Dance Macabre was a dancing larp based on the larp In Fair Verona((In Fair Verona is a tango-larp-love story made by Tue Beck Saarie (Olling) and Jesper Bruun for 30 players. The game explores different love relationships between male and female characters. The focus of the game is the individual character’s emotions and the attempt to overcome problems and fears around the subject of love. In this larp the dancing is the medium of storytelling and we found that very inspiring. For more information check the website: http://www.danceaffair.org/in-fair-verona/)) by Tue Beck Saarie and Jesper Bruun, and on one chapter of Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book. We initially conceived the game as an experiment to find out whether Czech larpers would even be interested in this style of larp, and whether the Nordic larp approach in general would be welcomed in the Czech Republic. We also wanted to identify the scope of adaptations required to make the Nordic larp-like game attractive for the Czech larp community. This article sums up the concept of the game, the mechanics used and the experience gained from the creation and organization of the game.
Dance Macabre has long been an open wound for me – but I mean that in the positive sense of the word, if there even is such a thing as a positive sense of the word. Now it’s become a strong memory, an emotional experiment that I was glad to have experienced. You don’t need to know any dancing; you just have to be willing to leave a bit of yourself in the game. Ciri – player
This form of the larp was largely inspired by a workshop presenting In Fair Verona at Knutepunkt 2011. After starting the preparations for Dance Macabre in summer 2011, we also attended the run of the In Fair Verona larp in Stockholm 2012, and used the in-game and workshop experience, especially some of the character creation techniques, the dancing and game design techniques, to fine tune the design of our game. We also created an Icebreaker workshop and added elements and techniques focused on nonverbal playing in all the workshops. We outline the main differences between Dance Macabre and In Fair Verona in the text to follow.
The setting and the plot of the game were inspired by the Danse Macabre chapter of Neil Gaiman‘s The Graveyard Book, particularly by the idea of a rare mystical occasion where the living and the dead have the opportunity to meet and communicate. Just as in the book, the location and the time of the game were of no particular importance and none too specific. The personal stories pursued in the game involved the crossing of the border between the living and the dead, and opened up issues such as how to achieve emotional closure, how to say last words before the final departure, how to move on with one’s own life or how to find a peaceful rest at the end of things. An example of story in the game might be possibility to meet and say farewell to your deceased love and find the courage to go on with your life with new hope for better tomorrows or your new love. In the game it was possible to seek revenge through fight (played out symbolically in a dance), but it was impossible to kill – although you could choose death for yourself.
Dance Macabre, photo by Šárka Růžičková
Pre-Game Workshops
I think a lot of thought went into the making of the game – any kind of game or preparation, though it may seem pointless at the time, proves to be useful in other part of the workshops. Iva Tatranová – player
One of the important lessons of our experience with In Fair Verona is that we enjoyed the pre-game workshops as much as the game itself. The workshops for Dance Macabre were four times longer than the game, it was therefore necessary to make them interesting and playful to ensure good, comfortable and friendly mood between players for the later parts of the game. We could see from the players’ hesitant behavior before the event that some were not quite comfortable with not knowing how to play the game and what was expected, so we made it our goal to make the workshops as smooth and easy-going as possible, encouraging players to ask for help whenever they lost track or became insecure about anything. The eight-person organizational team was at hand throughout the workshops, ready to step in, assist or answer any questions. We believe this helped the players to get ready for the game as smoothly as possible.
The 14-hour workshops combined dancing lessons, icebreaking activities, and training in non-verbal expression techniques, as well as lessons on how to create strong and enduring characters and stories. Speaking of which, the methods used to create characters and pursue their individual stories were also strongly inspired by In Fair Verona and applied plenty of similar techniques such as props, short concepts of characters, challenges for the character, or relationships with others as the means to deal with character challenges.
To make the game more interesting, we also included a part of the relationship workshop where players were asked to create and experience a same-sex relationship. A relationship with a person of the same sex was also a compulsory part of every character’s relationships in the game as our way of familiarizing players with all possibilities of the dance and game.
The dancing lessons were inspired by the larp In fair Verona too, but they were arranged in accordance with the preferred approach of each teacher (in four different runs of the game, we cooperated with three different pairs of dancing teachers), although all accounted for the specific needs of the game. The first part of the dancing lessons was incorporated in the Icebreaker workshop on Friday evening in order to introduce players early on to the basics of the specific tango motion and the lead-follow principle. The Saturday morning workshop was focused on tango technique only, while in the afternoon we teach people how to express different emotions and attitudes through dance, and how to use dance to establish relationships between characters. The Sunday morning workshop aimed to imprint the underlying nature of each character in the players’ dance and to teach players when and how to break tango rules to better express their character through dance. In all the workshops we demanded frequent alterations of couples and important part of workshops included change of lead-follow roles and dancing in same sex couples.
Dance Macabre, photo by Šárka Růžičková
We used many of the traditional techniques of dramatic education in our Icebreaker workshop and to a certain extent in other workshops too. In the Icebreaker, we thought the players to get used to being in close physical contact with each other, and to engage emotionally in the game. The technique drills also proved to be beneficial in helping the players to improve the quality of their character engagement in the game by giving them access to simple but effective range of movements to express different emotions and to connect different parts of the entire experience into a single whole. We think this was a very important part of the workshops because it helped players find and learn to express their characters even before they start dancing. Some of the techniques were presented at KP2013 in the workshop Shut your mouth and play it out :-).
To help participants remember the rather extensive quantity of information presented in the workshops, we sticked notes on the walls of the room with inspirational texts and important dancing tips or leads.
Just as at In Fair Verona, we reserved the Saturday evening for the Jam (dance party), where the participants may practice their dancing skills or just relax and party with others.
Game Design
The strongest moment for me was when the bell struck for the twelfth time and the whole evening was coming to an end. Death was walking around us and taking the dead back. And when she was approaching us and I saw her catch a sight of us from the distance, we looked each other in the eye; that made me shiver. Estanor – player
Through the workshops the players acquired the basic understanding of the character they were about to portray (to the extent of the information important for the game), its in-game point of departure and motivations, and the background relationships with other characters. This provided the players with the content for the first half of the game. Most players agreed to have their endings resolved through the process of the game, but some might feel uncomfortable about not knowing how it will all end up, so we gave them a chance to arrange their endings ahead of time. This arrangement also gave couples an opportunity to end up with each other without having to resort to steering the game. In the absence of a strict script, we found it important to give the players a precise timeframe to work with, especially considering that each player is in charge of his own game individually. For this purpose, we divided the game into 3 acts, each consisting of 3 sets, called tandas, and each tanda of 4 songs. From the gameplay perspective, the whole game takes place in the short while that it takes the bells to toll midnight. As a result, the ringing of bells divided the tandas, and bells were also used to mark the beginning and the end of each act, and the beginning and the end of the whole game too. Throughout the game, we used large clocks to identify individual tandas and give the players a good sense of how much time they have left to bring their story to its end.
Dance Macabre, photo by Roman Hřebecký
The acts were divided by short intermissions to give players some rest from dancing the whole time. We did not use a proprietary scenography in our workshop but rather follow the design inspired by In Fair Verona played in Stockholm 2012. Unlike in In fair Verona we decided not to include creation of the scenography in the workshops, but it was created by organizers because characters were more archetypal concepts without any occupation or social status and we wanted to save some time in the time schedule of the whole weekend. The set was conceived as a town square surrounded by buildings that are important for expressing various in-game emotions. The buildings were marked only by lines drawn on the dance floor; we also included certain inspirational props that could be used in the dance (scarf, cards etc.).
The figure of Death, the Grey Lady, played an important part of the game plot. Acted by an organizer, she escorted the deceased into the land of the living, and then guided them back to the land of the dead at the very end of the game. While the characters could not kill each other during the game, the Grey Lady might decide to collect a life during the game for some good reason. The characters were also free to dance with her if they wish to settle any old issues, for example ask why she took someone close to them. According to the players, dancing with the Grey Lady was one of the most intense experiences they ever had.
It should be noted at this point that the dancing aspect of the game, which combines argentine tango and contact improvisation, was not used in the game for its own sake, however enjoyable it may be, but rather as the means to an end, an instrument of personal expression of the player’s character and its story. Players in Dance Macabre were encouraged to play the whole game in silence and only through nonverbal communication. Unlike in In Fair Verona players did not talk to each other in the game at all. Even though we had doubts whether it will provide range of expressions wide enough to experience the story in its’ complexity, we were happy to see that it actually intensified the whole experience. The nonverbal aspect of the game made the entire experience considerably more intense and players tended to experience stronger bleed than they usually do from other larps.
After the Game
I was very pleased that the organizers did their best to create good after-game mental hygiene. They were aware the game can be difficult to cope with, that the aftereffects can be long and problematic and so they prepared for it and I think they did everything they could to help us, so that we wouldn’t leave as emotional wretches, but had mostly positive experiences and memories instead. Genevieve – player
Dance Macabre is (for me) like good whisky. First it’s bitter and doesn’t taste like much, but the flavor gradually improves and you start to really appreciate it. The final reflection came too soon for me – I drank too much of that whisky and was still a bit drunk. Maník – player
Dance Macabre, photo by Šárka Růžičková
The game ended on Sunday afternoon and it was followed by short period of deroleing and debriefing. As in In Fair Verona, players were encouraged to discuss their experience and their characters’ stories. The first run of the game revealed that players tended to be very emotional after the game, so we added some techniques to help the de-roleing process (i.e. naming the character, talking about it like about a stranger, a short game reminder about their personalities). The game appeared to exert a rather strong bleed effect on many participants, but regrettably, the timeframe available for the game did not allow for more post-game activities.
Summary
Four steps to a brilliant game: a step to the right, a step to the left, forwards and backwards. Death, love, hatred, forgiveness. Sindor – player
The purpose of Dance Macabre was to introduce nonverbal and dancing techniques as viable in-game communication methods to the Czech larp community, and also to present some of the other interesting features of the Nordic larp-like games. For us as organizers, the experience opened up a whole new host of gameplay possibilities and taught us a valuable lesson on how to work with players who lack previous experience of some of the more novel larp concepts, as well as a lesson about the importance of the deroleing process, and the great impact of the nonverbal aspects on the emotional experience of the game. We are also happy to report that the Czech larp players seem very excited about the game concept and that we have plenty of new prospective players willing to participate in the next runs of the game, as well as old players who wish to re-visit the experience.
Dance Macabre, photo by Šárka Růžičková
One of the most important things we learned was the importance of de-roleing and the deepness of nonverbal communication, which has a great emotional impact on the player, because due to the lack of verbalization it sometimes bypasses the rational parts of the brain and influences emotions of the player directly. For me personally, Dance Macabre was also an important lesson about the differences between games played in Prague and outside of the city, about the impact of location on group dynamics and its influence on the game itself.
Additional Note
The game has now been run eight times. There had been four runs before this article was originally written (2012–2014) and four more afterwards (2016–2019). The last two runs were played in English; one of them took place in the Czech Republic with international players (2018), and the other one was made in the UK in cooperation with local players and organizers, who took care of the production and invited the game designers to run the game there (2019). Neither of the English-language runs set any gender-related rules or content in the game. Players signed up in couples consisting of one leader and one follower, and all the content focused only on the dancing roles, i.e., the same-sex relationship mentioned above became a same-dance-role relationship.
Dance Macabre
Credits: Mikuláš Bryan, Kateřina Bryanová, Kateřina Holendová, Monika Kadaňková, Pavel Mejstřík, Pavlína Mejstříková, Šárka Olehová, Jana Pouchlá, Petr Růžička, Petr Urban, Caminito.Cz, Buenos Aires Tango, Ondřej Vicenik, Van Ahn Nguyenová, Iva Vávrová
Date: 2012–2019 (eight runs in total)
Location: Praha, Vanov u Telče, Svatý Ján pod Skalou, Lipník, Zámek Veltrusy, Krasnice Czech Republic; near Cambridge, UK
When I started organizing larps, there was only one way to run a production. For the purposes of this essay, I’ll call it the Infinite Hours model. Under this model, a fairly large team of volunteers puts in a massive amount of work to realize a labor of love. Leadership is focused on making the larp as amazing as possible through the brute expedient of work, work, and more work. People are motivated by the desire to make as much cool stuff as humanly possible.
In productions like these, ambition rules. Some of the greatest larps of the Nordic tradition have been made like this. If you count work hours and calculate what they would have cost if anybody got paid, you get incredibly high figures. Because of this, larps made under the Infinite Hours models often punch far above their weight in production quality.
Infinite Hours can lead to great work but they also have a cost. Under this model, people burn out. Organizers don’t sleep. Stress accumulates and makes people leave the scene entirely rather than subject themselves to another round of self-sacrifice.
I’ve made larp like this too. Almost every veteran organizer in the Nordic larp scene has.
The goal of this article is to lay out an alternate mode of production. I call it efficient larp production; and it’s important to ask, efficient in terms of what?
This is not about saving money. Rather, I’ll lay out a production method by which organizer stress is minimized and the effectiveness of a single work hour is maximized. The purpose of making the work more efficient is to allow for more rest, sleep, and leisure. The goal is that by the time the larp is over, organizers feel energized and happy, not worn out.
You can make great larps using the Infinite Hours model and terrible larps using the efficient model, or vice versa. How good a larp you create depends on your creative vision and design, not the choice of production model. This is about the wellbeing of the people who make larp, not the quality of the work. That’s a separate discussion.
A detail from Death By a Thousand Cuts, created using the guidelines in this article. Photo by Tuomas Puikkonen on Flickr. CC BY-NC 2.0.
Labor
There are three principal ways to structure the labor of a larp production. Counterintuitively, if nobody gets paid you can demand much more from them. Often they also demand much more from themselves. If people are paid, either all or some, questions of fairness and distribution of workload tend to arise because the project takes on the character of professional, paid work.
The all-volunteer model is the most traditional way to make Nordic larp. Full volunteer teams are often large, as people excited by the project join in. Project leads often work extremely hard for long periods of time, taking on hands-on work on top of coordination. It’s not uncommon for people to drop out during production because of stress so new volunteers come in to replace them. This can happen at all levels of the production.
Under the semi-volunteer model some organizers get paid while others work as volunteers. At the professional end of larp organizing this is quite common. Participation Design Agency, the makers of larps such as Baphomet and Inside Hamlet, has made productions like this. I’ve also used this model in larps like Enlightenment in Blood and Tuhannen viilon kuolema (Death By a Thousand Cuts).
Typically, in a semi-volunteer model organizers who work on the larp over a long period of time get paid, as well as those with specialized skills not available on a volunteer basis. Unpaid volunteers are used especially during the actual runtime of the larp event. The model is similar to that used at film and music festivals in many countries.
The challenge of running a semi-volunteer production is to ensure that everyone feels fairly treated. The people who get paid should carry the responsibility and the stress while the volunteers should get to participate in an interesting, meaningful way. This means that it’s harder to justify having volunteers shoulder the kind of extreme workloads you encounter in all-volunteer productions.
Finally, in a professional model everyone gets paid. The realities of bespoke Nordic larp design are such that this is very hard to do, because even big productions have small budgets. Perhaps this will change if subsidizing larp production by the state or cultural foundations becomes more common.
In a fully professional work model, the available resource pool in terms of people and work hours is the smallest. Since people are paid for their work, and work must be fairly compensated, the amount of work everyone does must remain reasonable. An increase in workload must come out of the budget, and the budget is always limited.
A wealthy character at an art gallery in Death By a Thousand Cuts. Photo by Tuomas Puikkonen on Flickr. CC BY-NC 2.0.
Bang For Buck
A design choice is efficient if it produces the maximum amount of meaningful larp action with the minimum amount of organizer work. This can be understood quite broadly: A beautiful prop that everyone in the larp sees which energizes their commitment to the setting is equally as good as a great innovation in character design that makes them motivate players to new heights of spontaneity at half the pagecount. What matters is that most choices made in the production follow the basic calculation of bang for buck. Or if not buck, then work hours and stress.
You need to start each larp production by doing an analysis of the idea from the perspective of efficiency. Does the overall larp idea seem like it’s possible to realize within the model presented in this article? It’s important to note that the answer may well be no. Some larp ideas are possible to organize efficiently, others are not. Some larps can only be made with Infinite Hours. For example, if the concept involves a large number of individual, distinctly different, custom-tailored player experiences, it’s probably impossible to make under the aegis of efficiency.
Maximizing the efficiency of an organizer work hour makes it possible to organize big larps with small teams. This is especially helpful for those organizers who are trying to make larps professionally and aspire to a sensible hourly wage. There are two ways to be paid properly for the work you do as a professional organizer: Higher pay and less work. Since the economics of larp organizing often mean that money is tight, it makes sense to see if hours can come down instead.
Specialization
“In our production, everyone does a little bit of everything.”
This is the absolute worst way to organize larp production.
Each individual organizer has resources that are spent at varying rates. Time, mental capacity, stress. Time is the easiest of these to measure and allocate but running out of mental capacity and accruing too much stress leads to burnout and long-term mental health problems.
The reason I strongly prefer larp organizations where everyone has a clear job title is that it makes it much easier to manage stress. If everyone does a little bit of everything, everyone is also responsible for everything. Everyone must stress about everything.
In contrast, in a team composed of specialized organizers, everyone is only responsible for their own sector. If everyone has food, the cook can sigh in relief and doesn’t have to think about whether the workshops are running properly. This way, an individual only has to stress about the work they control and understand.
A team of specialized organizers is only possible with the help of coordinators whose job is to make sure everything gets done by someone. These roles are typically those of producer, creative lead, or similar. Ideally, the coordinator delegates instead of doing practical work themselves.
In ideal circumstances, a larp organizer has wide autonomy to take care of their own responsibility while trusting others in the organizing team to do their part. Coordinators take care of problems and deficiencies in work allocation. This results in an efficient management of stress, since the number of things you have to stress about is minimized.
Death By a Thousand Cuts was a simulation of Finnish class society in the shadow of climate catastrophe. Photo by Tuomas Puikkonen on Flickr. CC BY-NC 2.0.
System Thinking
Efficient larp organizing requires systems thinking. Ideally, you don’t engage with the larp at all on the level of an individual playable character. Rather, you design interaction systems that provide the desired types of experiences for as many characters as possible. If an idea benefits only several characters, it should be discarded.
There are several tactics that can be employed to keep your thinking on the system level:
Always think of characters in terms of groups, not individuals
You can set a minimum group size, such as six for a smaller larp or ten for a bigger larp, to make sure you don’t accidentally start fiddling with individualized content.
Recycle
You can use the same idea over and over again as long as it’s not experienced repeatedly by the same players. For example, the larp has three secret societies. In the fiction they are different but no player will be in more than one of them. This means you can use the same rituals for all three. It might make the fiction incoherent from a top-level vantage point, but that’s not where the players are experiencing the larp from. The chaos and co-creation of larp will give each society a different texture even if they’re the same on paper.
Design interaction engines instead of plots
A plot is a handcrafted sequence of events. It’s very labor-intensive and thus bad for efficient larp design. An interaction engine is a mechanism in the larp that creates action. A single well-designed engine can create massive amounts of playable content in the larp thus freeing the organizers from writing bespoke content.
I learned this framework from working with Bjarke Pedersen. In the larp Baphomet, there’s a necklace. If you wear it, you are the god Baphomet and people will react to you according to specific interaction rules. The necklace roams the larp, worn by different people, generating action. It’s very simple but results in a vast variety of action.
Empower players
This is not the same as outsourcing elements of organizing to players. Rather, you want to give the players as much creative agency as possible so that they engage with your design in a robust, active way. This means that all content that you create naturally reaches more people who use it more thoroughly. Typical design choices that encourage this are transparency and a robust fiction that won’t break if the players start improvising.
Once you see the entire larp as a system, it’s easier to grasp which parts can be junked, which copied and repeated, and which must be handcrafted. Systems thinking has the additional advantage of helping you recognize blind spots in the larp’s design. For example, let’s say that you’re making a larp about love. If you design character experiences individually, it’s easy to get sidetracked and accidentally make a character who’s not connected to the theme of love. Designing on a system level helps avoid this because love is present as a systemic element.
We built a live radio station for Death By a Thousand Cuts, called Murder Radio. Photo by Tuomas Puikkonen on Flickr. CC BY-NC 2.0.
Personal Touch
All design that requires one-on-one consultation between an organizer and a player must be cut if at all possible. Ideally, an organizer relates to players and characters as groups, not individuals, during the preparatory stages of a larp production. This changes during runtime when taking care of individual needs becomes important for each player to have a good experience.
For example, a character creation process where a player makes their character together with an organizer is unacceptable because it requires the organizer to custom-tailor content for an individual player. This is extremely work-intensive and thus inefficient. In contrast, a process where the players create characters in organizer-run workshops is fine because a single organizer can handle a large group of participants.
The time between signup and runtime is when players have the largest amount of individual demands on the organizers. In my experience, 5% of players are responsible for 95% of questions and other requests for organizer time. To discourage this, I’ve found it best to try to cultivate a strong understanding of the larp’s vision and fiction among the participants, so that they feel comfortable making their own choices without having to consult an organizer.
Note that as with all the guidelines presented in this article, there are always special cases. In my own experience, working with participants with disabilities to help them have a good experience is a sensible use of organizer time even if it’s only for one person.
Writing
The number of words that have been written for a larp is never, ever an indicator of quality. More text doesn’t make a larp better.
Indeed, the opposite is true. Players are human beings and because of this they have limited cognitive capacity. Their ability to retain information from text is bound by their human nature. This means that the goal with larp writing must be to communicate as much as possible with as few words as possible. Information must be clear, concise, and immediately understandable. This way, players grasp it quickly, and organizers avoid the work of producing unnecessary textual mass.
Personally, using the character software tool Larpweaver revolutionized my larpwriting because it makes it possible to have complex characters with much less text than before. It automatizes a lot of tedious labor. However, Larpweaver also requires an unorthodox approach to how characters are designed so it may not suit everyone.
Other methods for reducing writing labor are character-building workshops where the labor of character-making is transferred to the players, and larp design that’s not very character based and thus doesn’t require long character texts.
In my experience, transparent design often makes it possible to eliminate labor that’s not strictly writing but adjacent to it. An example is character sendout, a truly tedious task that can be removed if you can dump the character texts into a Google Drive folder and allow players access to all of them.
A portable venue used for Death By a Thousand Cuts. Photo by Tuomas Puikkonen on Flickr. CC BY-NC 2.0.
Physical Production
When considering efficiency in a larp’s physical production, it’s important to note that this doesn’t mean compromising quality and comfort. Rather, it’s a question of how to allocate resources effectively so that the maximum number of players get to enjoy each feature.
Using existing locations, props, and infrastructure is probably the greatest single trick to efficient physical production. If you find the right castle for your magic school, you don’t have to spend so much time decorating it. What you need is already there. This is one of the areas where consideration of the larp’s concept and the realities of production most overlap. It’s a recurring topic among larp organizers: “I’ve found this great location. Now I only need to come up with a larp that works there.” That’s efficient larp production!
Efficiency favors relatively homogenized design where all participants either have similar experiences or one of a very small set of different experiences. In terms of physical design this means favoring props and scenography for big scenes and large groups of people. Beautifully decorated meeting halls, big showy props, and dramatic lighting are all examples of efficiency.
In the Finnish larp Proteus, the production team built a combat simulation in an airplane hangar, a spectacular set piece with smoke, lights, cars, and guns. The story of the game was built so that all characters got to experience it in small groups. The simulation was a repeating instance. This way a labor-intensive showpiece benefited the maximum number of participants.
Note that there are circumstances where it does make sense to put effort into physical production even if it only benefits a small number of players. Efficiency is not an absolute. One example is the dietary restrictions of individual players. Catering to them may be time-consuming, but it’s also necessary for the purposes of making the larp accessible.
Airbnb is a great place to find interestingly furnished venues for urban larp. Photo by Tuomas Puikkonen on Flickr. CC BY-NC 2.0.
Kill Your Darlings
Imagine this scenario: The night before the larp, the creative lead sleeps only an hour because they’ve stayed awake sculpting a cool prop by hand.
Never do this. Unless the task at hand is literally a matter of success or failure for the larp, you should cut features that require giving up sleep immediately before the larp’s runtime. Rested organizers are better organizers.
Killing your darlings is important at all stages of larp development, but especially so in the late stage of the production when it becomes clear how far your resources stretch. And remember, sleep and stress are resources. You should aim to have an efficient, rested crew during runtime; and sometimes that requires cutting away cool things at the last minute.
In my experience, the cool thing is often a custom-built technological solution that would be so awesome if it worked. At some point, you have to decide that you will live without it instead of wasting resources on troubleshooting that will lead to nowhere. Indeed, existing off-the-shelf technological solutions are nearly always better than unique prototypes, because of their reliability.
Here it’s important to remember that the players won’t miss features they never knew about. If you didn’t tell them there would be a scale model of a spaceship in the main atrium, they won’t be disappointed that it was never finished.
Casualties
There are some things you lose in the search for efficiency. A lot of larpmaking is driven by a love for detail, cool props, and interesting individual characters. If you want to go to the extremes of efficiency, there’s no place for those things. You only design what you need, nothing more.
Personally, I’ve never gone quite that far. Once the production machine is running efficiently, sometimes you’ll find the time to add a few little details, fun easter eggs that only benefit a few players. The important thing is to do these with your surplus energy, not by cutting from your own wellbeing.
When talking about efficient larp production, a common protest to the ideas presented here is that efficiency removes all the things that make it fun to make larp. If you’re running a larp production with volunteers, this is something to keep in mind: Why are these people helping you? Ideally, you can organize the work so that they can create the features that make it all worthwhile for them while cutting elements they’re less passionate about.
Happily, if you do this right, the larp benefits, as people are often at their creative best when making something they believe in. As a coordinator, you may sometimes have to cut one of your own favorite features so that a volunteer can have theirs.
Death By a Thousand Cuts ended in murder. Photo by Tuomas Puikkonen on Flickr. CC BY-NC 2.0.
Sustainability
My hope is that over the long term, efficient larp organizing makes it possible to sustain a larp community where people don’t get permanently burned out. Instead, they’ll hopefully be able to continue organizing for years to come. Similarly, for some of us this model makes it possible to make larp professionally, thus leading to more larps that people can play.
Another word for efficiency might be sustainability. The goal is that after a larp production is over, the organizers feel good, perhaps a bit tired, but still basically ready to do it again. This way, experience accrues in the community, great projects get made and people feel good about working on larps.
Perhaps even so good that at the afterparty of one project they’ll already start thinking about the next one!
Cover photo: We invited our funder Finnish Cultural Foundation to participate in the larp by providing a venue and one of their staff for a scene. Photo by Tuomas Puikkonen. Image has been cropped. CC BY-NC 2.0.
In the summer of 2018, I signed up for a feminist spinoff of College of Wizardry (CoW, 2014) called Hecatic Academy of Witchcraft (HAW). Since CoW usually aspires towards a gender-neutral setting, I was interested in seeing what a specifically feminist and female-focussed version of the larp and the magic college might look like. How would the concept of magic academia be changed if we were to imagine it as developed mostly by and for women? Would magic itself become something different? What would gendered magic look like? And importantly, would there be room for magic expressions outside of the gender binary?
Hecatic Academy of Witchcraft was the brainchild of Agata Świstak and Marta Szyndler, and it was described as a “world where feminine means strong, powerful and unyielding’ and a “safe haven where witches can study magic without the risk of being burned at the stake.” The spinoff larp was marketed for “women, for non-binary pals, for anyone with a feminine experience, and for men who want to try something new.” ((College of Wizardry. “Hecatic Academy of Witchcraft”. Facebook video. 22 June 2018. Accessed 31 August 2020.))
Having played as a professor at CoW before, I immediately knew that I wanted to teach again at HAW. Especially the new subjects of Moon Magic and Blood Magic sparked creative visions in my head of witches gathering in a circle under the full Moon to celebrate their womanhood. (Since I identify as a queer feminist, a witch and a cis woman, ideas for magic rituals centred on and celebrating female empowerment come easily to me). However, I was aware that I needed to make anything I did accessible to characters and players of all gender expressions and identities – and this honestly seemed quite the challenge. For instance, if Blood Magic or Moon Magic connotes a focus on “the female cycle” and menstruation, how would I include female bodies that don’t menstruate, non-female bodies that do, cis-gendered male bodies and people who might feel dysphoric about the subject? Is it possible to separate menstruation from the notion of a female biology? In general, how do we celebrate female power and magic in any larp setting without simultaneously reproducing binary gender thinking? How do we avoid cis-hexism?
The special feminist run of CoW was eventually cancelled, but it left me with a lot of unresolved speculation about uplifting the stories of women through elements of female power and magic while striving to make room for all players, including trans*((In this text, I will use trans* as a signifier for all non-cis people (such as transgender, non-binary or genderfluid people, etc.). In other words, I will use trans* for brevity as a signifier for anyone who identifies (always or sometimes) outside of the gender they were assigned at birth. This is a common practice in writing about trans* experiences that I first came across in Ruska Kevätkoski’s work in the 2016 Solmukohta Book (Kevätkoski, 2016).)) players and characters. My goal here is not to provide the perfect answers (I don’t have them), but to share my thoughts and hopefully inspire others to gender their magic systems with awareness and intention.
The Social Construction of Binary Gender
Let’s have a quick talk about the gender binary and how our implicit biases about gender might influence larp design. The gender binary is the historical and current notion (particularly in Western culture) that there are two – and only two – distinct and separate genders. Biological sex is often invoked as a reason for upholding the gender binary, with proponents arguing that individual gender expressions spring ‘naturally’ from inherent biology – a view that is sometimes called essentialist. An alternative view (and the one I hold) is that the binary division of gender is a social construct, i.e. a socially constructed and culturally fluent set of expressions and behaviours that are implicitly taught, learned and sustained.((See e.g. Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex. Vintage Books, 2011. Originally Le Deuxième Sexe. First ed. 1949; Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. Routledge, 1990, Tandon Neeru. Feminism: A Paradigm Shift. Atlantic, 2008. Accessed 23 September 2020.)) In the following, I will presuppose that gender categories are fluent, malleable and socially constructed – and that it is therefore possible to bend, break and rebuild them in larps and other fictional settings.
It is crucial to understand that just because something is a construct, this does not mean that it doesn’t exist. National borders are a social construct, but they are enforced by laws and sometimes maintained with violent force. Currency is a construct, but the numbers typed on a piece of paper or inside a computer still represent influence and agency in society. The male/female division of colours such as blue and pink or the idea that only women may wear skirts is obviously culturally constructed, but the negative consequences for transgressing outside the expectations of your assigned gender category can be substantial. Even when we resign ourselves to the restrictions of whatever gender category we were assigned at birth, there is still implicitly trained internalised and externalised social policing in place to ensure that we perform((“Perform” here not in the sense of “playacting” but meaning to present yourself through a set of implicitly trained and socially acceptable gendered behaviours.)) whatever behaviours have been designated as sufficiently “feminine” or “masculine” by our culture. This is true for both of the binary gender categories, because although white, straight cis-men are often viewed as a dominant group and as the “norm” (compared to whoever is being “othered” through normative discourse), their potential for self-expression is equally restricted by the rules of the gender binary. As Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie explains:
We define masculinity in a very narrow way, masculinity becomes this hard, small cage and we put boys inside the cage. We teach boys to be afraid of fear. We teach boys to be afraid of weakness, of vulnerability. We teach them to mask their true selves…
Although the binary categories of “male” and “female” are constructs, they have tangible and material effects on our lives. We live within and around these identities and categories every day. Many people perform their expected gendered behaviours without even thinking twice about it. Our assigned gender roles are implicit and systemic, and therefore they become the norm. Anyone who exists outside of this norm, either because they resist binary thinking, or simply because they don’t fit easily within the two established categories, often risk being shunned, oppressed or overlooked. The consequences of not “fulfilling” your assigned gender role can be harmful. Exclusion from communities or being marked as “other” have very long histories as forms of social punishment intended (consciously or subconsciously) to correct behaviour back towards the culturally normative expectation.((See e.g. Munt, Sally R. Queer Attachments: The Cultural Politics of Shame (p. 32). Ashgate Publishing, 2007.))
When we understand the mechanisms behind gendering and othering, and when we recognise the binary gender categories and their associated expressions as constructs, we are better able to anticipate and play with these concepts in larps during world building and in the development of gendered or ungendered((Since the gendering of people, expressions and behaviours is the accepted norm, the decision to omit gender altogether also become a gender-conscious choice.)) magic systems.
Illustration by Marie Møller
Gendering Magic
When we create worlds and settings for larps, we are deconstructing and reconstructing reality. Most larps, however abstract (with a few exceptions), still tell the stories of connected or disconnected human beings and their communities. Nothing comes from nothing, and the stories we tell are reflections of the human experience.
When it comes to gender, this means that we might unwittingly be reproducing binary stereotypes. That is why gender awareness matters, and why it is important to make conscious decisions about gender and to include trans* characters and narratives. Because of the historical erasure of trans* narratives, examples of trans* historical figures are not easy to find,((Sharma, Ayesha. “Transgender People Are Not Included In Mainstream History.” Everyday Feminism, 2018. Accessed 24 September 2020.)) and it takes deliberate effort to search them out and include them((Preferably without ascribing trans* identities onto historical figures whose personal gender identities can’t be ascertained.)) or to create fictional historical trans* characters for players to portray.
Likewise, when we create magic systems that celebrate female power (or any gendered magic), we must take care not to conflate magic and biology, thereby insinuating that e.g. femininity and female magic spring from a “female biology”((I.e. a female gender assigned at birth based on physical characteristics.)) rather than from the female cultural experience. If we create a system which states that female magic comes from such a “female biology” (i.e. from having a womb or from something more abstractly female but concretely connected to the physical), we are reproducing the essentialist idea that gender is biological. If gender is a construct, then gendered magic is also a construct. This is true for the actual construction of gendered magic systems when we create them out of game, and that must be true inside the diegetic reality of the larp as well.
The great thing about this is that if gendered magic (such as a female witch’s potential connection to the Moon) is a social construct, then this gendered border within magic can be explored and transgressed just as the boundaries of gender can be explored and transgressed in real life. We can (and should) embrace and empower the female minority exactly because it is a minority((“Minority” here not signifying a numerical minority but rather any social group that is subordinate to a dominant group with more power and/or privilege regardless of group size, see e.g. https://www.britannica.com/topic/minority.)) – but we can do that and also make space for other minorities. We can do it without doing unto others what has been done to women for so long.
Gentlemen Magicians and Wild Witches
There is so much potential for stories about gendered magic, so let me offer an improvised example: Imagine a world historically reminiscent of our own where men go to school and learn magic while women are denied access to both magic and learning. In this world, girls are taught magic in secret by their grandmothers in the woods. Their magic grows wild and intuitive while the boys are taught structured and formulaic spells – both branches of magic equally effective, but each with their restraints and specialities. In this world, the cultural division between boys and girls has created a gender binary. It has also created two separate forms of magic according to gender – not because only two genders exist but because only two genders have been allowed to exist.
Now in this world, there are male magicians who will never learn (or even want to learn) what the wild witches know. But there are some among them who yearn for the magic of the Moon and the forests and who turn out to excel in intuitive magic. There are those who were told they were girls, but who now live as boys to attend classes and surpass their peers in every way. And there are those who can master both branches of the craft and combine them into new kinds of magic.
Of course, several things could happen next within this world when people break the social expectations. I would love to see a story where combined or gender-transverse magic is celebrated to empower trans* characters and where it begins to dissolve the gender binary. Alternatively, backlash, banishments or cover-ups of all non-binary magic could mirror the transphobia, ostracism and the erasure of trans* narratives in the real world. This is where it is especially important to consider the purpose of the gendered player experience you are shaping and to remember your trans* players. While I firmly believe there must be room in larp for people to explore lives and identities outside of their own, and while some trans* people will appreciate seeing cis players struggle with the same institutionalised challenges they face every day, others might find it hard to watch someone else live out their most difficult real life moments.
With no direct experience in larp development, I don’t claim to be an expert, but I have made note of some good advice and best practices: Make it very clear in your scenario description if your gendered magic system will lead to play involving gender discrimination and/or trans* discrimination. Create trans* or ungendered characters to make space for all players interested in playing trans* narratives. Acknowledge the existence of your trans* players in advance. Don’t wait for them to initiate the conversation, but make it clear from the start that you anticipate what you can and are ready to listen.
When it comes to magic in a historical setting, it is interesting to imagine how the two (culturally constructed and segregated, but very real) genders might perform magic differently. But it is not enough simply to declare that there is male and female magic. We need to know why that is and what it entails. Stories of gender segregation have value when they investigate the gender binary in order either to teach us something about the lived experience of all genders at that time and place or to explore and transgress the gender boundaries they establish.
Gender-Neutral Witchards and Agender Fae
At College of Wizardry, it has become custom to call witches and wizards by the universal gender-neutral portmanteau “witchards.” No one seems to recall the exact origin of the word (a reflection of the largely community-sourced gameplay), but the term functions well to support the gender-inclusive tone that the larp aims for. In the player handbook for CoW, there is a passage on equality and inclusivity which reads:
Witchard Society is different though: magical ability can surface in anyone, and that makes everyone equal regardless of their looks, body, sexuality, gender, beliefs or ethnicity […] and genderqueer and transgender individuals are common and wholly accepted.((College of Wizardry. Player Handbook. Company P, 2019. Version 3.0, ed. Laura Sirola and Christopher Sandberg. Accessed 23 September 2020.))
I imagine this rule stated clearly and directly (and repeated in pre-larp workshops) makes a difference for many players, although I can’t speak for them. I can say that it means a lot to me when portraying a female professor of age and authority, and it matters in the gameplay I have sought to create for other players. At CoW, there are also pronoun badges for players to show clearly whether their characters identify as they/them, she/her or he/him. This enables me to use the right pronouns for the characters I meet (something I very much appreciate), and then promptly ignore their gender because at CoW, gender doesn’t matter – but it matters a great deal that gender explicitly doesn’t matter, because this stands in such clear contrast to the importance implicitly placed on gender in the real world.
In-game: The author teaching magic through music at College of Wizardry 22. Photo by Przemysław Jendroska, Horseradish Studio.
The upcoming larp A Harvest Dance((A Harvest Dance, set for October 2021.)) by Lotta Bjick and the team at Poltergeist LARP features another kind of magical creature that has transcended (or rather never had) the need for gender. The site describes: “Fae society is not human and the concept of gender is bewildering and strange to them, therefore all characters will be written and played without gender.” The vision is that all players will portray genderless fae characters and use they/them pronouns about each other at all times. As fae, the participants will be able to play with – or rather completely disregard – gender in fashion and demeanour because the fae are bewildered by the silly human mortals’ constructed gender binary.
Of course, although characters might be written as unbiased or genderless, it doesn’t mean that players are able to enter into the fiction and immediately abandon their subconscious biases. It takes effort, and that effort takes awareness and intention – and even then, we might still slip up. (For instance, in spite of best efforts, I have personally experienced both sexism and sexual harassment at CoW.) But it matters that we get to try, and that we get to enter into a world where concepts such as gender-equality or the total lack of gender is explicitly stated as the norm and the expectation.
The organisers of A Harvest Dance are aware that players bring their trained normative behaviours with them into the event whether they want to or not. The act of using they/them pronouns for everyone around you is a new experience and a social exercise. It is stated clearly on the website that players should avoid gendered pronouns and not use words such as “man” or “woman.” But, the organisers say, “We are aware that this is not what most of us are used to in off-game real life and we might mess up. That is ok!” (A Harvest Dance).
Although our ingrown biases are hard to shed, larps give us the option to try. The trying is important in itself because it shows us that the established social norms of the real world are transmutable and replaceable constructs and are not the only ways to exist and interact. Even when we try and fail, we learn something about ourselves and the pervasive condition of our subconscious preconceptions. Through the narrative device of magic (and the actual magic of larping), we are able to construct, inhabit and investigate alternate realities that can show us a glimpse of what a truly unbiased community might look like, or experience what a genderless society feels like. The creators of A Harvest Dance say that they “are excited to see what characters we all can create together without the boundaries of gender!” And so am I.
Menstruation Magic
I would be remiss if I didn’t at least attempt to include a discussion on magic and menstruation. After all, it was the notion of Moon Magic and Blood Magic as magic school subjects that set my thoughts in motion exactly because they made me think of menstruation rituals and the potential for accidental gender-based exclusion. Menstruation is historically and implicitly connected to womanhood, but it is not something all women experience, and it is not something only women experience.
Menstruation is connected to womanhood because it has historically been associated with the physical characteristics ascribed to ‘female biology’. Not only that, but menstruation has been marked as something unclean or impure by the patriarchy and is still abused as a reason to subjugate and disfranchise the female minority and keep women subdued.((UNFPA. “Menstruation and Human Rights.” UNFPA, 2020. Accessed September 27, 2020)). Women have been called hysterical (from the Greek “hystera,” meaning womb or uterus), and the menstrual cycle is continually cited as a reason why women should not hold positions of power.((See e.g. Robbins, Mel. “Hillary Clinton and the clueless hormone argument.” CNN, 2015. Accessed 24 September 2020.)) In some cultures and traditions, women are kept separate from their communities during menstruation, and they must undergo cleansing rituals before re-entering society. The loss of dignity and agency that women face through the stigma of menstruation is exactly why it is an important act of resistance for women to celebrate it. Menstruation celebrations and rituals can and should be used as a tool to empower the female minority and break this age-old taboo.
However, as I said above, not all women menstruate, and not only women menstruate. Some women are post-menopausal, some have medical conditions that disrupt or prevent menstruation, some have reasons and medical means to opt out, and some women don’t have a uterus. Some trans* people menstruate but do not identify as women, including a number of men. And some people are dysphoric about their menstruation (or lack thereof) because it doesn’t correspond with the (socially constructed) physical expectations of their gender identity. So how do we celebrate menstruation through magic without risking the exclusion of bodies that don’t fit neatly into binary gender categories?
I’m sad to say I don’t have the answer. To be honest, I thought about not including this segment at all because I have more questions than answers. But in the end, I believe the question merits being asked. My ultimate intention is not to provide a ready-made solution but to inspire further contemplation in others. Two brains are smarter than one, and larps are the perfect playgrounds to ask the “what ifs” together and experiment with subversions of social norms. But I do have one final thought to share on the matter.
While womanhood and menstruation are historically related issues, they are not actually the same thing. When we look beyond the conflation that patriarchal history has made of women and menstruation, we see that the connection is yet another social construct. Some bodies menstruate. Some of these bodies belong to people who identify as women. Some of them do not. Menstruation is a thing that some bodies do – not a thing that just women do. So maybe it’s possible to separate the two.
Perhaps in the right story and the right setting, rituals celebrating menstruation could be something different and apart from rituals celebrating womanhood. The great thing about magical world-building is that we are not limited by mundane maxims. We are free to imagine and inhabit alternate realities that are partially or wholly different from our own. We can create worlds where menstruation is celebrated in all bodies regardless of gender, or where menstruation talk is commonplace and not taboo, or where menstruation represents something else altogether.
As I said, there is good reason to celebrate menstruation specifically in order to re-empower a female minority that has been disfranchised directly through menstruation stigma. That can and should be done in larps that focus on the gender binary and the concomitant limits it places on everyone – larps that hopefully also consider the injustices done towards trans* people through the same social system.
The Power of Gendered Magic
Whether you believe in magic or not, gendered magic will always be a social construct because gender is a social construct. When we create worlds and social settings for larps, we are either reconstructing or deconstructing the gender binary. Once we realise that genders are social categories that have been culturally constructed over time, it becomes easier to reframe and reimagine them, which we can then do with intention and awareness of the ramifications it will have for players and characters of all genders, including trans* players and characters. We should not accept an implicitly essentialist approach to gender simply because it is the norm of the real world.
Larping – and especially larping in fantastical settings – gives us the power to decide to try something new, or to question the status quo by reproducing it for the purpose of closer scrutiny. We get to imagine worlds not only where “feminine means strong,”((College of Wizardry. “Hecatic Academy of Witchcraft.” Facebook video. 22 June 2018. Accessed 31 August 2020. )) but where masculine means being sensitive to the needs of others and expressive about your emotions. We get to break the cages and the restrictions placed on all of us through the binary construct of gender. Whatever choice we make about gender categories in our world-building and magic systems, it should be done with intention and for good reason because it has the power to change someone’s frame of mind.
Gendered magic has the power not just to include but to uplift gender minorities. With Hecatic Academy of Witchcraft, the idea was to reframe and celebrate women and female magic in exact opposition to the historical persecution of female witches.((Even though men were also persecuted for witchcraft, and although there are examples of countries where more men than women were executed, women were the main target of witch-hunts and executions in Europe and Scandinavia. (Guillou, Jan. Heksenes forsvarere: en historisk reportage. Modtryk, 2012. Orinally Häxornas försvarere – ett historiskt reportage. First ed. 2002).)) At A Harvest Dance, there will be an absence of gender, which is in itself a gender-aware choice and a social construction, and it will probably teach the participants something about their own perspective on and relation to gender. In my own example above about boys schooled in magic and girls learning magic in secret (where gender segregation has resulted in two different types of magic), we can imagine how characters that are able to combine the two gendered forms of magic might become revered for the very fact that they see through and transgress the implicitly binary system.
In larps, we get to do the telling – but narrative power also means responsibility. When it comes to creating space for trans* narratives in larp, cis people still hold the most power. By stepping up and making sure to include trans* characters in our stories, and by asking the right questions when we create gendered worlds and gendered magic systems, we begin to counteract historic and current trans* erasure. When we create realistic or historically inspired settings, we need to work towards including those stories that are too often erased, overlooked and forgotten. When we write alternate, fantastical and imaginary worlds and settings, we are free to reimagine gender, or its absence, for everyone.
Although I don’t have all the answers, I hope that sharing my thoughts and speculations on this issue might have inspired some further play with gender, magic and gendered magic in larps. There are already a number of larps with rich explorative ideas about gender (e.g. Brudpris, Sigridsdotter and Mellan himmel och hav), and I hope to see even more larps in the future with a deliberate focus on gender in their world-building in order either to investigate or remedy the gendered injustices of the real world. I especially dream of more larps where gendered magic – or the explicit absence of gender in magic – is applied as an allegorical device to illustrate and illuminate the fundamentally constructed condition of the binary gender categories of the real world in order to uplift and celebrate gender minorities. To me, this would be true magic.
This article will be published in the upcoming companion book Book of Magic and is published here with permission. Please cite this text as:
Møller, Marie. “Gendered Magic.” In Book of Magic, edited by Kari Kvittingen Djukastein, Marcus Irgens, Nadja Lipsyc, and Lars Kristian Løveng Sunde. Oslo, Norway: Knutepunkt, 2021. (In press).
In 2006, I was 18 years old, and I organized my first larp: a three day fantasy larp set in the ongoing campaign of Gyllene Hjorten (Eng. The Golden Deer). All things considered, it went well, for the most part thanks to the players, who made sure they had fun. We did make one mistake that I still remember. We had failed to foresee that once the group of evil soldiers got their hands on the magical ring everyone was looking for, they might leave the area. This made sense for their characters to do. We, the designers, had failed to provide a reason for them to stay on site. We were lucky and this happened on the last night of the game, which meant it did not disrupt the larp too much. If Larp Design: Creating Role-Play Experiences had been around at the time, could we have avoided this mistake?
The Larp Design book is gorgeous, with a striking cover and clean design. It is also massive with its 428 pages. Edited by Johanna Koljonen, Jaakko Stenros, Anne Serup Grove, Aina D. Skjønsfjell and Elin Nilsen, it contains a collection of essays about designing Nordic-style larp. With 66 authors from 10 different countries, it is an impressive feat. The stated goal is that the essays should be practical and useful for beginners as well as experienced designers.
The content is divided into five parts:
The Foundations of Larp Design, where the basics of larp design are introduced.
Designing What Happens Before Runtime, which contains advice on things such as communication before an event and how to run workshops.
Designing the Runtime. This part makes up the bulk of the book and deals with a wide breadth of topics from character design to questions of signaling consent.
After Runtime. This is a short section covering post-play activities and how to gather player feedback.
How to Export Nordic Larp. The final part is also very short, covering Nordic larp in other larp and art traditions.
The book starts off with an introduction to the foundations of larp design. It then goes on to outline how to design what happens before, during, and after the runtime of a larp. The final part is a discussion of how Nordic larp can interact with other larp traditions, and how to collaborate with other art forms.
The essays range from offering concrete advice to providing perspectives to consider. An example of the former is the essay on “How to Schedule the Participants’ Time on Site” by Alma Elofsson. How long are people able to stay still and listen? About 30 minutes. How often do you need to serve coffee to Nordic players? The answer is every 3 to 4 hours. While these questions might seem trivial, when they are botched, it can drag down an otherwise excellent larp experience.
An example of an essay exploring perspectives on a more complex issue is “Designing for Queer and Trans Players” by Eleanor Saitta and Sebastian F. K. Svegaard. Here, the authors offer up questions to consider to make your larp more inclusive to queer and trans players, rather than offering clear cut answers to those questions. For example, they explore how statements like “this larp will not feature homophobia or transphobia” can be troublesome. While signaling inclusion, it also risks erasing the erasing the identities they are meant to include. It does so by removing the structures that created those identities to begin with. These questions are complex and this essay offer a starting point for thinking about them.
Together the two examples above show the breath of questions explored in this book. There is so much great stuff in this book that it is difficult to decide what to highlight. Nevertheless, I would like to bring up three of my personal favorites. The first is “Basic Concepts in Larp Design” by Jaakko Stenros and Markus Montola. This is a succinct and elegant summary of the subject and its terminology. As part of the introductory chapter of the book and to the field as a whole, it is indispensable. For those that have read the existing literature surrounding Nordic larp, such as the Knutepunkt books, much of this will be familiar. However, for someone just getting acquainted with larp design, inter-immersion, steering, and herd competence, may be new concepts. Readers can see the entire glossary for the book here.
The second one is “Functional Design” by Kaisa Kangas. This essay states that “a functional larp design is one where the players have meaningful things to do during the larp, and where those things serve a purpose in the larp as a whole” (p. 143) whereby Kangas manages to capture the crux of larp design in one sentence. How can designers make sure that the things that the characters do in the fiction are actually doable in the larp? How can they balance playability vs. plausibility? The essay explores these questions with the help of a well-selected set of examples.
Finally, I very much enjoyed “Spatial Design for Larps” by Søren Ebbehøj, Signe Løndahl Hertel, and Jonas Trier-Knudsen. This essay opened my eyes in a new way to how the space in which a larp is set shapes play. For example, they suggest that using a smaller space will catalyze tensions and facilitate play focused on relationships and interpersonal conflict. And this comes with the added benefit of saving money on rent. What is there not to like?
A number of practical anecdotes are mixed in with the essays. In these, larp designers tell a story and make a judgment on whether they “nailed it” or “failed it.” Most of these are absolute gold, especially the ones describing failures. For the novice, there is plenty to learn there, and I am sure there are many veteran larp designers smiling at how they themselves made the same mistakes.
There are a few minor things to grumble about. There are some unfortunate typos, and I find the sans-serif font in the section introductions difficult to read. My main criticism of this book is that, at least at the time of writing, it is very difficult to get a hold of. To fulfill its full potential this book needs to reach people outside of those that attended the Knudepunkt 2019 conference. Otherwise it risks primarily preaching to the choir. The good news is that according to the editors, while the book is currently out of print, it will be made available in 2020. To be kept up to date on release information, sign up by clicking this link
Is anything missing? To my mind, there are two things. The first one is an essay about writing larp scripts. In an age when more and more larps are run more than once, and often by different people, advice on how to efficiently document the organizing materials for a game would be useful. The second thing I miss is a discussion about running a series of connected larps. Others will certainly find other things they would have liked to see included — with that said, this book covers a lot, and leaves few stones unturned.
Larp Design sets out to be a practical book and it hits the mark. For absolute beginners, it might be a little bit too much to chew off. I imagine it would be a lot to take in for someone with no practical design experience. That said, I do think this is a book that has plenty to offer for anyone interested in larp design, from the beginner to the experienced. I sincerely hope it will be more easily available. That way, future 18 year-olds might realize how to make the evil soldiers stay on-site.
Credits
Editors: Johanna Koljonen, Jaakko Stenros, Anne Serup Grove, Aina D. Skjønsfjell and Elin Nilsen
Johanna Koljonen, Jaakko Stenros, Anne Serup Grove, Aina D. Skjønsfjell, and Elin Nilsen, eds. 2019. Larp Design: Creating Role-Play Experiences. Copenhagen, Denmark: Landsforeningen Bifrost.
An autobiographical game is a game that is based on the experiences of the designer(s). There is, of course, a lot of wiggle room in that description. A game that realistically depicts an event from the creator’s life moment to moment is an obvious example, but what about an abstract game that is emotionally true to the creator’s lived experience but not literally true? Does a game in which players fumble around a room in total darkness without speaking count as autobiographical, if the purpose is to experience something similar to the helplessness and frustration the designer felt when they experienced a loss?
For the purposes of this piece I am going to talk about something that’s planted firmly in between the two. Specifically, I’m going to talk about designing an experience that explores autobiographical themes through metaphor while also incorporating characters that are based on real people. This goal is what I tried to achieve when writing The Truth About Eternity, my semi-live scenario for Fastaval this year.
The Truth About Eternity (Davis 2019) is a scenario about a near future in which ancestor worship has taken the form of preserving the deceased in digital tombs. When a person dies, their family can upload an artificially intelligent copy of them to a server and then continue to visit them via virtual reality. The scenario explores the relationships between two digitized ancestors and their three living descendants, all who belong to different generations, as well as the financial and emotional strain that comes with maintaining these digital tombs. One of the major themes is the struggle of balancing familial responsibility and personal freedom. At its core, this scenario is about Korean family dynamics, eldercare, guilt, and grief. It’s also about whether artificially intelligent copies of human beings have souls, but that question is presented in the scenario as a way to further explore those core themes.
While I clearly do not live in a world in which digital tombs of this nature exist, The Truth About Eternity is largely autobiographical. The three descendants, Esther, Helen, and Sam, are based on my grandmother, mother, and me. They are not carbon copies when it comes to the details, but I wrote them to be largely emotionally true to the three of us. The two ancestors, Jungwoo and Minji, are amalgams of various family members both living and deceased. Likewise, while some of the scenes are completely fictitious, many of them pull from real moments in my family’s history, some which I was present for and others which I heard about after, sometimes long after, they transpired.
Family photo of Clio Yun-su Davis and grandparents. Photo by Hoyun Kim.
Why Write an Autobiographical Game?
There’s a scene that makes its way into what feels like the vast majority of media revolving around ghosts. The protagonist somehow witnesses the trauma of the ghost through a vision or by investigating what happened to the deceased, and through witnessing the trauma they have either freed the ghost or have learned what must be done in order to do so. This trope is so prevalent that it’s hard to imagine there’s nothing to it in real life. There is something healing about having other people witness the most painful moments in your life because in sharing these moments you become less alone in them.
What part of your life do you want other people to witness and experience, and why? If you’re thinking about writing an autobiographical game, it will likely help to have as specific of an answer to that question as possible. If I had gone into writing The Truth About Eternity with the goal of creating a game about my family rather than creating a game about the guilt and profound grief my family has contended with while taking care of my grandmother who has advanced dementia, I would likely not have gotten too far. In my experience, vague design goals often lead to less memorable experiences for players. I would rather play in a game about someone’s family dinner growing increasingly awkward because a will was recently read than a game about a family dinner that becomes awkward because the characters don’t like each other for unspecified reasons.
Once you have determined what part of your life you would like other people to experience, even just for a snapshot, it’s a good idea to have some understanding of the “why” behind the design. There is a decent chance that your “why” will look like one or all of the following:
Because I want other people to understand this part of my life.
Because if other people experience this (in a controlled environment), I will feel less alone.
Because words are not enough to explain what I experienced.
Because I want to be witnessed.
Because other people have gone through something similar and I want them to know they aren’t alone.
The Curse (Stark 2013), a scenario written by Lizzie Stark also for Fastaval, has a premise and family tree that both pull from the author’s own life while not exactly replicating it. The designer created the scenario partly as a means for giving others a glimpse into the challenges faced by those who have hereditary cancer in their family, and specifically cancer caused by a BRCA mutation. That is, at least in part, her “why.” Marshall Bradshaw, another American larper and designer, wrote his short semi-autobiographical larp A Political Body (Bradshaw 2018) in order to provide an opportunity for players to explore the struggle of having to choose between participating in a protest and staying home when a chronic illness flares up badly. The larp functions as a highly specific snapshot that depicts a much longer-term issue.
The Truth About Eternity was the equivalent of the cursed video tape from Ringu (Nakada 1998) or The Ring (Verbinski 2002) for me. In these films, the ghost of a girl who was killed by being pushed down a well manifests her anger and pain as a video tape that kills the viewers after they watch it. The scenes shown in the video are mostly abstract, with shots that illustrate her trauma dispersed throughout. The video’s message is not a simple confessional of what happened, but a strange piece of art that conveys the creator’s suffering by inflicting suffering upon those who witness it.
I was, and still am, this ball of guilt and sorrow due to my grandmother’s condition and the immense challenges that have come with taking care of her. It has been unbelievably hard to communicate the sheer magnitude of my grief through conversation or even in writing. Like the girl in the well (yes, I am running with this analogy), I had to create something else in order to make people understand the emotional component of my family’s situation. One of the goals of The Truth About Eternity is absolutely to make its players distraught. When I hear that players cried during a run, it feels like part of the weight of the situation has been lifted off me. It feels like an essential part of my existence has been seen by another person—finally—and just by being seen, some of the pain dissipates. Is it selfish to write a game for those purposes? It might be, if there weren’t a lot of players out there who specifically seek out games that try to rip their hearts out.
There is a secondary reason for why I wrote The Truth About Eternity, and that is to help people who are unfamiliar with Korean culture and Confucianism to understand it a little better. The Wikipedia entry on Korean Confucianism serves as a good brief overview of some of the cultural information relevant to the scenario. As mentioned previously, this scenario was specifically written for Fastaval in Denmark. There are parts of it that would be different if I had written it for an American audience, and parts that would be very different had I written it specifically for Asian players intimately familiar with the culture.
Much of the workshopping at the beginning is in place to deter accidental (and potentially purposeful) microaggressions. Autobiographical games that depict a culture different from the one the majority of its players come from have this additional challenge, as you must provide cultural context for the life events inspiring the content. You also run the risk of participants interpreting the game’s message as “this is what is wrong with this culture and why it’s worse than others” even if the goal is supposed to be “here is a glimpse at some of the complexities of this culture.” This especially tends to happen when players enter a game with existing assumptions about said culture gleaned from stereotypes, depictions of it in other cultures’ popular media, and brief encounters with it without deeper knowledge and context for its values. James Mendez Hodes touches on this tendency in his article “Best Practices for Religious Representation, Part I: Check for Traps,” in which he warns against wasting time on hierarchies of evil (Mendez 2019). One nightmare outcome for my scenario would have been if players used it as an opportunity to paint Korean (and Korean American) society as inferior and unevolved compared to others because of the game materials’ inability to make the characters’ values relatable. Too much information and the players are overloaded, while too little and they do not have enough to work with. Martin Nielsen and Grethe Sofie Bulterud Strand outline good practices for portraying cultures in larp in their “Creating and Conveying Cultures” chapter of Larp Design: Creating Role-Play Experiences (Nielsen and Strand 2019).
Writing Characters Based on People you Know
There are some questions of ethics and etiquette to consider when basing characters on real people. Each case is different so I won’t go into much detail here, as there are plenty of articles on how to deal with this when writing fiction that apply to games as well, such as Matt Knight’s “Using Real People, Places, And Corporations In Your Fiction – How Real Can You Get And Not Be Sued?” (Knight 2017). The short of it is, it’s generally a good idea to not make characters one hundred percent identical to those they’re modeled after. The more similar they are, the better it would be for you to get explicit permission. There are, of course, exceptions, but this is a good place to start.
A game that is autobiographical for you, the designer, is also likely in part biographical for one or more people unless you are creating a game in which multiple players all play different facets of yourself or alternatively, a single player experience. You may very well be telling other people’s stories as well as your own. In a chapter of Larp Design: Creating Role-Play Experiences entitled “Writing Realistic, Non-Exploitative Characters,” Laura Wood (2019) describes the thinking behind writing Inside, a larp that takes place during an English class held in a women’s prison. The characters, created during a pre-larp workshop, pull from the histories of real people with whom the designer has interacted, but are purposefully not recreations of specific people’s lives. This is one way to avoid exploiting real individuals and their lived experiences.
When emotions are strong and psychological wounds are fresh and/or deep, it can be tempting to write characters based on people we know as saintlike or evil beyond the shadow of a doubt. If you’re going for a surreal, cartoonish, or over the top tone, then this might work! If not, however, you will probably want to include a bit more nuance. Real lives and people are complex, and if you want to convey that complexity, you are going to have to do some things in your design that may hurt a little. Or a lot.
Playable characters based on people who have hurt you generally need to have qualities other than that they hurt you. Again, when you dive into very surreal territory you might want to throw this out the window, but when writing realistic characters, this is important. Players are already often inclined to take a character with unpleasant traits and play heavily into them, making them as despicable as possible. I learned this the hard way with Jungwoo, an ancestor character who does some nasty, selfish things but is also supposed to be pitiable and at least somewhat sympathetic. Many runs of The Truth About Eternity seem to have featured a decidedly horrible version of Jungwoo, something that I’m taking into account as I prepare to make revisions to the scenario.
Likewise, playable characters based on people who you love and admire need to have flaws. I struggled with this when writing Esther, who is based on my grandmother. I ended up taking one of her best qualities and amplifying it so much that it became a flaw—Esther is so selfless that her selflessness actually becomes a burden to her family. Similarly, writing Helen was a challenge because she is largely based on my mother who shoulders many of the same responsibilities that Helen does. It wouldn’t be difficult to play her as someone who easily makes all the most selfless decisions if I didn’t make her realistic by giving her her own conflicting needs. If a character is placed on a pedestal, a player may be hesitant to portray that character with the depth they would like for fear of breaking an unwritten rule about representing that person as perfect and beyond reproach.
Family photo of Clio Yun-su Davis and mother in South Korea. Photo by Mark Davis.
Writing a Character Based on You
This is where things get even trickier. There are so many ways in which writing yourself into a character can go wrong. You have to have a keen sense of self-awareness in order to write a character based on yourself realistically, and I’m still not sure whether I managed this or not. My approach was to create a character who shared my motivations, fears, and one big flaw that I’ve had plenty of time to examine. Sam, the youngest character in the scenario, is the embodiment of my desire to have all the elderly people in my family well taken care of despite what it might do to those fronting the brunt of that responsibility. In my case it is primarily my mother, in Sam’s case it is Helen, his mother. As much as Sam and I might sacrifice to help our families, it is never as much as our mothers sacrifice. So it is that Sam is fairly oblivious to how his desperation urges his mother to martyr herself. Sam has this flaw because I have spent a lot of time reflecting on its manifestation in myself. Had I not, I don’t know what kind of character Sam would have turned out to be, but I suspect he would be rather two-dimensional, not very believable, and therefore difficult to play.
It can be a little weird and disorienting to have other people step into your shoes and play someone who is based on you for several hours. They may make decisions that make your head spin because you’d never see yourself making them, or they may accentuate your worst or best qualities in a way that makes you feel anywhere from slightly embarrassed to utterly ashamed. If you find yourself reacting strongly to the way others portray you, it’s a good idea to remind yourself that they are likely playing for drama and not to accurately depict you. Depending on how much you disclose, there is a good chance the player won’t even know their character is based on you.
So far, I’ve mostly been amused and fascinated by how players portray Sam. I’m relieved when people play him as naive and childish because it means I didn’t write him to be a perfect angel simply because I didn’t want to see myself in an unflattering light. It is wise to check your motives when writing yourself into a game. If it turns out that the whole thing is a long way of saying you were right and everyone else was wrong, chances are you need to revise it.
Is This a Game that is Emotionally Safe for You to Facilitate?
This leads us to a question I grappled with even before I started writing The Truth About Eternity. Is the game you want to create something that you would be able to facilitate without it causing you too much distress? You are, after all, setting up a bit of an Ebenezer Scrooge and the Ghost of Christmas Past situation in which you may be witnessing variations on upsetting scenes from your past, depending on the content of your game. Some of those variations might take you by surprise in terrible ways.
I don’t have a good answer when it comes to The Truth About Eternity because illness kept me from attending Fastaval this year so I did not get to facilitate the game for its intended audience. I have, however, heard and read detailed accounts of the runs that took place in my absence. Before I settle on a definitive answer, I feel that I need to run the scenario for a group of players not composed of my friends.
What I do know is that I cried for about twenty to thirty minutes every time I sat down to write this scenario, which made finishing it in the first place ridiculously difficult. There were also multiple layers to my concerns about seeing players embody these characters. Would they make a parody out of these characters’, and therefore my family’s, suffering and the way I presented Korean culture? Would they find the characters and their situation so alien that they couldn’t possibly portray them with any seriousness or depth? These concerns are in addition to the standard anxieties so many people have about their games; do the mechanics work, are the workshops helpful, is the pacing okay?
My advice is mostly hypothetical since I did not run the scenario in the environment it was written for. However, I would suggest running it first with players you trust before making yourself vulnerable to the world at large. That way at least you can see how it is you react when you know the other people in the room have your back and will understand if it’s an intense experience for you.
Receiving and Parsing Feedback on an Autobiographical Game
It’s a pretty radical act of vulnerability to write an autobiographical game and then hand it over to people who are going to tell you what’s wrong with it. When you take the time to create something that holds so much meaning for you and share it with the world, you will eventually encounter people who don’t like the thing you created at all. When you’ve created something based on your own life, you might find that even if you’re normally thick-skinned, the criticisms sting particularly badly.
It can also be difficult to distinguish, particularly when writing about a culture that is likely unfamiliar to the players, when your design isn’t doing the best job of explaining how to portray that culture or when players are being unintentionally insensitive. I also dealt with this challenge when writing and calibrating The Long Drive Back from Busan (Davis, 2017), a freeform larp created for the 2017 Golden Cobra Challenge about a dysfunctional k-pop group. If the majority of runs of the game do not encounter an issue with this, then it may very well be an issue with the players instead when it does occur. When players are being intentionally insensitive, it tends to be more obvious, and unfortunately you can’t trust much of the information you gain from those sessions.
Fortunately, none of the feedback I received for The Truth About Eternity was painful to read. In fact, it was overwhelmingly encouraging and informative. Some runs were a little bumpier than others, and players pointed out the things that didn’t go perfectly, but at the end of the day the experience resonated with many of them exactly the way I wanted. There were some players who did not connect emotionally to the content, but that’s to be expected with any game. For now, I can safely say I do not regret writing this scenario and sharing it with people. I would love to see more autobiographical games in the future from designers from different backgrounds.
Nielsen, Martin and Strand, Grethe Sofie Bulterud. 2019. “Creating or Conveying Cultures.” In Larp Design: Creating Role-Play Experiences, edited by Johanna Koljonen, Jaakko Stenros, Anne Serup Grove, Aina D. Skjonsfjell, and Elin Nilsen, 228–31. Copenhagen: Landsforeningen Bifrost.
Verbinski, Gore, dir. 2002. The Ring. DreamWorks Pictures.
Wood, Laura. 2019. “Writing Realistic, Non-Exploitative Characters.” In Larp Design: Creating Role-Play Experiences, edited by Johanna Koljonen, Jaakko Stenros, Anne Serup Grove, Aina D. Skjonsfjell, and Elin Nilsen, 228–31. Copenhagen: Landsforeningen Bifrost.
Ludography
Bradshaw, Marshall. 2018. A Political Body. In Review.
Mikołaj Wicher has together with Agnieszka Kisiel (translation) and Marcin Słowikowski (graphic design) produced a set of cards to help with larp design. Here is how they introduce the cards themselves:
The Larp Design Cards are a tool for LARP game creation. The goal is to aid the designer in visualising various elements of the game and the connections between these elements. Inspired by The Art of Game Design. A Book of Lenses, the Cards are meant to assist teams of creators in preparing a game together. Other influences include “The Mixing Desk of Larp” and “The Elements of Larp Design” but, contrary to those, Larp Design Cards are a practical tool and not a descriptive system. The formula given here is the first version, and I encourage you to experiment with it.
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.
If someone is unable to breathe, that is an emergency. After three minutes without air, there is risk of brain damage. After somewhere between six to eight minutes without air, the person will typically die if breathing is not restored.
That is why, when someone seems to be choking or having difficulties breathing at a larp, you should always assume the situation is real and go to their immediate aid. You have to act fast. With just three minutes to potential brain damage, there is no time to wait and figure out if the player is just acting or if it is the “real deal.” On top of that, someone having difficulties breathing cannot shout “Hold,” “Cut,” or anything else to show that it is a real emergency. Often, due to panic, the person who cannot breathe can’t use any non-verbal signals either.
Therefore, you should never, ever design larp mechanics that require participants to role-play that their characters have breathing difficulties or are, indeed, choking. In particular, you should never design plagues, poisons and other maladies which would affect a lot of characters and thus create spontaneous choking scenes.((A larp blog isn’t the best place to give medical advice, but there are lot of great first aid videos on the subject, made by professionals, which you could easily check out. For example, this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccr4lKZjHks))
When players expect to see other players role-playing characters with breathing difficulties, there is great risk that someone will mistake a real emergency for an in-character role-play, and not act on it. Especially, if everyone is pretending to wheeze and have a hard time inhaling. Having some sort of a non-verbal signal to show that you are okay can be good, but it actually only helps if you are okay. If no one rushes over to you in a real emergency because they assume you are role-playing, an okay-signal isn’t any help. As time is of the essence in such emergencies, even a delayed reaction can have serious consequences.
Role-playing heart attacks or strokes poses the same risks as role-playing breathing problems, as they, too, are time critical life-threatening emergencies. For that reason, I advise people to avoid role-playing them as well.
Of course, we can design larps in which characters get poisoned or fall ill. I just recommend that the designers choose symptoms that do not look exactly like a real emergency that must be resolved within minutes. For example, you can use vomiting, skin lesions, screaming in pain, writhing on the floor, bleeding from the eyes, numbness spreading in the body, or anything else you can come up with as long as it isn’t easily mistaken for a very common, time-critical emergency.
2013 and 2014 may be remembered as the conception of the Nordic blockbuster larp. Two ambitious larps – The Monitor Celestra in Sweden and College of Wizardry in Poland – succeeded in attracting an unprecedented level of international attention from media and players. They did so, in part, by advertising their inspiration from established fictional worlds with large fan followings (Battlestar Galactica and Harry Potter respectively), and by the choice of spectacular and eye-grabbing locations: a naval destroyer turned spaceship, and a castle made into a wizarding college.
Both productions were created by large teams: Celestra boasted a team of 85 people, while College of Wizardry had a team of 20 organizers and helpers, plus 33 NPC players. Although they were partially run by professional larpmakers, they were both nonprofit games((While none of the CoW organizers got paid for their efforts, some Celestra organizers got a small payment.)). A ticket to College of Wizardry cost €180 and a ticket to Celestra twice as much, but they both provided players with room and board, as well as some costuming, yielding good value for money. The 32-hour Celestra was run three times for a total of 389 players, with plans for remakes. College of Wizardry, capitalizing on the success of the initial 138-player run, sold out tickets to the 2015 re-run in minutes.
However, this is not a story about production. Neither massive production teams, enthusiastic players, nor spectacular locations are by themselves enough to create a successful larp((As many participants of the spectacular art festival / forgepttable larp Futuredrome (2002) are probably aware.)). This is a story about the design model the Celestra team happened upon in their effort to produce a large larp on a rushed schedule – a model that mixed recent innovations from experimental and progressive Nordic larps back into the tried-and-true approach we will call brute force design. This is a story of how that model was further refined at College of Wizardry, and about how these larps may even set the new norm in how to create action-packed fast-paced larp entertainment for mature audiences.
Brute Force Design
Before the progressive Nordic tradition of larp, there was brute force design. Nobody, of course, called it that – they called it “organizing larp”. We are proposing this name retroactively to describe an approach to designing larps that we often encountered in our own scenes the 90s, and still recognize in many of the larps produced in other traditions.
At a typical brute force larp, designers will use a plethora of techniques to drive conflict and mystery, such as:
Characters are split into groups with conflicting agendas (orcs want to kill elves)
There are subgroups inside groups (the elvish general wants to attack head-first to show bravery, while the king favors a stealthy approach)
There are power hierarchies (the general commands the officers who command the soldiers)
There are secrets, which players can discover, hoard, and trade (the general is a traitor plotting to kill the king)
There are puzzles that can be solved (assemble a torn-up treasure map)
Run-time game mastering is conducted by triggering events, introducing surprises, and inserting messenger characters (an NPC scout enters the tent of the king, informing that a horde of undead is approaching the camp)
The key characteristic of brute force isn’t that it uses any one of the techniques in this list, but that it uses a lot of them simultaneously.
Rather than the less is more approach common in the last decade of Nordic larp design, the brute designer will embrace quantity over quality and insist that, in fact, more is more. The results of that are unpredictable and chaotic, but seldom boring. Some of the conflicts and puzzles might be completely forgotten, while others command center-stage. The larp exemplified above might end in a battle of four armies, the discovery of an ancient treasure, an elvish civil war, or all of these at the same time.
In addition to the philosophy of more is more, a typical brute force design combines the diegetic social structure of colliding power hierarchies, and the dramatic structure built around discovery of hidden narrative, with the assumption that players will play to win.
Colliding Power Hierarchies
In a power hierarchy, the higher ranks have the right to command the lower ranks, and expect their orders – within limits – to be followed. Power hierarchies are overt: everyone knows who the boss is. Both these features distinguish power hierarchies from more subtle status hierarchies typically ignored by brute force designers, which describe who is socially dominant, who is allocated more attention, and whose voice is more respected.
Power hierarchies make for easy role-playing. Neither the givers nor receivers of orders should be in any doubt as to how to perform their character’s social role. They also come with clear affordances for dramatic tension: the potential for rebellion is implicit in every tyranny, and every weak leader invites intrigue for succession.
To make things more interesting, though, the brute designer will rarely settle for just one power hierarchy. Instead, games are built around the contested relationships of multiple groups. The simplest possible collision is between two hierarchies pursuing mutually exclusive goals: both the orcs and the elves are looking for the ring of power, but only one side can have it.
More complex collisions happen when characters are given allegiance to more than one hierarchy (i.e. both family and close friends), or when some allegiances are secret and aim to subvert the visible hierarchy.
These collisions serve to furnish the larp with conflict, but they also provide characters with dramatic choices: to serve country or ideology, friend or family.
Discovery of Hidden Narrative
Brute force designs will usually distribute clues and puzzle pieces throughout the game, but they aim to be more than simple treasure hunts. The clues spread through character backgrounds and introduced by NPCs will often combine to reveal back story, the diegetic myths of the past that preceded the larp, and that often impart important further clues on how to win it; for example, by revealing the true motivations of other characters. Buried items combine to form game-changing weapons, or devices that reveal even more of the backstory.
In this way, the larp designer tries to fit the players’ experiences into a larger diegetic narrative, one that began long before the larp, and which is meant to give the unfolding of the larp meaning in the context of that larger narrative.
Playing to Win
The structures of colliding hierarchies and puzzle – solving implicitly invite participants to play to win. After all, outside of roleplaying, puzzles are usually meant to be solved and games about conflict are usually played for the thrill and challenge of seeking victory.
When the brute designer can assume that players will try to reach their goals within a limited set of strategic choices, their behaviour becomes comparatively easy to give direction: the designer only needs to dictate goals and rewards for each individual or group, thereby defining what constitutes “winning” for them, and manage their resources and strategic alternatives.
Playing to win, which is the core of gamism (see Kim 1998), usually requires the players to compromise between roleplay and gameplay. A player may try to achieve a coherent and true-to-genre portrayal of their character, complete with personal flaws that would hinder the character in conflicts of the larp. But the moment the player faces a strategically important decision, those flaws and attitudes are often discarded in order to achieve victory.
Ups and Downs of Brute Force
Playing to win is the default expectation of most people approaching a game, while power hierarchies make for the clearest possible social roles and relationships, and the existence of secret hierarchies and solvable puzzles match Hollywood genres such as the murder mystery, the spy story, and the supernatural thriller. For this reason, brute force larps tend to be easy to play and require little explanation.
The brute force approach easily brings about a string of great scenes and powerful moments for the players.
It is also resilient against mistakes; a malfunctioning plot will be overtaken by a functional one. Finally, the sheer amount of content – more is more – usually leaves each player with plenty of options for what to do next.
The key word, though, is “usually”: the chaos of brute force design provides no guarantees – of anything. And implicit in the model are also a number of dangers.
First of all, players in a brute force larp easily get overrun by a plot train. Secretly digging for treasure in the forest? Too bad. The elves just attacked, and the forest is the battleground. Adrenaline-pumped and ready to fight the final battle?
A pity; the generals just declared a truce in order to to pursue the hunt for hidden treasure. The emergent narrative of one group can easily disable the play of another group; crisis and conflict in particular trump subtler themes.
With power hierarchies comes the risk of plot monopolization: the characters at the top, if they play their cards strategically and sensibly, tend to sniff out and take control of the business of their underlings. Plot for the underlings is tricky to begin with: two kings are easier to write than twenty soldiers, and the designer’s attention – biased by a lifetime of exposure to film and literature – is often attracted to the former.
With the atmosphere of secrecy that hidden narrative and potential traitors tend to produce, the monopolized plots tend to become opaque, known only to leaders and their trusted advisors. At their worst, brute force designs provide great entertainment for the handful of players with high-ranking characters, at the expense of all the other players.
As mentioned, playing to win often leads players to sacrifice character coherence when encountering strategic choices. Increasing the number of plots further fragments the experience: the fisherman’s wife no longer has a function when the larp turns to battle against the orcs.
When overrun by a competing plot train, the player will need to reinterpret their character as someone different, someone who actually has a role to play in the plot. Brute force larps, while they often yield memorable scenes, also generate moments of frustration as players need to internally renegotiate their characters while steering((See The Art of Steering by Montola, Stenros & Saitta in The Knudepunkt 2015 Companion Book.)) around plots and colliding allegiances.
Players do not always accept such compromises. At any given brute force larp of the 1990s, you would find individuals who approached the larp with other ideals than playing to win, culminating in manifestoes such as Dogma 99 (Fatland & Wingård 1999) and the Manifesto of the Turku School (Pohjola 2000) that confronted gamist play from different perspectives.
Dogma 99 prohibited backstory, secrecy, main plots, main characters and “superficial” action – in other words: hidden narrative and colliding hierarchies. The Turku Manifesto insisted that players should approach roleplaying with no other goal than to immerse in character, dispensing with goals such as playing to win, and implied that a coherent and selfconsistent simulation, free of narrative direction, should be the goal of larp designers.
Subsequent innovations in the Nordic larp discourse have served to emphasize, facilitate, and focus on those other ideals, from perfectly coherent simulation to faithfulness to the genre and narrative arcs.
These newer arthaus larps have emphasized relationships over conflict, implicit status over explicit power, life in the trenches over the adrenaline of the battlefield. They have evolved techniques such as workshopping, blackbox scenes and inner monologues to broaden the expression and to help players develop characters deeper.
Some have surrounded their players with a fully immersive 360° illusion (Koljonen 2007) made of impeccable physical representations and simulated access to outside world, while others have done away with physical illusion entirely and used empty rooms with stage lights, symbolic props and non-diegetic music.
Surveying the state of the Nordic larp discourse at 2012, it appears that brute force had fallen entirely out of fashion in this progressive scene.
Brute Force in The Monitor Celestra
The Monitor Celestra was a larp set in the world of Battlestar Galactica. It was played on the Halland-class destroyer HMS Småland, built in 1951. The game was created around the vision of playing space drama within a beautiful self-enclosed environment of 360° illusion in the spirit of the classic Swedish larps Carolus Rex (1999) and Hamlet (2002).
The organizers went to great lengths turning the museum ship into a decommissioned Monitor-class vessel commandeered for military use in the aftermath of the fall of the Twelve Colonies of Kobol. Most notably, the larp featured a system of control terminals for navigating through the galaxy, communicating with other vessels, and fighting space battles.
During the first act, the Celestra found herself stranded in deep space, separated – perhaps irrevocably – from the remainder of humanity, pursued by the vast firepower of the enemy Cylons, with onboard society deeply fractured.
At the first glance, the Celestra design bears resemblance to a typical brute force larp. Celestra featured at least a dozen colliding power hierarchies ranging from Colonial Navy to the civilian crew of the vessel, from the Vergis corporation to organized crime factions. The larp was set in the immediate aftermath of the destruction of human civilization, so which of these hierarchies would command the allegiance of any one character was anyone’s guess.
The game masters had prepared surprises, such as Cylon infiltrators, and occasionally brought in non-player characters to stir the pot. There were hidden narratives to be discovered by piecing together clues and asking NPCs the right questions.
For example, the players could figure out the origin story of the three Cylon models, determining whether they were friend or enemy, and learn to understand the holographic ghosts that haunted the ship. Clearly, the philosophy of more is more was at work.
However, The Monitor Celestra added several elements to the concoction. While not all design choices worked out equally well, we can discern a new model of larp design in the combination of the ones that did.
While these additions were mostly triedand- true design solutions, the way they fit together and complemented each other was new and unique, with the potential to improve significantly on the brute force design model.
Playing to Lose
Most importantly, the Celestra team subverted the brute force tradition by insisting that all participants play to lose. The players were instructed in detail on how to avoid winning the larp, and were obliged to follow that instruction: in fact The Monitor Celestra Briefing document distributed to players proclaimed that “playing to win is for asshats anyway”.
Although Celestra may have been the first Nordic larp to explicitly tell players to play to lose, the idea goes back at least to Keith Johnstone’s (1979) work on improvisational theatre. At previous Nordic larps focused on oppression or tragedy, such as Hamlet, the necessity of playing to lose did not need to be articulated: these larps did not make any sense if approached with a gamist mentality.
Celestra also subverted gamism at its holy of holies, with gun rules emphasizing responsibility and drama over fairness and challenge:
A gun controls a room until another gun is pulled. […] The rule is simple: they get what they want, whereupon the gun is holstered or otherwise removed from play. It’s the responsibility of the whole room involved to play up the lethality of the situation […] When the gun wielder has gotten what she wanted, it is her responsibility to get the gun out of play – by running away (good luck with that), holstering the gun, dropping it and surrendering, or stand down in some other way […] You can never stop someone brandishing a gun from getting what she wants, except by pulling another gun. The second gun now trumps the first.
The Monitor Celestra Briefing
Breaking Up Plot Monopoly
In addition to asking that participants play to lose, Celestra featured widespread player duties((In Celestra they were called “out of character duties”, but we chose to simplify the expression.)). The scientist characters were instructed to share secrets late in the game for dramatic impact, or to introduce other characters to HoloBand equipment used to create diegetic black box scenes in the style of the Caprica TV series.
Civilian journalists were instructed to gather information, to keep everyone posted, and to activate civilians by providing them with news to play on. Corporate middle management had player duties to keep the game dynamic by repeatedly gaining the trust of one of the factions and then switching sides or staging coups.
Most of the player duties served to break up plot monopolies and emphasized playing to lose: to have characters reveal secrets they strategically should have kept to themselves, to involve and inform others of their agendas and back story.
While in a typical brute force larp, power hierarchies end up serving the players on the top, Celestra sought to make them serve the players at the bottom. The tops of the hierarchies received extensive player duties, encouraging them to funnel plot downwards in the hierarchy and make choices leading to better roleplay, rather than making strategically smart decisions.
Being a cog in the machine provides the player with a social role and game content, even when it means running errands or monitoring a comms terminal. By building an elaborate 360° illusion, with technology simulating a fully functional spaceship, such tasks could be set up to give nominally bottom-tier characters agency and relevance.
Being in charge of the comms terminal meant that the messenger could withhold or sell crucial information, and the engineers in the reactor could shut off power to other parts of the ship at a whim. Even when they chose to obey orders to the letter, these characters were exercising agency.
In terms of play experience, though, not all errands are equal. Especially in the first run, some players noticed that tasks such as standing guard alone made for poor play experience.
Playing a leader in this kind of an environment and guiding the experience of subordinates is akin to game mastering without the overview that the actual game masters enjoy: highly dependent not just on player skill set but also on the information provided by the organizers. In the second run leaders were instructed to make people always work in pairs.
Especially after this change, the players at the bottom of the hierarchy had better experiences of Celestra than the players left entirely outside one: It was much better to play a crewman in the engine room than a refugee without a place.
The Power of Established World Material
In brute force games, players sometimes have an incoherent understanding of how to behave in the game. This pertains to things such as acting style (should every sentence uttered by elf queens sound like a fateful prophecy) and to diegetic culture (how should an elf scout salute his queen).
Being based on two television shows, Celestra got both the acting style and the diegetic culture almost for free – very few changes were made to the established world material, so everyone could have an equal understanding on how the world worked. Both players and designers drew on the characteristic narrative patterns of Galactica, such as the ever-present conflict between civilian and military leadership.
Another way of controlling players’ stylistic choices is through employing an act structure. An act structure, inspired by theatrical storytelling, divides a larp into temporal chunks with explicitly different play style instructions and even conflict rules. Act structures and player duties have been used in some form in Nordic larps since the late 90s((At least since Moirais Vev, organized by Eirik Fatland and others, in Norway, in 1997. )), but Celestra may have been the first to combine these with brute force design elements.
The four acts took the game from collaboration against the common Cylon enemy to space exploration, internal conflict, and finally the critical moments that would decide the fates of the Celestra and everyone inside. In the fashion of the 2002 larp Hamlet, player characters could only die in the last act – and indeed, the conflicts inside the ship escalated steadily so that characters dropped like flies in the final hours.
The Celestra Model and The Monitor Celestra
Celestra went a long way in reworking brute force design. By using established world material and slicing the larp into acts with clear purpose, player confusion was reduced and the risk of plot trains going stray was lowered. By asking participants to play to lose and distributing player duties, the tendency towards plot monopolization could be counteracted.
A thorough and technology-assisted 360° illusion made the world more coherent, gave agency to the lower rungs of the hierarchies, and made the Celestra a spectacular aesthetic journey.
In short, this was the secret sauce of The Monitor Celestra:
Brute force + play to lose + player duties + act structure + 360° illusion + established world material.
We’ll call this The Celestra model, although it should be noted that this is the model we, as critics and participants, discern in the functional and mutually dependent parts of the design. For example, some techniques employed in Celestra have been intentionally omitted: the larp featured phantom players, diegeticblackbox scenes and verbally roleplayed Viper battles, which were not essential to the overall structure discussed in here. Thus it is not necessarily the model conceived of by the design team.
How did it work? Amongst the Celestra participants we find those who, two years after the event, cherish the time spent on the Småland as the greatest cultural experience of their life. But we also find players who left in rage and frustration long before the game had ended, and are still certain that was the right decision((Eirik Fatland played a Vergis corporation scientist, Markus Montola played the faction leader of the Colonial Navy. Due to the complexity of the larp, these vantage points only covered a fraction of the game: As Montola headed one hierarchy and Fatland was subject to another, the experience of not being a part of one remains underrepresented in this text. Both authors played in the second run of the game.)).
While these extremes are both unusual outcomes of a larp, they are not contradictory: a larp design may work differently for different players, depending on many factors such as the character they play, their personal preferences in larp design, their personal preparation and so on.
The players celebrating the larp, who are in the majority, will remember it as an important milestone in Nordic larp history – in terms of costuming, scenography, gameplay, technology and design – and as an action-packed, adventurous and emotional journey in an interactive 360° environment.
However, the critical voices are also clear. Some of the worst experiences were had by players who attended the first run, and were caused by errors that were fixed – in part due to constructive feedback from those players – for the second run. But there were also negative experiences reported at the second and third runs.
The impressive complexity of the design, with dependencies between collapsing hierarchies, individuals, and computer systems, made the game very fragile. For example, in the first run the seemingly minor problem of a lack of an instruction manual for the systems – one document amongst hundreds – had game-ruining consequences for many players.
In the second run of the game, it was very hard for players to distinguish fact from fiction in the rumour mill going on inside the game, and solidly determine whether Cylons had actually infected the onboard computers or not. Replicating the clockwork operation of a full battleship with complicated social roles, social groupings and spatial designs was an amazing experience when it worked, but it was highly vulnerable to the disruptive chaos of a brute force design.
While recognizing this, we think it is equally important to recognize that Celestra is celebrated as a major achievement and life-changing event by many players. That many of its production and design choices, such as the unsurpassed quality of organizer-provided costuming or the interaction with mysterious phantoms, were executed perfectly. And that by daring to innovate on such a large scale, The Monitor Celestra set the stage for future larps that could iron out the kinks in its groundbreaking approach.
Robust Adventure in College of Wizardry
College of Wizardry was a larp inspired by the Harry Potter fiction, played in the 13th century Czocha castle in southwestern Poland. The game ran uninterrupted for 52 hours, portraying the first days of the school year at the Czocha College of Witchcraft and Wizardry. The game was a combination of school routines (teaching classes, pranking other Houses to lose points, snitching about pranksters) and adventure (sneaking around the basement, fighting Death Eaters, handing out detention for such activities), culminating in a grand opening ball.
In the spirit of the 360° illusion, the Czocha castle served as a perfect environment for this game: not only is Zamek Czocha a fully furnished castle, but it is also a remarkably Potteresque one: it features a cellar for Potions classes, a tower for Divination, a dungeon for Defence Against the Dark Arts, and large dining halls for common dinners. It even comes with secret passages hidden behind bookshelves and panels. To perfect the illusion, the organizers handed out robes and ties that were the required parts of the school uniform, while the players brought in loads of small props, such as notebooks, trinkets, and wands with LEDs to light the tunnels.
Even with no physical combat, CoW was a larp for all senses, where you actually drank wine with frat boys in the common room, actually wrote an essay with a faux quill, and actually sneaked quietly in order to avoid janitors after curfew((Players’ contribution to the larp was considerable: for example, Liselle Angelique Krog Awwal made more than a thousand props for the game, Christopher Sandberg organized the professor players to produce a 200-page schoolbook, and Staffan Rosenberg created the Potions laboratory with hundreds of ingredients, tools and recipes. As player-created content was integrated to organizer materials, it is not easy to retrospectively say which parts were in the game “by design”, and which ones should be considered “player contributions” external to the design itself.)).
According to Claus Raasted, the figurehead of College of Wizardry, some of the design was directly inspired by The Monitor Celestra:
The school setting made it especially easy to utilize this [kind of design]. Teacher/student interaction, house rivalries, bloodline conflicts, former school cliques, junior/sophomore/senior conflicts, etc. The list goes on and on, and all of these structures were good at producing emergent narrative and interesting stories. If you weren’t interested in doing one specific area of play, there were always five more you could dive into.
Claus Raasted, personal communication
Since the organizers knew they would have an international and varied audience, College of Wizardry was intentionally designed to be hard to break: according to Raasted, a key component was to disconnect game design from character design, which gave the organizers a lot of flexibility. Once you have a fully functional school larp with all the appropriate structures in place, the larp is going to work regardless of individual students and teachers((In Celestra, a similar approach was used in the sense that many character descriptions spent vast majority of text to describe the social structures and out of character function of the character, and very few paragraphs on descriptions of personality, or personal goals. As a major difference, CoW explicitly permitted players to radically work on their characters.)).
The academic schedule was a perfect example of a design element that was hard to break. No matter what kind of a student or professor your character was, for most of the time the school schedule answered the question of what to do in the game.
Lectures, meals, and club meetings would largely proceed no matter what else happened. Good work catching that Azkaban escapee, ten points for your House, now attend your Divination class before you lose them. The academic schedule interwoven with an act structure((Unlike most games with act structures, CoW was played continuously. Diegetic events signified act changes.)) provided both game content and an arc of escalation and de-escalation, which worked well as a broader framework for emergent stories. Due to the laissezfaire attitude towards characters, the solid backbone of established world material, and everyone playing to lose, College of Wizardry could adopt a strict policy of your character not ours, a policy which would break most games, but made this one more robust:
The first rule of characters for College of Wizardry is that you can change the character if you don’t like it. […] If the character is a troublemaker with a heart of gold, but you’d rather play a cowardly snitch who’s obsessed with the rules, then we’ll change it. The only thing it needs is ideas from you on what you’d rather play instead, and together we’ll make it work.
College of Wizardry player instructions
This allowed the organizers to max out player agency: players were explicitly instructed that changes pertaining to diegetic facts were allowed even while the game was running. The message was clear: you traveled all the way to Czocha for a 52- hour larp; if it doesn’t work for you, change it. And if you can’t change it yourself, the game masters will help you.
The hard to break principle also showed up in other areas of the game. As staff players were given player duties, if perhaps not as explicitly as in Celestra, the students were liberated to do whatever they liked, as the carefully cast professors would eventually contain any player-created crisis.
The magic system was made hard to break by basing it on the principle of playing to lose: whenever a spell was cast on a character, the target player would ultimately decide the effects of the spell, meaning that student duels would always end in one of the players choosing to lose.
The only exceptions were that no-one could die before the final act, and that the staff would always win magical conflicts with students. While Celestra had a main plotline to resolve that players were able to impact and to a certain extent break, CoW eschewed one altogether.
The staff players adopted even more practices to open up student play. For instance, the organizers suggested that the professors should accept every excuse to skip class, which provided the student players the freedom to swap classes, to go adventuring, or even to take a much-needed nap.
While in Celestra most characters belonged to power hierarchies, in College of Wizardry, every player character was a part of them. In that sense, the equation was very simple as the game only featured three kinds of player characters: students, professors, and a very few members of the janitorial staff((While the Celestra had very few non-player characters, College of Wizardry had a cadre of them, ranging from ever-present ghosts and visiting Aurors to monsters residing in the nearby forest. The nonplayer experiences are excluded from this analysis, since there was no uniform NPC experience due to the difference of those roles.)). Even the characters who did not belong to secret societies or student Houses were a part of the broader school hierarchy. This structure largely eliminated the outsider caste, giving everyone a part in the community. Indeed, according to the evaluation survey it appears that College of Wizardry worked best for the students, then for the professors, and worst for the less integrated janitorial staff.
The power hierarchy was also very wide and interchangeable: While the ship hierarchies of Celestra could only have one captain and one first mate at the top tiers, the professors were largely interchangeable in the school hierarchy. This took some pressure off their players, lessened the need to find a particular player during the game, and mitigated the risk of a central player being unable to play.
The College of Wizardry design was made possible very much due to the genre and the fiction of the game: the topsy-turvy Harry Potter fiction is forgiving and easygoing, practically the very opposite of the military and naval hierarchies of Celestra. It does not matter if a professor appears a little silly when leaving alchemical ingredients to be easily stolen, or when accepting a spurious excuse for not showing up for class.
Indeed, several professors played to lose by drinking a potion that made everything appear wonderful to them – even the fact that their wonderfully talented students conjured up spirits of the dead and dabbled in unforgivable curses. By removing themselves from the conflict equation, they provided play for people below them in the power hierarchy – such as the group of Auror students left to deal with the issue((The Design Document instructed the staff to stay on the sidelines during the grand opening ball when conflicts started to escalate. However, they were not offered a ready solution on how to do this, and it is debatable whether this instruction was intended as a binding dictate or merely a helpful suggestion.)).
This design, combined with the brilliant 360° illusion of the Czocha castle and the very significant contributions of several players, made the players give the larp rave reviews. Out of the 112 respondents to the evaluation survey, 91% totally or somewhat agreed with the statement “I had a great game”, and an astounding 74%((Players attending their first larp were excluded from this figure.)) of the respondents agreed with “College of Wizardry was my best larp ever”.
The implication of these overwhelmingly positive numbers is not that this was a perfect larp, but that by building on the Celestra, CoW discovered a formula for blockbuster larp: a brute force larp of adventure and escapism, guaranteed to win popular appreciation. The jury is out on whether the new formula can be applied outside the world of Harry Potter, as the disorganized fictional setting of young adult Bildungsroman was an essential part of making it hard to break.
The next, clear step towards improving the formula will be the addition of workshops for character relationships and group dynamics. Indeed, even though the Celestra was already criticized for leaving social relationship development to players’ own internet discussions, College of Wizardry still used the same approach. As a result, the majority of players responding to the evaluation survey expressed their desire for on-site character relationship workshops before the game.
Both of these games would have greatly benefited from just a few hours spent efficiently building relationships and dynamics, and indeed the CoW team will utilize them in the second run of the game.
The Terrific, Terrible Blockbuster Formula
From the late 90s onwards, larp in the Nordic countries (and, increasingly, internationally) has undergone a revolutionary pace of development. By rejecting brute force designs in favour of structural and stylistic innovation, larpwrights have shown that larp can deal with complex and mature themes – from the fraught psychology of intimate relationships to the politics of the Cold War and the social dynamics of the AIDS crisis. The Celestra model combines the traditional brute force larp with inventions from arthaus larp to great effect – perhaps a bit like the Hollywood blockbuster appropriated techniques from popular vaudeville theater and from experimentalists such as Sergei Eisenstein or Fritz Lang. In other words: this is a blockbuster formula for Nordic larp.
The attempts of Celestra and CoW to deal with contemporary politics, such as nationalism and discrimination, were peripheral compared to the action-packed, sometimes thrilling and sometimes comedic events generated by the brute structure. In this regard, these larps were faithful to Battlestar Galactica and Harry Potter that inspired them. While even action movies can find the time to portray compressed emotional and romantic content, in blockbuster larps intimate and serene moments are always in danger of being hit by a stray plot. There might be an unsolvable problem in how to serve the bottom ranks of power hierarchies with enough brute game content without pushing the leaders to steer constantly with both hands full of plot.
While the formula can be improved with techniques such as character relationship workshops, some problems are likely to prove unsolvable: most importantly, the chaotic arrival of competing plot trains is likely to plague these games in the long run.
These risks are inseparable from the sense of action and agency produced by such designs, and must be accepted as such by players and organizers. After all, the blockbuster formula is a formula for an action movie or an HBO drama, not a formula for an accurate documentary or a subtly nuanced performance.
Acknowledgements
A number of players and organizers of The Monitor Celestra and College of Wizardry gave their opinion on this paper prior to publication. Although we did not follow all their suggestions, those discussions significantly improved this text. Above all, however, we are grateful to the teams that organized these two larps.
Ludography
Carolus Rex (1999): Karim Muammar and Martin Ericsson (game design), Tomas Walch and Henrik Summanen (production and dramaturgy), Emma Wieslander (writing), Mathias Larsson, Erik Stormark and Daniel Krauklis (runtime logistics help). Norrköping, Sweden.
College of Wizardry (2014): Szymon “Boruta” Boruta, Dracan Dembinski, Freja Gyldenstrøm, Agnieszka “Linka” Hawryluk- Boruta, Agata “Świstak” Lubańska, Charles Bo Nielsen, Aleksandra Hedere Ososińska, Ida Pawłowicz, Claus Raasted, Dorota Kalina Trojanowska and Mikołaj Wicher, with a team of around 15 helpers. Rollespilsfabrikken and Liveform. Lesna, Poland. http://www.cowlarp.com/
Futuredrome (2002): The Story Lab, Riksteatern, Fabel, Oroboros. Kinnekulle, Sweden.
Hamlet (2002): Martin Ericsson, Christopher Sandberg, Anna Eriksson, Martin Brodén, with a large team. Interaktiva Uppsättningar and riksteatern JAM. Stockholm, Sweden.
Moirais Vev (1997): Eirik Fatland, Lars Wingård, Erlend Eidsem Hansen, Karen Winther, Martin Bull-Gundersen, Andreas Kolle.
Koljonen, J. (2007): Eye-Witness to the Illusion. An Essay on the Impossibility of 360° Role-Playing. In Donnis, J., Gade, M. & Thorup, L. (2007): Lifelike.
Fatland, E. & Wingård, L. (1999): Dogma 99. A Programme for the Liberation of LARP. In Gade, M., Thorup, L. & Sander, M. (eds.) (2003): As Larp Grows Up.
Pohjola, M. (2000): The Manifesto of the Turku School. In Gade, M., Thorup, L. & Sander, M. (eds.) (2003): As Larp Grows Up.
Cover photo: Part of the crew of The Monitor Celestra before the start of the first run, by Johannes Axner, is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. Other photos by Johannes Axner from The Monitor Celestra (first run) and College of Wizardry (first run).
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