of course the experience is subjective. Of the various people I know who have played the various runs of Odysseus (2019) over the last week, for example, despite playing ostensibly the same larp, with some overlap, their narratives will be similar, but their reactions to it will be personal. Just as it is with people who have played College of Wizardry, or Inside Hamlet, or any larp that has been re-run. For my UK friends who are unfamiliar with this concept, it is when you run the same larp – usually with the same characters (but different players) – multiple times. It is not a campaign, but literally the same game being repeated. You can play the same larp multiple times, but with very different outcomes.

    But I played House of Craving and it was different, and yet I am struggling to articulate how it was different and why. And so this is neither a review, nor a critical summary, but rather a gonzoid attempt to make sense of what the fuck just happened. 

    A recently widowed man discovers that his wife owned the house where she grew up and that she has left it to him in her will. He decides to spend the summer there – with his extended family and friends – in order to try to come to terms with her death. The characters are all broken in different ways: Some of them aren’t terribly pleasant, others are self-absorbed, others still are so damaged that they would be better suited to be anywhere but in close proximity to these others. Of course this terrible potential for conflict is what powers the engine of larp. But the house is beautiful, the cooking staff are geniuses, and there is a pool, and plenty of champagne, so what could possibly go wrong?

    Over time it becomes apparent that these twelve people are not alone. The ghosts of the house object to this family’s presence and, as the day progresses they will influence, manipulate, and then finally control the living family to play out a cycle of tragedy and abuse. Eventually the family will be absorbed by the house, and as the old ghosts move on – into the darkness – they replace their ghosts to become the ghosts for the next family to arrive. And then the cycle will repeat itself. Again and again.

    PLUS TWO, n. (++) Both the chronology and the nature of the action of a drug are unmistakably apparent. But you still have some choice as to whether you will accept the adventure, or rather just continue with your ordinary day’s plans (if you are an experienced researcher, that is). The effects can be allowed a predominant role, or they may be repressible and made secondary to other chosen activities.

    The stories of this larp – and those who played it – are interlinked and overlapping. A story written in an earlier run may persist as an artifact to be discovered by those who came after. A drawing or a photograph of Jacob may affect a different Jacob when he comes across it in a future run. A short story written by Monica in run 3 could be read aloud by Monica in run 5, but she has no memory of having written it.((Metalepsis, again.)) There are other echoes too, like a twisted game of Chinese Whispers, some stories are retold as remembered or as experienced by the players. Those of us playing run 5 do not know what happened in run 1, but some of that narrative surely became plot to drive our own story. Who are the authors of our fates? Those who played as ghosts in run 1? The others? Ourselves? I cannot say. 

    This larp is a horror story, it unravels as a descent into madness and death. From the player’s perspective, we think we will have an (un)easy revenge on the next set of family players; but we do not, because the true horror, and the fear is yet to come, as we discover what happens to our ghosts and the approaching darkness that will devour them. And worse still the human’s play back at you. After all this is larp not some Punchdrunk loop. Their agency is real.

    House of Craving is an immensely physical larp. You play it with your whole body in a way that I find terrifying; there is little abstraction, and more touch in this larp than I have experienced before; largely because of the proximity and influence of the ghosts. But as ever you retain autonomy, the option to tap out or to invite escalation exists.((I tap out once during the larp. I have one quiet regret for not tapping out a second time. I attempted to escalate but the mechanic – lightly scratching a co-player – does not work for those who bite their fingernails!)) Despite the ability of ghosts to eventually control humans, as players we remain responsible and accountable for ourselves and our own experience. We are instructed to steer for our own play, rather than to focus on the experiences of others. It is a bold undertaking, and a risky one if the players are not all on the same page. But for our run, we are all on the same page! We had an evening together before the larp: our players met for dinner in Odense and then had some self-guided workshops (with wine) at the venue. Here is the point I knew it would work. So much of what we do as larpers is subliminal. If you know your fellow players already it helps, but sometimes a group or an individual just does not gel. Our core-group of four players whose plots and backstory were intertwined clicked. Understanding that this group were all looking for similarly intense experiences really helped; we know even before the larp starts that we’ll be able to cooperatively play ourselves deep into the madness that is to follow. The word often used is chemistry, but perhaps it is more reasonably alchemy.((Or possibly pharmacology.))

    The first morning consists of a series of workshops; these are designed to teach you how to play the larp. This is not simply an explanation of meta-techniques and an info dump of rules, but rather a set of subroutines that reprogramme the players to conform to the new social norms of the story world. We, the new players, are slightly nervous and slightly hungover, watching the players who had been the family the previous day. It is interesting. They smile, they hold eye contact for longer, they are unafraid, have no concept of personal space, and carry with them a nervous joy that permeates the black and white checked ballroom, empty but for a candelabra and a few chairs. I want to opt out of at least one of the proffered workshops, but force myself to take part; I am so far beyond my comfort zone that it becomes Brechtian. The sessions are physical; I am strong, used to fighting back; part of the exercise here is to give up control. The ghosts always win. Pushed to the floor with ghosts whispering in my ear I take a deep breath and relax, becoming one with the checked tiles beneath my cheek and I am not afraid anymore.

    The larp starts with a nap. The characters have fallen asleep before lunch and all awake in different parts of the house. They amuse themselves for an hour before lunch – Jacob and Wilhelm do “masculine things” in the garden, the homoeroticism of wrapping someone’s hands before putting on boxing gloves is lost in front of an audience sipping champagne – and then at lunchtime, things start to get weird. At six thirty the humans are utterly under the control of the ghosts, and by midnight they are destroyed and devoured by the house. The whole experience is ten to twelve hours of intense play but the following day the cycle repeats except the human players of the previous day are now their own ghosts and a new set of humans come in – as the same characters – to repeat the day. All except for the first run, where the ghosts are NPCs, and the last run, where the family players do not get to play ghosts. I played the penultimate run. 

    PLUS THREE, n. (+++) Not only are the chronology and the nature of a drug’s action quite clear, but ignoring its action is no longer an option. The subject is totally engaged in the experience, for better or worse.

    But when it comes down to it, I can’t begin to describe what happened. Individual events and scenes taken out of context may sound challenging, confusing, or simply make no sense, and the contexts are subjective. Instead I am going to have to resort to the obvious analogy. Larp is sometimes thought of as a consensual hallucination, and this one was more hallucinogenic than most. 

    The Shulgin scale – quoted throughout this piece – looks at the experience of a chemical over time, and describes the physical and mental effects of the experience on a positive scale of plus one to four (Shulgin and Shulgin 1990). As I am typing this, another player on a backchannel chat is describing the mental state of the players, four days after the larp, as like a comedown after 48 hours of MDMA. Their description is valid. Except there is no crushing bleakness for me. I am still on a high. I am mainly frightened that it will wear off and what it will feel like when it does. Other players have described this process already. Perhaps this is a part of the horror of this game, having to look in the mirror and realise that the larp is over and the magic circle is no more?

    House of Craving was a solid plus three for me. It is important to note that this is not a rating scale. A high number is not objectively the goal of larp, or the best thing. One cannot argue that any larp that fails to achieve it is a failure – because most larps don’t, indeed hardly any larps do, nor do they intend to. House of Craving was a horror larp, but there were no moments of blind terror or jump scares and it did not feel dangerous. The fear was the slow realisation of creeping entropy juxtaposed with beauty, and this juxtaposition made the fear feel much worse. My run produced two of the most beautiful larp moments of the 34 years I have been larping, including one which was so eye-wateringly incredible that it makes me gasp to think about it. I am not going to tell you what they were. It would be like describing the effects of 2,5-Dimethoxy-4-chloroamphetamine((DOC, a hallucinogenic amphetamine first synthesised in Canada in 1972 (Shulgin and Shulgin 1990).)) to someone who had not taken it. I can’t offer you details, only impressions.

    I played towards not some sort of death, but towards oblivion. My character’s ending was a ceding of control to the unknown by a character who was willfully in control of himself and his environment up to that point. He did not allow himself to feel physical fear or pain, he kept it inside, until – at the end – only fear remained. The only thing that scared him was the loss of his wife. His litany “without you, I am nothing” became the poem that ended the larp, as he slipped away from her and the lights went out. (Here I literally move away from my fellow players and end the larp alone in the darkness, I feel their hands reach out to find me, but I am gone.) “Without you I am nothing. Without you I am nothing. I am nothing. Nothing. (nothing).”

    The patterns and the layers of the piece is what made it work; the ultimate form of intertextuality, stories tied into intricate and beautiful knots, held tight against willing skin. As a piece of ontological design which constructs a narrative and performative space – a larp if you like – House of Craving is a masterpiece of the form. It is a dramatically and personally profound piece of capital A-Art. Given the right players, a little bit of larp magic, and a prevailing wind, it can be life changing. It is certainly life affirming, sexy as hell, and really rather scary. 

    PLUS FOUR, n. (++++) A rare and precious transcendental state, which has been called a “peak experience,” a “religious experience,” “divine transformation,” a “state of Samadhi” and many other names in other cultures. It is not connected to the +1, +2, and +3 of the measuring of a drug’s intensity. It is a state of bliss, a participation mystique, a connectedness with both the interior and exterior universes, which has come about after the ingestion of a psychedelic drug, but which is not necessarily repeatable with a subsequent ingestion of that same drug.

    There is a point on the Shulgin Scale above plus three. Plus four, however, is a state of being which is profound by definition and by effect, but it can also be terrifying and dangerous. The experience of playing House of Craving was a powerful one yet it remained safe. But the fall out is even more fascinating. I feel fantastic; as though the loved-up effect of MDMA has persisted long after the chemical has worn off. My body image issues, whilst probably not gone for good, are certainly in abeyance; I went into the larp as someone who would describe himself as “old” “fat” “bald” “ugly” ”haggard”; I have come out of it with a healthy dose of “fuck that.” Do you know that we are all beautiful – all of us – and that is the truth, everything that tells you different is merely advertising? I have no religious conviction that this state of affairs will persist, but the larp has produced a profound effect on how I perceive who I am, and this is plus four, and it is wonderful.

    If a drug (or technique or process) were ever to be discovered which would consistently produce a plus four experience in all human beings, it is conceivable that it would signal the ultimate evolution, and perhaps the end, of the human experiment.

    — Alexander Shulgin and Ann Shulgin, PIHKAL: A Chemical Love Story (pp. 963–965).

    References

    Shulgin, Alexander “Sasha,” and Ann Shulgen. 1990. “#64 DOC.” PIHKAL: A Chemical Love Story. Transform Books. Available at Erowid.org: https://erowid.org/library/books_online/pihkal/pihkal064.shtml

    —. 1990. PIHKAL: A Chemical Love Story. Transform Books. Available at Erowid.org: https://erowid.org/library/books_online/pihkal/pihkal064.shtml

    Cover Photo: Promotional photo from House of Craving. Photo by Bjarke Pedersen.

  • The Immortal Legacy

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    The Immortal Legacy

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    In high school, I had a phase where I was really into the Romantic poets. I read about Percy Bysshe Shelley in particular and was struck by his “The Masque of Anarchy,” a rabble-rousing political poem:

    And many more Destructions played

    In this ghastly masquerade,

    All disguised, even to the eyes,

    Like Bishops, lawyers, peers, or spies.

    Percy Bysshe Shelley is one of the most famous poets of the Romantic period. I found the world of the Romantics fascinating. In the biography Shelley: The Pursuit by Richard Holmes I read about his personal life, which even as a high schooler I understood to be a truly amazing trainwreck.

    Gothic is a 2023 larp by Avalon Larp Studios inspired by the Ken Russell movie of the same name, featuring the Romantic poets in a story of gothic horror. I signed up and got lucky, playing first Percy Bysshe Shelley and then the servant William Fletcher.

    This was because Gothic was based on an unusual production model pioneered by another intimate horror larp, House of Craving. There are five overlapping runs of the event. Played in a mansion in the Danish countryside, the larp runs continuously as a repeating one-day instance which each player experiences twice, first as a poet and then as a servant.

    When I was playing Percy, the person who had played Percy yesterday was now my manservant. The next day, I was the servant and a new player was portraying Percy.

    Image of a red and white candle and a white mask between them
    Photo by Simon Brind.

    Horror Stories

    At any given time, Gothic only has five poet characters and five servant characters. The ensemble is small and tight. The division between the social positions of the characters meant that the focus of play is on the five players who arrive together each day. When I was Percy Bysshe Shelley, my primary focus was on my co-players who played Mary Shelley and the others, and when I was Fletcher, I interacted most with my fellow servants.

    This allowed for nuanced, interesting social and internal play. The schedule keeps things moving with events such as afternoon tea, a séance and dinner but there is space to explore ideas and build scenes together.

    The fact that they share a design structure made me initially compare Gothic to House to Craving, a larp known for its extravagant, depraved madness. During play, I realized that Gothic was quite a different experience, more focused on the depth of the themes, characters and the setting than the visceral, bodily experience of House of Craving. The Romantic poets allowed for an unusually thorough examination of the various ideas connected to the larp because the characters themselves were quite capable of both discussing and implementing them.

    The poets were intellectually ambitious, and that meant we as players could explore things like the difference between an ideal and reality, or conversely the problems caused by strict, heedless application of ideals to reality.

    In the fiction, the larp was set in Villa Diodati where Lord Byron famously stayed in the summer of 1816, spending three days together with Dr. John Polidori, Mary Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Claire Claremont. The time spent by the poets at Villa Diodati is famous for Lord Byron’s challenge that each should come up with a horror story. It is this prompt that gave Mary Shelley the push to come up with her idea for Frankenstein, a landmark work of horror literature.

    Our group of poets approached this task diligently, each of us coming up with a story. This meant that not only was gothic horror the genre of the larp, we as characters were also telling each other horror stories in the dimly lit, creaking mansion in the middle of the night. There were layers upon layers of horror, building to an escalating level of unreality as the night progressed.

    The themes of artistic legacy and creative immortality influenced my play strongly. There was an unusual space for playing on the complex real-life legacy of the characters because the design facilitated it, key details brought into focus in the excellent character writing. To prepare for the larp, I’d read Miranda Seymour’s excellent biography Mary Shelley and was surprised how directly applicable it was, especially in the surreal late night scenes where talking about the future was as sensible as talking about the past. I’d done extracurricular reading beyond what was suggested by the organizers because I enjoy it, but it paid off.

    There was an interesting creative tension between the themes of poetic and creative immortality for the characters, a group of legendary artists, and larp as an artform. Larp is ephemeral by its very nature. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein lives on although she and even the society she came from have disappeared.

    A larp lives on in the memories of its players, and shadows persist in documentation such as photos and this essay. Otherwise, it’s lost the moment it ends. Yet what larp loses in the pursuit of immortality it gains in the immediacy of the experience.

    Image of old photographs, books, and opera gloves on a desk
    Photo by Simon Brind.

    Noises in the Dark

    When you go to international larps, you end up staying at a lot of mansions available for rent in different countries across Europe. They’ve been built to the specifications of a certain culture of servants and masters. The living quarters of the family in residence are separate from the discreet, narrow staircases and attic rooms of the servants needed to keep the household functioning.

    Playing Gothic was the first time I experienced an old mansion through the social context it was actually made for. Since the larp had a number of partially overlapping runs, the players of each run had to arrive discreetly so as not to disturb ongoing play. Thus, a taxi left me and several other players outside the grounds of the Danish country manor where the larp took place and an organizer came to fetch us, guiding us discreetly to a servant’s entrance. This way, we’d be as invisible as possible to the players who were at that moment gazing forlornly out the windows as the poets.

    We spent the evening doing workshops and then retired for the night, all on the basement floor of the expansive building. The next day, we had more workshops before we’d start play at 14:00 as the poets.

    Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley were both aristocrats. As the poets, we’d be sleeping in the magnificent first floor bedrooms so before play started, we bundled up our linens and carried them up the stairs to where we’d sleep the second night, in grand style. We moved from the servant side to the public facing side.

    Our third day onsite, our second day of play, it was our turn to play the servants. Thus, we bundled up the linens from our beds again. Most of the servant’s rooms were in the attic. We shifted back to the servant side both inside the fiction and physically inside the mansion.

    At night, the mansion was extremely atmospheric. Waking up to go to the bathroom, I was walking the corridors alone, listening to the strange sounds of the building, pitch black doorways and creaking windows looming over me.

    It’s a common human experience that when you wake up, your brain misconstrues something you see in the dark. The shape of a coat hanging from a doorframe looks like the silhouette of a human. For one reason or another, I’m very prone to this. It happens all the time and I don’t really get an emotional reaction from it anymore. Seeing something looming in the dark just after waking up, I know it’s just my brain being stupid again. The vision goes away when I turn on the lights.

    I was sleeping in my room the third night, on my side cradling a pillow with my left arm, my hand resting against my face.

    As I woke up, I saw a hand holding my hand.

    Turns out, I wasn’t quite as blasé as I’d thought. It took a while to fall asleep again after I’d frantically grabbed for my cellphone light.

    Who Is Remembered

    One of the key moments of the larp is a séance involving prophetic statements about the futures of the poets. The themes of who gets remembered and who’ll have a legacy are brought into the open.

    As players we knew the statements were true and we knew which applied to which character. This meant that the unfairness of how these people’s lives proceeded was integral to the experience, both in terms of character history and future fate.

    The Romantic poets are long dead and the versions we play are fictional, calibrated to the questions we are interested in exploring. From the biographies I knew the larp’s take on history was surprisingly faithful. Perhaps the poets had led such dramatic lives that it was easier to adapt them to the purposes of the larp’s design. Still, I also knew the versions we played were romanticized and exaggerated to make the larp function.

    A sitting room in a mansion bathed in red light
    Photo by Simon Brind.

    The question of who is remembered and how was explored both explicitly and implicitly. It was an ongoing topic of conversation for our characters who operated on what they knew at that moment: Lord Byron was famous, while the others were unknowns, although Percy Bysshe Shelley had written poems that could go somewhere. Other works, like Frankenstein, were still in the future.

    Our characters didn’t know that in terms of popular impact, Mary Shelley would in time be the most enduring of the writers present. Although Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley both continue to be read, it’s no exaggeration to say that Frankenstein is in a completely different category. As players we knew this and were able to play on it, even as it remained outside the frame of the fiction.

    From her biography, I knew that Mary Shelley’s relationship with success was complicated. Her creative career was overshadowed by the difficult fact that her biggest hit was her first book. She wrote many others but never managed to capture lightning again.

    Percy Bysshe Shelley was never particularly popular during his lifetime. His poems became iconic only after his death, and one person who put a lot of work into making that happen was Mary Shelley. You could almost say that the idea of Percy Bysshe Shelley as the archetypal ethereal elf-poet was created by Mary as she curated and contextualized his work.

    A play based on Mary’s Frankenstein made her novel a pop culture phenomenon already during her lifetime and accelerated sales of the book. After Percy’s death, she exercised significant control over how his legacy should be remembered. In all this, although she suffered many indignities and setbacks made worse by 19th century gender discrimination and the travails of being a professional writer, she also exercised power of her own. She was an active participant in the shaping of literary memory.

    Of the poet characters in Gothic, I find the most tragic to be Claire Clairmont and Dr. Polidori. The latter was the only one alongside Mary who actually completed the story he came up with during those fateful days at Villa Diodati, called The Vampyre, a progenitor of the romantic vampire genre. Although not as famous as Frankenstein, it too has remained in the canon of horror literature.

    Dr. Polidori based the vampire of his story on Lord Byron and when he got it published, the publisher decided to attribute it to Byron instead of its true author. Although Byron himself demanded that his name be removed, this and other setbacks eventually depressed Polidori so much that he took his own life at the age of 25.

    picture of the author in costume as the servant Fletcher taken in a bathroom mirror
    The author as the servant Flecher. Photo by Juhana Pettersson.

    Working people barely get remembered at all. The servant characters were also based on real people at least to some degree, but the problem is that records about their lives are limited. The servant I played, William Fletcher, was probably the one of whom the most complete picture is available from historical sources because he stayed with Byron for such a long time and enjoyed a very close relationship with him.

    As each day of play ended, we received letters informing us of the future fates of our characters. Percy’s letter didn’t have a significant effect on me because I already knew his fate. Reading Fletcher’s letter was a much more emotional experience. Although he might have felt an inkling of power and control amidst the terror-infused chaos of midnight at Villa Diodati, in the end he was just a poor man living in an age that wasn’t very kind to those without money, title and connections.

    In the end, all the famous people around him failed to take care of him.

    This was the fate of Claire Clairmont too, a lover of Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley who ended up betrayed by both and having to make her own way in a cold, uncaring world. Still, some of her perspective remains. Even before the larp, I’d already become familiar with her voice because her writings were used extensively as source material in the Mary Shelley biography.

    Living Words

    Playing a famous poet is intimidating for those of us not capable of writing great poetry on demand and Gothic had a clever solution for this problem: The off-game room had a stack of poems and you could grab one and just decide that it was something your poet had just created.

    As a player, you had what you needed to make a scene work.

    That was my experience of the larp in general. The production model of overlapping small runs used in Gothic is difficult to pull off and requires that everything runs smoothly. This was the case and if there were any hiccups backstage, you didn’t really see them.

    Similarly, I was blessed with a cohesive group of co-players who shared similar priorities for what we wanted to do. You could sign up for the larp either as an individual or a group. The run I played in was the only one composed of individual sign ups while the other runs were groups who had signed up together. Due to luck or good casting, I felt our group shared a similar level of interest in exploring the mythology of the Romantic poets and their legacies.

    Emotionally, the heaviest scenes were all when I was playing Percy Bysshe Shelley. I got confronted with my failures as a man, a poet, a husband, a lover and a radical, but all that is much easier to deal with when you’ve spent the day as a poet of immortal genius.

    The most meaningful scene I played was at the culmination of a game of hide and seek instigated fairly late at night. I ran after Mary, thinking that we could hide together, but the hiding place she chose in the servant’s quarters was for one person only. Realizing I needed a place of my own, I used the same hiding place that had worked for me the last time I’d played hide and seek, probably thirty years ago: Behind the door.

    Lord Byron’s hired companion Tita rushed into the room with a baying crowd and noticed Mary. Someone even banged on the door I was hiding behind, but they didn’t notice me and eventually left the servant’s quarters altogether, leaving behind Mary and her maid.

    I revealed myself and Mary, supported by the maid Elise, let me have it, all the poison in our relationship, everything that was wrong, pouring out in one powerful, eloquent torrent. I was staggered by it and needed a moment to take it all in. At that point, Elise left, leaving me and Mary alone. I sat on the bed and the conversation continued, slowly shifting gears until it’d moved from the emotional fireworks of gothic horror into a more realistic emotional register.

    My key to playing a Romantic poet was that they were very young, precocious teenagers given agency by status and wealth. Lord Byron came across as an elder statesman and he was just four years older than Percy Bysshe Shelley. How come the poets were so irresponsible, so extra? Well, they were barely adults!

    When I had my Percy Bysshe Shelley phase, I was at an arts high school where you had a lot of peer support if you wanted to be dramatic. The first time I got drunk in my life, it was with absinthe smuggled from Portugal by my grandmother. (It was illegal in Finland at that time.) We did the whole ceremony with a friend and I got so wasted, I couldn’t take the bus home in the morning without puking on the sidewalk.

    Who knows, if I’d had the wealth and fortune of a Percy Bysshe Shelley or a Lord Byron, what heights of folly I would have managed at that age?

    Image of stairs in a mansion
    Photo by Simon Brind.

    Gothic

    Gothic was produced by the Avalon Larp Studio collective.

    Main organizers: Simon Brind, Halfdan Keller Justesen, Laurie Penny, Martine Svanevik, and Sagalinn Tangen.

    Content writers: Aina S. Lakou and Charlie Ashby.

    Website feedback and proofreading: Alexis Moisand, Alma Elofsson Edgar, Esperanza Montero, Eva Wei, Andreas Markehed, and Siri Sandquist.

    Location Scouts: Julie Streit Pilegaard (main location), Ragnhild Hutchinson, Tidvis (playtest one) and Laurie Penny (playtest two).

    Food Design:  Anna Katrine Bønnelycke and Maria Østerby Elleby.

    Playtesters: Lars Kristian Løveng Sunde, Jørn Norum Slemdal, Frida Sofie, Danny Meyer Wilson, Tor Kjetil Edland, Aina S. Lakou, Ingrid G. Storrø, Kerstin Örtberg, Halfdan Keller Justesen, Kol Ford, Emmer Felber, Rebel Rehbinder, James De Worde, Dominika Kovacova, Jorg Rødsjø, Martine Svanevik, and Charlie Ashby.

    Onsite Crew: Maria Kolseth Jensen, Sascha Stans, and Søren Werge.

    For additional acknowledgements see the larp website.

    Cover photo: The larp location. Photo by Simon Brind.

  • Terror and Warmth

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    Terror and Warmth

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    We step into the ritual chamber wearing our ceremonial robes, the hoods on our heads. We’re at a beautiful estate in the Danish countryside, secluded enough to feel the outside world only as a distant concern. The larp is Baphomet (2015-) and I participated in it in 2019. It details the fall of a vintage era Hermetic cult as they connect with the dark gods Pan and Baphomet.

    As the ritual goes on, we huddle in the middle of the room, backs to each other, facing the walls. A High Templar circles us and intones the ritual while we hum a low, collective sound that feels bigger and deeper than any individual.

    The experience goes beyond the typical boundaries between fiction and reality that superficially define larp. The outwards-facing huddle is a simple formation but it means that my back is physically against other players. I feel the sound vibrate in their bodies. Someone shorter than me is in front and their voice is indistinguishable from mine.

    Our collective hum changes. There are vibrations, emotions, dissonances and shrieks. It feels like an auditory summation of the larp’s emotional state at that point. There are moments of terror and warmth. It’s a profoundly positive experience of togetherness but the larp’s horror themes shine through and fear makes itself manifest.

    The seemingly contradictory experiences of human connection and inner darkness are present at the same time, not as a contradiction but as complementary elements. This is a common theme in a family of larps of which Baphomet is one.

    Others in the same genre are Pan, House of Craving, Inside Hamlet, Libertines, Conscience, and End of the Line. They are defined by an aesthetic of sordid indulgence, dark emotional content, and playground-style design creating opportunities for participants to sin creatively.

    several people in 20's clothing posing outside a manor Baphomet Run 2. Photo by Bjarke Pedersen.

    Communities of Sin

    As is typical of larp, these games create small temporary communities, microcosms in which the participants enable each other to experience the thrills and terrors that draw them in. In my personal experience, the communities of play especially in the smaller larps such as Baphomet and House of Craving (2019) are unusually warm, supportive and positive.

    Indeed, so much so that participants joke about not wanting to go back to the real world and its hierarchies, anxieties and daily oppressions. While the larp’s fictional landscape is full of degradation and injustice, the off-game community is humble, constructive, and ready to listen.

    Of course, no larp experience is homogenous across its player space. There are surely other player experiences as well, especially in the bigger of the larps mentioned. Still, when I’ve left for the airport after the larp, the positivity of the play community has been a topic of conversation with other players in a way that differs from most of my other larp experiences.

    After one of these larps, I lamented with another male player the fact that the easy physical closeness between men would slowly fade in the outside world. It would become more awkward to hug as the repressions of society wore away at us.

    This experience of closeness and community doesn’t happen by accident. Larps all about characters doing terrible things to each other function best when the workshops are geared to build trust and intimacy. When the players feel safe and comfortable they can go to emotional extremes that would otherwise be inaccessible to them.

    Two people on the verge of kissing House of Craving (2019). Photo by Bjarke Pedersen.

    When I think about other types of larps that have featured a similarly close, warm community experience, they’ve tended to be small games which have workshops with similar goals. One such is the Brody Condon larp The Zeigarnik Effect (2015) in Norway. We played characters undergoing gestalt therapy and the workshops were needed to get us accustomed to the game’s unusual mode of communication and interaction.

    Because of the positive nature of the overall emotional experience of these larps I’ve started to wonder whether they’re horror larps at all. The one I worked on, the Vampire: the Masquerade larp End of the Line (2016-), was explicitly conceived as a horror-themed playground designed to enable each participant in a dynamic, personal way. The aesthetic was from horror but the actual experience was made so you’d get to do fun things you can’t do otherwise.

    Designed for Transgression

    There are a few design choices that make this sort of larp possible. They tend to be typical of Nordic larp design in general but are often implemented in specific ways to enable the players to transgress in a fun and safe way.

    Workshopping together to build intimacy, trust and a shared sense of the social space is crucial. The players have to feel that the play community of the larp supports them and is open to their ideas. They have to feel free to express themselves and take creative risks. This is achieved with workshop exercises that build trust and intimacy. In some larps, player selection also plays a part.

    Safety or calibration mechanics that allow the player to stop or adjust play on the fly also play an important part. The presence of such mechanics makes it possible for participants to feel like they can trust their fellow players and the play situation.

    These mechanics can be used for many different reasons, not all of them dramatic. When they work well, they allow the player to navigate around issues that make transgressive content difficult for them to access, whatever those issues might be.

    Two people behind a third person with their hands on that person's shoulders House of Craving (2019). Photo by Bjarke Pedersen.

    While not present in all the larps mentioned in this article, transparency is great for enabling the players. In Inside Hamlet, Pan, Baphomet, and House of Craving, every player can read all characters if they so choose in the preparation for the larp. For some players this makes it easier for them to instigate transgressive game content with other players. They know from their reading that the other player’s character is just as fucked up as their own.

    All together, these design choices work best when they give the player the tools to take responsibility for their own larp experience. A player who feels enabled and in control can more easily engage in play where the character is in the opposite situation.

    Cruelty is Fun

    There’s an overlap in themes, techniques and player base between these larps and BDSM culture. They allow us to enjoy feelings, sensations and emotions that are taboo in normal conversation and polite society. Things that are ordinarily considered wrong, debased, or evil become playful, fulfilling, and fun when enacted within a consensual, supportive context.

    BDSM often features role-play and I don’t think that’s categorically different from larp with erotic or sexual themes. Rather, there’s a sliding scale of different designed experiences from an abstracted larp experience to a fuck session with a light sheen of fiction.

    One example of a thing that’s bad in real life but often fun in play is cruelty. In the right context and with the right people, cruelty can be tremendously sexy.

    Everyday life has limited opportunities to enjoy cruelty in an ethical way because it tends to require a victim. In larp and BDSM the victims are there consensually and they can enjoy the thrill of being subjected to cruelty, safe in the knowledge that they control their own play and can exit it as needed. In this way, being the victim of cruelty can become a fulfilling, profound experience. For a player of a masochistic or submissive bent, all the more so.

    The design of these larps supports the playing of cruelty in much the same way the culture around BDSM scenes supports it. Safety mechanisms and workshopping provide a framework in which taboo impulses can be explored. Character writing and other design elements provides alibi for being cruel. However, personal experience suggests that the most dynamic scenes of cruelty in a larp are expressions of player creativity and energy enabled by the design but not necessarily originating in it.

    Two people in corsets, lounging on a couch
    Members of the Voltemand noble family at Inside Hamlet. Photo by Marie Herløvsen.

    In Baphomet, there was a scene where another character threw me to the ground and kicked me in the balls. Following the rules of the game, the hits and kicks connected only lightly and I play acted to make them seem real. I fell to the ground, groaned, moaned, whimpered. I remember the scene very well because there was a release of energy, a spontaneous burst of power animating those present. Even for someone like me, who’s not masochistic by nature, it was a fun larp scene to be in because of the intensity and release of emotion.

    The over the top spectacle and transgressiveness of cruelty makes it interesting and dynamic even when it doesn’t satisfy a personal kink.

    Sex

    Did I ever tell you about that time I was fucking my dead wife’s sister while moaning my wife’s name in her ear? It was funny because my son was there too. I remember him drawling: “Go Dad!”

    There was also a ghost who was touching his crotch through his pants but that was normal in House of Craving.

    Sex is a huge component of these larps. Sometimes there’s so much fucking that players complain of it becoming boring. It’s larp sex of course but the playstyle is physical. You might not actually engage in genital penetration but you’ll probably end up kissing people, groping them, getting groped, caressing, touching.

    It’s amazing how quickly this sort of sexual interaction becomes normalized. Once everyone has collectively adjusted their perception of what’s normal you find yourself casually grinding with people as easily as you ordinarily shake hands. The way we’re socialized, sexual and flirtatious contact always matters. It always means something. Except after a morning’s larp workshop, it suddenly doesn’t.

    Although this has the effect of banalizing sexual interactions, it also makes it possible to reach new types of sexually inflected play that would otherwise be out of reach. It also feels liberating: It’s fun to be part of a community that has temporarily decided to let go of standards of sexual behavior.

    A person in a white dress with stockings and ballerina slippers holding a cigarette
    A courtier at Inside Hamlet. Photo by Marie Herløvsen.

    Of course, the role of sex in your experience depends on the specific larp and how you choose to play it. In Inside Hamlet (2015-), about the last days of the degenerate court of King Claudius, I played a judgmental priest. I participated in many sex scenes but my role was to denounce the sinners for their moral turpitude. Other times, like in House of Craving, sex becomes such a basic element of the larp’s landscape that you won’t even remember all the fucks you participated in.

    House of Craving is about a family who gets together to remember the dead mother and wife. The malevolent house starts to affect them, ghosts guide them, and finally they fall into an everlasting state of mutually destructive degeneration. As the characters’ sense of reality collapses, so does the need for the larp’s fiction to be coherent. The higher truths of the emotional journey take precedence.

    I have never participated in so many debased larp scenes as I did in that game but it felt quite straightforward when it was happening. The workshops had glued us into a cohesive social unit and we could brutalize each other with casual ease. The play was intense, so much that I took frequent breaks in the off-game area to gather my wits. Often someone else was there too and we enthused together about how great the experience was.

    The approach to sex in the design of these larps is coy despite the graphic nature of the stories they generate. It’s all about the tease, not the actual act of fucking for real. You don’t have sex, you dryhump. From the purpose of larp dynamics this works much better as sexual flirtation drives action but sexual fulfillment doesn’t. The character may be sexually satisfied but the player isn’t and that keeps the player in motion.

    People in a manor house eating food off of a person laying on the table House of Craving (2019). Photo by Bjarke Pedersen.

    Prey

    Baphomet and Pan (2013, 2014, 2020) feature a signature piece of larp design: the necklace mechanic. The way it works is that a player who wears either the Pan or Baphomet necklace is that god. Other characters will worship their god, falling on their knees in manic adoration. They do everything the god says.

    You can wear a necklace for a maximum of half an hour after which you should pass it onto another player. This way, the necklaces travel the larp, organically causing chaos.

    Wearing the necklace is a power trip. It’s fun to be worshiped. There’s more to the experience, however. As a larper, you’re very well aware that the god has to provide content for their followers. It’s fun to tell people what to do but it uses up material pretty fast. There was a moment when I was standing in the middle of a room with perhaps ten people kneeling all around me, waiting expectantly. I drew a complete blank. Couldn’t think of a single thing for them to do.

    Suddenly I heard one of the players vocalizing like you do in that situation, just speaking whatever seems kind of appropriate. They said: “We want to eat you.”

    Blessed inspiration! Feeling great relief, I proclaimed: “Eat my flesh!”

    The others thronged at my feet and started biting my flesh, especially my arms since they were exposed. Not very hard, but hard enough to leave a mark. Still, it was a small price to pay for being spared the terror of failing to provide playable larp material for the expectant crowd.

    Three people in white with pink necklaces lounging on a chair House of Craving (2019). Photo by Bjarke Pedersen.

    Most players pass on the necklace much faster than the 30 minute limit. I don’t think I ever had it for longer than fifteen minutes. That’s just enough time to do one scene.

    The necklace is a wonderful symbol for how these larps work because it shows the fun of both sides of the power equation: the experience of wielding power and of being subjected to power. When players play these scenes, they support each other’s experiences. Neither the god nor the worshippers can experience that role without the other.

    There’s a distinct difference in the power equation in terms of how many people there are in a scene. When I have the necklace and I’m surrounded by ten other people, ostensibly I have the power. However, their expectations as players place great demands on me, effectively constraining how much I can use my game-granted authority. In contrast, when the scene is small, it’s much easier to start choreographing other people. In a smaller scene, I can safely assume that there’s enough to do for the other players, giving me freedom to think about what’s fun for me. Perhaps because of this, my best necklace scenes were small.

    When we made End of the Line, we focused on the basic vampire theme of predator and prey. In the design, we strove to make as many of the characters as possible into both. Depending on the circumstances you could hunt other characters and be hunted in turn.

    A person feeding of another's neck in a room covered in graffiti End of the Line (Finland, 2016). Photo by Tuomas Puikkonen.

    The thrill of being hunted is an essential part of the experience, indeed possibly even more integral as that of being the hunter. You can zoom out from this assertion to a wider characteristic of larp design: Often in larp, villains, enemies, and oppressors are used as supporting characters to generate play. The player characters are the victimized whose experience is subject to a lot of design thought. Against this background, the design in End of the Line was an attempt to systematize this dynamic while also giving the hunter an autonomous play experience that didn’t feel like playing a supporting character.

    After the larp, one player compared the design to primal play found in BDSM culture, where predator and prey-dynamics similarly provide a foundation for the fun.

    Pure Experience

    In many of these larps, especially in Baphomet and House of Craving, the design foregrounds immediate emotional experience and interaction to an extreme degree. As Baphomet comes to a close, the lights are dimmed. This makes it harder to see who has the necklace and who doesn’t. The social dynamics of the game have been running for two days and the participants have fused into a collective madness where elements like character or story become increasingly meaningless compared to the immediacy of the interactive moment.

    In these last moments, we don’t need the game design crutches of the necklace or the fictional frame. We are free floating active agents with full agency to let the impulses created by the larp’s social dynamics dribble out. We don’t play as individuals but as a collective.

    A person holding another person down while another watches on, with a fourth person staring at the camera House of Craving (2019). Photo by Bjarke Pedersen.

    As the larp ends, we gather in the ritual room. The atmosphere is hysterical, people falling to pieces all over the place. Yet as a player it doesn’t feel dangerous at all. Quite the opposite: It feels like a place where you can safely allow the expressions of the experience to flow through you.

    Huddling together, making the ritual hum, feeling it in our bodies, feeling our breath, voice, collective spirit start to tear as the gods Baphomet and Pan manifest. As players we know how this moment goes. We know the meaning of these choices on a game design level. We are mentally prepared to deal with the chaos even as it pulls at us from every direction.

    The larp has two endings, the Pan ending and the Baphomet ending. As a player you can choose which god to follow depending on the themes of your game experience. I followed Pan in a horde of people running to the mansion’s spa area, tearing our clothes off as we went, plunging into the pool.

    We’d had instructions that we should submerge ourselves in silence, without speaking or making a sound, and as we rose from the water we would be out of the game.

    This didn’t happen. Instead as all the followers of Pan were standing in the water we started screaming. I have no idea who started it but suddenly the sound was swelling from inside us in an impersonal collective furor, a meaningless, inhuman wall of noise echoing from the walls of the pool chamber. As we became exhausted by the sound we went underwater and out of the fiction.

    A person in jewels staring at a skull Inside Hamlet. Photo by Marie Herløvsen.

    War Stories

    The larp Inside Hamlet had a rule that after the game you were allowed to talk about your own experience but you shouldn’t talk about what other people were doing. It was okay to say: “I crawled and licked another player’s boots,” but not: “Gustav crawled and licked Annie’s boots.”

    The purpose of this rule is to enable people to play freely with kinky, dark, and extreme subjects without getting outed with non-players who might not understand the context. It’s a community safety mechanism making it easier for players to relax.

    This rule and other similar ones has left us with the result that these larps are often talked about in an euphemistic manner, eliding many of the more outré things that happen in them. Players talk about them face-to-face or in small, closed online groups.

    When it’s only one larp, it doesn’t matter too much, but it’s become a hallmark of the genre. From the outside they’re decidedly opaque, which is especially obvious if you’ve gone to them and witnessed the discrepancy between the reality and the discourse. This is why I chose to write this essay: I wanted to make an attempt at mapping the emotional landscape of these experiences in an open manner without undue coyness.

    Some of the larps mentioned in this essay, especially the bigger ones, feature complex, nuanced narrative elements. Conscience (2018-) modeled its storyworld on that of the TV series Westworld, and our End of the Line used a well-known role-playing game as its basis. Inside Hamlet is based on a famous play.

    A person looking at poetry near the corpse of a person with flowers on them
    Ophelia’s Funeral at Inside Hamlet. Photo by Bret Lehne.

    You can play each of those larps without engaging with the kind of sordid activities celebrated in this essay. Because of the breadth of their design, they can support many different kinds of playstyles.

    This is why I think that while the tendencies of this genre are present in each of those games, they reach their fulfillment in Baphomet and House of Craving. In a sense, these two are not larps of the mind at all. They function on a more primitive, submerged emotional level where the nuances of the fiction don’t matter nearly as much as the emotional landscape of a beautiful larp scene.

    Those moments of emotion are why I’ve played so many of these larps. Those and the warmth of their temporary, fleeting communities.

    Cover photo: A Stormguard and a Companion at Inside Hamlet. Photo by Bret Lehne.

    This article will be published in the upcoming companion book Book of Magic and is published here with permission. Please cite this text as:

    Pettersson, Juhana. “Terror and Warmth.” In Book of Magic, edited by Kari Kvittingen Djukastein, Marcus Irgens, Nadja Lipsyc, and Lars Kristian Løveng Sunde. Oslo, Norway: Knutepunkt, 2021.