Nordic Larp

Tag: Knutepunkt 2017

  • Telling Character Stories

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    Telling Character Stories

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    There are many ways to tell a character story. Nordic larp design often implies that characters are written by the larpwright(s). Relationships and turning points in character stories are set up from the start, often being part of the overall design of the larp. With authorship comes a certain degree of ownership and control over the character for the larpwright. The player who receives such a character, continues telling a story that someone else started and owns.

    German larp design mostly leaves it to the players to bring characters they created completely on their own. Characters belong to the player alone. The story belongs to the player and every larp (and every piece of downtime in ongoing campaigns) is another piece in an ongoing tale, which the player influences as she sees fit. Those characters live whenever and wherever the player decides and often collect years of relations, experiences and tales at numerous events.

    This article will explore the effects and implications of a self-written, player-owned character on different levels: How do larpwrights, organisers and game masters incorporate this kind of character into a game? What is the influence on design choices? As a counterweight to the German concept, the article will look into the character creation at College of Wizardry (Nielsen, Dembinski and Raasted et al., 2014-).((College of Wizardry is a weekend larp, depicting the school life at a college for witches and wizards in an alternate version of our current reality.)) Originating from a nordic tradition of pre-written characters, the rerunning larp now faces an increasing amount of characters that are player-written. It will become apparent why both plot-driven and character-driven larps can incorporate self-written characters and how this can enhance the individual player’s experience.

    1. The German Concept: Bring Your Own Character!

    1.1. Terminology

    Talking about “the German concept” of larp characters does not imply that there is only one way all characters are made. The German larp scene includes a growing variety of playing-styles. This article will, however, focus on the most common way of character handling that is typically assigned to German larp. From here on, I will work with the following definition of “the German concept”: A player comes up with a character idea independently from any larp. She developes a background story and traits based on the initial idea, as well as a costume and possibly even props. The character may or may not be attached to the backstory or world-setting of any larp ever played. Anything from using pen & paper inspired backgrounds, references to settings from novels and movies, to free floating ideas is possible. There is no corrective or norm to follow. The only limit that has to be taken into account is the genre of the larp the character is supposed to belong to. As most German larps can still be summed up as based in a “fantasy” setting in the broadest sense, that will be the reference frame for this article.((Considering plot, the roots in pen & paper show again: The setting of most larps is “fantasy,” ranging from low fantasy (most characters would be thieves, rogues, healers or knights, plots are about politics, justice and fighting the evil) to high fantasy (characters such as elves and other fantastic races get involved, plots are about demons, rituals, otherworldly menaces and evil witches and wizards, etc).)) The newly created character may take part in campaigns such as ConQuest((Commonly known as ConQuest of Mythodea, mostly referred to as Mythodea in the international scene.)) (Guess et al., 2016) and Drachenfest (Schlump and Wolter et al., 2016) and may attend any other smaller larps of different campaigns, or events that are not associated with a campaign at all. There are no restrictions: any event can be attended with the same character, even if the different games do not refer to the same setting. The same character can be played in different campaigns.

    The word “campaign” is not used consistently in German larp. The biggest ongoing campaign is ConQuest of Mythodea, with three annual events, of which two add to the main plot.((ConQuest being the main event. Jenseits der Siegel serves as a prequel to this. Chroniken von Mythodea is set in the same world-setting and loosely tied to the plot of the main event.)) But “campaign” is also used to describe a loose assemblage of larp settings. Among various, one is well established in Germany: The so-called Mittellande Kampagne. (Deutscher Liverollenspiel-Verband, [date unknown]) This “campaign” works as a giant sandbox. Depicting a fantasy world, it contains various fictional countries, that vary in politics, population, and subgenres. Over the course of years, many larp organisers have established plotlines that tell the story of a freely scalable part of the fictional continent and uncounted one shot larps have been played in this setting. Other campaigns exist under this definition, but are less frequently played upon. (Larp Wiki, 2106) In this article, the term “campaign” refers to events like ConQuest of Mythodea and, to add another European example, Empire in the UK.

    Nevertheless, the very structure of the Mittelande Kampagne reflects the German approach to characters and their stories: It creates an environment, in which players have a huge variety of options on which larp to play next with one character and thus determining how the story continues, while the setting remains vaguely consistent as a bonus to the consistency of the character story.

    1.2. Roots of the “German Concept”

    In contrast to Eirik Fatland’s assertion that nordic larp has its roots in psychodrama (Fatland, 2016), larp in Germany emerged quite firmly from the pen & paper gaming tradition. Presumably the first German larp-like events took place in the late 1980s. The first event which is acknowledged to meet the definition of a larp in Germany and was directed at a public audience took place in 1991 under the name Dracon 1. (Neupert, 2002)

    Coming from a gaming tradition, early German larps were heavily regulated by rule systems, which defined what a character could do with a certain amount of experience. As the active larp scene developed simultaneously in different parts of the country, a number of rules systems were published, none of which achieved a leading position across Germany.((Prominent rule systems were among others: DragonSys, Phoenix-Carta, Silbermond, That’s live. As German larp develops away from the gamist approach of the early days, WYSIWYG “rules” now mark a majority of the games held. (Bolle, 2010))) What they had in common was a game-like structure: Skills were bought with experience points, which were gained by attending a larp. The aim was to translate pen & paper rules to a playable and practical framework for larp. Even the conversion between different rulesets was regulated,((Most larp organisers offering a set of “house rules” on how to convert your character from one system to another.)) enabling players to attend more events with the same character. Attending many larps was, save few exceptions, the only way to get to play a powerful, capable character. As previously stated, this collection of experience points could extend over campaigns and stand alone events alike. The amount of experience points that a character would receive after a larp depended on the duration of the event: One day at the larp was rewarded with a fixed amount of points. The skills and power had to be earned over actual years. Personal and systematic progress of the character went hand in hand.

    Today, the strict obedience to rule systems is broadly abandoned. Although many events still o cially follow a rule system, the rules have less influence on the actual game, which mostly shifts to a variation of WYSIWYG, called “you are able to do, what you are able to depict.”((“Du kannst, was du darstellen kannst,” commonly referred to as “DKWDDK.”))

    1.3.Practical: Implications, Influence on Design, Problems and Solutions

    1.3.1. Prerequisites: Players “versus” NPCs

    From the first events up until now, German larp has developed many forms of organisation and structure. Again, to make the case more clear, I will refer to the best known and widest spread structure, which is also typically connected to the fantasy setting. The larp is run by organisers and a rather big amount of non-player characters (NPCs), aiming at a 1:2 ratio between players and NPCs. The NPC roles vary in quality and importance, but altogether, they drive the plot.

    Because the characters don’t come along with a backstory that is inherently connected to the plot, they cannot be used to trigger events. This task falls completely to the NPCs as “tools” of the organisers, creating circumstances that push events forward. Characters and players alike start the larp with very little knowledge about the plot. Their task is to engage in play with NPCs, who carry information about the current in-game situation and try to manipulate the characters for their own advantage, give them mysteries to solve or help them in doing so. They can depict conflicting parties, which try to pull the players’ characters to either side. In general, NPCs are used to make the setting of the larp “come to life.” Dramatic escalation or factors such as time pressure to solve a plot are communicated in-game through NPCs. Depending on the game designers’ choice, NPCs can help move the plot forwards when it is at risk of being derailed by the players.

    1.3.2. Challenges for Organisers and Game Designers

    Along with this concept of character creation and ownership come a lot of challenges and implications for every party involved in a larp. Game designers and organisers certainly face the most of them. How can you create a plot, not knowing who will be there to take part in it? There are basically two ways to solve this challenge: One is to adjust the game as far as possible to the characters, which is mostly done for smaller events with up to 50 participants on the player side (e.g. Verushkou—Si vis Pacem, Bad Monkeys Crew, 2016). The second option is to let the characters adjust to the game, which has proven to be a good strategy for larger events, like ConQuest and Drachenfest.

    1.3.3. Know Your Players

    To gather information about the characters that will take part in the larp, many organisers combine the signup with the option to send in information about the background and special skills of the characters. This serves the purpose of identifying significant gaps between the planned plot and the set of people to solve it. Organisers get the chance to adjust their plans according to their audience and create personalized, small scenes for each player. This may be an individual in-game arrival to the site, during which players meet an NPC that in some way refers to their character’s background. It may also be a dream or vision scene during the game that picks up on personal plot hooks which the players gave to the organisers at sign up, intertwining the character’s story and the story of the larp. Less frequently, organisers design (side)-plots especially for the characters that have been announced to the game.

    Another influence of gaming tradition can be found in the “character check-in” and “check-out.” This used to be a standard procedure at German larps but has been dropped by many organisers over the course of years. During check-in, organisers go through the written character sheet and check if skills and experience points match and list up the items that a character brings to a larp. The check-out awards the character with new experience points and documents the new status on owned in-game items. The thorough, written documentation of the character makes it easier to switch between campaigns and settings.

    Although all these tactics give designers an idea of which characters are at their games and gives them the opportunity to a certain extent to tailor plot to groups, working with player-written characters does have the effect of disconnecting larp designers from their players.

    1.3.4. Beat Them with Mass

    If an event surmounts a certain size, it becomes undoable to adjust plot personally for each player. The challenge is met by offering a main plot for a certain set of characters, assuming that a fitting constellation will show up and/or that players will steer their characters towards the plot. Additionally, these events offer smaller side-plots. Those are designed for character types that will most likely not become involved in the main course of action and focus more on character game rather than following the more epic setup of the main plot. For example, a main plot could be “reconstruct an ancient magic machine to ward off a powerful demon” while a side-plot about “find out who stole the midwife’s healing herbs” happens. In events that reach a capacity of 1.000 and more players, again like ConQuest and Drachenfest, a part of the larp turns itself into a sandbox.

    1.4. German Character Concepts: An Epic Journey

    The process of writing characters is surprisingly badly structured and supported in Germany. Knowledge about how to create an interesting and functional character is not spread across players and most larp organisers don’t proactively support character creation for their players. It is assumed that players attend the larp with characters that are ready to be played. The responsibility for the playability of a character lies completely with the player.

    For creation, most players deduct from pen & paper experience. For example, they work with sets of questions that a player may answer about their character, determining background and traits, incorporating topics such as religious beliefs, biggest dreams and fears, turning points in life and so on.((Such as the sourcebook of the German pen & paper system Das Schwarze Auge, widely known in the German larp community (Römer, 2007, p. 294).))

    This process of creation leads to a set of recurring stereotypes((“My parents were killed by Orcs” has turned into a running gag in the German larp community. Additionally, many character stories are set up according to the archetype of the “Hero Quests.”)) and a huge amount of character stories that are very similar to begin with. The lack of originality in character stories leads to the common conception that telling another player your character background story is considered bad style both in-game and off-game. This does however not apply to telling the stories that make the character an original person, based on larps that have been played. The sharing of “war stories” around a campfire is an inherent part of German fantasy larp which is valued by many players as a part of what makes the spirit of a good game. The unoriginal starting point is kindly disregarded for the sake of stories that are truly unique because they were actually played out.

    The focus of character creation is not on making up a deep, highly dense and well designed character, but more about generating a starting point from which the player can immerse into the larp straight away, letting the course of events and the relationships that develop shape who the character is. This aspect of actually co-creating a character during the game is not unlike the process of creating character relations that takes place before a College of Wizardry run.

    1.5. Effects on Player and Playing Style

    Owning and playing a character in the long run also has various effects on the player side. These cover a broader range of categories. Starting on a practical level, one may assume that players planning on playing the same character across several events are more willing to put effort and money into costume and props. It can be argued that the longer a character is played, the higher the identification between player and character becomes.

    The longer a character story is being told, the more chances arise to form the picture of a natural person, including bad decisions, traumatic experiences, successes, romances, friendships and so on. Characters that have been played over years can grow to be a part of their player. They go through a development that may resemble the actual personal development of their player. “War stories” that a character experienced are told both in-game and off-game.

    Consequently, the death of a character is a highly important event to most players that is thoroughly planned to make it a memorable moment that is “worth it.” Players steer their character towards not dying on most of the larps they attend: They are less prone to take lethal risks to not end the story ahead of time, so for example, they may engage in physical conflict, but not without regard to their own safety. In this, the element of literally having leveled up a character with experience points over years certainly plays a part.

    2. College of Wizardry — A Sandbox for Your Character

    The College of Wizardry larps offer another perspective on how character stories can be told and fitted into the design of a game. There are two parallel developments to be observed with CoW: First, the opening of the initial setup from mandatory pre-written characters to opt-in pre-written characters and secondly, players extending the stories of their pre-written characters beyond the larp. Both developments are supported by the CoW game design.

    2.1. Nordic Concept: Pre-written Characters

    Locating CoW larps as a middle ground requires a look at the Nordic end of the scale. Just as for the “German concept,” there is no such thing as “the Nordic larp.” The applied approach to “Nordic concept” in this article will follow the idea of what is commonly perceived as “nordic” in the German larp community: Many nordic larps tell a standalone story not situated in a campaign. Characters are often pre-written by the game designers, including at least a basic setup for relations and personal character goals during the game. The characters are usually connected in a way that allow a low ratio of NPCs to players.((Of course, the defining aspects of a “Nordic larp” extend these parameters by far and it can be argued if there is a thing such as “the” Nordic larp.))

    In this setting, the game designers have a lot more potential influence on how the story of the larp will unfold. By retaining control of the characters, they can insert breaking points and levels of escalation beforehand by anchoring characters in relations and background stories. It’s possible to create a more coherent design, reflecting themes and moods in different elements such as plot, set design, props, and characters. The designers access and influence all layers of the game (Stenros 2014). The player takes part in someone else’s narrative, in which the character plays a fixed part.

    Opposed to that, the German concept means that a player continues to tell their own, independent character story in the framework that the larp provides.

    The more detailed the relations between characters are predesigned and the more their actions and goals during the larp are predetermined, the better drama and escalation can be anticipated and again be incorporated in the overall design. Games which follow this form are consequently much more characterthan plot focused.

    It can be argued that a pre-written character story, including connections to others, produces a higher level of drama at a larp than a self-written, unconnected character would experience. The fact that the nordic narrative is often more carefully crafted does not necessarily mean that it turns out as planned. Relationships and storylines that develop on the spur of the moment during a larp can be just as powerful as predetermined developments.

    2.2. Practical: Creating a College of Wizardry

    2.2.1. Design and Balancing of a Sandbox

    College of Wizardry is designed as a sandbox larp. Handing out characters that are only roughly sketched out, is a very different approach than predetermining every connection and in fact, the whole game is set up to give the players the biggest possible amount of freedom both in their playing style and with the topics they want to play on.

    “The larp will not fail because a certain character is played differently than it is written; it will just mean that different stories are created. This is important. Your character is your own.” (Raasted, Nielsen and Dembinski et al., 2014, p. 19)

    CoW follows a number of design choices that enable both self-written and pre-written characters and even allow the combination of the two concepts in one larp. Similar to the plot driven German larp that has been discussed so far, the key element for CoW is to give the players broad freedom in choosing the focus of their game.

    How a certain run of CoW turns out very much depends on how much players indulge into the co-creating aspect of the design. The larp offers both the space and time for different playing styles to coexist. No matter how many demon summonings go on in the dungeon, the college drama can still be gossiped about in the common rooms (Nielsen, 2016). Although the focus of character stories shifts from run to run, the overall framework that ties the larp together will still work.((Events that are fixed in time and place, such as lessons, school gatherings, and the Saturday night ball etc.))

    In a plot driven German concept larp, a lot of how well the larp goes depends on balancing the different kinds of characters. That can be done by announcing the larp to be mainly aimed at a specific group (rogues and thieves etc.) or adjusting the plot to the characters that actually attend, as described earlier. The individuals have a high impact on the game. Opposed to that, the structure of CoW is focused on groups and collectives. The College has to work as a whole and the Houses have to work as ingroups for their members. (Jankovic Sumar, 2016)

    This is achieved by a few, but effective fixed balancing factors at CoW: The large majority of players play students. Special roles such as headmaster, teachers, janitor and prefects are assigned by the organisers.((This may seem to be understood, but would not necessarily be in a German larp, where there is no given limit to how many kings and queens of made up realms may show up to an event.)) To make the collectives and groups at CoW work, players have to stick to the Houses and years their characters are assigned to. Whereas the design can take an excess of rich snotty students, evil characters or any other kind of personal alignment, it could not handle one missing House or a school in which no Juniors exist, because the game dynamic evolves around the interaction of Houses on a vertical and years of students on a horizontal layer. The design of CoW as a college eventually unites all individual characters due to the fact that they are all students in the first place. And in this, they are all the same and part of the same collective. (Jankovic Sumar, 2016)

    2.2.2. Character Creation

    After three runs, CoW went through a thorough redesign, removing all Harry Potter references and setting up a whole new background for the larp. What remained was the choice to hand out pre-written characters, which left vast options for individual interpretation and design by the players. (Again: “Your character is your own.” Raasted, Nielsen and Dembinki et al., 2014) Laid out as an international larp from the very start, CoW had to incorporate a broad culture of players. Openly created characters enabled various interpretations and playing styles. (Nielsen, 2016)

    The pre-written characters for CoW have never been balanced on a scale of royals and rebels, werewolves and hunters or other factions represented in the student body. Starting with a very diverse team of character writers and trusting the self balancing power of large groups as well as the natural inclination of players to aim for different styles, the organisers of CoW did not actively adjust characters to balance the game for the first five runs. (Nielsen, 2016)
    Relationships to other characters were suggested on an abstract level which fitted the character. For example, a bookworm would be suggested to find study partners, a dashing duellist would be proposed to assemble a group of fans. The characters were written action-focused, giving agencies for all kinds of play (Nielsen, 2016). Accordingly, suggestions for “things to do at the larp” were listed as inspirations to enhance the playing experience.

    The option to bring a self-written character was not proactively advertised, but was allowed by the organisers on personal request. For the very first run, organisers put a lot of effort into developing characters together with the players, which turned out to be impossible to uphold with the increasing feedback they received from outside the player community as the popularity of CoW grew. (Nielsen, 2016)

    One element of design, however, was written into the characters in order to set the tone for the larp. CoW was designed to be fun experience but also a serious larp, so most characters came with a “darker tone and atmosphere.” (Nielsen, 2016)

    For run 10, which is upcoming by the time this piece is written, the option to bring a self-written character has been incorporated into the signup form. A 50/50 division between preand self-written characters is expected for that run (CoW 10, Casting Document, 2016). Many players who’ve previously played with pre-written characters now opt to return with characters they’ve created on their own (CoW 5, Casting Document, 2016). It can be argued that this degree of opening up the sandbox even further is possible because of two factors: the mood of CoW has been successfully established and settled in numerous runs. And a huge part of players keep returning, carrying on this spirit both through their own depiction of their characters and actively helping newcomers and first time larpers to adjust to the setting (Nielsen, 2016). Foremost, this means to pass on the idea of creating an action-focused character and encouraging the creation of character relations.

    The combination of both the design focus on collectives rather than individuals and the strong player community enable CoW larps to not only incorporate self-written characters, but merge them with a set of pre-written ones.

    2.2.3. Telling CoW Character Stories — Extending the Game

    The organisers choice to hand over creative ownership of the characters to the players worked well for a large group of participants. As the runs proceeded, an increasing amount of online pre-game took place. Events leading up to the larps were played out in Facebook groups and chats and collaborative fiction. The social online platform “Czochabook”((“Czochabook; an in-game social media platform in which players sign up in-character. The platform mirrors a Facebook-style format and is thus immediately familiar and accessible to most players who choose to engage.” Ashby, Charlotte: Playing around the Event: The College of Wizardry pre-game and postgame, in this book)) served as a tool for characters to stay in touch and forward their plots (Mertz, 2016). After several games, uno cial spin offs were held,((The Debauchery Party, 2015 To hell and back, 2016, CoW5: A Midwinter Night’s Dream, 2016.)) continuing to tell character stories.

    For example, for a group of around 28 people, a story arc developed that started with pre-game before CoW5, extending to the spin off larp To hell and back after CoW5 had taken place, and ongoing text based role-playing up to CoW8, which was set up as a sequel to CoW5 and CoW6 (Jankovic Sumar, 2016). On the final event, most of the character stories of that specific group were led to some kind of resolution. The overall feeling was that they had now been told to a point at which the players could find closure.

    This dynamic developed due to the fact, that in the course of intense prebleed (Svanevik and Brind, 2016), bleed and immersion, the members of this group created not only an individual character story each, but a complex network of social connections that shifted and grew throughout the process.

    This development was heavily favoured by the action-focused design of the characters in the first place. Starting from pre-written characters, the intensity of the experience lead the players to embracing their characters as their own creations and they tasked themselves with telling their stories in the best (most dramatic, immersive and intense) way possible. Whilst this development in general resembles the German concept in so far as that the storylines evolved over a number of events, there are significant differences. A CoW character cannot be played outside the CoW setting and it is not possible to bring a character from any other larp campaign into the game. Instead of “just” attending more larps with one character, the players of CoW created events, plots and life for their characters outside the hands of the organisers.

    3. Conclusion

    At first sight, the difference between the German concept of character creation and storytelling on the one side, and the nordic-inspired approach of College of Wizardry seem to bear a lot of differences. Having taken a closer look, it has become apparent that both concepts enable players to take control over their character’s stories and the option to play them longer, either moving one character from larp to larp, or extending the story of one larp with pre-games, spinoffs and sequels. Both mechanics create high identification between player and character and thus intense immersion during the game.

    Both a self-written German character and a pre-written CoW character start as sketches that are designed to allow an action-focused, immediate start into a larp, where they can grow and develop during the game and in interaction with other characters. A part of that process is put before the game for CoW, where players create relations before the game, online and in workshops. As both design and player community favour the incorporation of self-written characters, CoW has successfully opened up to this character concept.

    In essence, the German concept and College of Wizardry prove that there are (at least) two core strategies to design larps for self-written characters: One is to adjust the larp to the characters, focusing plots on their backgrounds and skills and giving the characters a strong guidance towards a determined goal. The second one is to do much the opposite: Let the individual characters play freely in a sandbox, where they will be re-collected regularly in various collectives that frame the experience.

    Giving players freedom to run their own characters and play them over time—through pre-game or several events—has a chance to make them identify more strongly with their characters and immerse more deeply, even if the character only started out as a list of traits or two paragraphs on a character sheet. The war stories they tell are real, in a sense, not just written as background story. As they play the same character again and again (on Czochabook, in co-creative fiction or across events) they experience, grow, learn, and create stories that are much deeper than what you may find at a stand-alone event with no pre-game.

    Bibliography

    Personal Communication

    • Fatland, Eirik. A New History of Live Role-playing. Talk. Solmukohta: 11/03-2016
    • Jankovic Sumar, Edin. Email interview. [held 16/10-2016]
    • Nielsen, Charles Bo. Email interview. [held 17-Oct-2016]

    Ludography

    • Bad Monkeys Crew, Verushkou 2—Si vis Pacem. Strange Land e.V. 2016 [date of access 01/11-2016] http://www.strange-land.de/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=225&Itemid=99.html
    • Deutscher Liverollenspiel-Verband e.V., Mittellande Kampagne. [date of access 25/102016] http://www.mittellande.de/
    • Geuß, Fabian et. al., ConQuest of Mythodea. Germany: Live Adventure Event Gmbh. 2016 [date of access 30/10-2016] http://www.live-adventure.de/ConQuest/start.php
    • Geuß, Fabian et. al., Jenseits der Siegel. Germany: Live Adventure Event Gmbh. 2016
    • Geuß, Fabian et. al., Chroniken von Mythodea. Germany: Live Adventure Event Gmbh. 2016 [date of accessed 30/10-2016] http://kampagnenspiel.live-adventure.de/StartSeite
    • Mertz, Thomas. Kin. 2016 [date of access 25/10-16] http://getkin.org/
    • Moisand, Alexis, Alissa Murray, Sarah Verbisky and Ben ‘Books’ Schwartz. CoW5: A Midwinter Night’s Dream. 2016
    • Nielsen, Charles Bo, Dracan Dembinski and Claus Raasted et al. College of Wizardry. Poland: Liveform (PL) and Rollespillsfabrikken (DK), 2014-
    • Pennington, Matt et al., Empire. United Kingdom: Profound Decisions. 2016 [date of access 01/11-2016] http://www.profounddecisions.co.uk/empire?3
    • Schlump, Fabian, Sandra Wolter et. al., Drachenfest. Germany: Wyvern e.K.. 2016 [date of access 30/10-2016]. http://www.drachenfest.info/df/index.php
    • Skjøns ell, Aina, Martine Svanevik, Ingrid Storrø and Charlotte Ashby. To Hell and back. Oslo, Norway: Valkyrie Larp. 2016
    • Skjøns ell, Aina and Charlotte Ashby. CoW 3 Mini Spinoff: Two Parties. Copenhagen, Denmark: Valkyrie Larp. 2015

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

    Cover photo: Osmond von Bar, leader of the Heereswacht, during battle. Conquest of Mythodea 2016. (Play, Holger Sommer)

  • Reply to Martine Svanevik

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    Reply to Martine Svanevik

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    Disclaimer: The opinions expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Nordiclarp.org or any larp community at large.

    This text is a reply to a response from Martine Svanevik to an earlier text by Charles Bo Nielsen.

    First thing I will address is the point of freedom for a murder mystery larp.

    First of all I would look at the design and see how I could work around it. I would argue it is to fragile a larp design if it can fall about from characters making change. The best mystery larp I ever played was “Sankt Elisabeth,” which was a haunted hospital, where we had to explore the rooms for clues and hints. The main antagonist of the larp was revealed through the larp and not through the background story of the characters. The stuff you shouldn’t change was the actual clues in the hospital. The characters all had relations to people who had died at the haunted hospital, but these relations was build up through play with NPC ghosts of former patients. The true brilliance came from the design being so steady, I and another player was 45 minutes late to the larp and got a shorter briefing and got introduced later to the larp, but it didn’t effect the experience that much, because we still got to explore through the hospital to find clues and meet up old patients.

    Had we had super tightly written characters, with a near scripts like part of story bits we needed to reveal from our backstory to the other characters, all sorts of things could have gone wrong and often does in horror/psychological thriller larps.

    Long answer short: Challenge yourself as a designer and work around it. Make a horror larp, not horror movie.

    Martine Svanevik points out there are two solutions if there are not carefully crafted character plots. Either independent plots with no direct ties to characters or a transparent design, so everyone can share and follow the changes they do. I had a great conversation about the claiming that transparent design leaves no room for surprise in the larp with a Russian larp designer Di Villiers about this at GNiales. It is all about getting that “aha! moment”—which for Svanevik and Di Villiers is when a intricate string of neatly folded surprises are revealed. But the “aha! moment” also happens in a very open transparent larp. In a open design larp you put out lots of ideas and plan with your co-players, when suddenly you create the great larp moments, you only put out as dreams, not by a well planned and playout script, but by everyone coming together and playing each other up to reach those strong immersive moments we all play larp for. The payoff for feeling that you as a player achieved greatness is just as rewarding if not more as getting it served on a silver platter.

    “Reacting dynamically to unexpected events” I would say is quite an romanticisation of railroaded larps. While I will acknowledge that it is a goal that is often achieved, I also often end up in a situation where it feels to be constructed or that I can see it coming before it happens. With a more natural story developed through play during the larp, you actually have no idea where the larp will take you. But with a railroaded experience—and especially if you know the creators—you start to realise the patterns, even more so if you are also a designer yourself.

    Then Svanevik brings up: “players have a tendency to repeat the same tropes.” This I believe to be a very valid critique. Because it is very true that with little external control, we will end up falling back to default ideas and positions, pursue the story we think we want, rather than the story someone else might have in store for us. So if you design your larp with much player freedom in mind or you play a larp like this, be aware of the tropes and challenge yourself to rethink your ideas and not go with the first and the best thing that pops into mind. And as organisers help player creativity along, through workshops, preparing for the larp, teach them something new about society, culture or play styles, so they get new impressions they can get inspired by.

    As a larp designer you should help your players see the potential of your larp and together go beyond and above, what would be possible if only one part did all the creative work.

    Ludography

    • Kaoskompaniet., Sankt Elisabeth. Kaoskompaniet. Denmark: 2013.

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

  • Response to Charles B. Nielsen

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    Response to Charles B. Nielsen

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    Disclaimer: The opinions expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Nordiclarp.org or any larp community at large.

    This text is a response to an earlier text by Charles Bo Nielsen. He has in turn written a reply to this text.

    I agree with many of the suggestions Charles B. Nielsen makes in Loyalty to Character. It is true that larps do not follow a script, that even if you write a character for a certain player, that player may pull out at the last minute. What sounds like fun play for a character writer may not be fun for the person playing the part, and any game may take an unexpected turn. As a larp designer, it is therefore tempting to go down Nielsen’s route, to say: “your character is your own, make of it what you will.” But does this approach make for a better larp? Or a better experience for the players?

    From a designer’s perspective, this open approach to character writing seems to work best for loosely designed, sandbox style games. When you have a specific story in mind, with a set of characters and relations, every player cannot change as much of their character as they want. Take a murder mystery, for example. In order for the drama to be intense, each character must have a connection to the victim and a reason to want them dead. The players may not know who the victim will be before the game starts, so if you allow each of them to change whichever part of their character they want, the mystery may fall to pieces on day one.

    There is beauty in a carefully crafted plot where snippets from a character description comes into play during a game, where each character plays a small part in a larger story. Although most larps do not—and arguably should not—run on rails, there is a particular joy in being surprised at a twist in a story you did not know you were an integral part of. Giving players complete control over the characters requires game designers to either craft plots that are independent from characters—which is a great loss, if you ask me—or to design games that are played with open cards so that every player knows the ramifications of any change they make. This second approach removes the opportunity to surprise players by in-game turns of events. By releasing control of character creation, the designers leave it to players to build their own stories, plots and relation networks to a much larger degree than in a more tightly designed game. This will naturally favour those players who enjoy and are adept at building and sustaining such networks and who enjoy building their own stories, rather than reacting dynamically to unexpected events.

    In addition, it is a known truth that left to our own devices, players have a tendency to repeat the same tropes. A player with a penchant for drama will almost always end up bleeding, broken and crying alone in the dark. A player who loves experiencing the rise to power might turn even a mild-mannered romantic into a power-hungry, machiavellian mastermind. I’m not saying that this doesn’t happen when players are asked to play parts as written, or even that changing characters is a bad thing, but complete freedom means that there’s no external push to try something new. Larping offers such opportunities to try on new roles and experiences, but sometimes you need to be offered a part you did not know you would enjoy playing in order to experience it.

    If you always get to build your character, you might subconsciously end up playing the same game over and over.

    I’m not against character steering. Sometimes it is necessary to step out of a game and change direction. The shortfalls in Nielsen’s approach is that it limits the types of stories game designers can tell, and that it removes the external push for players to try something new. In Nielsen’s games, I suspect many of the players will end up telling the same story over and over and, more importantly, that the stories they tell will be player-written and player-controlled.

    Nielsen is right when he writes that “the idea to take a character sheet and change as much of it as you want is alien to many larpers and it requires a shift in both player mentality, and in larp design.” I am just not sure if this shift is the right choice for every player and every game. Any larp designer wanting to employ Nielsen’s character design needs to be aware of the knock on limitations in terms of the game they can write, and any player going to such a game needs to be aware that by owning their character’s past, they also need to own that character’s future.

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

  • Loyalty to Character

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    Loyalty to Character

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    Disclaimer: The opinions expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Nordiclarp.org or any larp community at large.

    Ask not what you can do for your character, ask what your character can do for you?

    The Problem

    I have worked with character creation for many years and making characters fit both the larp and the players at the same time has always been a struggle. The player of the character might change, new ideas for relations pop up down the road, how the player understands the character might be completely different than what you had thought. The larp is most likely going to develop in a direction you were not able to predict, because that is what larps do. They do not follow a script, they adapt, they bend, twist and turn. Some smaller, heavily scripted larps, might have a certain amount of control over the characters and players, but the bigger the larp, the less you can predict or control the course of the action. So instead of insisting to try and keep tabs on everything, work with the character as a starting point, not a script for a character you need to play out like in a theatre. It is your character and your experience that matters.

    Some larps introduce workshop-created characters to get the player involved at an early stage in and allow designers and players to collaborate to create a shared vision of the character and that solves many problems. I think an easier solution is a change in player mentality. With both College of Wizardry (Nielsen, Dembinski and Raasted, 2014-) and Fairweather Manor (Boruta, Raasted and Nielsen et al., 2015) we tried to communicate that characters were meant to serve as inspiration for the players, not a chain around their necks. We told players explicitly that they were free to change what needed to be changed so the character could fit the experience they as players sought from the larp. Obviously while still being mindful of others and communicating with their co-players. But the idea to take a character sheet and change as much of it as you want is alien to many larpers and it requires a shift in both player mentality, and in larp design. In this article, I’ve outlined my thoughts on how you as a player should approach your characters, not to tell the story the organisers envisaged, but to make the characters your own and through that create the most amount of game.

    You Are Not an Actor

    Larp is not acting, there is not a tightly written script you have to read out aloud where every part of your character’s journey is dependent on you staying entirely true to your character. Larps are (mostly) dynamic and flexible, stories and actions are (mostly) improvised. For your character to always function in this exercise of mass improvisation, your character needs to be flexible as well.

    We Wrote the Character for You!

    Now, when I advise you to only stick to the character for as long as it works, it is not because I want you to disregard the tireless work of character writers, but because the designers wrote the character for you to have a good experience. Be aware of when it stops working, when you start crying not due to: “talking about your sister’s suicide while peeling potatoes in the mud”((Knudepunkt TV video (Thank you Karolina and Stina): A journey in to Swedish larping”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TyrLndFJBfs)) but because you as a player feel stuck. You have very likely been there yourself; the character just did not make sense, either for you or with the direction that the larp had taken your character. Realise and adapt.

    When I sat in the organiser room of CoW and Fairweather Manor, I met players crying their eyes out because they didn’t know what to do, they were simply unable to act out their character and have a good experience at the same time. This is a moment to “CUT,” “BRAKE,” and “STOP.” Take a deep breath and sit down, and ask yourself: “What do I as a player want to experience at this larp, why did I come here in the first place?” When you have figured that out, try figuring out how to get there.

    My advice is always to consider this before going to a larp. Spend time acknowledging why you want to play a specific larp and a specific type of character, to adapt your expectations to when you meet the larp. If you do not know what you want, then try something you would find enjoyable in other larps—being it eating cakes or drowning people in a lake (I’m not here to judge). Do it. Just do it. After you have done it as your character, try and rationalise why: “I just did this, what the fuck just happened?.” This also happens in the real world, sometimes we just do something stupid we never wanted to do, and then afterwards we try to rationalise it. It works perfectly fine in real life, so it can in larp too. Real people don’t consider everything they do: they do stuff. Often it takes a while before they realise why they did it. This is a perfect excuse to change directions for your character at a larp. Use it.

    Contradictions Are Interesting

    You see it all the time in real life, and in fiction. When someone contradicts their own beliefs or actions, it can make for interesting storytelling. So whenever you ask yourself: “What would my character do?,” also ask: “What would my character never do?” Then ask yourself as a player, what would be the most interesting story? The protective knight that lost his temper and beat up the beggar on the street, the thief that returned the stolen goods, the doctor who ended up killing his patient, the enemies who suddenly became best friends? Sometimes playing against stereotypes can provide better stories and more intense experiences than playing a character as written.

    Just like Falling in Love

    Think of it as falling in love. Sometimes we just do stupid shit for love. That is your motivation. Now ask yourself, what or who is it that your character loves? Then do that stupid unthinkable thing to get closer to it. “My character do not fall in love,” well maybe you just did anyway? Or maybe you did something stupid to protect someone? Love is the perfect illogical explanation for lots of potential play. Again, obviously be mindful of your co-players, never use spontaneous love as an excuse to stalk someone you as a player like out-of-character. Use it to start new interaction and if you feel stuck with no direction for your character.

    “I Suddenly Remember All about This Trauma from My Past?”

    Remember your 1-10 pages of character is not a full life story. People who have written diaries as teenagers has hundreds of pages of dribble and if you read it all, there would still be more teenage angst to go. Maybe there was something that wasn’t mentioned in your character? Like in real life, you also suddenly remember something from your past, that gets triggered. This could also happen to your character. Be creative and don’t panic, there is almost always a way to get a back into a larp and mold a poor experience into a great experience. I have dozens of boring or just poor larp experiences, where I went out-of-character and went for a walk to reconsider my options, sometimes asking real life friends at the larp for help. If they are your friends, they would prefer you tell them of your struggles, than just try and brush it off, even if you interrupt five minutes of their weekend larp. Who knows, maybe they are also confused and together you can solve each other’s lackluster experience.

    Sharing Is Caring

    This brings us to yet another approach. Instead of thinking about what you as a player want, think about what you could do to enhance the experience of others. If someone else looks bored, try to play with them. It might so happen that they then do the same for you when you get bored. Maybe someone is trying to keep a secret? Expose it to everyone, see what happens. Maybe someone else wants to be beaten or wants to win, let them, others will mimic your collaborative play. Look outwards and become a playmaker for others. The best stories are created together and sometimes you can get a great experience yourself by delivering one for someone else. Maybe you can deliver someone’s poems or collect their taxes, maybe someone is sitting with to much to do and you can lift part of that burden. You might break ranks a bit or upset norms in the setting, but if someone is struggling with their position anyway, their experience might already suck, so breaking a bit of the immersion of hierarchy is often the lesser of two evils.

    Reinventing the Wheel

    I am not trying to reinvent the wheel, steering was a term introduced a few years ago at Knudepunkt. I strongly recommend you read: The Art of Steering by Markus Montola, Eleanor Saitta and Jaakko Stenros (2015). What I advocate is to actively steer your character. Take charge of your experience. It is even more important today, where you have likely gone to a larp in a foreign country that cost a fortune. Try one or more of the techniques I suggested above and if you’re in doubt, always come and ask the organisers, they might not know everything, but they could have a good idea on how you could adapt your character.

    Going Out-of-character

    There is a lot of debate about whether or not it is okay to leave character. In the 90s’, it was clearly considered the biggest achievement to stay in character as long as humanly possible. Today, things are changing, while immersion is still an important goal, we want to be more aware about consent and opting in / opting out. For you to be able to play with informed consent and be able to opt out, you need to on some level to feel comfortable with stepping out-of-character and asking your co-players “is this okay?” as well as saying: “NO!” (or “Yellow Penguin,” if that is the agreed safeword).

    Nordic larps often have safewords as a default, and creating comfortable off-game awareness can be done in different ways, which I am not going to go into in this article. What I can say is that when it works, it is usually quite easy to fall back into character, surprisingly easy in fact, at least in my experience, whenever someone takes you off-game. We always think that immersion is slowly being built up. I would argue it can be kickstarted. Think of when you watch a powerful movie, some movies take you right into the action with a single chord or one camera shot. I have experienced the same in larp. If you have doubts, go off-game and ask, and then agree on a way to reboot the scene and do it.

    Kickstarting Immersion

    There are many techniques you can use to kickstart immersion, most of which are inspired by methods from theatre and may require a bit of practice. At Fairweather Manor, playing the role of the butler required the player—Daniel Sundström— to go into the off-game room to get updates about the programme for the larp. Each time Sundström entered, he would do a specific modern hand gesture (Going out-of-character) and when stepping back into the larp he would stand up straight and take a deep breath as if he was about to jump into a swimming pool (Going into character.) What he did was giving physical signals to his body, when going from off to in-game. I recommend you find a distinct physical trait for your character, which you stop doing if you go out-of-character and restart doing as you try to immerse yourself. It can be a specific voice, a way to fold your hands, a tipping with your fingers, favouring one leg—you see it in movies all the time, the really immersive character have these physical traits that completely changes the actor.

    The Actor Daniel Day-Lewis is famous for the way he changes his physicality. If you watch a few of his movies in a row, you will notice that he almost always changes his jaw position when he acts to helps with accents and changing his facial structure. I’m not saying you need to be an Oscar level performer to larp, but let yourself be inspired by it.

    Generally what you want is very clear physical behaviour transformation and have some odd physical action while going out-of-character, making it clear for your mind and body, that you are leaving the magic circle.

    Another approach is setting a scene. Every player involved should agree, off-game, on who starts the conversation and then you jump in. It is best to pick a scene that is powerful and can get your adrenaline going, like a fight, running or going onto stage to perform. Demanding immediate action from your character turns the focus away from your “off-game self,” you focus on the task instead of your own thoughts. Basically, you want to distract your mind, it is a bit like trying to fall asleep, if you think too much about it, it only becomes harder.

    Lastly, music. If you are running a black box larp I strongly recommend using music or lights to signal immersion. Just like in a movie, using our senses can trigger us to get into character, out-of-character, or evoke emotional responses which are often a great distraction from off-game thoughts. This is also why black box larps can be so powerful in just one hour of play. It can get as intense in one hour as a weekend in a castle. Because just like a castle evokes emotional responses by having the smell, the feel and the look right—a well designed black box larp can play with your senses to empower immersion.

    We Can Negotiate Violence, Why Not Characters?

    At the Swedish boarding school larp about bullying, Lindängen (Elofsson and Lundkvist, 2016), my biggest regret was the scene I did not cut. It was a scene where one character was group pressured into slapping another character. It was a powerful scene, but the player doing the slapping was only giving “fake slaps” as the crowd shouted: “Hit harder,” “hit harder.” I could see the group pressure bleeding over from the character to the player as well. Fortunately, the player stood firm and did not escalate, but after the scene ended I realised that I should have said cut, stopped the scene and let us find a way to play up the intensity of the fake beating rather than playing it down.

    We make these realisations when it comes to scenes being too violent or intimate, and we agree to change them without blinking. We should give our characters the same courtesy. If something isn’t working, go off and agree with your co-players or organisers how to improve it. Worst case, you ruin one good scene but you save an entire larp experience.

    You can read a response to this text by Martine Svanevik here:
    https://nordiclarp.org/2017/02/21/response-charles-b-nielsen/

    You can read a reply from Charles Bo Nielsen to the reply here:
    https://nordiclarp.org/2017/02/21/reply-martine-svanevik//

    Bibliography

    Ludography

    • Nielsen, Charles Bo, Dracan Dembinski and Claus Raasted et al. College of Wizardry. Poland: Liveform (PL) and Rollespilsfabrikken (DK), 2014-.
    • Boruta, Szymon, Charles Bo Nielsen and Claus Raasted et. al., Fairweather Manor. Mozna, Poland: Dziobak Studios, Rollespilsfabrikken (DK) and Liveform (PL), 2015.
    • Elofsson, Alma and Mimmi Lundkvist. Lindängen International Boarding School. Organised by Alma Elofsson and Mimmi Lundkvist. Malmköping, Sweden: 2016.

     

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

  • Character-based Design and Narrative Tools in the French Style Romanesque Larp

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    Character-based Design and Narrative Tools in the French Style Romanesque Larp

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    We like to engage in larp through compelling and vivid characters. However, the available tools to create them are many and diverse: whether we go with short or detailed characters, give them a lot of background or just create a short frame for the players to develop, whether we leave the control of the story to the larpwright or give more leeway towards the player’s agenda. All of these approaches are tools that can be calibrated according to each designer’s purposes.

    France has in the past fifteen years enjoyed the development of its specific, character based, drama-oriented larp scene called the romanesque genre. With a heavy emphasis on character development and personal relationships, this type of game has garnered a huge, devoted following. Though it has been but recently documented (Choupaut, 2013; Algayres, 2016a), the romanesque scene has steadily evolved through almost two decades and developed some specific traits regarding game design.

    This article will endeavour to present the romanesque style larp in relation to other similar larp styles in Europe, and establish some tools we use to create characters and narration in this type of larps. The objectives are to expand both the knowledge about larp production in Europe and the narrator’s toolbox to create characters.

    What Is the French Style Romanesque Genre?

    An Overview of the Genre

    Harem Son Saat (play, Joram Epis) Harem Son Saat (play, Joram Epis)

    The romanesque term started being applied to games in 2010, by Frédéric Barnabé for l’Agonie du Poète (2010). However, that game was the last iteration of a long series of games coined as “emotional” or “dramatic,” which was almost as old as the practice of larp in the country. In its primary sense, romanesque means “which belongs to the realm of a novel,” a descriptive for dramatic events or actions. Therefore, it is used to describe games that are constructed as rich, narrative experiences, with pre-written characters whose rich backstory and psychology are the driving forces of the larp.

    Since then, the term has been appropriated to qualify many games following the same general features. While these features might still be debated, we have focused on the following traits (Algayres, 2016a):

    1. Focus on the character. Character creation is mostly in the hands of the organisers, and they will be very detailed, with a lot of intertwining backstory and built-in information.
    2. A huge impact of the past which explains the details in the character. The backstory gets a significant importance in building the potential for narration and the character’s psyche. Some elements might be kept secret, to be discovered for dramatic impact.
    3. An environment built as a microcosm. The diversity of characters serves as a means to establish the workings of society in the specific time and context of the game, which is why the romanesque usually love historically inspired settings.
    4. The use of narrative archetypes. Romanesque larps often draw inspiration from literary classics and embrace the romanesque genre’s common tropes as a means to drive narration.
    5. The dominance of tragedy, with character-based narrative integrating a lot of human drama, conflicts and character dilemma. This is not an absolute, though, some games advocate a lighter atmosphere or tragedy-comedy mix, such as Rêves d’Absinthe (Algayres and D’authie, 2011), or Prima La Musica (Primoot, 2016).
    6. Tightly-knit narrative arcs, which are meant to reach their climax during the game, with characters living out an exceptional destiny or a defining moment of their lives over the course of the game.
    7. A focus on the characters’ emotions and on each participant’s identification with their character, in the same manner as a reader identifies with a character in a work of fiction. Bleed may occur as a result of identification with the character.

    The generally recognised strength of these larps is that they provide a very rich, detailed frame, with complex characters thoroughly inserted in their context and network of relationships. However, as a significant part of the world, character-building and control of the story remains in the hands of the organisers. This type of larp places greater limitations on players’ agenda and freedom (in character selection and creation especially). This is usually a design choice that creators justify by that they are using it to enrich the overall story and narrative, to create more closely connected characters and potential for tight narratives and complex story arcs.

    The Historically Inspired Larp in France and in Europe

    While the term romanesque has been coined to describe a very specific sub-genre of French larp culture, we can observe games with similar intent in several other European countries. It is also interesting to see that we can find similar traits in the games in the historically inspired genre. History and larp have always worked well together, since “a historical larp can have a more interesting and challenging gameplay because of the richly faceted social situations history brings with it” (Salomonsen, 2003, p. 94). Game designers from all over Europe have had the opportunity to exploit the richness of history all the while retaining the creative licence to twist accuracy for practical or dramatic purposes, and we’ll quote some significant, but by no means exhaustive, examples.

    In Finland, historically-inspired larps are a part of the scene, with Viking history, the Victorian era, and Finnish history around the time of independence featured as time periods of interest. Finland, like France and for similar reasons, has had a tradition of long, very detailed characters, as the absence of workshops made it necessary to include a lot of information about the character’s psyche and environment in written form.

    An interesting example is provided by the Czech larp Skoro Rassvet (Haladová, Platir et al., 2013).((Whose international runs were organised in Denmark through the organisation Solhverv.)) Skoro Rassvet is a game set in 19th century Russia, heavily influenced by Russian literature and especially Tolstoy. The game is played in a day, with a half day of workshops, and the action takes place during a family gathering for a formal dinner. In its approach and objectives, this game would certainly have been dubbed romanesque in France. The character design, however, differed sensibly. The written material was relatively short by historical larp standards (less than half a dozen pages), and most of the character development was done during the workshops, essentially through social codes and rituals, and role-playing scenes from the past (Hampejs, 2015).

    Prima La Musica (play, Joram Epis). Prima La Musica (play, Joram Epis).

    Other examples from the obviously rich Czech scene include Salon Moravia (Bondy and Bondyová et al., 2104), set in a brothel during World War II, De la Bête (Pešta and Wagner et al., 2013), a super-production set in 18th century France, and Legion (Pešta and Wagner, 2015), which combines historical inspiration and hardcore larp in its depiction of a 1915 retreating military unit.

    Norway also has a significant historical larp scene, which used to be dubbed “stocking larps” (Stark, 2013). Norwegian historical larps were presented at the French convention Les GNiales with great interest (Hansen, 2014). They appeared as very rich, deeply layered productions, with high requirements for historical and costume accuracy which put them close to historical reenactment, and, in keeping with Nordic larp, bigger creative agenda for the players where the building of interactions and narrative arcs were concerned. Kjærlighet uten strømper [Love without Stockings] (Voje and Stamnestrø et al., 2004) can be mentioned as an example of the historical drama inspiration. The game, set during a wedding in 1771, presents its objective as a mix of intrigue, personal and societal drama, integrating significant amounts of conflict and romance.

    The rapidly blooming progressive scene in Italy, under the banner of the collective Terre Spezzate, has made several contributions to the historically inspired genre. I Ribelli della montagna [Rebels on the Mountain] (Capone and Bi , 2015) was a rich, vivid rendition of the last months of World War Two which got unprecedented media attention, support from A.N.P.I.—Associazione Nazionale Partigiani Italiani [National Association of Italian Partisans], and praise for its thoughtful and sensitive rendition of the conflict. Chiave di Volta [Keystone] (Tireabasso and Villa Avogadro, 2015), is a lush dramatisation of the 19th century centred around the theme of power, the possibility to play both masters and servants in a complicated power play, and a huge production value. Both of these productions have cleverly integrated design elements and techniques from Nordic larp (safety mechanics, workshops etc.) while retaining their own unique style, resulting in extremely well crafted larps.

    And of course, the blockbuster larp also ventured into the historical drama setting with Fairweather Manor (Boruta, Raasted and Nielsen et al., 2015), a larp set in Edwardian England and inspired by the hit TV-show Downton Abbey. While the brute force design proved partially unfit to cover the complexity of a multi-layered society (including diversity of age, rank and function), the game was effective in carrying over a lot of content and player-generated interactions. The first iteration of the larp warranted an unofficial spinoff, a second run and a sequel over the course of the following year.

    Back in France, the most recent larps of the romanesque genre have shown a clear ambition to expand on the genre and make it evolve for the better through the inclusion of those nordic style techniques whose use has become widespread in recent years (workshops, black box), keener focus on directing themes, and more refined work on the societal frame. Prima la Musica (Primoot, 2016) is a larp about the French opera scene of the 19th century, using opera-inspired dramatics and music both diegetically and non-diegetically through an open, black box system. Still Water Runs Deep (Ruhja, 2014) is a Jane Austen/Dickensian inspired larp with a sharp focus on class hierarchies and gender stereotypes, which was also played as a cross-gender experience, with participants praising the insight it gave them of the opposite genders’ constraints and problematics. Finally, Harem Son Saat (Algayres, 2016b) was the first international game of the genre, using English as a main language,((Which stood for Turkish in the 1913 Ottoman background, while French was in-game a diplomatic second language.)) built around the themes of oppression, gender segregation and culture shock.

    Therefore, while romanesque is solidly a French term, character-driven literary and historically inspired larps have by no means been limited to a single geographic area. The rich potential of history and its dramatisation has been widely exploited and feels still rich with great potential.

    Character Design and Narrations in the Romanesque Genre

    Archetypes in the Romanesque Genre

    Prima La Musica (play, Joram Epis). Prima La Musica (play, Joram Epis).

    Romanesque larps are character-centred games, with a significant part of the game design being devoted to the conception of the characters, all of them organiser-created. While length and composition of characters tend to vary from one larpwright to another, a couple of techniques can be pinpointed.

    The first one is what I’d like to call the smart use of archetypes. This is a very thin line to tread, as any overused archetype can become a cliché and damage the necessary suspension of disbelief. Let’s use an example. You might hear French players harp about the “switched at birth” plot, used as an ironic commentary on romanesque clichés, though, to my knowledge, it has rarely been used in the scene, except in the prohibition-game era Chicago. Illegitimate children and foundlings, however, are definitely a staple of the genre, but this is fitting to historical periods when children born out of wedlock had no status in society.

    Classic or archetypal plotlines or characters can be true to period, but also resonate with an audience of participants which has usually grown up learning and enjoying these stories. It has been argued that larp itself can be viewed as an incarnation of the monomyth, each participant’s experience echoing the traditional hero’s journey. (Hook, 2010, p.34)

    So how do we go about practicing the clever use of archetypes? In a romanesque setting, we consider all characters protagonists. Therefore, we’ll use archetypes to define them through several angles:

    • The inner nature of the character: the patriarch, the overbearing matron, the hotheaded, the cynic, the ingénue, the rebel. This is very basic and can turn cliché if the character is limited to the inner archetype.
    • Their contrast in relation to others (also called foil). This is particularly frequent in pairs or trios of characters, such as siblings, close friends, etc. You’ll have the optimist to the realist, the extrovert to the introvert, the by-the-rules personality against the rebellious type, etc. Foils are really useful because, through simple characterisation, they create a lot of potential for conflict between the characters.
    • Their position within a network of relationships and in relation to others. Each character is the participant’s protagonist, but can be another’s sibling, a third’s best friend, the romantic interest of a fourth, the antagonist to a fifth and so on.

    If we just use any archetype, a character stands a sure chance to become cliché, because its archetype will be instantly identifiable, and its characterisation weak. This is where several archetypes used in conjunction with the others become useful: the character becomes more layered, therefore more human. However, the archetypes at work can still have a universal meaning to participants, which makes them particularly effective.

    The Dual Approach in Character Design

    Another element of character design typical to the romanesque genre is what we call the dual approach. While it is by no means limited to the romanesque, it has also become typical of some of the games. The dual approach in character design is a combination of the following elements:

    • The initial approach: the character’s motif or raison d’être, their reason for being present. This can be accomplished through family ties, a function or specific job, a plot-related motif. This must answer the questions: why are they here? Why should they care? Why will they stay?
    • The final approach: what will the character’s potential arc be? What will be their greatest moment? It can be a reveal (hence the predominance of secrets in some larps), an epiphany, a staged grand scene, a necessary evolution, but an element (or several) which will make the character’s journey (and the participant’s experience) significant and meaningful.

    In a typical design, both of these approaches, as well as the archetypes at play, are handled simultaneously, as the character (and the network of characters) is constructed bit by bit. The final criteria is to analyse if the characters are playable, interesting, and enjoyable.

    The objective of this type of design is to provide the participant with potential for a rich story and interactions. Some games tend to follow a more streamlined route, and have even been criticised for railroading the character’s arc too much. However, most of these games definitely have a clear narrativist approach, only limited to what is coherent with the character’s context and psyche. For some time periods in history, these elements of context and the social pressure can really be played as antagonists of their own.

    Conclusion

    With more than ten years of established existence and a very rich history of diverse and celebrated games, the French style romanesque scene is certainly a prime example of a national scene which strives through its own specific identity, all the while getting enriched through contact with other genres and countries.

    Rêves d’Absinthe (post-game, Joram Epis).
    Rêves d’Absinthe (post-game, Joram Epis).

    Bibliography

    Personal Communication

    • Erlend Eidsem Hansen. Days of deeds, Nights of Myth— The Design tricks of Historic Larps in Norway. Les GNiales. Paris, France: Conference, 2014.

    Ludography

    • Algayres, Muriel and Abbaye d’Authie. Rêves d’Absinthe [Dreams of Absinth]. Ouroux, France: Association Rôle, 2011.
    • Algayres, Muriel. Harem Son Saat. Château de Cernay, France: Association Rôle, 2016b. http://www.assorole.fr/haremlarp-en/
    • Barnabé, Frederick. L’Agonie du Poète [The Poet’s Agony]. Joyeuse Castle, France: Association Rôle, 2010. http://agoniedupoete.fr/
    • Bondy, Radim, Veronika Bondyová, Jan Fiala, et. al. Salon Moravia. Brno, Czech Republic, 2014. http://www.pojd.name/salon/
    • Boruta, Szymon, Charles Bo Nielsen and Claus Raasted et. al. Fairweather Manor. Mozna, Poland: Dziobak Studios, Rollespilsfabrikken (DK) and Liveform (PL), 2015. http://www.fmlarp.com/
    • Capone, Andrea and Elio Bi . I Ribelli della montagna [Rebels on the mountain]. Villaggio delle Stelle, Italy: Terre Spezzate, 2015. http://www.grv.it/setteprincipati/item/424-home-ribelli.html
    • Haladová, Markéta, Petr Platil, Martin Buchtík, et. al. Skoro Rassvet [Breaking Dawn]. Translated by Jeppe Bergmann Hamming, Maria Bergmann Hamming. Odense, Danmark: Association Solhverv, 2103. http://rassvet.cz/
    • Pešta, Adam and David František Wagner et al. De la Bête. Valeč Castle, Czech Republic, 2013. http://www.delabete.cz
    • Pešta, Adam and David František Wagner et al. Legion : Siberian Story. Hvožďany, Czech Republic: Association Rolling, 2015. http://legion.rolling.cz/
    • Primoot Team. Prima la Musica ou L’Opéra Terrible [Prima la Musica or the Opera Terrible]. Montbraye Castle, France: Association Urbicande Libérée, 2016.
    • Ruhja Team. Still Water Runs Deep. Paris, France: Association Rôle, 2014.
    • Tirabasso, Chiara and Daniele Cristina Villa Avogadro. Chiave di Volta [Keystone], Biella, Italy: Terre Spezzate, 2015 http://www.grv.it/chiave
    • Voje, Adrian Angelico and Anne Marie Stamnestrø et al. Kjærlighet uten strømper [Love without stockings]. Kleve gård, Norway: 2004. http://www.rollespill.no/rokokko/

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

    Cover photo: L’Agonie du Poete (play, Nadine). Other photos by Joram Epis.

  • YouTube and Larp

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    YouTube and Larp

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    A WARNING: This might be a bit more casual than the other essays in this book. From start to finish, my whole journey of success, I have been in way over my head. I have been surrounded by intelligent, capable people that know exactly what they are doing. If you would like to hear from them, check out literally any of the other pages. If you would like to hear my rambling about how I accidentally became a pseudo YouTube celebrity, keep reading and enjoy the ride.

    My dungeons and dragons group made fun of me for going larping. I remember being so excited and talking to them all about the character I was making, and the game I had found, and how much fun I was going to have, and they went to YouTube. I began larping in an age when larp on YouTube was videos of lighting bolt packet throwers and fake looking fight scenes. They went on a marathon to show me how stupid I was going to look, and then we continued to roll dice and describe fighting magic orcs.

    My name is Mo Mo O’Brien, and if there’s one thing you need to know about me it’s that I don’t care what people think, so despite the mockery from my tabletop group, I went larping anyway. It was everything I knew it would be, and so much more. I instantly knew this was going to take over my entire life. I went to more events, and uploaded more pictures to my social media, and more people started asking me questions.

    I had recently started a YouTube channel, and I thought I’d answer all the questions in a video. I called the video “The Basics of larp” and it covered everything from the definition of larp, to the different genres, to what you needed to start playing. That was the video that began it all. My channel now has over 70,000 subscribers, that video now has almost 400,000 views, the comments are flooded with requests for more larp videos, and I can no longer go to any larp without at least one person coming up to me and telling me they were there because of me. My YouTube channel has even taken me to places like panelling at San Diego comic con and being in a popular candy commercial. Since then, larping YouTube channels have been exponentially growing, and are still growing. So, I thought I’d give people some tips for larp YouTube Channels!

    1. Speak to Non-larpers

    You don’t have to tell larpers why larp is awesome. They already know. If you see someone with a t-shirt for a band you like, you don’t walk over to them and try and convince them why that band is awesome. They’re already wearing the shirt. If a larper sees ANYTHING larp related, good chance is they’re probably going to like it regardless of content. Don’t limit your audience. Any video where I talk about larp, I always explain what it is as fast and as simply as I can within the first 20 seconds. How I describe it is “an adult game of make believe.” That seems to cover any genre of larp, no matter how experimental, and everyone can picture it since everyone knows what “make believe” is. Then I proceed to talk about it as if i’m explaining it to a group of veteran larpers, and noobies.((Slang on newbies, for beginners or people without any pre existing knowledge and experience.)) People are all secretly narcissistic and love seeing themselves in things. So, try to make videos that non-larpers could see themselves in. In every video I never assume the viewer knows what larp is, and then explain it in a way that could appeal to everyone. Larp is so broad and so many things, there is always something someone will like about it; costume designing, prop designing, writing, acting, combat. There are styles of larp that incorporate more sport, more tears, more competition, more costume showcasing, more set dressing. There’s a aspect and style of larp for everyone, so make sure everyone knows that. Which means….

    2. Learn How to Tell a Larp Story

    My friend Jamie who runs my main larp campaign once gave me a very long, slightly drunk, speech on how to tell a larp story to non-larpers. First of all: non-larpers do not care about mechanics, skills, or rules. Not at first anyway. When people ask “what was the last book you read?,” their first question will usually always be “What was it about?”, not whether it fit into the three act structure or took a more experimental approach. Do not tell non-larpers that you have a level four fire spell that allows you to hit a monster with 30 health for 10 flame damage. Say “I hit a monster with a fireball.” One of those stories sounds WAY more exciting than the other. Sell your larp adventures for the adventures you had, not the numbers it gave your character sheet. When you’re larping, the emotions are real, so tell the story as if you were ACTUALLY THERE because that’s what larp feels like. Not everyone likes numbers or behind the scenes information, but everyone loves a good story.

    3. Sell Yourself

    This is not as skeezy as it sounds. What i mean by this is just find all the best parts about yourself, and showcase them. YouTubers compared to a lot of other “celebrities” is that we are a far more personal art medium. We do “question and answers” where viewers can learn all about us, vlogs((Video blogs.)) where they can spend the day with us, and it’s a lot less “glitz and glamour” than other beings of well known status. People watch a video for the content, but they stick around and subscribe for the YouTuber. This doesn’t mean invent a new personality. This means find the parts of your personality people like, and electrify them. That goes for your characters as well.

    To expand on this idea, you should check out another YouTuber that’s NOT a larper, but pretty close: Miranda Sings. Miranda is a fictional character with a YouTube channel, created by comedian and singer Colleen Ballinger. In 2008 Colleen started uploading purposefully bad song covers to YouTube as a joke, and Miranda has gained over 7 million subscribers since. As she developed the character of “Miranda” she says she just read her YouTube comments, took note of what viewers found weird or obnoxious, and started to do it even more. Take note of what aspects of your characters and yourself your viewers like, and do it more.

    4. Make It Look Nice

    Sit in front of a lit window or bright light source. Make sure any fans, or air conditioners, or any other machinery making noise is turned off. Make sure your camera isn’t making you look too orange or too blue (you can change this by adjusting your lighting. Natural light gives off a blue tint, unnatural gives off an orange.) Make sure your background looks tidy and nice.

    For a while, I thought none of this really mattered…until I went back and watched my old videos. All these technical things are like the bass line of a song. You don’t notice when it’s there, but OH BOY do you notice when it’s not. So make sure you’re well lit, your sound is good, and your shot is set up nice. Which also means, pay attention to your background. If you want people to pay attention to nothing but your words, consider a blank wall behind you. Talking about costuming? Maybe display some of your pieces behind you. Want people to have a glimpse of your personality? Show your whole bedroom. Let your background tell a story.

    5. Get That Larp Footage

    Just talking to a camera is fine, but when you cut to something else, it makes sure the audience is paying attention, because it gives them some new to look at. Also it saves you the time and effort of trying to do your awesome larp justice. You can just show your audience so they don’t have to imagine it.

    One of the biggest rules in visual storytelling: show, don’t tell.

    Hide your camera, stay out of game for a while, ask for filming privileges in exchange for some pictures of the event, ask the organiser if they can make the camera cannon in the game.

    Even if it’s just pictures someone else took, ask them if you may use the pictures.

    6. Be Picky

    Larp is really hard to translate to video because, a lot of the times it’s not a spectator sport. Its meant to be experienced, not watched for entertainment. So, try and pick the footage that portrays what larp FEELS like, not looks like. Add some music or sound effects to fight scenes, so it doesn’t just sound like latex hitting latex matched with grunting. Pick those intense scenes with dramatic lighting. Remember to market to non-larpers. People don’t want to see a larp, they want to feel it. Choose the footage, and edit it accordingly, that portrays how that moment felt when you were in it.

    When you larp, a lot of the emotions and adrenaline is real, but this is a little harder to translate to film. When you watch a movie, a scene could have a completely different feel or intensity based on the cinematography, the editing, the music, the lighting. Picture a shot of a few kids splashing in the water. Now picture it with happy, upbeat, ukulele music. It’s a fun day at the beach! Viewers are content, and calm, and are reminded of carefree summer days. Now, picture the exact same shot, but with the jaws theme song underneath. Not a carefree beach day anymore is it? Footage provides what the larp looks like, but what you do with it determines how your viewers feel about it.

    I tried to put together all of these things into one of my videos which I called “Lock Stock & Barrel: a five minute larp.” I was dared by another YouTube channel to create a larp that would last 5 minutes, and film it. So I created a simple life or death scenario; 6 people locked in a post apocalyptic shelter that was running out of air, and the maximum inhabitant capacity would drop by 1 every 1 minute. Meaning, in order to survive, one person had to be eliminated or evacuated every minute. They were given items like: booze, poison, water, a gun, bullets, cookies, and other items designed to kill each other. There was an also an exit to the shelter with a 30% chance of survival in the wasteland. This was apparently fun for the players, and they wished it was a little longer. For the sake of a youtube video though, it was the perfect length. Because it was such a short amount of time, it was high energy, panicked, and 5 minutes of intensity. There was no time for spaced out improvised beautiful dialogue. It worked better, because it was messy and all over the place, like the real situation would have been if it was filmed for an audience. I also held it in my own home so I set up my filming lights, I got to set the scene the way I wanted, all with filming this in mind. Like it was an improvised movie.

    But the biggest tip I can give, not just to larp YouTubers, but all YouTubers in general: Just do it! Don’t worry about messing up, or having the right equipment, or not being ready. We all had to start somewhere. Watch the videos you make, figure out what you liked, and what you didn’t, and adjust accordingly. Just figure it out as you go along. Fall into your place. So get going!

    As an addendum to this piece, Simon Brind conducted a brief interview with Mo Mo O’Brien; edited highlights are included here:

    Simon Brind: Would you tell us a little more about the design for the five minute larp? Do the people have characters? Did you pre-write them or did the players do it? Was there a set?

    Mo Mo O’Brien: It was very light rules, basically if they wanted to do anything physically, they just asked out loud and I told them if it went ok. They had characters they decided on themselves. Formed their own relationships and backstories. All the knowledge they were given was they had been in this bunker for almost a year. We made up the characters on the spot in a workshop before the game. The set, was my living room, with a spotlight in the middle. You can watch the whole thing here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgQFuLhe-ks

    SB: Are there ways that larp could become a spectator sport? or a spectator event? Would it still be larp?

    O’B: If larp was a spectator sport, it would be called improv theatre. If all the mechanics and techniques were designed to entertain an audience and not the player, it would be an episode of whose line is it anyway. Even if there was an audience to an actual larp event, by my definition, it would become improv theatre. Though I’m sure there’s 40 essays out there by people much smarter than me with different theories about it.

    SB: How else could YouTube be used in larp? Could one be played out using YouTube videos and responses do you think? Or as a part of a game?

    O’B: What I would love to see is YouTube being used as a tool in larp. We have all this new technology that I feel could be utilised better. I recently did a game called As we know it that took place entirely, on my own, sitting in a closet, and all the interactions were over text. It was a game about isolation and through technology, perfect isolation was able to be achieved. There’s so much people can do with video, I think it could be used in larp a lot more.

    SB: Can you tell the story of a larp in video? Could the 5 minute experiment scale up to 30 minutes, 3 hours or even 3 days?

    O’B: Could I tell the story of a 3 day larp in a 10 minute video? Absolutely. Especially when it comes to internet media, it is typically more likely to hold someone’s attention. It’s important to find the right balance between rambling, and cutting it short. Say what you NEED to say. Sometimes you need to cut what you WANT to say, which is the most heartbreaking thing about good editing. Take notes before you film. It helps you formulate your thoughts, keeps you from forgetting anything, and will help eliminate nonsense and rambling.

    SB: Nordic larps have done a great job of documenting their games and they are producing some great promotional videos((Promotional videos for Fairweather Manor, Black Friday and the like.)) too. But what else would you like to see from game organisers? How could they improve?

    O’B: Blockbuster nordic larps are EASILY the simplest kind of larp to film, because it is so close to improvised theatre. They usually have the best costumes, props, sets, and scenes since it’s more about characters, than character sheets. Since it’s typically more aesthetically pleasing than a lot of boffer larps, it’s easier to share, and easier to relate to, because you have to worry less about portraying how the experience feels, because it looks so nice from the outside. So I think what the western larp media needs, is to focus on what the western larp community HAS. Focus more on the competitive and self improving nature of western sport style larps, and learn how to translate that feeling of adrenaline and action to film.

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

    Cover photo: The author during a video shoot. (Photo: Carol O’Brien). Other photos by Mo Mo O’brien.

  • Playing the Stories of Others

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    Playing the Stories of Others

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Contextualisation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Jussi Ahlroth, 2016

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

    The Normal and the Abnormal

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

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

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

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

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

    Zeid Khalil, Life under Occupation, 2014

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

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

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

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

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

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

    A Militarised Society

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Cultural Exchange

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Bibliography

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

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

  • Food for Thought: Narrative Through Food at Larps

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    Food for Thought: Narrative Through Food at Larps

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    Food is an essential part of any culture. Taste and smell may be some of our more abstract senses but they have the power to bring us closer to memories and common experiences than many of the other senses. Anyone who pretends to be an intellectual knows about Marcel Proust and his Madeleine biscuit; how the taste of the Madeleine brought forth memories of the protagonist’s childhood with crystal clear vividity. It is our belief that food has this power. Food is very strongly culturally bound. What is deemed edible or taboo is strongly rooted in us, and often it does not matter that we intellectually know that something is safe or even tasty. If our culture has taught us that dog meat or insects are taboo we will have a very hard time bringing ourselves to try them. Simply put, food is a strong carrier of both memories and common culture.

    Eating food is also often a social ritual. The time during the day when we gather together, and share our experiences with each other. In all these ways food and eating are excellent tools to carry a narrative. To enhance an experience of being in an alien or different culture, or even literally to act as plot-tools. Still it is our experience that a lot of larp designers forget about the power food can hold over the participants experience. Below, we will share our experiences as both organisers and kitchen helpers/volunteers. We hope that our experience and creativity both will bring food to the forefront when it comes to narrative tools but also inspire more larp-designers to use the kitchen staff and the food as narrative tools. If they do it is our belief that they deeply will enhance the larp experience for their participants.

    The Food

    We are very emotional about what we eat. This is natural since we quite literally would die if we did not eat. Getting food when we are really hungry is among the most pleasurable experiences in the world. Likewise the disappointment of realising you cannot get food when you are really hungry can be devastating. There are very clear cultural connections to food. What is supposed to taste good, and what is expensive. Even if we try to pretend that champagne and caviar are really cheap in a certain larp culture the larpers will have a hard time accepting this as truth. Likewise, presentation means a lot for the eating experience. Texture, colours, the way it is presented and plated. If you understand this you can start to really play around with the food to create the feeling you yourself envisioned as a organiser and larpwriter. We will now present some case studies of how we have used the food itself to enhance a narrative and in some instances even created narrative with it. We have made jello to make a larp about American gods feel more American and we have made hundreds of fluffy little cakes to give a mad hatter feeling to a mental ward in fable inspired fairy tale larps. Food is a way to involve another sense into a full body larp experience and we want to tell you a little about the way we have done that in the past.

    Beyond the Barricades — Literally Putting the Narrative in the Food

    Beyond the Barricades (Göthberg and Wei, 2015) was a larp inspired by Les Misérables, it took place during the French Revolution of 1832. The players portrayed the revolutionaries on the barricade and all either deserted the cause or died heroically in the ending scene. The wish was to create a feeling of constant pressure from the outside, both from other barricades to stay strong and from the military to give up. We also wanted to serve very simple food, something that made the characters, all from different socio-economical classes contrast each other. Some saw it as luxury dinner, other as basically inedible garbage. The meals were very simple, a french onion soup without the garnish or quite literally lentils and garlic. It was carried in beyond the barricades by the kitchen staff in buckets and served together with loafs of bread. However, in some of the breads letters from another barricade were hidden. This created hilarious discussions between the NPC players, organisers and kitchen staff regarding how to pace the NPCs dramatic curve alongside the dramatic curve served to the players in the breads, making sure that the NPC’s portraying revolutionaries from the same barricade as the letter inside the breads followed the same narrative curve as the letters we served up for lunch or dinner. It also helped giving a feeling of a meaningful surrounding outside the barricade and created some nice scenes when the bad news of the other barricade falling under the military attacks were delivered in a bread during the last day. The kitchen staff also used the food to guilt the players characters into doubting their commitment to the revolution. By blaming the revolutionaries for cutting off supply lines resulting in less profits for the poor workers that made the food for them, and the further the larp went bringing in more and more meager supplies the food became a symbol for the fruitlessness of the revolution. This was possible to do since there was extra food available in the off-game area, and we also served up a feast on the evening after the larp ended.

    Made in Hessbrand — Starvation and Disgust

    Made in Hessbrand (Zeta, Johnsson, Modin and Isaksson) ran in 2015 and was a part of the long going fantasy campaign, Heart of War. The setting was far away from the war in question. Deep in the countryside of Hessbrand, a country visually and culturally inspired by Ireland in the 14th century. The story was something along social revolt and miserable failure. The players portrayed Hessbrännian workers and a manufacture for buttons or supervisors from an occupation force. During the larp the players made a revolt, barricaded themselves in and finally got completely massacred by arriving soldiers. The feeling the organisers wanted to communicate was one of poverty, sickness, working too much in the factory and oppression. We tried to make that happen through the food serving, but in the same time we wanted to serve tasty food so that people could eat their full. We started of presenting ourselves and the food to the players before game start. We played disgusting and filthy characters. Everyone had probably seen me sneeze in the pots. We asked them to actively play down the food as weird looking and disgusting. The food served was “Fishys mush” which was named after the colour they had, green and yellow. They were served together with honey glazed fried cabbage, bread, hummus, and fried bacon. The compliments were tasty and therefore made it possible for players who have a hard time to stomach the mush on account of them looking almost inedible to still get a decent meal. The green mush was green lentils cooked in garlic and olive oil until it turned into a porridge and the yellow mush was simply mashed potatoes with a mushroom sauce mixed into it which gave it a greyish colour and lumpy texture.

    This meant that the food was very tasty even if it looked horrible. This together with the player actively joking about how disgusting the mushes were and the kitchen staff portrayal of thieving lying entrepreneurs happy to make money out of others misery helped create a feeling of the food as a horrible thing you did not want to touch with a ten foot pole, but the only nutrition to get within walking distance. It increased the players’ feeling of being abused by a system and the feeling of poverty. In the same time the actual food was really tasty and filling.

    Last Will—The taste of something different

    Last Will (Stenler, Strand and Gamero 2014) was a larp set in a dystopian future when Chinese culture had grown in importance together with American. This created a vision of the future where a lot of texts were written in Chinese and Chinese culture was present in name culture and such. Last Will was a larp about modern day slavery and the loss of democratic rights, set in a dystopian future Sweden, in a gladiator stall. The players portrayed slaves of free workers (who lived under slave like conditions). They were not allowed to leave the gym where they lived on plastic mats behind plastic sheet walls. Their whole life circled around making sure the fighters were good enough to survive the gladiator-style fights. Food was served from “upstairs” quite literally as both the in-game administration and the off game organisers were sitting up the stairs from the playing area. The organisers had a clear vision of what they wanted the food to say. It was suppose to speak industry, impersonal, calculated nutrition and Asian. This was very well achieved. The food was simple lentil stews with potatoes and other root vegetables. Added in was also seaweed which gave the food an unpleasant slimy texture and a slightly Asian flavour. It was served in vacuum packed bags of plastic, the food weighed by me and the other helpers to make sure it was more or less the exact amount of an adult’s daily intake or calories, supervised by the cooking organisers. It was then frozen and thawed in water baths before served at the venue. Together with your allotted plastic bag you would get seaweed crackers and some of the characters even got “vitamins” to moderate their health. These “vitamins” and the calculated sizes of the food gave the players a feeling of being under constant supervision and moderation from the people upstairs. The Asian flavours helped create a feeling for the culture that larp was portraying and if you could not stomach the seaweed lentil stew and felt you needed something else to eat the players could go to the off game area where there was plenty of fruits, sandwiches, chocolate and hugs. This made it possible to serve food that was a bit strange in flavour because if the players could not stomach it there was a backup solution.

    Tre Kronor, Lindängen and the luxury of the upper class

    Just as it is hard for players to really immerse themselves in an experience of poverty and hunger if the food offered is a cornucopia of delights, playing on themes of luxury and richness will also be enhanced and helped by the right food. More than that, food can work as a nice divider between rich and poor at larps where different economic classes mingles. Tre Kronor (Linder, Wånngren and Ahlbom, 2012) was a small one night event. The setting a high status upper class freemasonry lodge’s yearly banquet. During the larp the kitchen staff were players as well, but we paid less than those playing upper class. A professional cook planned and executed lavish multiple course dinners for the upstairs crowd that the staff heated and served during the larp. The downstairs staff got simple soup and cheap alcohol. This created a nice division between player groups, a feeling of entitlement in the upper class characters and a feeling of oppression for the downstairs crowd. The kitchen, dressed up in uniform clothing helped to create an atmosphere where any wish or demand was upheld.

    Another larp where the players portrayed the upper class was Lindängen Boarding School (Elofsson and Lundkvist, 2013). In this section I want to concentrate on the food and how it acted to help create a feeling of luxury for the players. Sometimes you might not have the possibility to get a real chef to make the food, but there is a lot you can do to play around with the feeling of more luxurious food for the participants even as a volunteer with no formal training. We will talk more about the different way we choose to portray Lindängen below but there is still some interesting points to be made about the food itself on the different runs. During Lindängen 1 (2013) we opted for classical dishes from Swedish schools but in a fancier setting. Green pea soup with white wine instead of the traditional brown pea soup. Salad served in pretty containers, and homemade bread (cheap and luxurious) gave a feeling of more upper class establishment. During Lindängen 2 (2014) the kitchen chose to be even more upscale, with a lot of energy going into making food from scratch which made it possible to serve food that usually is quite expensive even if it did not cost that much since it was made from cheap ingredients such as gnocchi and stuffed peppers. For Lindängen 3 (2016) the homemade croissants were a hit that gave a quite ordinary breakfast spread a more fancy tone, together with the attention to details such as cheese roses and whipped butter.

    The Fluffy Muffin Plot — When you Cook up Larp Magic

    Sometimes just the presence of the most mundane normal thing will create game for a large group of players. These stories are never planned but happens in the moment. Some might even argue that this is the basic strength of larp as a medium. We are as larpers hyper-aware of any possible storyline and we tend to try and make sense of the random. During Lindängen 3 this happened to great effect in the many twists and turns of “the fluffy muffin plot.” It is—as are so many of these larp stories—too long and too personal to be of a broader interest in its entirety but we will try to give you the boiled down version here, to explain how you can create play with food at larps.

    One player (who portrayed a very stern and scary teacher) asks the organisers one morning for some “fluffy muffins.” He was going to make a psychological experiment. The organisers were a bit confused but asked the kitchen staff to make some fluffy muffins. The thought of a very stern and sadistic teacher playing around with six fluffy muffins generated a lot of laughter in the kitchen. The kitchen obviously made sure to have the windows open and to talk about this very loudly to spread the rumours about the fluffy muffins and their longing to spit in them. By the time the muffins reached the teacher who ordered them, the rumour that the kitchen spat in them was already in motion, and therefore by larp magic became true. The kitchen totally DID spit in them.

    The psychological experiment is done and create an interesting scene for the players and that could have been the end of the fluffy muffins. However there were five muffins left so the teacher served them to the five students with the highest status in the third year. They were of course terrified to accept such gifts from their horrible teacher, but decided after much anguish that to eat them was better than to not eat them. However one of them was so curious about what these muffins actually meant that he sends a younger student to find out about the muffins (since speaking directly to the kitchen was forbidden.) The student who was sent to find out the truth misunderstands him though and just ends up ordering more muffins. Since the kitchen was well staffed it had the time to bake new fluffy muffins and serve them. Through the inner working of status fall and reputation this last serving of the fluffy muffins resulted in the fall from grace of some students, the rise of others and some scenes of oppression. All very welcome at a larp about pennalism and boarding schools.

    At the same larp we also let some students make a hat out of cheese that they used to bully another student. And on earlier Lindängen frozen peas, spinach and at a memorable occasion frozen scones has soothed black eyes of students. The importance of this story is to show how much you can do with food and kitchen staff to create game and dynamic. The so called “Fluffy Muffin Plot” ended up being one of the most retold narratives in the debrief group, and would never have happened had not the organisers planned for a big enough kitchen crew that a person could be spared to make the muffins in the first place.

    The Kitchen

    All larps that provides food for their players needs some kind of kitchen crew. These are often volunteers, or even organisers, who have a huge responsibility to make sure everyone is fed (preferably food that is sufficient in nutrition and quantity and on time ) and who because of that often spends most of their time off game without being a real part of the larp and the story. We would like to propose different ways to use the kitchen as a play area and the kitchen crew as proper characters. People who are responsible for feeding the rest of the larp (as well as with other kinds of practical off game duties) should of course never get involved in the game to an extent where it interferes with those responsibilities but there’s still plenty of room to create characters that contributes to the setting and fills an in-game purpose without interfering with the actual cooking.

    Lindängen — One Larp, Three Different Kitchens

    One larp that has already been mentioned in this article is Lindängen, a larp about an upper class boarding school revolving around themes such as bullying, peer pressure, social status and the never ending upholding of a system that keeps hurting the people within it. It’s been run three times and one or both of us have been a part of the kitchen crew each time. What’s particularly interesting about this larp is that the way the kitchen was used as a play resource and the role it filled in the game varied a lot between the different runs.

    For the first run, we were aiming to create a contrast between the upper class students and teachers of the school and ourselves, as well as offering a safe space for those characters (and players) who suffered the most from the bullying. The kitchen staff were portrayed as working/lower class who sold home made booze and listened to loud socialistic punk music. Being in the bottom when it came to status and influence also created the opportunity to actually question what was going on in the school. The kitchen itself became a place where all the “outsiders,” the ones who didn’t want to play along with the system and those who it affected the hardest, could come to breath or hide out for a moment. Within the kitchen walls, no one could hurt them and to it’s staff they could reveal how they really felt about the school. In the end the kitchen staff also worked as a reminder on how status is the only thing that matters within the system when their attempts to actually make a difference and create some justice miserably failed.

    The kitchen in the second run was rather another tool to uphold the system than a contrast to it. Not only was the food fancier, the kitchen staff themselves had a much more polished and professional approach with more of a personal distance (at least officially) towards the students. The kitchen also played a role in the actual bullying through the use of kitchen duty as a penalty for students that misbehaved. While the kitchen in the first run was a place to hide from oppression it was now a place to be even more oppressed. In a similar way the kitchen during this run amplified the need of upholding a surface. They would be very professional towards the player until they were sent to kitchen duty when the facade would be lowered and the player now forced to mop the kitchen floor had an opportunity to hear conversations between people who came from a different social background and had a different view of the world. This suppressed form of dislike towards the school and its traditions worked well in giving the players a feeling of another world outside of the school, but a world that was judging, different and impossible to be a part of.

    For the third run, the role of the kitchen was pretty much set by the players themselves. During the pre-game workshop they decided that one of the unofficial school rules would be “no personal socialising with the kitchen staff” and even though this rule wasn’t upheld at all times it contributed to an us and them-division between the kitchen and rest of the school. This was even more established through for example a scene where the career counselor used a member of the kitchen staff as an “example of bad character” before a group of students. The kitchen staff was in many ways more looked down upon than in the previous runs but still filled the purpose of being the harmless adults, the ones you can turn to when one of the games has gotten out of hand and someone is actually hurt without risking getting in trouble for it.

    Coven — Increasing the Creepiness

    Coven (Häggström and Falk, 2015) was a larp inspired by the show American Horror Story: Coven and centred around a small coven of witches with the task of both educating people with magical powers as well as hiding them from witch hunters. The larp started with a group of teenagers who had just learned about their powers and the whole existence of the witch community arriving to the coven, their new home. The feeling of the coven was supposed to be eerie, freakish and unpredictable for those who were new to it and one element that was used to create this was, of course, the household staff.
    The household did not only provide the food but also other chores like tidying up the sleeping quarters, making beds and assisting in magical rituals. The kitchen was not only a place where the food was prepared but also the place to go to if you needed to get blood, salt or plastic covers for said rituals. The staff itself were portrayed as emotionless, ageless and it was uncertain even to ourselves if they even were human. We spent a lot of time stone faced staring out the kitchen window, sweeping the same spot of the floor over and over again, making beds extremely neatly, folding the players clothes and reorganising their personal belongings when they weren’t looking, wiping blood of the floor without showing any sort of emotion and so on. We even listened to the same song on repeat in the kitchen throughout the whole larp. For the players this created a feeling of having walked straight into a horror movie. The knowledge that the household always saw you became very powerful, and the players experienced a feeling of loss of personal space when their belongings would be reorganised as soon as they turned their head. The almost mechanical movements of the household, paired with the same song going on repeat really made you doubt if they were real people. It became very effectively a way of entering into a magical circle of belief as the characters tried to accustom themselves to a new reality where magic was real and dangerous.

    The Do’s and Don’ts of Kitchen Work at Larps

    We have during our unofficial career as kitchen volunteers gathered some overall valuable lessons that make life easier for everyone, participants as well as organisers, that are listed below. We hope that these tricks of the trade will help others, organisers and kitchen volunteers alike to make their work easier.

    Three Things You Never Should Do

    • Poison your players.((We have all done it, but try your best and never do the same mistake twice. Like Siri did.)) With this we mean, do not serve food that the player in question is allergic too. Make sure to clearly mark allergy-friendly food, or serve it separately for the larper in question. Most modern settings will allow to mark the food clearly with a name sign using the player’s in game name.
    • Not having enough food to feed everyone. This means that during starvation larps there should be access to food off game that has not gone bad or is disgusting but good, preferably warm, food, ready to help players through a taxing time. If this is not going to be available, clearly communicate this to the players in advance and make sure there is a convenient way for them to stash off game food for themselves if they need sufficient nutrition to handle the larp.
    • Understaff your kitchen. It creates anguish, pain, stress and bad role-playing on behalf of the staff. Mistakes happen more easily when the kitchen staff have not had sufficient sleep. Better to have space in the budget for a person too many than to have too few in the volunteer group. That way you can have some designated to do the actual cooking, one to do last minute shopping (which will happen) and some more focused on creating the right atmosphere and role-playing if you want the kitchen to actually enhance your game.

    Three Things You Should Always Do

    • Appreciate your kitchen staff. Do not underestimate the importance of good kitchen staff. They will be able to help you create the right ambience and make sure organisers and players are well fed. All they want is some cred and maybe some chocolate, energy drinks or other poisons of their choice. Make sure to thank them after the larp and give them a small token of appreciation and they will be happy to go the extra mile for you.
    • Clearly communicate to the players how much food will be served, what kind of special diet you will provide for/not provide for and so on. It’s never okay to let the players discover they won’t have enough to eat after they have paid a full participation fee and arrived to the larp (you can of course serve any food you like but tell the players about it). This means be clear if there will be dietary options available, if there will be off game food in cases where the scenario doesn’t leave room for a lot of food etc.
    • Work with the players special diets instead of against it. Look at the players needs before setting the menu and try to make sure as many as possible will be able to eat as many meals as possible. A lot of vegetarians? Make all food vegetarian! Gluten allergies? Serve rice instead of pasta. If you make the food vegan it will also work for lactose and milk protein allergies. This will most likely save you not only time but also money.

    Conclusion

    We hope this advice will be helpful in your future culinary endeavours. We truly believe food is an essential part of any larp experience. If we allow it to be. Let texture, flavours and presentation play towards the atmosphere of the larp, and make sure to staff your kitchen with enough people so that they will have time to help you create the feeling and game play that truly supports the story you want to tell.

    Bon Appetite!

    Ludography

    • Alma Elofsson and Mimmi Melkersson Lundkvist. Lindängens Riksinternat (run 1). Sweden: 16-20 September 2013. Cooking and serving by Siri Sandquist, Rosalind Göthberg, Samuel Sjöström, Hugo Sandelin, Elsa Broman and Anneli Friedner
    • Alma Elofsson and Mimmi Melkersson Lundkvist. Lindängens Riksinternat 2 (run 2). Sweden: 30 April-4 May 2014. Cooked and served by Siri Sandquist, John Bergström, Rune Nordborg, Mojje Mårtensson, Calle Wickström
    • Alma Elofsson and Mimmi Melkersson Lundkvist. Lindängens Riksinternat 3 (run 3). Sweden: 2016. Cooked and served by Rosalind Göthberg, Lukas Renklint, Elvira Fallsdalen, Erland Nylund, Emil Rogvall
    • Rosalind Göthberg and Eva Wei. Beyond the Barricades. Sweden: 4-6 June 2016. Cooked and served by Siri Sandquist and Lukas Renklint
    • Mia Häggström and Sofie Falk. Coven (run 1). Sweden: 18-20 September 2015. Cooked and served by Rosalind Göthberg, Sara Gerendas, Hannah Merkelbach, Elli Garperian
    • Mia Häggström and Sofie Falk. Coven (run 2). Sweden: 2-4 October 2015. Cooked and served by Rosalind Göthberg, Sara Gerendas, Elvira Fallsdalen, Carl Nordblom
    • Anna-Karin Linder, Oscar Wånngren and Hampus Ahlblom. Tre Kronor 2, Sweden: 2012. Cooking and serving by Siri Sandquist, Frida Karlsson Lindgren, Nicolas Lennman, Jonathan Dahlander, Severin Gottsén, Johannes Harg, Carolina Lindahl och Theo Axner
    • Anna-Karin Linder, Oscar Wånngren and Hampus Ahlblom. Tre Kronor 3, Sweden: 2013. Cooking and serving by Siri Sandquist, Rosalind Göthberg, Frida Karlsson Lindgren, Elsa Broman, Lukas Renklingt, Nicolas Lennman, Johannes Harg, Elin Gissén, Carl Norblom, Malva Tyllström and Severin Gottsén
    • Mimmi Melkersson Lundkvist, Erik Holst and Teresa Axner. Organise Safely. Sweden: 2015 Cooked and served by Rosalind Göthberg and Lukas Renklint
    • Lukas Renklint, Rosalind Göthberg, Elvira Fallsdalen and Eva Wei. Once upon a Time 1. Sweden: 2014. Cooked and served by Rosalind Göthberg and organisers
    • Lukas Renklint, Rosalind Göthberg, Elvira Fallsdalen and Eva Wei. Once upon a Time 2. Sweden: 2015. Cooked and served by Rosalind Göthberg and organisers
    • Lukas Renklint, Elvira Fallsdalen, Rosalind Göthberg and Eva Wei. Sigridsdotter 1. Sweden: 2015. Cooked and served by Rosalind Göthberg and Siri Sandquist
    • Lukas Renklint, Elvira Fallsdalen, Rosalind Göthberg and Eva Wei. Sigridsdotter 2. Sweden: 2016. Cooked and served by Rosalind Göthberg and Siri Sandquist
    • Siri Sandquist, Erland Nylund, Linnea Björklund and Thor Forsell. Dusk of Gods. Sweden: 2015. Cooked and served by Siri Sandquist and Thor Forsell
    • Siri Sandquist, Staffan Fladvad, Johan Nylin and Elin Gissén. It’s a Man’s World. Sweden: 2015. Cooked and served by Siri Sandquist and Fredrik Nilsson
    • Sofia Stenler, Annica Strand and Frida Gamero. Last Will. Sweden: 2014. Cooked and served by organisers and Siri Sandquist and Frida Karlsson Lindgren
    • Sara Zeta, Ola Johnsson, Hanna Modin and Josefine Isaksson. Made in Hessbrand. Sweden: 2014. Cooked and served by Siri Sandquist, John Bergström and Elin Holm

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

    Cover photo: The authors posing with a batch of bread (pre-game, Siri Sandquist).

  • History, Herstory and Theirstory: Representation of Gender and Class in Larps with a Historical Setting

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    History, Herstory and Theirstory: Representation of Gender and Class in Larps with a Historical Setting

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    Disclaimer: The opinions expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Nordiclarp.org or any larp community at large.

    Why Larp with History?

    Human history as a setting for larp goes back to the earliest days of the form – even to before larp was identified as a special kind of activity in its own right, in the committee games and fictionalized simulations that preceded the larp that we know today.

    What makes history so appealing?

    • The richness, range, and depth of the real historical tapestry is such as to make it inexhaustibly appealing as a source of larp material. From Ancient Egypt (Queen of Denial, Barnard and Holkar, 2014) to medieval Britain (The Lists of Avalon, Barnard, Jones and Jones, 2011) to the Industrial Revolution (Railways and Respectability, Barnard and Dall et al., 2007) to the Korean War (M*A*S*H: Brothers in Arms, Barnard and Dall et al., 2013), there’s something for everyone. And provided you avoid exoticization and respect the people involved, the whole spectrum is available to you.
    • Familiarity to participants is another advantage: they may already be familiar with the chosen historical milieu, or, if not, they can easily make themselves familiar by using readily-available reference materials. Compare the difficulty of communicating familiarity with a fictional setting whose details are only available in the minds of the designers.
    • Historical settings lend themselves readily to parallels and lessons related to life today, for the more instructive school of larp design. For example, the 1970s Berlin of “Heroes” (Holkar, 2016) studies attitudes towards the demonized Other, and how similarities, once exposed, may resonate more strongly than differences. The distance of the setting helps to make clear the significance of the themes in our own world.
    • And there’s no denying the emotional power and resonance of larping historical events — perhaps those in which one’s own ancestors, or national predecessors, might have been involved.
    • But a larp design that draws upon history has, perhaps, first to consider the limitations and biases of our societal defaults of historical understanding and analysis.

    The Problem with History

    We must recognise that our knowledge of history is filtered by the (necessarily limited) information that we have about it. We may have access to written accounts from the period: but who wrote them, and why? We may have artefacts, structures, and other physical remains: but who has interpreted them to us? What assumptions did those interpreters make?

    Photo of upstairs and downstairs characters in Fairweather Manor
    Fairweather Manor is an example of a larp based upon historical fiction that explores the dynamics between characters of different classes and genders. Photo courtesy of Dziobak Larp Studios.

    To generalise: surviving historical texts were largely written by educated and wealthy men. And these texts, and non-textual historical remains, have also until recently largely been discussed by educated and wealthy men. Even if the author of your direct source is not in that category, you have to ask: who then were that author’s sources and to what extent did they question them? So, for example, Georgette Heyer wrote a feminized take on the British Regency period((Georgette Heyer, Regency Buck (London: William Heinemann, 1935).)) in which women have a greater focus than in historical accounts of the period. But she restricted her scope to the same narrow upper section of society that had been depicted by Jane Austen; she also restricted her research largely to the use of materials left by educated and wealthy men and to the study of decor and costume, rather than establishing what might have been going on in the world outside those stately imagined drawing-rooms. Whether, as an educated and wealthy woman herself, Heyer had any interest in the lives of the poor and underprivileged of that period, we do not know, but she certainly didn’t write about them. If you draw your larp-design inspiration from historical fiction rather than directly from history, you run the risk of inadvertently being on the wrong end of a filter of this type.

    Other Histories

    The study of women’s history, and people’s history (ordinary people, as distinct from those in power), gives new and fascinating perspectives on familiar historical settings.

    “Other” history is of its nature a kind of revisionism: it asserts that traditional historical accounts are partial and/or incomplete. Women’s history draws attention to the roles of women throughout history; it studies the lives and works of individual women, and groups of women, “of note” and otherwise; it examines the effects of historical events on women; and so on. It necessarily questions the privileged values assigned by traditional history to the lives and activities of men. It may also identify situations where women’s actual contributions have been neglected or belittled, at the time or subsequently.

    In the same way, a people’s history, also known as a “history from below”, approach to historiography looks at historical events and developments from the point of view of ordinary people rather than leaders. It proactively focuses on the lives of the poor, the dispossessed, and those who in general have no access to power. And it seeks to demonstrate how historical changes that we traditionally ascribe to “great men” are often more the product of inexorable social forces rising from below.

    Women comforting each other in a prison larp
    Female characters in Winson Green Prison, a larp about women fighting for the right to vote. Photo by Vicki Pipe for the run at The Smoke Festival 2017.

    In A People’s History of the United States,((Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States (New York: Harper & Row, 1980).)) Howard Zinn (1980) says:

    The history of any country, presented as the history of a family, conceals fierce conflicts of interest (sometimes exploding, most often repressed) between conquerors and conquered, masters and slaves, capitalists and workers, dominators and dominated in race and sex. And in such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, as Albert Camus suggested, not to be on the side of the executioners.

    In larp, even more than in history, positive portrayals of characters are important — because they must be playable. Endowing your female and poor characters with affordances that may not have been demonstrated in the traditional historical record is going to make them more interesting to play, as well as serving the political end of representation. For sure, larp the executioners. They’ll be interesting to play — but the victims don’t have to be just oppression-fodder.

    A straightforward example of this kind of “other” history in larp is Winson Green Prison (Sandquist and Göthberg, 2016). It portrays “the women who fought for the equal right to vote, and the men who loved them” — people who at the time were weak, oppressed and despised by society, but who have been vindicated by history. Their struggles are moving and affecting, but we know that they were in the right and that their descendants will see them as heroes. This makes for a good playable mix of struggle and satisfaction.

    Historical Responsibility in Larp

    Grownups in the Gere family: Dina, Gere, Aina (Post-game, Anna-Karin Linder Krauklis)
    Brudpris (2014-, Norway) is a larp that explores the dynamics of a patriarchal society. (Post-game, Photo by Anna-Karin Linder Krauklis)

    When looking at and working with historical events and settings via the medium of larp, designers may feel that they owe a responsibility to the people of those times to represent them fairly: to not skew or downplay the depictions of those who have been neglected or diminished by traditional historical accounts. This is not always easy, but it’s a worthwhile use of time. As well as helping to make your design more responsible and understanding, it will also help to make it more interesting and original. There have been countless historical larps in which powerful people make key decisions while lesser folk fill in the background around them; how much fresher and more entertaining would it be to find stories in which women, or ordinary common people can take focus? For example, Dulce et decorum est… (Rider Hill, 2012) depicts a noble family and their influential friends, engaging in political discussion around a dinner table in an English country house in the runup to World War II: a solid and well-proven style of larp setting. Meanwhile Love Letter (Curd, Gammans, McCormick and Perry, 2015) examines the lives of a group of ordinary English village dwellers as the same war impacts upon them — the effects on those who fight, and those who are left behind — caused by the decisions of remote politicians to whom the larp makes no direct reference. Both are successful designs in their own terms, but one is doing something much more unusual than the other.

    St Croix (Stamnestrø and Voje, 2015) opens the question of how a power disparity between characters — in this case, slaves and slave-owners — can generate good play for both parties. Slaves have authority over very little, not even their own bodies: how do you empower those players in the larp? What affordances do they have available? Brudpris (Linder and Dahlberg, 2015) partly answered this question by giving its oppressed female characters an unhistorical sexual dominance, so those players were able to compensate, during sexual encounters, for lack of agency in other areas of play.

    Beyond the Barricades (Wei and Göthberg, 2015) brings vividly to life the Parisian revolution of 1832. The sides are clear, but one’s relationship to the people alongside whom one stands might not be — especially when unity starts to break down. This design allows for a nuanced approach to social class, and to the development of trust.

    War Birds ((Moyra Turkington, Ann Kristine Eriksen, and Kira Magrann, et al, War Birds (Toronto, Canada: Unruly Designs, 2016).)) is a collection of six freeforms and larps looking at the war experiences of women; as aviators, refugees, internees, partisans, drivers, or factory workers. It ably demonstrates the range and variety of play experience that can be generated from examining a straightforward other-historical premise.


    Moyra Turkington talks, at Living Games Conference 2016, about the genesis of War Birds: following “redlinked” stories in Wikipedia to see the unwritten history of women’s wartime contributions.

    The Myth of Authenticity

    One argument sometimes given for the dominance of wealthy males in historical larps is that this exercise of privilege is authentic for the period being depicted, and that to show otherwise would be a falsity.

    Quite apart from the question of whether the “facts” about the period upon which this view is based are correct or not — as discussed earlier, the filter over historical materials is a highly selective one — it can be argued that the whole notion of authenticity is specious. It’s impossible to larp “the 16th century” from the point of view of the 21st century; all you can ever do is larp an approach to the 16th century, which emerges from the context in which you’re designing.

    Our contemporary view of the 16th century is very different from that of historians of fifty years ago; and in fifty years time it will be different again. And as an artistic creator rather than a simulator, a larp designer will draw out themes and messages that resonate particularly strongly with their own contemporary audience. Just as performances of the play Hamlet take on new directions and resonances depending on the political and social currents of the time when they’re being performed, so too do runs of the larp Inside Hamlet (Krauklis and Ericsson et al., 2000; Ericsson et al., 2015).

    Deliberate inauthenticity — for example, giving women more prominent and higher-status roles — should not be seen as a betrayal of historical truth. Rather, it can allow a designer to recontextualise history more effectively for their audience. For example, Oss imellom (Hatlestrand and Edland, 2015) includes working-class homosexuals in a middle-class-based organisation that historically would have excluded them, so as better to present the variety of homosexual experience in 1950s Norway. To skew your design in this way, against the power balance of the traditional historical message, is to raise up living underprivileged people against those dead people who have been privileged by the conventional narrative.

    faders for the Mixing Desk
    The Mixing Desk of Larp design tool features a Loyalty to World slider, where designers can adjust according to playability vs. plausibility. Developed for the Larpwriter Summer School.

    Media and Message

    It may be that, actually, designing larp directly from the historical record is not your approach. Rather, you might be designing to convey the flavour of media works (books, films) set in that period. A larp set in the Old West is perhaps more likely to be responding to a particular subgenre of Western movie than to the actual history of the period. And a larp set at the 17th-century court of Louis XIV is almost certain to be drawing more heavily on the (19th-century) Musketeers novels of Alexandre Dumas than on documents of the period.

    This is no bad thing — resonance with your intended players is more likely to be found within media with which they’re familiar — but it’s another filter to be aware of. Reading Dumas, one would think that all warrior men are strong and masculine, while women are weak, passive, or conniving. However, we know from the existence of historical figures such as La Maupin, Philippe of Orleans, and the Chevalier d’Eon that the 17th-century French court was a much more genderqueer world than the 19th-century novelist was happy to admit; we know that the cowboys of the real Old West were often black, and sometimes women. By looking into history as well as your entertainment-media sources, you can broaden your representation without moving too far away from the material with which your players are familiar. And you should be honest with yourself, and with your players, about whether your game is aiming primarily to be history-based or fiction-based.

    Hell on Wheels promotional photo with three male and three female characters
    The Czech Hell on Wheels is a Western genre larp adapted from the fictional television show. Photo by Potkani.

    Techniques for Representation

    • Look beneath the surface – Seek out “other” histories as well as mainstream ones. By now, women’s and people’s history are well enough established that a wide range of historical periods have been covered by these approaches.
    • Look at the sources – Take in actual history, as well as media depictions of the period. You may find that the way the history has been portrayed on the page or on screen is quite different from modern historians’ understanding of it.
    • Ask the logical questions – If women aren’t mentioned in the orthodox account, why might that be? Where were they, and what were they doing? What place did poorer people have in the economy?
    • Turn the familiar face of history around – For example, war histories often focus on men who are away fighting, or on the portrayal of the victors as uncontested heroes. How about those family members who stayed at home? – what can you find out about them, that could make for interesting larp?((Heroes of the Hearth (Stiainín Jackson, in Seven Wonders (London: Pelgrane Press, 2015) is a tabletop RPG that looks at this situation.)) How about the experiences of those who were defeated?
    • Turn over stones – Why are some periods of history frequently visited by larp, and others neglected? Whose stories are still out there, waiting for a larp designer to pick them up and reflect them as something wonderful?
    • Challenge your own assumptions – However well you think you know the period, you may without realizing it be stuck in a skewed account given by a partial historian or fiction writer. Find another source, and see if it backs up or counters your belief.
    • Don’t be afraid of inauthenticity – If you feel you need to, you should deliberately adjust the historical “truths” to better make the range of stories that you seek. It’s larp, not re-enactment.
    • Check in – If you are yourself wealthy and/or educated and/or male, make sure that you’re not inadvertently carrying your own society’s tacit assumptions into the design. Involve people from other groups in your work. Build more balanced perspectives by working together.

    The Ends of History

    A historical setting for a larp can be a wonderful thing, but it can also be a painful and betraying thing. You can make sure that you’re giving your design ideas, and the play aspirations of your larpers, the maximum opportunity to express themselves by engaging with history critically, by putting in the exploratory work around it, and by looking for stories that haven’t been told.

    When it all comes together just right, you can be sure that your larp design and its enaction will earn their own places in the history of the artform. Take a look at Just a Little Lovin’ (Edland and Grasmo, 2011), the story of an assortment of people with little in common apart from their relentless othering by the media and those in power, finding community together, turning suffering into love. Their stories are respectfully told, solidly researched, and thoroughly contextualised. A larp like this brings its history to raging, pounding life — and makes its messages speak to our hearts and to our minds.

    Thanks to Liz Lovegrove and Becky Annison for their help and ideas during the writing of this article.

    Ludography

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

    Cover photo: Characters in the 2015 run of Just a little Lovin’, celebrating their otherness (photo by Arvid Björklund).

  • Moment-based Story Design

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    Moment-based Story Design

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    I believe it was the late Rosalind Russell who gave this wisdom to a young actor: ‘Do you know what makes a movie work? Moments. Give the audience half a dozen moments they can remember, and they’ll leave the theater happy.’ I think she was right. And if you’re lucky enough to write a movie with half a dozen moments, make damn sure they belong to the star.

    William Goldman, Adventures in the Screen Trade>, 1983

    War Stories

    Why are we in this business of creating stories for people to play? What do we, as creators, get out of the experience of running games? Why do we do it? I get a kick out of knowing that the players have gone through intense emotional experiences. How do I know whether we’ve achieved that? I use a simple measure. I listen to what I call war stories.((My brother, who works in TV and film, reminds me that these are known in TV as “water cooler moments” i.e. where, in the workplace, people will cluster around a water cooler discussing last night’s episode.))

    It’s something that’s obvious in hindsight. Every time you get a bunch of larpers together to socialise, out come the war stories; tales of things that happened at events to them, or to their friends, or at another event that they heard about once. “That bit when the demon appeared …” “And then, my God, I was running from that thing, I’ve never been so scared …” “The look on her face when she realised the truth!”

    Most of those stories have been provoked by moments of intense experience, of intense emotion: fear, shock, hilarity, love, freezing cold weather, sleep deprivation, utter disbelief. These people have been put through the mill, and these stories are the resulting moments that stood out to them, memories that will live on in their heads forever, stories they want to share. And so they share them. Many become iconic, and are passed on second or third hand.

    This isn’t solely restricted to larp, of course—it’s the sort of conversation that happens when film-lovers get together to discuss “the bit where Hulk punched Thor!” or “when Bruce Willis realises the truth!” These stories bind people together in pubs, or on forums, or at book clubs. A need to share the things that really affected them, that etched those experiences into their minds.

    It’s only in recent years that I’ve come to the realisation that such froth((Used in UK larp circles to mean excessive outpourings of excited conversation about an event you’ve played, an event you’re going to, a game system, or really anything about larp at all. An umbrella is advised.)) is my primary measure of a successful game. But in starting to analyse the phenomenon, I realise that it’s how our team at Crooked House((A long-running UK larp organisation that runs high-budget one-off events with lots of special effects.)) has always approached shaping stories. We write larps by coming up with moments that we hope the players will talk about afterwards, and we’ve been doing that for years. It’s something we evolved entirely accidentally, with no in-depth analysis of what we were doing.

    Background

    Historically, the core of our team has been very focused on set-piece moments. This is because we have people who work in set design, stunts, pyrotechnics and props for films; we do our best to make best use of those talents. The art & stunt department always have gags they want to try, no matter the genre.

    And we’ve always tackled games as an exercise in genre. When we ran a gore-based horror event, we did our best to push the boundaries of taste and decency and to cover a whole range of tropes that players would recognise, but would have never encountered before in larp. Similarly, on running a pulp action-adventure, we made certain to pack it full of red lines drawn across maps, tombs half-buried in sand, ridiculous accents, and traps involving lots of creepy-crawlies.

    We write and run one-off events. We knew our pulp adventure was probably going to be the last one we’d ever run, so we packed it full of as much pulp as we could find, as we wouldn’t get another chance.

    The Writing Process

    So we get together with a rough idea of theme and setting, and a long list of experiences we’d like the players to have. These could be set piece stunts, gags, or special effects; atmospherics where we generate a certain mood; small interpersonal moments; several hours of continuous unrelenting horror. They could be ideas for rules. They could also be material for pre-event, to set the scene. At this point many of the ideas will be only partially formed. For example, our list might include “have to deal with a confined space,” “there should be a moment where all the lights go out,” “a scene where the antagonist lays bare every character’s deepest secret” or “we could do that trick with a Ouija board and magnets.”

    Then, through brainstorming sessions, we identify a few key moments and solidify them, making them the tentpoles of our game timeline.

    With our tent-pole moments in place, the shape of our event starts to emerge, as do the themes, and the story itself. This is the stage at which we may reject ideas from our list outright, as we find they don’t suit the story or the theme or the mood. Eventually we’ll have a firmed up set of key experiences and a rough idea of when they might happen.

    If we were creating a story for a book or a film — and we’ve used this system for that — then the story would be essentially linear. One key moment would play out after another, and the viewer would have no options to change that, no choices to make. Our tent-pole moments would always happen in the same order.

    With larp, we could run our games in that way, but there’s a danger of “railroading” the players—making them feel as if their actions have no effect on the story, as if it’s being told to them rather than as if they’re part of creating it.

    Our games are somewhere between linear and totally free. We are certain of several fixed moments that will happen no matter what, and we know roughly when they’ll happen, but we leave a lot of space for flexibility with other moments and the order in which they might play out. This is critical not only for the dramatic flow of the story—for example, during these few hours the players shouldn’t be overly stressed or challenged, but right here we need a climax— but is also critical for the art department, so they know in what order they need to get sets built or rebuilt and stunts and effects rigged. We have a rough idea of the window of time in which a particular moment can be experienced.

    Note that there’s no guarantee a moment will happen. We give the players the opportunity to take part in a particular scene, gag or event at specific points. All we’re doing is providing opportunity. Those opportunities may not be taken in the way we expect, or may not be taken at all. And, honestly, we cheat. In some cases we make the players believe they’ve made their own timeline choices, but we’ve secretly railroaded them. I give an example of that later on in this article.

    We’ll do several brainstorming passes filling in the blanks. Normally I go away and write a treatment of the flow of the game as if it were a story, because this irons out inconsistencies and brings up all sorts of issues we haven’t thought of—it also shoots down ideas that we thought seemed amazing at 3am.

    And then we’ll simply repeat, talking through the game again and again, picking apart each moment and polishing it until—hopefully—it shines, making sure the story is consistent, making sure our supporting cast fit in where they should, and layering theme and mood into everything we can. When we’re done, some of the things we’ve come up with will be concrete set-piece-like moments. Others will be ongoing opportunities for players to generate moments themselves. Both are equally important, and I’ll give examples of the design of each.

    A Moment Design Example: The Jump

    A 'moment' from God Rest Ye Merry (staged, Rachel Thomas). A ‘moment’ from God Rest Ye Merry (staged, Rachel Thomas).

    It’s 3am. You haven’t slept for two days now. There are strange things happening in this mansion. You’re upstairs in your bedroom, in bed with your partner, but the lights are on; you’re both too scared to turn them off.

    There’s something about this room. When you came in, you noticed the wedding pictures of the young couple, and the photos of their baby daughter. You know it’s a daughter, because the crib is still here, beside the bed; the name Gwendolyn hangs on a wooden plaque at the end of it. You turned the photos face down, because you realised who they were; the young couple who died here years ago. You’ve read the newspaper reports, and heard the family stories. You’ve found letters: receipts, bills, final demands.

    And you’ve heard things. A baby crying, although you couldn’t find the source. A man and a woman arguing, muffled, through the wall; something about money. And, twice now, a gunshot, somewhere outside through the corridor. You’ve never found where it came from… although there was blood on the bathroom floor.

    And now, tonight, you hear the gunshot again. And the baby starts crying outside your door. A girl screams. And the door flies open. There stands the young mother, dressed in black, the baby bundled under her arm. She’s in tears, makeup running. In her right hand she brandishes a revolver. She runs into your room and turns around, frantically warning away her pursuers. Except there aren’t any pursuers; the doorway is empty—but she can clearly see them. She runs to the window, still waving the gun; opens the window; and throws the baby out.

    At this point, you, the player—because you are a player, and this is a moment in a live-action game that you’ve been taking part in for the last few days, having taken on the role of a 1950s character— might realise something. If you’ve got enough detachment from the terror of the moment, if you can draw yourself back, you can think “Ah. I get it. I understand what’s going on. The baby’s clearly not real. it’s all fine. It’s just a play, a scene, a trick. I don’t need to panic.”

    At which point the young woman jumps out of the window.

    When you’ve recovered yourself enough to get to the window and look out, there’s nothing below; no baby, no woman, nothing at all.

    We started this one with a simple request from our stunt team. “We want someone to jump out of a first floor window and disappear. And we don’t want the players to know how we did it.”

    This was for our event God Rest Ye Merry (Thomas and Thomas et al., 2015), a Christmas ghost story set in the 1950s. The house, a rambling old mansion set on Dartmoor, was perfect for our needs, and on our site visit we scoped out the perfect window.

    So, from a writing perspective, we knew that our stuntwoman Kiera Gould would be the one who jumped. And it made perfect sense that, for a ghost story, the disappearance would be due to ghostly goings-on. It follows, then, that this must have been how someone died. And that the players would see this as if it were a vision—it would be a haunting. To make it extra-scary, we would have them seeing it late at night.

    The first concern came from the stunt team. The window Kiera would be jumping from was a bedroom window, and we expected two players to be in bed asleep. What was to stop the players leaping out of bed and interrupting the stunt, ruining the gag? We came to the conclusion that we’d put a barrier between the bed and the window, and settled on a baby’s crib, since there was one in a nearby room. We would fix it to the floor.

    This immediately led to story. The woman who had died had a baby. So who was she, and what happened to the baby?

    Someone came up with the genius idea that Kiera should come in, distraught, with the baby under her arm—a dummy, obviously—and should throw the baby out of the window first. Not only would it add to the horror, it would mean there would be a moment where the players thought that the baby-throwing was the whole gag, and, internally, they’d relax—just as Kiera jumped.

    “Wait,” said the stunt team. “If there’s a baby involved now, they’ll work extra-hard to interrupt the stunt. Can we introduce some other barrier?”

    So—why was the girl distraught? Well, we decided, she’d just shot her husband, and now, filled with regret, was going to commit suicide. So we would give her a revolver. The scene would start out in the corridor, with the sound of a revolver firing and a scream. Now, as the girl ran into the room, she would be brandishing the revolver, “accidentally” waving it towards the players—who she, being a ghost, couldn’t see. This acts as a psychological barrier to anyone wanting to get involved; a gun being waved in their face.

    An interesting facet of our barriers—the crib and the gun and, in fact, the mood we’ve engendered up to this point— is that we’ve almost certainly shut down the player’s desire or ability to stop the girl jumping but, crucially, they think it’s their own choice. They will think they’re unable to act through their own fear, rather than through our railroading or design.

    So there was the basis of the stunt. On top of that, we built up and layered story—the room was filled with mementos from the young couple’s marriage; elsewhere in the house you could find evidence of the husband’s debts and excessive gambling habit; newspaper clippings reported their deaths; family stories told of the tragedy; a wooden plaque on the crib named the baby Gwendolyn. And sometimes, if you listened carefully, you could hear a couple arguing, muffled, through the wall.

    From a very basic moment idea, we now had a chunk of story, a very visceral moment, that was wound into the fabric of the house and the event and which fitted our themes. We knew roughly when it would happen—around 3am Saturday night.

    Oh yes. The girl vanished completely, as did the baby, when you looked out the window. Despite the long drop below. How did we do that? We’ll leave that to your imagination.

    A Moment Design Example: Pulp Languages

    Now something from the other end of the spectrum—a rule specifically introduced to allow the players to spontaneously generate their own memorable moments.

    For our 1930s pulp action adventure Captain Dick Britton and the Voice of the Seraph (Thomas and Thomas et al., 2006), we’d decided that multiple languages would be a fun feature of the game, as we had an international cast of characters. However, very few of the players involved spoke multiple languages. How could we deal with this?

    Well, we could adopt ridiculous accents. So if you spoke, say, with a French accent, it would be assumed you were speaking French. But if we did this, it meant that we wouldn’t be fitting into the pulp stereotype; in pulp, Germans need to sound stereotypically German, Americans need to sound stereotypically American and so on when speaking English.

    So we dreamed up a very simple system. Any sentence that was supposed to represent French would be prefixed with the keywords “Zut alors!” Any sentence that was supposed to represent German would be prefixed with “Achtung!” “Effendi!” for Arabic. And so on. Terribly stereotypical, but pulp is stereotypical, and we were erring on the side of comedy.

    Adding to that, we came up with a very simple system of written languages. Anything in red would be Arabic; green would be German; blue French and so forth.

    This was introduced as a rule to our players. The key reason for including this was very simple—to allow them to create moments where the players OOC entirely understood what was going on, but, for comedy purposes, their characters would not. I call this sort of technique Seeding Opportunity—providing fertile ground for moments to happen in.

    This would only work in this style of game. For a deeply serious game based on secrets and lies, the OOC/IC divide simply wouldn’t work. But for our purposes, it worked brilliantly.

    Here I’ll cite an anecdote from one of our cast, Harry Harrold:

    So when my bazaar salesman started a line with “Effendi”—the English-speaking customer couldn’t understand a word, but the spy who was posing as a translator could, and the conversation went something like:

    Customer: How much is this statuette? It looks jolly ancient

    Spy: Effendi: How much for this?

    My salesman: Effendi: I don’t know, my uncle’s mother in law’s family makes them by the dozen, how much will the idiot pay? Tell him it’s tenth dynasty … I’ll cut you in.

    Spy: He says it’s very valuable. Tenth dynasty.

    Customer: I say, marvellous …

    You see where it’s going. The customer’s player knowing exactly what I was saying, and the simple delight of three people performing their little hearts out to an audience of—oh, I dunno, maybe half a dozen at the time? It carried on for a while in the same vein. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve told that story.

    Harry Harrold, The Hole in My Tooth, 2016

    Pay close attention to that last line. “I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve told that story.” We’ve achieved our outcome—the desire to create a war story that players would tell and retell.

    So, with our Jump stunt, we were introducing a specific moment. With this language rule, we were introducing the possibility for the players to create their own moments.((Okay, okay. Some moments we helped them create. For example, the minefield with a large sign—in greenreading “Achtung! Mines!” Which came into its own when it was crossed by a small group of players who could read it perfectly well, but none of their characters knew German…)) We’ve found the mix of these techniques extremely successful.

    Other Media

    I’ve talked solely about larp here. But since we started working this way, I’ve applied these techniques successfully to writing films, books, and in particular to computer games. Each medium has its own rules and styles, and by doing this you don’t need to eschew standard dramatic structure—but, in the same way as with larp, thinking about what your audience will take away is a great starting point for building your story.

    Conclusion

    It’s my contention—and experience—that if you work this way, if you concentrate on the highs and lows, on provoking war stories, you’ll have a memorable game.

    It almost doesn’t matter what goes between those moments, so long as it makes some sort of sense. Honestly. I know that sounds crazy, but most people have terribly fuzzy memories and the bits they didn’t enjoy or found bland fade away, leaving the bits that excited them.

    Sure, the quality of your whole piece will be vastly improved by good joining-of-thedots, but to turn it on its head, if you don’t have those memorable moments, you have nothing. I’ve lost count of the number of movies I’ve seen or books I’ve read that I can’t recall anything about a couple of months later. But people in pubs still talk about the time we had a WW1 tank, ten years later.((We didn’t. It was two sides of a tank faked up out of plywood + paint with a couple of pilots inside and some carefully positioned pyrotechnics, so that when a puff of smoke came out of the barrel, a piece of the ground exploded. But we still hear about “that game where they had a real tank.”))

    Bibliography

    • Goldman, William, Adventures in the Screen Trade. Warner Books. 1983

    Ludography

    • Harry Harrold, The Hole In My Tooth. LarpX. 07/05-2016 https://larpx.com/2016/05/07/ the-hole-in-my-tooth/
    • Ian Thomas and Rachel Thomas et al. God Rest Ye Merry. United Kingdom: Crooked House. 2015
    • Ian Thomas and Rachel Thomas, Thomas, Brewis and Macmillan; Captain Dick Britton and the Voice of the Seraph. United Kingdom: Crooked House. 2006

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

    Cover photo: The setting for the stunt “The Jump”, from God Rest Ye Merry (pre-game, Rachel Thomas).