Workshops are a staple of many Nordic larps, playing a crucial role in preparing participants to step into their roles, engage with the narrative, and collaborate effectively. While learning is a central aspect, workshops are more than just an educational prelude to the game; they are spaces where boundaries are negotiated, skills are honed, and the magic circle of the larp begins to take shape.
Designing a workshop, however, requires a different set of tools than those used in larp design. Here, the focus is on learning outcomes rather than narrative, and on facilitating participants’ transition into the fiction of the larp.
This article serves as a guide for designers, outlining a series of steps that will take you from the initial idea to the final plan for a learning design. While the focus is on workshops, a complete learning design often incorporates other formats, such as briefings and exercises (see “WEB: Workshop – Exercise – Briefing“). The steps described here can be applied to the entire learning design process. They are, however, particularly useful for workshops, which require more intensive design effort and work. In this context, a workshop is defined as:
“An interactive and co-creative session focused on participants’ hands-on interactions”
Step 1: Examining the participants’ needs
The first step in creating a learning design that aligns with your vision and the narrative framework of your larp is to consider what the participants need in order to play it.
To guide the process of identifying these essential elements, there are three key aspects to focus on:
What participants need to know
What participants need to create
What participants need to do
The key aspects– diagram by Nór Hernø
Knowing:
The knowledge you require the participants to have needs to match the learning outcome of your design. Is there any foundational knowledge they must have to engage meaningfully with the larp? This could include everything from safety mechanics to character memories, or the social dynamics of the setting.
Creating:
Consider what aspects of the larp you want the participants to contribute to and have ownership over. Creating together fosters co-ownership, and by allowing the participants to generate elements of the larp, there is a good chance they will be more personally invested and have an easier time remembering those design elements.
However, be mindful of the limitations: There are things that you may not want the participants to create. For example, they may design aspects of their characters and relationships, but you might want to ensure that the framework and key narrative elements remain under your control to maintain coherence with your larp design.
Doing:
You can facilitate how the participants start to larp, work together, act and interact with each other, and feel safe doing so, through your learning design. This can be both explicit and implied:
Explicit: You might need the participants to have specific skills or take certain actions. For example, if your larp includes tasks or jobs, you can create a learning design that explicitly teaches the participants to do it.
Implicit: You might want the participants to have a certain behavior, for example if your larp emphasizes a specific form of interaction or mood, you can model the participants’ behavior implicitly through your design, by having them do the workshops in a certain way or by implementing themed tools like music, photos, directed movement patterns, etc.
Create a list, mind map, or whatever feels right for you, of the elements necessary for the participants to play your larp. If you already have specific ideas you want to include in your learning design, add them to this brainstorm too.
Step 2: Sorting your ideas
The next step is to start sorting through the brainstorm and ideas, considering the relevancy of the elements, determining if they can be combined, and identifying which formats best support the learning outcome you want from your design. The article “WEB: Workshop – Exercise – Briefing” covers the three learning formats, as well as a model for visualizing the balance between them.
Do this sorting however you prefer. For example, if you have created a list, underline the most important elements and add their relevant learning formats. Alternatively, if you have done a mind map, grab some coloured pens and start circling.
Sorting your brainstorm, focusing on synergies and learning formats– diagram by Nór Hernø
“Know” might be better supported with a briefing, “do” may play a greater role in exercises and workshops, and “create” is often a central element of workshops. However, this is not always the case. You might be able to integrate several elements of knowing into a workshop – for example, knowing the social dynamics of the setting, a shared cultural action, and so on – if it overlaps with what the participants need to create and do.
When you have finished this sorting process, you will know what needs to be planned (briefings and exercises) and what needs to be designed (workshops).
Step 3: Finding inspiration
When you are aware of what kind of workshops you need to support your larp, you can start designing them. Luckily, you don’t have to start from scratch, as there are countless places you can draw inspiration from, including:
Other workshops: Examine workshops, both for larps and not, you have experienced, which have been successful in similar contexts. Think about what they consisted of, how they facilitated learning, and what kind of atmosphere they created.
Other people: Conversations with other larp designers, facilitators, or participants can be a valuable source of inspiration. Ask others how they design specific workshops, what their favorite workshops and -tools are, and what they have learned from experience.
Educational materials and exercise books: Look to educational resources such as teaching guides and manuals, or the many books on physical and team-building exercises. While these might not be directly related to larping, they often offer valuable inspiration, you can build on.
Online sources: The internet is an endless resource – Also when it comes to workshop ideas. From the specialized articles found at Nordic Larp to a simple Google search, type in keywords relating to your workshop needs and you get more ideas than you have time to read.
While inspiration can come from many sources, it’s crucial to tailor it to the specific needs of your larp. You should never attempt a 1:1 replication of a workshop. Every larp is unique in its narrative, setting, and participant dynamics, and your workshops need to reflect that uniqueness. What worked in one context may not be directly applicable in another.
Step 4: Adapting, designing, and describing
After gathering inspiration and ideas, you need to start adapting and designing the workshop, transforming your ideas into a concrete plan. Start describing the workshop step by step and let the following questions guide you in this process, adapting the workshop to the participants’ needs and your larp design:
Does it align with the larp? Do not use a workshop just because it is fun or interesting. It needs to align with the required learning outcome, so be prepared to kill your darlings.
Does it fit with the mood and setting of the larp? If your larp is light-hearted and fun, you want different workshops than if it is dark or emotionally intense. Aligning your workshops with the mood of the larp helps participants immerse themselves.
Does it support the desired participant behavior? The workshop should foster behavior and interactions that align with your previously defined “doing” elements. If the participants’ behavior during the workshop can mimic how they are expected to behave during the larp, you can help facilitate their transition into the fiction of the larp.
Can it be adjusted for practicality? Not all exercises are suitable for every group or available time and space. Ensure that the workshop is feasible for the available space, time, and the size and composition of the group.
Considering these questions when describing the workshop can help guide your design process. A well-designed workshop supports your game by guiding participants toward engagement with the narrative and their roles within it. By designing and adapting with that in mind, you can create a workshop that is both unique to your larp and effective in helping participants immerse themselves in the experience.
Step 5: Structuring your learning design
The final step to creating a learning plan is structuring all the learning formats and sessions. This includes both the briefings, exercises, and workshops you have planned. Establishing a structure helps you organize the content and further develop it by uncovering oversights or additional potentials.
To guide this step, use the 6W-Structure:
When
Where
Who
What
How
Why
The 6W-Structure to develop and organize your learning plan– diagram by Nór Hernø
The first three Ws cover the practical information you need for running the learning plan: When and where will the learning session be held, and who is involved (both facilitator and participant group). This will help you map out the plan and identify most logistical issues, such as whether the schedule works (remember everything takes more time than you think) or if the location fits the planned session. This is especially necessary for more complicated learning plans with several locations and facilitators but is also useful as a framework for simple plans.
The next three Ws cover the content, descriptions, and your design choices: What is the headline of the session and what materials are needed, how is the session is conducted (described step by step), and most importantly – why it is done. Asking why you are doing said learning session helps you reflect on your design choices and easily share these reflections with others. It also helps you discover if you have overlooked something in step 4, such as whether your chosen workshop aligns with the larp or if something in the workshop actively works against your design.
As a rule of thumb, always ask “why” 3 times to get from the surface descriptive level to the conscious design level. Through this process, you might discover a flaw in your design and fix it before the plan meets the participants, or realize that, by changing a few elements, you can achieve an even better outcome. An example could be the following workshop:
Ask Why three times– diagram by Nór Hernø
This difference in the reason behind the workshop can help you design for that specific purpose. In the first example, you might want to instruct the participants to collaborate during the ritual, aiming for impressive and empowering aesthetics, whereas the second example might shift the workshop’s focus to clearly define the individual participants’ tasks and how they can fail.
The final result can be presented in table as the following (short) example:
The finished learning plan – diagram by Nór Hernø
This table functions not just as your finished design overview, but also as a runtime plan ready to use.
By following the steps outlined in this guide – examining participant needs, sorting ideas, finding inspiration, adapting designs, and structuring them – you have the tools to create a purposeful learning plan with workshops tailored to your specific larp. By aligning your learning design with not only the learning needs, but also the narrative, mood, and desired behavior, you ensure that every element of the workshop contributes meaningfully to the overall experience of workshop as well as larp.
Cover image: Panopticon workshop, photo by Christian Kierans
This is a statement I have encountered in the larp community quite a few times by now, which is rather tragic to someone who has worked professionally with learning design for years and has a deep passion for it.
Designing and organizing a larp requires skill. The same applies to designing the learning experience required to play said larp: It necessitates a distinct focus on learning output and the methods required to achieve that goal. Creating a learning design equal to that of our larp design will help us facilitate the participants’ transition into the fiction of the larp, as well as better their recollection of important information.
The first step of creating a learning design is to consider what the participants require to play your larp. The next step is to take the available learning formats into account, figuring out what format will best allow that to happen. Often, everything we facilitate for the participants prior to the start of the larp (and sometimes during) is referred to as “workshops”. The problem with using “workshop” as a blanket term is that workshops are a specific kind of learning format, and this term does not encompass everything we do prior to a larp. This can cause a clash of expectations, making the participants feel like expressing the opening sentence of this article. After all, the worst workshops are those that aren’t actually workshops.
Instead of using “workshops” to describe the time before a larp set aside for the participants’ learning experience, I suggest using a more neutral term like “larp preparations” or, as I prefer appreciating alliteration, “pre-play-prep”.
The most common learning formats used for the pre-play-prep before a larp are: workshop, exercise, and briefing. The WEB model described below is a visual tool in two parts, created to define, distinguish, and summarize these three types of learning sessions. In this context, the three formats are defined as follows:
Workshop: An interactive and co-creative session focused on participants’ hands-on interactions.
Exercise: An activity where participants, individually or in groups, practice a given technique or skill.
Briefing: An orientation session that informs and instructs participants before they are to do something.
Each type is suited to specific learning goals and participant engagement levels, and understanding these differences can help create better experiences for the participants.
The WEB Model: Definitions – diagram by Nór Hernø
The WEB Model: Spectrum
The three types of learning sessions can be positioned on a spectrum indicating the participants’ level of activity, agency, and degree of co-creation.”
The WEB Model: Spectrum – diagram by Nór Hernø
The learning sessions have a shared purpose, which defines their focus and design – Learning – Although they approach learning in different ways, using different tools and techniques to facilitate the process.
It is important to note that the model is a spectrum and not a scale. The spectrum does not indicate value or learning output, as none of the learning sessions is inherently better than the others. Each one is best for different purposes:
Workshops can give participants co-ownership of a given project, as participants co-create the content. They are ideal for creating shared narratives, culture, and routines, which are not previously defined by the larp designer. Examples: Creating (fully or in parts) characters and relationships, developing rituals, establishing the cultural customs of the group, etc.
Exercises give participants the opportunity to practice and train a given technique or skill, making them comfortable repeating and reproducing it in another context. Examples: Practicing meta-techniques and game mechanics, rehearsing a ritual, practicing specific interactions and behaviors, etc.
Briefings are good for clear and direct distribution of information, where every participant or participant group need the same instructions necessary to participate in the larp or a different activity. Examples: Giving the participants practical information, explaining setting, rules, meta-techniques, game mechanics, etc.
In some cases, it can be impossible to distinguish clearly between the three types of learning sessions, as they might overlap or mix different approaches, e.g., when the participants rehearse the ritual they just created together, when the explanation of a meta-technique transitions to practicing it, or when participants practice specific interactions and behaviors by embodying their characters while co-creating the scene in which these interactions occur.
In other cases, the difference between the three types of learning sessions is clear to the point it can be comical to imagine using the wrong one: You would not workshop the location of the toilets or the schedule of the larp.
The reason why it is important to be aware of the type of learning session is two-fold:
It helps you be aware of your pre-play-prep design choices and what kind of learning output you might want for a given session. Do you want your participants to co-create something new? Do you want them to repeat something you have created? Or do you want them to listen to and understand a set of instructions?
It helps you and the participants manage expectations, such as energy levels and the type of engagement required.
The WEB Model: Pre-Play-Prep Sum
In a learning design consisting of multiple learning sessions, the sum of the sessions can be represented in the following figure:
The WEB Model: Pre-Play-Prep Sum – diagram by Nór Hernø
For example, if your learning design consists primarily of briefings combined with a few exercises, the sum of the sessions might be represented as follows in the figure:
The WEB Model: Pre-Play-Prep Sum, example 1 – diagram by Nór Hernø
The sum of learning sessions is again not an indication of value or learning output but solely a depiction of variation in the pre-play-prep. If there is a strong tendency toward placement in a corner of the triangle, as in this example, consider whether this aligns with the desired learning design or if more variation is needed.
For example, if greater participant activity and agency are required, one or more suitable workshops can be added to the pre-play-prep, altering the figure:
The WEB Model: Pre-Play-Prep Sum, example 2 – diagram by Nór Hernø
This approach to pre-play-prep provides a structured framework for designing larp learning experiences and helps visualize the balance of learning sessions. This can support the designer in making informed choices about how to engage participants effectively and ensure the desired learning outcomes. A clear understanding of the different learning formats allows both designers and participants to manage expectations about the level of participation and the type of engagement required in each session, leading to a more enjoyable and cohesive experience – and fewer workshops that could have been an email.
Footnote/anecdote regarding the model:
The WEB Model was created on the final night of the 2023 Danish Larp Designers’ Summer School in response to participants repeatedly asking me about the difference between a workshop and an exercise – a situation prompted by a dare. The finishing touches and the English translation of the model (originally titled “BØW” in Danish) were completed in preparation for my 2024 Solmukohta talk and workshop on the subject. Subsequently, the model was reintroduced to the Danish Larp Designers’ Summer School as part of my workshop design class in 2024.
Cover image: Panopticon workshop, photo by Christian Kierans
“We won’t stop the larp if it’s just an air raid.”
— Anna Posetselska, Ukranian larp designer and organizer
When war erupts, larps come to a halt. The same holds true for various other cultural activities. Society is in a state of suspension. Individuals are fixated on their phones, doomscrolling through the news and social media. Larpers stay connected, checking in on each other – has someone we know died, have the bombs struck a town where our friends or relatives reside?
However, in the subsequent weeks, months, or even years, larp returns, even if the war persists. This occurred in both Ukraine, grappling with the Russian invasion since February 2022, and in Palestine, where the recent war in Gaza started in October 2023. Ukrainian larp designer and organizer Anna Posetselska, along with Palestinian larp professional and designer Tamara Nassar, provide insights into what it is like to organise a larp during times of war.
Larping during wartime in Ukraine
One of Anna Posetselska’s players was a real-life battle medic. She brought her enormous medical kit to the larp in case the venue, a holiday village about 30 kilometers from Kyiv, would be hit by Russian bombs.
“The small places around Kyiv are rarely targeted,” Posetselska says. “We were prepared to move the larp if the situation became too dangerous.”
During play, there were air raids, but the game was not paused.
“We won’t stop the larp if it’s just an air raid,” Posetselska says.
“We experience air raids in Kyiv all the time; just last night, there were explosions. They are part of our everyday life now; we have grown accustomed to them, at least to some extent. We don’t rush to a shelter every time we hear an air raid alert because if we do, we’ll sit there half a day many times a week. That way, you lose your sanity much faster than you lose your life. The chances of losing your life in an air raid while larping are rather low.”
Posetselska’s larp Nevermore: Family Issues, was played in May 2023. The 60-player larp was loosely based on the Netflix series Wednesday. The story about a high school for special kids who are taught how to live with ordinary people was both accessible and safe.
During war, people have many things on their minds, and just surviving from day to day can require a lot of mental energy and resources. That is why a larp should be easily accessible, Posetselska explains. She needed a ready, playable world that the players could grasp easily and without too much effort. Watching a couple of episodes of Wednesday was enough.
Another reason to choose the world of Wednesday was that Posetselska aimed to transport the participants as far away as possible from the war.
Nevermore: Family Issues (2023). Photo by Anna Posetselska. Photo has been cropped.
“There’s an ongoing discourse about larp as a form of escapism and the extent to which players engage in larp to distance themselves from reality. In our case, the answer was evident: participants genuinely sought an escape from their daily lives. We urgently needed to transport them to a different place and persona,” Posetselska says.
The setting had to incorporate dramatic elements and challenging questions and relationships, yet avoid overly sensitive themes.
“When designing a larp during a war, it’s crucial to ensure that people are not further traumatized or confronted with themes too close to home,” she emphasizes.
Could players detach from their everyday concerns and immerse themselves in the lives of high school students and personnel? Yes and no, Posetselska says.
“Players conveyed afterward that the sense of community was robust, and they experienced relaxation. Not everyone could fully immerse themselves in the game – it may not have necessarily been attributed to the larp or their fellow players, but rather to the exceptionally challenging situation they were in outside the larp. They expressed having a good time, but were unable to completely set aside the worries from the outside world.”
During breaks in the game, both players and organisers scrutinised their social media feeds – had any significant events occurred, had the rockets struck anyone they knew? However, unlike the previous year, individuals managed to stop constantly scrolling through distressing news and concentrate on the game.
Ethical questions
Before the onset of the war, Anna Posetselska made a larp every few years.
“Designing larps is a profoundly significant aspect of my life; I feel invigorated when channeling my mental energy into creating games. I wanted to create something for over a year, but it was impossible due to the war.”
Nevermore: Family Issues (2023). Photo by Anna Posetselska.
In 2022, the year of Russia’s major invasion, the larp community engaged in discussions regarding the ethical implications of playing larps during wartime. A pertinent question arose: do larpers possess the right to partake in leisure, enjoy and relax while their friends – many of whom are fellow larpers – are engaged in active combat and losing their lives? This ethical deliberation extended to various facets of life, questioning the appropriateness of social activities like dining out and attending plays or concerts when one’s compatriots are fighting.
“But soldiers fighting in the frontlines kept saying that they were fighting and dying so we could live. At some point you attempt to reinstate elements of your everyday life, otherwise you get mentally very unwell,” Posetselska says.
In February 2023, a modest larp involving approximately 20 players was organised in Kyiv. Evaluating the community’s response, Posetselska understood that it was something larpers desperately needed. Those fortunate to participate were elated, while those unable to partake experienced profound disappointment.
“Playing larps constituted a significant component of our lives, and the community ardently yearned for a return to normalcy.”
Posetselska notes that when she announced her larp, it encountered no opposition; rather, it was met with unanimous enthusiasm and support.
Narrow planning horizon
Nevermore: Family Issues (2023). Photo by Anna Posetselska. Photo has been cropped.
Before 2022, Posetselska typically started the planning process for a larp approximately a year before its scheduled date. Now, she conceived the idea for Nevermore in March 2023 and decided to execute it as swiftly as possible. The prevailing wartime conditions added to the urgency.
“In the initial months of the war, we couldn’t plan even a few days ahead. Then, the planning horizon would widen from days to weeks and eventually expand to a month. Presently, we operate on a planning cycle spanning a couple of months,” she says.
Who knows what will happen to you or your friends in half a year? During war, six months feels like an eternity.Posetselska calculated the shortest time the larp would take to design and prepare and decided to run it in May, just over two and a half months after getting the idea.
Prior to the war, Ukrainian larps were predominantly played in Russian. However, the linguistic landscape has since changed, as there is a growing trend towards making and playing larps in Ukrainian. Despite the fact that Russian is Posetselska’s mother tongue, she embraced the challenge of composing for the first time all game materials in Ukrainian. This linguistic shift, while demanding, was important because the Ukrainian language has become a more significant part of Ukrainian identity after the 2022 invasion. Participants, mostly from Kyiv but also from other Ukrainian cities, alongside a few international attendees returning to their homeland for the larp, predominantly engaged in gameplay in Ukrainian, irrespective of their native tongues.
Demand for a larp
Posetselska’s foresight proved accurate: there was a substantial demand for a weekend-long larp. Initially conceptualized for 40 players, the larp was expanded for 60 participants due to overwhelming interest and perceived necessity.
In Ukrainian larps, character creation often involves collaborative efforts between players and designers, and this held true for Nevermore. Typically, during times of peace, players engage in preparations for multiple larps simultaneously. This time they only concentrated on Nevermore. Posetselska notes that she has never encountered, and likely won’t encounter in the future, the level of engagement and dedication she observed among participants preparing for Nevermore.
“People exhibited an unprecedented level of creativity, contributing an incredible array of ideas, and demonstrating remarkable support,” she remarks.
Nevermore: Family Issues (2023). Photo by Anna Posetselska. Photo has been cropped.
The impact of Nevermore extended beyond its immediate context, inspiring other designers to initiate larp events.
“Many designers who had been awaiting a more opportune or secure moment came to realise that the time for larping is now,” Posetselska says.
She knows of several minilarps tailored for small circles of friends, as well as half a dozen larger games spanning 2-3 days. The common objective across these endeavors is to transport players as far away as possible from the grim realities of war.
Political awareness in Palestine
Two thousand kilometers south of Kyiv, in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, larpers have adopted a markedly different approach. Since the latest war in Gaza started in October 2023, all larps in the West Bank have centered around themes of war, occupation, stress relief and political awareness.
Tamara Nassar, a Palestinian larp designer and organiser working for the Palestinian larp organization Bait Byout, asserts, “It would feel disrespectful towards our friends and relatives who are dying in Gaza to play larps for fun.”
Bait Byout collaborates with various organizations, predominantly NGOs, introducing them to larp and aiding them in achieving their objectives by incorporating larp into their toolkit. They are currently running a project, together with the British-founded organization Oxfam International, that addresses women’s sexual and reproductive health education through larp.
With the Swiss charitable organization Drosos Foundation, Bait Byout runs Larp Factory, targeting participants aged 18-35 studying or working in the social sector. The program spans five weeks and involves 22 participants in an educational journey where they acquire skills in playing, designing, and organizing larps. Upon completion, participants are equipped to utilize larp as a tool in their professional settings.
Additionally, Bait Byout has in the past designed and run larps for both adults and children in Palestine and Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon.
As the war unfolded in Gaza in October 2023, Palestinians on the West Bank held their breath.
“We knew to expect bad things, but the level of destruction was unimaginable. Everything stopped, the whole society stopped,” Nassar describes. While Israel started bombing Gaza, violence in the West Bank also skyrocketed, Nassar says. Over 300 people have been killed in the West Bank, 80 kilometers from Gaza.
Nassar grimly acknowledges, “We know that Israel is not going to stop in Gaza; we are next.”
New challenges
Bait Byout was looking at opportunities to take larps to Gaza, but those projects are now on hold. The five-week Larp Factory course which was planned to start in October, faced complications due to the war.
The situation in the West Bank has become substantially more perilous. Bait Byout had planned workshops and minilarps across various locations in the West Bank, but had to revise the plans. Several challenges arose due to the war.
First, the Israeli military has closed most of the checkpoints the Palestinians have to cross to move between cities in the West Bank.
Second, Israeli settlers have become more violent. They patrol the backroads the Palestinians were sometimes able to use to move around, and are using firearms more often.
Additionally, since October 2023, daily raids on Palestinian homes and arbitrary detention of Palestinian civilians by Israeli soldiers have intensified. Palestinians can be detained without formal charges for extended periods, sometimes spanning months or even years. Violence and arrests had increased even before the war, but now such detentions are triggered by minor factors, such as discovering Gaza-related content on a Palestinian’s phone. Faced with these risks, Bait Byout could not expose their participants to potential harm.
Nassar explains that to mitigate these challenges, “We had to gather all participants in Ramallah, secure lodgings for a few days, and confine them to this safer environment to minimize movement.” Participants would visit home briefly and then return for another session. Moving around was dangerous and had to be reduced as much as possible.
At the time of the interview, participants of the Larp Factory had recently completed designing their first larps and were about to present them to the wider group in the coming days. The thematic focus of most larps centered on the social situation in Palestine. Furthermore, participants were about to play their first long larp, Tribes, a historical fiction exploring the tribes of Jericho.
Focus on war, occupation and politics
The war in Gaza has not only impacted the logistical aspects but has also influenced the thematic focus of the larps organized by Bait Byout. During the war, all of their larps are centered around the themes of war, occupation, stress relief and political awareness. Nassar believes there wouldn’t be a demand for larps played only for entertainment in such a dire situation.
“To have fun while they are dying over there? I don’t think people would accept that,” she says.
Bait Byout had originally planned to run a fairytale larp titled Keys to the Kingdom, designed by Nassar, for 50-100 children aged 6-12. In this larp, participants assume the roles of fairies on a quest to retrieve stolen keys, overcoming trials to restore magic to the kingdom.
However, due to the wartime context, they opted for a different children’s larp called The Evil Lions & The Hungry Animals. In this scenario, players represent various animals oppressed by evil lions symbolizing the Israeli military. Through unity and setting aside differences, characters learn to rise against oppression and defeat the lions.
The symbolism is evident to adults, but do the children understand that the larp is about the Israeli occupation over Palestinian territories, and the evil lions represent the Israeli military?
Most of them do, Nassar says. She explains that children experience the narrative as an opportunity to enjoy defeating the oppressor without delving too deeply into the political nuances. The larp serves as stress relief for kids, diverting their attention from the distressing news about the mass killing in Gaza. Chasing lions with water balloons is simply fun.
The larps run as part of the women’s reproductive health program, too, underwent changes.
After the war began, Nassar redesigned the game she was working on to include scenarios of women giving birth in Gaza during the conflict.
“One cannot talk about sexual and reproductive health without mentioning the dire situation women are facing in Gaza,” Nassar explains. One of the scenes in A Journey of Discovery depicts the challenges faced by women having C-sections without anaesthesia in a region where Israel has bombed hospitals and power plants, and air strikes can occur while women are in labour.
According to Nassar, Bait Byout goes against the tide by continuing to run larps. Many other activities such as sports, theatre, and music are currently on hold, and even festive celebrations during Christmas and Ramadan have been largely canceled or altered. The cultural institutions that do continue working have changed their program. It would not feel right to show comedies.
Bait Byout is now developing a series of larps about everyday life in Gaza during the war. They were supposed to reflect the Nakba of 1948, in which the Zionist movement and Israel violently displaced and killed Palestinians, damaging Palestinian society, culture, identity, political rights, and national aspirations.
“But another Nakba unfolding within the war on Gaza has changed the game to reflect the current situation,” Nassar says. The larps primarily target foreigners, especially employees of various international NGOs. At the time of writing, the Israeli military has killed over 30.000 Palestinians, overwhelmingly civilians.
Ludography
Nevermore: Family Issues (2023): Ukraine. Anna Posetselska.
The Tribes (2013): Palestine. Janan Adawi, Sari Abdo, Majd Hamouri, Mohamad Rabah, Shadi Sader & Shadi Zatara.
Keys to the Kingdom (2019):Palestine. Tamara Nassar.
The Evil Lions & The Hungry Animals (2017): Palestine. Zaher Bassioni, Majd Hamouri & Mohamad Rabah.
A Journey of Discovery (will be played in 2024): Palestine. Tamara Nassar, Fawzieh Shilbaya & Alaa Al Barghouthi.
This article has been reprinted with permission from the Solmukohta 2024 book. Please cite as:
Pettersson, Maria. 2024. “Organising Larps during War in Ukraine and Palestine.” In Liminal Encounters: Evolving Discourse in Nordic and Nordic Inspired Larp, edited by Kaisa Kangas, Jonne Arjoranta, and Ruska Kevätkoski. Helsinki, Finland: Ropecon ry.
Cover photo: Photo by DangrafArt on Pixabay. Image has been cropped.
If you ask ten people what larp is for them and why they do larp, you will probably get at least eleven different answers. For me, it is all about meeting my dearest friends. I recently turned 30, and all the people I invited to my party were people I met through larping. Unfortunately (or fortunately) due to how global our hobby is, a lot of those people live all over the world, and I only see them at larps. However, when I go to a typical weekend larp, though I get to enjoy an amazing larp, I never have enough time to talk to all the awesome people.
That’s one of the main reasons why I love an iFoL. IFoL, standing for “Its Full of Larps”, is typically a long weekend from Thursdays to Sunday, dedicated to short form larps (1-6 hours) played at a rented large house. Between the larps, there is lots of talking, cooking, board games, sometimes a sauna – in general, just having a good time together. It is like only experiencing the big moments of a larp while spending most of the time as yourself, not as a character. Or like being at one of the KP/SK conferences, but without panels and in a way smaller venue. This gives the participants more time to really get to know each other and spend time together between the games – instead of only having a short time for socialising at an after party after a larp.
Apart from the social aspect, the organisational design of iFoLs is quite different compared to a lot of larps these days. Since a couple of years ago, we have seen quite a big trend of commodification in larps (see Seregina 2019): the larper is more of an attendee than a participant, and larps are often more about buying experiences – not co-creating them. At an iFoL, the opposite applies: everyone is part of the organising team. This is emphasised in the design: an iFoL usually begins with the people who organised the venue and registration saying the iconic phrase: “Our part is over – now everyone is organising.” This shows the importance of co-creation at an iFoL.
This also means that the participants must be ready to volunteer to guide larps, to organise time schedules, to cook, to help with the logistics, and so on. And everyone must be involved in keeping the space clean. If you want something to happen, you must organise it yourself.
Usually, these roles are not appointed up front. Instead, people volunteer on the location. Apart from a food plan (due to needing to buy the groceries before), the final schedule of the event is decided spontaneously. Most of organising is done ad hoc; for example, to sign up for larps, participants may stand in a line after dinner to get a spot at a larp, or room corners may be reserved for different larps, with people gathering at specific corners to sign up for specific larps. These on-the-fly mechanisms make it easy to find out which larps still have open spots and which are full. Signups tend to be organised just a few hours before the games to allow people to arrive and organise their schedules flexibly.
The system of self-organising and co-creating works surprisingly well, though there are also some challenges. In an ideal world where responsibilities would be shared equally, the main tasks that need to be done before the event would be shared between all participants. However, in our non-ideal world, this does not work. To make the events happen reliably, there usually must be a smaller organising team that decides to facilitate an iFoL. This team manages the preliminary tasks such as booking the venue, handling participant registration, and organising the food for the event.
Additionally, there are always small things that require coordination – an ingredient missing from a meal, a participant needing to be picked up from the train station, or a person feeling lost at the event. The goal is to share these responsibilities between everyone, but usually the main organisers tend to be the first who are asked to provide help. They can then coordinate with the other participants and ask them to help with the tasks.
The events do not work well with too few or too many people. If there are less than 25 people, experience has shown that this leads to not many games being played, and people get disappointed for not being able to larp. Not everyone wants to play all the time, and if there is already a bigger larp with maybe 15 people attending, there might not be enough willing participants to play another larp simultaneously. Likewise, with over 35 people attending, self-organising does not work as well. In larger groups, people tend to rely on other people doing the required tasks and no longer feel responsible for the co-creation.
The participation fees of iFoLs are divided equally between everyone. Since iFoLs started, the tradition has been that everyone pays the same amount to participate, and this includes the main organisers. This was based on mutual co-creation – even the main organisers are just participants, and all participants are equal organisers. The main organisers have tasks before the event, but ideally they would not have to do anything anymore once at the location (though as said before, this ideal does not fully hold). However, equality is not the same as equity, and having everyone pay the same amount of money does not give everyone the same chance to participate. Thus subsidised and sponsor tickets have become available during the past years.
What I have written above have been my experiences on participating in iFoLs – and organising one. Even though the main idea is written down in the iFoL manifesto (Deutch & Kasper 2015), at the end iFoLs are about creating an experience together. They are not about attending as consumers – they are about co-creation and organising together. They are about spending time with old and new friends in a safe and welcoming environment to play larps, to talk, and to have fun together.
To have an iFoL work out well for all, you need to trust your fellow larpers. There are enough of us who want to co-create events together instead of buying experiences, and enough of us who are ready to take the responsibility. Over all my years of attending iFoLs, this mentality of co-creation and co-organising has permeated the events – and it is the main reason why I love iFoLs. In the end, this is what our community is about at its best: friendship.
This article has been reprinted with permission from the Solmukohta 2024 book. Please cite as:
Kramer, Katharina. 2024. “On Co-creating Experiences – iFoL.” In Liminal Encounters: Evolving Discourse in Nordic and Nordic Inspired Larp, edited by Kaisa Kangas, Jonne Arjoranta, and Ruska Kevätkoski. Helsinki, Finland: Ropecon ry.
“Everything is a designable surface”, as the larp designer, writer and theorist Johanna Koljonen (2019) says. This means that every single aspect of larp can be designed for particular effect: scenography, characters, workshops, communications, costumes… Even the absence of design can be designed. You can make the conscious design choice to leave a particular aspect of the larp open to the chaos of emergent play.
In many larp productions, the designer of the larp is visible to the participants. Perhaps they post about the larp on Facebook, run workshops or chat with players arriving at the venue.
If we take Koljonen’s maxim seriously, we have to conclude that the person of the designer is also a designable surface: how they dress, talk, come across. Is the designer stressed and angry or relaxed and reassuring?
The Second Run
In 2021, we made two runs of the larp Redemption (Finland 2021) and in 2022 we did two runs of another larp, 3 AM Forever (Denmark 2022). I was working with different teams but there was a subtle yet noticeable phenomenon in both larps: the first run had a nervous edge and the second run was more relaxed. This is one of those qualities that’s hard to quantify but when you run a lot of larps, you learn how to read the energy of the crowd. Running the larp twice back to back makes it possible to subjectively compare the vibe of two sets of players.
So what could cause such a difference?
For the players, the run they played was their first experience of the larp. Although there were minor adjustments, neither larp underwent substantial revision between runs. It was just the same larp, played twice.
However, one thing was different. Me. Us. The organizers. Talking with participants preparing to play the first run of both larps, I was nervous. We’d never run the larp before! Would it work? Of course I tried to keep cool but humans are often very good at picking up subtle social cues, especially in groups undergoing an intense process of socialization.
At the workshop of the second run of both larps, I felt relaxed, buoyed by the knowledge and experience gained from already running the event once before.
I started to wonder: was the nervous edge of the first run caused by the nervousness felt by us, the organizers? Did the players pick up on our emotional state and mirror it, the way humans often do?
Designable Surfaces
What are the different areas that can be designed for in terms of how the participant interacts with and experiences the designer?
Examples are social media, workshops and runtime, and discussing the larp after the event, for example at conventions or on messaging apps. There’s also a difference whether the organizer who’s interacting with a participant is someone tasked to do that, or a team member whose main function is something else.
Social media. In many larp productions, the first interactions are online. Social media posts, answering questions on Discord and Facebook. Maintaining a friendly persona is easier when communications are not immediate. If a prospective participant gets on your nerves, you can take a break, breathe, and then respond instead of going with your first reflexive take.
It’s a good idea to agree in advance who speaks with the voice of the larp in public, online spaces. This can be done by one person only, or several, depending on your chosen communications strategy. What matters is that everyone who speaks to participants projects a friendly persona and knows what they’re talking about. You should avoid disagreeing with each other in public as that damages the credibility of all communications very quickly.
The tone of online communications also matters. Going full corporate can backfire because it makes the larp feel sterile and unfriendly, not the communal experience so many larps strive to be. The question of the right tone varies by the individual but I usually try to go for a personable but somewhat official persona.
To be official, it helps not to reply to messages late at night and to keep the language and syntax correct instead of casual. You should avoid sharing personal emotions unless they’re positive ones related to organizing the larp: “I’m so excited to meet you all on site!”
To be personable, you can share carefully curated personal emotions related to the running of the larp: “I love seeing player creativity bring the larp to life!” You can empathize with individual players in a positive way and share updates from the larp team’s process: “We’re meeting with the team today!”
You have to find a way to use your own personality in a manner that feels natural to you, otherwise you risk sounding fake and alienating. If your communication feels forced to you, it might be a good idea to re-evaluate it.
On location. I recently played in the larp Gothic (Denmark 2023). The venue was a mansion in the Danish countryside and each run had only ten players. t. When we came to the venue, there were organizers busy making the larp run but always also someone whose job it was to talk to us. To sit down with us in a relaxed manner, asking after how the journey to the larp went. The workshops all followed this pattern, leveraging the larp’s limited number of players to make each interaction friendly.
This is an example of designing the designer.
When players arrive, they often feel nervous and jittery. They haven’t yet settled into the flow of the larp and they’re worried about all kinds of things, from their own play to food or accommodations. It’s enormously helpful if there are relaxed organizers present.
Chatting with the players is an organizer task. It should fall on those team members who have slept properly and maybe even enjoy talking to players. Meanwhile, the stressed-out scenographer should be allowed to build in peace.
Workshops are an obvious area where organizer presentation matters a lot. The energy projected by those running the workshop carries over to the larp. It’s important to feel that the experience is in safe hands, that you can trust the people you’re with and that everyone is friends here.
In situations like that, designing the designer means sending out the team member who can put on the most convincing facade of reassurance to talk to the players.
After runtime. The period after the larp event is the trickiest one in terms of designing the designer because of the question of how to set boundaries. When does the responsibility of the larp designer end?
Excess
It’s easy to be idealistic when designing the designer: we should always be accessible to participants, respond to every need and be available for emotional support forever even after the larp has ended.
The problem with this approach is the limited nature of the human being. If we demand everything of ourselves, we risk exhaustion and burnout. Because of this, part of the process of designing how you come across is about boundaries.
Before the larp, perhaps you’re only reachable via a specified channel, such as an organizer email address. You won’t do larp business on Messenger in the middle of the night.
During the larp, perhaps issues related to the wellbeing of individual participants are handled by a dedicated safety person. This way, the stresses of running the larp won’t cloud handling the needs of individual participants.
All of these design choices are about the wellbeing of the organizer. That too is part of how to design the designer. The best way to appear relaxed and cool in front of the players is not when you learn to fake it, but when you’re genuinely not suffering from intense stress. When you feel good, your participants feel good.
Bibliography
Johanna Koljonen (2019): Essay: An Introduction to Bespoke Larp Design. In Larp Design, edited by Johanna Koljonen, et al. Bifrost.
Ludography
3 AM Forever (2022): Denmark. Juhana Pettersson, Bjarke Pedersen, Troels Barkholt-Spangsbo & Johanna Koljonen.
Gothic (2023): Denmark. Avalon Larp Studios.
Redemption (2021): Finland. Maria Pettersson, Juhana Pettersson & Massi Hannula.
This article has been reprinted with permission from the Solmukohta 2024 book. Please cite as:
Pettersson, Juhana. 2024. “Designing the Designer.” In Liminal Encounters: Evolving Discourse in Nordic and Nordic Inspired Larp, edited by Kaisa Kangas, Jonne Arjoranta, and Ruska Kevätkoski. Helsinki, Finland: Ropecon ry.
Cover photo: Photo by John Hain. Image has been compressed.
So, you have found yourself on the verge of a burnout, or already in one, without the tools to stop repeating the cycle. In this text I will, as a newly working occupational therapist, larper, larp creator and two-time burnout survivor, give you some real-life tips and tools to fight back.
Many of us think that burnout is something that only happens at work, when we are doing too much in a stressful environment. But burnout can also happen when we do something we love so much that it consumes us. This is called Passion Burnout. While burnout can happen to anyone, people working with things they love are at higher risk. When we do what we love, we risk thinking that we are not really working. We risk thinking that because we love the work so much, we should actually do more, that because we do what we love we don’t need to rest. When our passion peaks we become full of energy, and that can make us unable to detach from work enough to focus on the things we need to do in order to avoid exhaustion.
Many larp organizers are in danger of experiencing Passion Burnout, because we love what we do. But if we acknowledge the risk we can work together to prevent it. We can learn to spot the symptoms of burnout, both in ourselves and others: feeling helpless, trapped, defeated or overwhelmed, as well as lack of joy, fatigue, changes in sleep and/or appetite. We can encourage each other by setting an example by taking care of ourselves, setting boundaries, offering help and lowering our expectations. Together we can build a more caring and nurturing community.
Now for the tips and tools.
Burnout is not your fault
You, like everyone else, are a victim of this capitalistic society that lives from our work. In this system you get rewarded, praised, and judged by the work you do, with larps just as much as with every other pursuit. In the capitalist world you don’t get more money or respect by doing less. But if you manage your time better, if you prioritize yourself instead of the work you are doing, if you stop sacrificing your own well-being, your family, your friends, your relationships and your mental and physical health, there is at least one person who will respect you more: You.
Know where your time goes
Use a time management circle or a similar tool to find out how you spend your time and how you would ideally spend it. Writing things down will help you notice where the time actually goes, and with this knowledge, you can start making adjustments to your daily routine to better fit your needs. When organizing a larp, it can help you to write down larp organizing time into your day so that it doesn’t take over your whole free time.
Draw two circles and divide them each into 24 slices. The first circle is your everyday life: how you actually spend your time. Think of the last few months or the last time you organized a larp and fill the circle with your everyday occupations such as sleep, work, taking care of yourself, cleaning, cooking, down time, relaxing, hobbies, etc. You can be as specific or as vague as you like, you can fill it hour by hour, or more approximately. Use color coding if that helps.
Now fill out your second circle. Think of your perfect life and fill your dream circle with what your everyday life would look like if by some magic all your hopes and dreams had come true.
Then look at your two circles side by side. Visualizing the differences can help you find the things you can control. Maybe you need more time for sleep, or more time with your loved ones, maybe less work and more time for self-care. See the differences, but remember that you are not a wizard but a mere mortal. So start small, just one change towards your ideal life. Set yourself a goal that is realistic and achievable. The goal can be as simple as “I want to have an hour a week for myself to go outside” or “I need half an hour more sleep a day”. State that goal to yourself and start to find your way towards it by sharing it with a friend – or a stranger at Solmukohta – and asking for help along the way.
Write things down
The following tool is useful while working on a larp project. The version pictured is called the Time Management Matrix. It can help you see what needs to be done in order to manage a project and help avoid burnout by giving you a clearer idea on how to spend your time and where you can cut yourself some slack.
Urgent
Not urgent
Important
crises
deadline driven
emergencies
etc.
preparation
prevention
planning
etc.
Not important
interruptions
some emails or social media activity
some meetings you don’t need to attend
etc.
busy work (work that adds a little value, like searching for theme songs for characters)
something someone else should be doing
etc.
Fill the matrix with the things you need to do for the larp. Fill it with your responsibilities and burdens. After you have things written down, you can see the actual amount of work that needs to be done and spot the things that are less important. Which are the things you don’t like to do, and which things give you joy? What could you delegate to others? Are there things you don’t have to do at all? To help avoid burnout, I would suggest focusing on the things you like and delegating the ones you don’t.
Look at the amount of work ahead and estimate how much time it would take to complete it. Set boundaries: look at your time management circle and be realistic. When are you going to do this work? Make a schedule and add in breaks and off-time. And if the work feels like too much, ask for help.
Ask for help
Hard and shameful? For me at least it is. Many of us think we need to be able to do everything ourselves, because we value ourselves mainly through the amount of work we do, be it professional or artistic or passionate work. But try to think of what it feels like when someone asks you for help. Most of us would feel appreciated, and that it would be an honor to be a part of your project. Asking for help is giving an opportunity for others to feel good by supporting you.
Find a way to connect with yourself
This tool is a Green Care exercise. You can do it even in the middle of running a larp, you only need ten minutes. The goal is to find a way to regulate your emotions and ground yourself.
Go outside, to nature if possible. If you can’t go outside, find a picture of nature that speaks to you, or try to remember a nice view of a landscape. Start by observing your surroundings. What does it look like, what do you hear, feel or smell? Look at the big picture first, then some smaller details. If it’s hard for you to stand still, move. If you find yourself thinking about other stuff, notice that thought and then let it go, shifting your focus back to your surroundings.
After a few minutes, when it feels good to you, start shifting your focus to yourself. With the same attitude of observation, without judgment or evaluation, try to feel yourself. Listen to your breathing. How does your skin feel, where in your body can you feel your heartbeat? If you feel like moving your body, do so. Move in a way your body wants to move. If you feel an emotion, let it in and try to look at it with a sense of wonder.
When you feel ready, slowly wrap your hands around yourself. Hug yourself and thank yourself for this exercise. Do this exercise when you feel disconnected, overwhelmed or when you need a moment for yourself.
Calendar some Me Time
When I’m in the middle of organizing a larp I tend to view that time as my free time, which has led me to overworking myself. It’s really easy to cut time away from rest and self-care, but taking care of yourself is necessary to avoid getting burned out. This is difficult, I know, but scheduling some Me Time while working on a larp project really helps. How much you need depends on you. If this is hard you can start small? Mark this time in your calendar and make sure not to book anything else over it. Even if larp organizing is your hobby, don’t do that work in this time, make this time your haven, for resting and enjoying yourself.
The change needs to happen with you
Lastly, I must give you the bad news: I can help you with tips and tools, but you have both the power and the heavy burden of actually using them. This is the hard part. You must take responsibility for your time management and set up the boundaries to protect your well-being. And please, for your own sake and for the sake of the whole community: ask for help when you need it.
Don’t be afraid of the amount of tips and tools presented here, these are not “one size fits all.” Pick and choose those that feel doable for you. If something doesn’t work, try something else.
And don’t forget that the community is here: the people who can help you with tools, support and labor. If we reach out and admit that we cannot do everything alone, we can lift each other up. With community, care and support we can achieve magic.
This article has been reprinted with permission from the Solmukohta 2024 book. Please cite as:
Friman, Taro. 2024. “Please Stop – an Occupational Therapist’s Advice on How to Avoid Burnout.” In Liminal Encounters: Evolving Discourse in Nordic and Nordic Inspired Larp, edited by Kaisa Kangas, Jonne Arjoranta, and Ruska Kevätkoski. Helsinki, Finland: Ropecon ry.
Cover photo: Photo by Manfred Hofferer from Pexels
Perhaps this conversation has been had before, perhaps it’s an elephant in the room. Since seeing a gaping hole in articles addressing environmental sustainability on Nordiclarp.org, I want to bring this topic into awareness to specifically address one topic, potentially a convenient and uncomfortable blindspot of the larp community: aviation emissions in international larp.
Climate breakdown is the most prevalent and urgent threat to life on the planet. In another year of record breaking extreme weather events — heatwaves, floods, droughts and wildfires — the atmospheric effects of global warming are tangible across the globe, and show no sign of slowing. The worst of it, floods in Pakistan practically submerging the country, killing thousands and displacing millions. Heatwaves in Europe created droughts so bad that ancestral carvings below a safe water level were revealed on the banks of the River Elbe in Czechia, complete with the inscription “Wenn du mich siehst, dann weine” (If you see me, weep). The World Health Organisation reports that climate change is responsible for 150,000 deaths per year and that figure is set to double by 2030.
There is some hope. Nothing is inevitable and it still remains possible to keep the rise of global temperatures to below 1.5 degrees, as is the goal of the Paris Agreement, the international treaty agreed at the COP Summit in 2015. A transition to a decarbonised economy is essential, and the demands set out by a Green New Deal fight for environmental justice propose critical intervention on a local and international scale, at the same time as tackling widespread inequality across the globe. Alongside halting fossil fuel production in favour of carbon-free energy sources; transferring skilled labour to transport infrastructure; zero-carbon housing and environmental reconstruction projects; and sequestration of utilities into collective ownership; the area in which I wish to highlight is a sustainable model of how we reorganise our time to move away from production and consumption, towards a more fulfilling existence including more time for leisure activities. The Green New Deal puts forward the case that a collectively owned future allows more time spent with access to nature, sport, artistic activities, and play.
In a decarbonised future, jobs and activity in these fields is plentiful. In combination with the prospect of an ageing population, the focus for decarbonisation must shift away from a production economy to one organised around care and leisure. Zero-carbon cultural activity is integral to the survival of the planet and investment in its wider sense — education, funding, jobs, infrastructure, time — has to be escalated on a mass scale. Playful activity sits at the core of this, the very essence of play in its most rudimentary form is a zero carbon activity, borne of the imagination. In comparison to other forms of culture such as film, the average production releases 500 tonnes of CO² emissions into the atmosphere, play is a future-proof and sustainable activity.
Larp (live action role-play) occupies a unique cultural space where its activity is collectively generated by players. This sets it aside from the industrial production and consumption of the film industry (notice how these words are highly compatible), and to an extent visual arts and theatre. The way that larp activity liberates culture from passive consumption because of its active player agency is the reason that I fell in love with larp. Its adjacency to DIY cultural forms is incredibly exciting for me, designers and players collaborating to create a meaningful experience through their shared imagination. As a designer, you can start with an empty page. Of course, it’s useful to have setting, characters, prompts, and techniques for players to fill in that page, but in theory, you can start with incredibly little as the play is co-designed and improvised by players. And those players have the capacity to feel as if they are on a spaceship or Wild West saloon bar by tapping into their collective imagination. They do not need specialist skills to play, everything needed in order to understand and play the larp is communicated and learned in a short amount of time. At its core, the most basic description of chamber larp is people in physical or digital space using their imaginations to create, and immerse themselves in, fictional worlds. This doesn’t come at the expense of cultural relevance, but quite the opposite: through its collective storytelling we are able to experience a deeper contemplation of the questions society asks us, today and tomorrow.
International and Local Inequality
Not all larp looks like this. Categorisation of role-play activity is a network of interlinked forms and design methods, but for the purposes of this article, I want to highlight the distinction between international long form larp and local chamber larp. These are intricately linked; without the international connections of events such as Knutepunkt and Larpwriter Summer School, many local scenes could not have flourished in the same way. Many local communities contain an international diaspora and chamber larp festivals programme international designs, arguably very important for the upkeep of local scenes. But nevertheless, I will try to draw an imaginary line in the sand between: long form larp — usually higher production values, with international participants, a relatively high financial cost to participate, lasting for multiple days — and chamber larp — usually DIY production values, with local participants, low cost, lasting a number of hours.
Firstly I want to clarify, this is not an attack on designers or players who enjoy long form larp. This is an attempt to advocate for forms of larp practice and design which should be celebrated and elevated for a zero carbon future. It feels necessary to highlight my feeling of incongruence between what I consider to be a highly environmentally sustainable practice and how this fits within a wider landscape of the international larp community.
I would imagine that on some conscious level, sustainability of larp design is an aspect of organising that is considered by most if not all designers. In a community with a progressive culture of compassion for those playing, the emotional and physical safety of players is usually a built-in priority throughout all stages of a larp. It is present in design, pre-game communication, workshopping, in-game safety techniques, and post-game briefing. In comparison, sustainability appears absent from design. I am not quite suggesting that sustainability requires parity by articulating design choices throughout; however, it needs a more careful consideration if larp can make a claim (or I can on its behalf) to have future-proof and sustainable credentials.
It is very difficult to analyse the whole larp landscape without empirical data so it should be made clear this is an anecdotal perspective. We can look at data for comparable art forms and the comparison to global visual arts activity is a useful one; however it has to be acknowledged in terms of scale, larp is a much smaller community. The estimated greenhouse gas emissions of global visual arts is 70 million tonnes; for context this fits into a global list divided by country between Romania and Morocco. This figure of 70 Mt of emissions falls dramatically to 18 Mt if visitor travel is removed. According to these figures, visitor travel accounts for 74% of total emissions from visual arts globally. This is a very sizable proportion of the sector. I understand that larp is comparably tiny compared to the proliferation of visual arts, and without having data to analyse, it’s an analysis based upon anecdotal evidence. For what it’s worth, here’s my hot take: in the case of larp events, the ratio of carbon emissions from travel is likely to be much higher.
From my own experience of facilitating sustainability activity for an arts organisation producing international work, land travel was sometimes not feasible; the delivery of the project required aeroplane travel for an artist and a producer. In these instances, aviation emissions tended to dominate the carbon footprint of the project, merely for 2 return flights. In the case of larp, even though there isn’t an audience per se, as players have an active role in the co-design and its “performance,” they are integral to the larp design and it really matters how they travel.
In larp design, I feel there is a blindspot to carbon emissions from international travel. This article isn’t a flygskam hex; players can make their own choices about travelling to events and it’s likely that many choose an international larp event as their way of taking a foreign holiday or seeing close friends. For larp designers, this is as much of a design choice as your setting and characters. Multi-day larps designed with higher production budgets and higher costs to play are very often designed for an international set of participants attending so have a disproportionately high environmental cost, in comparison to chamber larp events with local participants. If the number of players is up to 100, 50 of them taking international flights is not an unreasonable figure to estimate, generating 18.9 tons of carbon emissions from plane travel alone. This is around the same as 75,000 public transport journeys of 7km each. As designers we have agency to choose our venues or locations, the length and structure of the larp, and who attends. The last point is a salient one; if there aren’t local participants for the larp then the audience becomes an international one, consciously or unconsciously, in the design process. (I’m writing this from Oslo, where I moved nearly 2 years ago; chamber larp hasn’t really recovered from the shadow of the Coronavirus hiatus, a collective effort to nurture new players and designers only seems to be emerging now). Likewise if the price to play is one that only engages experienced players then I can’t see how new local players are able to access, nor new designers to flourish. This creates exclusions because of lack of affordability and divides potential players on the basis of class and race, something I believe the larp community wishes to avoid.
Flight emissions are a socially unequal source of emissions, a huge global disparity with the wealthiest taking a disproportionate amount of flights. Whilst aviation currently accounts for around 2.5-3% of global emissions, the proportion and total is set to increase as other sectors of the economy — electricity generation and transport — move towards renewable sources of energy. Unlike these sectors where existing solutions can be scaled up by urgent government action, the aviation industry does not currently have these technological solutions. Climate breakdown is disproportionately caused by emissions from the Global North, disproportionately affecting the Global South. The Global South is more vulnerable to extreme weather events as a direct result of historic colonial oppression leaving them with the least resources to cope with rising temperatures, sea levels, flooding, and drought. The compassion shown for human safety in larp design ought to extend to outside of those playing, by climate justice being ingrained in designs.
I have considered how I access information about larps, primarily through social media which may play a factor in how my perspective is shaped. It may be that I mostly hear about larps on a large scale because those are the organisers shouting the loudest, with the biggest promotional reach. I am less likely to come across information about local chamber larp scenes, or groups of friends quietly organising through Whatsapp to meet and play in living rooms on the other side of the world; (please make my day and tell me about this)! Larp designs can be digitally sent and received by facilitators in another part of the world; it is one of the few artistic mediums where international travel is not required in order for the larp to be realised.
There is a comparison I can make to my other playful love, football (*waits for Google Analytics to tell me half of all readers stop here*; please don’t, you’re almost done). In football, the elite leagues occupy the most media attention at the professionalised level of the game. Football as business has infected the game, players earning grossly inflated salaries and charging eye-watering entrance fees which has, at least in England, priced out the working class. However, the wider picture of the entire league structure, the football “pyramid,” named as such because the lower amateur leagues far outnumber higher, professional leagues. The lower leagues at the base of the pyramid are organised regionally, furthest from the top are organised with the closest geographical proximity. Below this, the number of games played informally in the park or on the school playing fields are even more numerous, and even though the difference in player skill and production values is notable, it’s the same game, enjoyed at its fullest by those participating. As an ecosystem, football as a comparison is not perfect, especially as financial resources are distributed incredibly unequally, but the football pyramid does provide an interesting model for redistributing a better balance between local and international.
In a sustainable decarbonised future, the network of larp design has to take the shape of a pyramid with a greater proportion of larp activity organised at a local level. I’m not saying whether or not the elite international leagues ought to exist; this is at the discretion of the reader. Besides, larp is not a competition, it’s a supportive and inclusive community. In spite of this, perpetuation of larp design which is reliant on wide scale carbon emissions from aeroplane travel without larp infrastructure existing at a local level, makes it a fantasy to claim that the imagination is without a substantial cost to the environment.
On a practical level, I would be interested to see evidence of designers working on sustainability of larp events in the future, sharing best practice, and continuing the discourse. To keep specific to the topic of flight emissions, this starts with data collection, as boring as it sounds. Knowing where participants are travelling from and most importantly, how they travelled, is fairly easy to implement with a travel survey as part of player sign-up or on-site. This shouldn’t create barriers along national borders for players travelling internationally, but rather, give a fuller picture of the carbon emissions for your larp event. By knowing this information, designers are able to see the environmental cost of the larp, identify gaps on local scenes if the event is mostly accessed by air travel, and adjust their designs and promotion accordingly. In this way the pyramidal structure does not become top heavy and avoid the danger of toppling over. A follow-up to this article could address some smaller scale sustainable design choices, however — serving vegan meals to players who have travelled thousands of kilometres to eat it — is like trying to put a fire out with a thimble.
Cover photo:Ross Parmly on Unsplash. Image has been cropped.
Content Advisory: Statutory rape, sexual abuse, organizer negligence, manipulation
A Finnish man is dragging his luggage behind him as we approach a subway station in Rome. We both have wheeled suitcases with long handles, and while I carry mine down to the station, he drags his along the stairs. Bump, whirrr, bump, whirrr, bump, whirrr, bump…
“Aren’t you worried you’ll break your suitcase?” I ask him.
“No,” T replies, “if it breaks, it was a bad suitcase. I don’t want a bad suitcase.”
Little did I know, during the production of Dragonbane, I would become that suitcase.
Fifteen years ago, Dragonbane was played in Sweden. I was in the three-person team who begat it all, three years prior. I was the second, and the one responsible for the story, setting, and name of the larp.
The other two were Fýr Romu and T. My first book, the roleplaying book Myrskyn aika (“Age of the Tempest”) was about to be published when T came to the door of my studio apartment in Turku one day with a proposition. I have chosen not to use his full name.
“I am going to make a larp about a mechanical dragon. I want to set it in the world of Myrskyn aika, and I want you as the creative lead on this larp.”
(They might have used the word “main designer,” or “head writer,” but the meaning was the same.)
I knew T from before, us both having taken part in each others’ larps since the mid 90s. He was not a close friend, but I dare say we knew each other quite well. And knowing him, I had my doubts about his leadership style. His earlier big projects, the Wanderer larps, were known for bad management and burnouts.
“Yes. There were problems, but I have learned my lesson,” T told me in his deep voice. His deep, convincing voice.
Then he showed me their plans. A Finnish forestry company has an experimental six-legged logging machine. Like a robotic ant the size of a truck. With the published book giving us a professional status, we would convince them to loan that machine for the larp. Before that, we would recruit Fýr to build an animatronic dragon around it, and we could have it walk around in the larp. The dragon would be able to turn its head, make facial expressions, and even breathe fire. T and Fýr were both interested in pyrotechnics.
We did, indeed, soon recruit Fýr who, like me, was studying in Turku. He had a crooked smile and a ginger ponytail. I believe he would not object to me calling him a mad inventor. I did not know him then, but we are still connected now fifteen years later. I am still not sure if Fýr is younger or older than me.
Myself, I was a young artist and writer struggling with burnout, depression, and tendonitis. I believed larp is an art form and a medium, and wanted to prove this to the world. My professional writing career was just getting started, Myrskyn aika being a major breakthrough since it was published by a proper book publisher and sold in book stores. I was young enough to still be looking for mentors, but experienced enough in the larp scene to be wanted as a mentor by others.
Together, we set to work creating the coolest fantasy larp ever.
Plans and Realities
This was a time when the Nordic larp scene was still in its infancy. We had met foreign larpers at Knudepunkts, and taken part in some of their larps, but this was going to take all that to the next level. We would recruit an international team and create a mega-larp for 1200 players with pre-written characters. And the animatronic dragon.
Now, we did not have the dragon yet. We had our eyes set on a prototype made by Plustech, a Finnish subsidiary of the multinational corporation John Deere which makes tractors and forestry machines. But, T convinced me, once they see our plans, they would be idiots to say no. After all, what a prototype needs most of all is visibility, and that we could promise them. Imagine going to a forestry trade show with a dragon!
We had crazy plans. We would transform fantasy larp forever. We would have players from dozens of countries, making this by far the most international larp at the time. We would create the best larp in the world. Through pyrotechnics, magic would really work! The village would have bespoke wheat fields to reap, which would be sown months in advance. The budget would be one million euros. Every off-game item from cell phones to underwear would be forbidden. We would utilize experimental augmented reality technologies. Our trailer would feature Eddie Murphy and be shown in film theatres.
We quickly started to recruit teams of builders, designers, writers, and producers. T made plans for getting us sponsors and backers, Fýr started drawing blueprints for the dragon, and I went to work on coming up with a concept for the larp.
The recruiting process was a strange one to say the least. People found out they had been recruited when they started receiving messages from an e-mail list they had no idea they were on. Communication and leadership were chaotic, and I probably share some of the blame for that.
My own notes on who is working in what capacity are odd reading now, eighteen years later. We very quickly recruited Christopher Sandberg into the production team since we knew him as the hotshot producer of the Hamlet larp. The next time his name is mentioned in my notes, he is running the writing team together with me. Eventually he replaced me as the creative lead.
Mikko Rautalahti wrote in the Finnish Larppaaja magazine about how unflattering the project seemed from the outside. This rant was published in early 2004 so a long time before the larp actually happened:
The organization behind the project was constantly in flux … Communication between the different teams didn’t work, so for example the costume team made their plans based on an already obsolete player count without checking with the people in charge of the plot. As a cherry on top, some French harebrain decided to post a good portion of the project’s inner discussions online for the whole world to see, which obviously created even more confusion among organizers as well as the public.
…
The project checked all so-called [T] boxes. Even though the creative lead of the project is Mike Pohjola who has written Myrskyn aika and is known for the groundbreaking inside:outside, and has often demanded for more emphasis in larp writing, the producer [T] kept doing his own thing, recognizable by stunningly ambitious plans and a completely haphazard execution.
…
On the other hand, [T] is also known as a man who spits in his hands, takes the scarily big bull by its horns, and wrestles that monster to the ground regardless of how many people are standing by, saying it can’t be done.
…
One can’t help asking, does the game really have to be this big? Is the content such that realizing the vision really needs more than a thousand players – or is the true reason for the size simply the need to seem important?
Translated by myself for this essay.
This sort of feedback simply made us more determined to prove this could be done.
The Story
I had written a Middle-Earth tabletop roleplaying scenario for the Finnish roleplaying magazine Magus (published in 2001 in the magazine’s 50th and last issue). It was about beornings and dragon worshippers journeying into the Grey Mountains to encounter a dragon, and then, perhaps attack it, or bargain with it, or betray the others to it. I had written plenty of history for the dragon worshippers, and even added a note saying the adventure could be turned into a larp.
That became the first seed for the story of Dragonbane. The first brief went like this:
Two ancient peoples have been at war for longer than anyone can remember. It all began with a Dragon, god to some, enemy to others. Now, the dragon worshippers have almost won, and the last remnants of the once proud people have set a call for heroes: Who will slay the dragon?
The last few days have seen the arrival of several chivalric orders, a handful of mysterious sorcerors, and many strange travellers from lands afar. Some are there to contest for the right to slay the dragon, others (like the dragon worshippers) are present to argue against the slaying. And, of course, many people are there just to take advantage of all the foreign dignitaries.
…
What secrets does each hero carry inside them? What is your dragon? When it comes down to an epic battle of Good and Evil, you must decide what you think is Good. And pray to your gods you got it right.
That is where the project got the name Dragonbane from. (Later on, Christopher and I would try to change the name to the more appropriate Dragontide, but T deemed it too late.)
As the story was developed further, we listened to feedback from different team members, most prominently the country coordinators and the writers. Christopher and I talked endlessly on the phone about how to tackle the different creative issues we would face with having a thousand players from very different larp cultures with no time to get to know each other beforehand. The idea to use Finnish style pre-written multi-page character descriptions was soon scrapped.
The village of the dragon worshippers soon became Cinderhill. But it was not until later when Christopher was the main designer when we switched the approaching adventurers into the dragontamers and the witches. Those two groups, along with the dragon worshippers of Cinderhill, constituted the character mega-factions in the larp.
My plan was that Cinderhill would not be the typical feudal-capitalistic pseudo-medieval village of fantasy larps, but something like a religious cult and a Soviet commune. One of our Estonian team members had grown up in a Soviet commune, and did not see this as a very positive thing, but I tried to convince her Cinderhill would be a utopian version of that.
I, as a published author, was T’s trump card, and he took me to many meetings with sponsors and local authorities to show that he had a professional writer in the team. I would typically pitch the story of the larp to the potential partners, and then on the way home, write a letter we could send to our teams and the existing partners. In fact, much of my early work was writing these press releases instead of designing the larp.
Here’s one such letter, written to invite fantasy larpers into the project:
While larp is a fun hobby everywhere, there’s all the time more and more people saying it doesn’t have to be just fun, it can be an earth-shattering, world-changing miracle. Some larps in Northern Europe have made a stab at this. In the last few years, we’ve had larps like Europa, Panopticorp, inside:outside and Hamlet.
…
Until now, fantasy has been over-looked by the larp creators who wish to take the medium forward. Fantasy has long been stagnating into a tired collection of Tolkien clichés, but Dragonbane will reinvent fantasy for the 21st century.
…
We see larp as a medium very close to shamanism, magic and fantasy. With Dragonbane we aim to renew not only fantasy, but larping, as well.
Quite soon after we had announced the project, we were already on the way to Italy to be guests at Lucca Comics & Games Fair. I am still not sure whether we were really guest of honor, or if the local larpers just told us that. The “other” guests of honor included Larry Elmore and Margaret Weis, and we were quite starstruck.
We flew to Rome, T dragged his suitcase to the metro, and we took a train to Pisa, from where we were driven to Lucca. The local mayor cut an actual ribbon at the opening ceremonies of the convention.
We had two talks Friday, one about Nordic larp (which was called larp in Northern Europe back then) and the other one about Dragonbane. Everything we say was translated into Italian so the audience could understand us. We wondered at how these people could larp fluently in English.
In the evening I ran a small larp, I Shall Not Want, which was focused on subdued character immersion at murdered businessman’s wake. For many of the Italian participants this was their first non-fantasy larp, and the first one where the focus was on character immersion.
We did our best to network with the local larpers, and T put me to work writing lots of material for Dragonbane.
One morning at breakfast we noticed Larry Elmore was sitting alone at another table, eating his eggs. We knew him as the biggest fantasy artist of our childhoods, having made the cover of the Dungeons & Dragons red box we grew up with. T wanted to recruit him, I advised against it. Nevertheless, we went to his table, and introduced ourselves. Larry assumed we were random fans. He smiled politely and said hello.
Without blinking an eye, T started an unsolicited pitch on Dragonbane with his very strong Finnish accent. “And we will actually have a real animatronic dragon! Now, do you think that’s pretty cool or what?” Larry kept nodding politely, but it was obvious he did not believe a word we were saying, and wanted to be left alone. T took this as his cue to ask him to create original dragon art for us. Larry said something vague like “Sounds real interesting,” and promised to get back at us. He did not, of course. We were just two European crazies who interrupted his breakfast.
Later on, with a similar pitch, T did manage to attract the Argentinian dragon artist Ciruelo. The art on the poster was made by him.
The Rabbit Hole Method
Christopher Sandberg, a passionate Swedish larp designer and producer, delivered several long game design documents which included everything from the setting to costume design of the individual groups. We discussed the topics day after day, week after week, and finally came up with what we saw as a breakthrough: The Rabbit Hole Method.
The larp would start with the players in their regular clothes, suffering complete amnesia. They would not know who or where they are. Walking around in the woods, they would find clothes that feel much more appropriate, and slowly start to remember that they are, in fact, a dragon worshipper from the village of Cinderhill, or a witch, or a dragontamer. They would change into their real clothes, i.e. the costume. They would remember their new name, and find friends and family that they know quite well but they are also meeting for the first time.
This would take a few hours, and then they would arrive at the village or some other group location, where they would already be in character, and dream-like go about their business making paper or fetching water or starting fires. And then the larp would go on like a regular larp.
The Rabbit Hole would solve so many issues, mainly the players not knowing each other beforehand, and being able to play in their own languages as well as whatever English they can muster. Nowadays we would have workshops instead of trying to solve these issues in-game.
Unbeknownst to me at the time, Rabbit Hole is also a metaphor for taking hallucinogenic drugs. Some people did pick this up, and it again was a blow on the public image of the project.
We felt this was an ingenious solution. But our Danish country coordinator who had promised us fifty Danish teenagers said this was way too experimental for them. The kids liked to beat orcs in the woods, not take part in strange ritual dramas. (I am sure many of those former kids are running full-blown ritual drama larps now.)
Christopher and I felt we could convince the Danish teenagers, or forget about them. But T was worried about our player base. This was a thousand-person larp. We must have those teenagers! So, the Rabbit Hole was scratched, and we started to look for a more traditional approach.
We still did not have a location for the larp, but we did not want it to be in Finland. The neighboring countries Estonia and Sweden seemed good options.
The team got in contact with Estonian larpers and a location scouting team left Finland on a ferry.
T brought along his legendary Humvee which was known as “The Finnish Bar” in many Knutepunkts since he held unofficial parties there with lots of booze. I never went, but knowing he was later incarcerated for sex crimes, it is hard to know how much grooming happened at those parties.
Nevertheless, the car came in handy driving to the Soomaa national park in south-western Estonia. Sometimes we would cross bridges that were only barely able to carry the car’s weight, and all the passengers would have to get out and walk.
Local larpers took us to explore Soomaa on boats. It is a vast area of bogs, forests, and meandering rivers, where Estonian freedom fighters and bandits used to hide. The area that on the map had seemed suitable, proved to be completely impossible. It was a virtual jungle, and in the summer would be full of rapid animals and violent boars.
The evening was reserved for workshops. The production people including T and Mikko Pervilä held their own meeting in one part of the house we were using, while I talked with some of the writers. Fýr ran a third meeting for the Estonians who were present, and their job was to come up with a name for the dragon. I had no idea such a key element of the fiction was being crowdsourced, and when later that evening I was told she is called “Beautiful Death,” I simply thanked them for the input. This, obviously, got them quite irate, having just spent hours coming up with a good name. (And it was good.)
I went to visit the production meeting and I discovered a very drunk T angrily explaining to Mikko Pervilä about how he does not understand the project like T himself does. And Mikko, exasperatedly trying to get some point across. The Estonians probably did not get a very good impression of us.
The next day T took me to meet the director of the National Park. He was polite and interested, and promised to stay in touch. (He did.) He also suggested a different location, parts of which were on privately owned land, and could be built on.
The new location was idyllic, you almost expected to find a hobbit village somewhere. The area was mostly plains or dried swamp, with small forested areas providing contrast. A beautiful river ran slowly through the plains, providing an interesting in-game obstacle for anyone needing to cross it. There was a ruined farm house with just the chimney remaining, and a wild orchard in the yard. Berry bushes and apple trees had started to spread in the nearby lands.
We figured we could build our village right on the outskirts of the national park. T envisioned a grand main hall for the village that he could then use as his personal summer cabin after the larp. “And I’m sure some envious larpers will twist that around to sound like I’m only using free labor to build myself a huge cabin! But after a project as huge as this, I think I’m entitled to something for myself.” Another possibility would have been to testament the cabin to the whole team or to one of the organizations behind the larp, but these were not mentioned.
For some reason, there was no room in the Humvee for me on the way back, so I had to take a series of Soviet-era buses to get to Tallinn and the ferry. This gave me time to do some of the writing tasks T had given me, including writing a letter about the successful Estonian scouting trip for our team and sponsors. Typing on a laptop in a bouncing bus, hands hunched like a vulture’s feet, was not good for my tendonitis.
The bus-ride turned out to be a blessing in disguise, as I later found out T’s Humvee had broken down on the country road he had been driving. I was not there, but I remembered his comments about the suitcase in Italy. “It broke down, so it was a bad car. I don’t want a bad car.”
Still struggling with stress, depression and the wrists, I was starting to suspect, if I would break down, too, before all this was over.
After we had publicly announced that we had chosen Soomaa as the location, the Estonian authorities did, indeed, contact us again. They said we absolutely cannot use the National Park since many of the things we have planned are directly against the rules of the park and the laws governing it.
T and I were both quite angry and disappointed at the Estonians. If someone had made sure of this a few months earlier, we would have saved hundreds of hours of labor, by skipping the whole trip. In retrospect, it was us, the main organizers, who should have made sure of that.
Suspect Parties
Many of the bigger project meetings took place at T’s home in the countryside between Turku and Helsinki. There were also several other people there, some from T’s larp organization, some his friends, others just people hanging around. Or maybe they were all involved in Dragonbane. I discovered Fýr was now employed by T’s company.
The workshop weekends included meetings and commonly prepared meals, but also lots of extracurricular activities, including clearing the garden of dried shrubs. I did not take part in that. I was also a teetotaler at the time, so I could not fully participate in the other program which mostly consisted of drinking games in the sauna, drinking games in the pool, and drinking games wrapped in towels.
There were always teenaged girls around, and these older men wanted to get them drunk. I did not know the girls, maybe they were involved with one of them, maybe they were just working on the project, maybe something more sinister was happening. It was hard to tell, and knowing what I now know, I should have spoken out more clearly. Today, I would characterize the atmosphere as toxic.
We writers did have actual productive meetings, though, although sometimes they felt more like seance sessions, with us trying to decipher what Christopher was saying over a long-distance phone call on speakerphone.
The rumors and the strange mood and the “use them until they break” style of management obviously led to many, many people burning out, quitting or just quietly disappearing. This meant we had to constantly find new people to take on those positions. People kept coming and going. Christopher as creative lead was replaced by others before the project was over.
For Solmukohta 2004, Juhana Pettersson and I designed the art larp Luminescence, produced by Mikko Pervilä. It is known as “the flour larp,” since we had a room filled with 750 kilos of wheat flour. Plenty has been written of that larp in other articles, but cleaning up after the larp was quite a hassle.
T wanted me to be in some Dragonbane meeting, while I was expected to be cleaning the room. “No problem,” he said, and ordered two teenaged volunteers to go clean the flour room while I took part in the meeting. Needless to say, the volunteers simply left the project, and I later got an angry call from the janitor.
Luminescence. Photo by Juhana Pettersson.
At a later stage in the project, a larper woman I was dating told me T had asked her to join Dragonbane‘s music team. Having seen what was going on at those project workshops, I did not feel them to be a safe environment for someone I cared about. (Again, I should have worked harder to protect also those I did not know.) I asked her not to participate in the project, and she got mad at me at first, but then agreed.
Since we were constantly struggling to recruit new people, and I as one of the key organizers had just worked against that goal, I finally started realizing I could not be involved in Dragonbane much longer.
Everything Goes Wrong
I was sitting in the audience at an ice hockey stadium listening to a pyramid scheme recruiting event. T was convinced we should have them as our financing partners, and had sent myself, and some of the production people to take part in the event, and then later on try to meet some of the key people in their dressing rooms.
The whole thing was obviously a scam. Obvious to me, but others in our team were not as skeptical.
We managed to get an audience with one of the speakers, and explain our case. Dragonbane could be officially branded by the pyramid scheme, and they would get lots of publicity for their business. They promised to think about this.
When Mikko Pervilä heard about this, he said he would quit immediately, if Dragonbane went through with this. So, the cooperation was cancelled. I am grateful to Mikko for that. (He later quit anyway.)
We had long since forgotten about getting Eddie Murphy for the trailer. Then we found out we would not get the Plustech forestry machine, either. How could we have Dragonbane the great dragon larp if we have no dragon?
The project went through constant changes. The location was switched from Estonia to Sweden, the targeted player number was cut and cut again from 1200 to 400. Fýr’s dragon building crew were hard at work making plans on a new kind of dragon built on top of a truck, but without Plustech, they could not keep up with the schedule.
Christopher and I realized there was no way for the larp to happen in 2005, and managed after long, painful debates to convince T to postpone it by a year. He opposed the change because once he promises to do something, he does it. But, we told him, his promise could not be kept in 2005, but it could be kept in 2006.
Around that time, T decided he had to change his leadership style. This is how he comments on the topic in the documentation book Dragonbane: The Legacy:
“As the project progressed, it became increasingly evident to all participants that the only viable decision making model was a military style one. The more idealistic version proposed early in the game just did not produce results and in a project of this size and with this little time it is not a good alternative. There are reasons why corporations and businesses do not operate on committee or democracy basis.
A smaller, less international project could have succeeded with less dictatorial management, but with Dragonbane the more authoritative style should have been adopted even earlier. In hindsight, it is easy to see that the year we lacked could have been saved by choosing army style project management from day one.”
I wanted out. I was very stressed and felt I would soon break like the suitcase and the car and so many other people in the team before me. But explaining this to a person who does not take no for an answer was not easy.
I told T I needed to do some paying work since Dragonbane was taking up all my time. “How much do you need?” he asked. He proposed I come work for him. Having seen how Fýr was already in a position of T having economic power over him, and now with militaristic style, this was not what I wanted to hear.
In the end I just had to tell him I could not work in the project under any circumstances. “Fine,” he said. “I hope you won’t turn against us and start badmouthing us.” I promised I would not. And I have not written or spoken about my experiences publicly, until now.
After that I became a broken object, someone T did not want around.
A year later the larp was actually about to happen in the forests of Bumfuck, Sweden. (Actually Älvdalen in Dalarna County.) I could not take part in the larp as my mandatory civilian service would start immediately after and if I was late, I would be punished. Travel to and from Älvdalen took so long I could not risk it, but I wanted to be there at the start.
I had read online about how the players who had arrived early had met angry organizers and been forced to work on building the village. The dragon’s neck had broken and it was being repaired at a vocational institute in Finland. Nothing was ready, and there was not enough food for the involuntary volunteers.
Fundin, a Dragontamer player from Sweden had this to say:
Mistakes were made, and I think the main one was not trusting that the players could fix things for themselves, less promises would have made a better game.
Had we been told to bring tents, cooking gear, food and taming tools the game would have been better. There were few who couldn’t bring tents for example, no problem, then only a few tents would have had to be made = less work for the organisers.
I asked about making taming tools and was told to go to Finland or southern Sweden for a workshop… I would have been able to make them at home if that had been cleared beforehand..But *No* was the general answer to any Idea, everything had to be specially made for DB, that was the big problem, and you were not allowed to make anything by yourself without an organiser or a workshop.
When I arrived, the mood among the organizers in “The Bootcamp” was, indeed, hostile. At the time I thought it was because I was seen as a traitor, having quit the project. Now I have found out the mood was hostile towards everyone so it could have simply been lack of sleep. That ten people who should have been there to help were repairing the dragon had taken its toll.
It was clear everything was badly organized and there were not enough people to do everything that had to be done. And not enough cars to get people from the Bootcamp to the larp village to build it. On the other hand, there were a huge number of incredibly beautiful props, fabrics, and such.
I did odd jobs. I cooked a hearty vegetarian meal for the people at the Bootcamp. I remember T being very happy that I took carnivores into account, not realizing the sauce was soy grit instead of minced meat. I helped dye scrolls with strong tea. I helped the players build the village. I held the opening brief for the players in the witch group.
The players and volunteers I met were exhausted and almost delirious. One of them, Tonja Goldblatt, looked at me, unbelieving, when I arrived at the village. They had not eaten or rested properly, and had to work in the poorly organized work camp. When I had wanted Cinderhill to resemble a Soviet commune, this was not what I had in mind. It was certainly no utopia.
I wasn’t part of any main organizing team, but I ended up working my ass off for this project and I burned out. It was no small feat and it did manage amazing things, but Dragonbane broke me for years. For years it was really hard for me to talk about the whole project because of the bitterness. It was my first international larp and turned me away from Nordic Larping for years.
I only caught rumors of the larp itself from the Bootcamp, and then I had to leave. As I was ready to depart, the dragon arrived. They had driven it to a ferry, sailed it to Sweden, and driven it from the ferry to Älvdalen. Its neck was still broken, but it could move.
At the last moment T decided to replace the person who had prepared to play the voice of the dragon. He replaced him with himself. Even though the fancy software could turn everyone’s voice into the dragon’s voice, it could not change his very recognizable accent.
Aftermath
For the longest time I was ashamed of the project. I assumed almost everyone had a really bad time. And sure, many people did. Many burnt out. But for others this was every bit the magical experience we had set out to create. Friendships were forged and sense of wonder essential to fantasy created lasting memories.
In the book Nordic Larp, Johanna Koljonen’s and Tiinaliisa T’s article on the larp starts with these atmospheric words:
I heard the dragon give out a heart-rending shriek. The sky exploded, and pillars of fire shot up behind the temple. The Dragon died – and at that moment it became truly real. The odd angle of the head looked like the twisted position of one who has expired in pain. And its skin, when I rushed in, wailing, towards it, felt slightly warm to the touch.
In the same book, an anonymous Cinderhillian player comments:
We indeed had a working village! When we bakers found out we had bread and cheese, but nothing to slice the cheese with, one of the village smiths made us a perfectly good cheese-slicing tool!
Charles Bo Nielsen recently reminisced on the group Larpers BFF:
I would like too add that as someone who was 18 at that larp, it was an amazing experience, first major international larp for me. So heavily coloured from that perspective.
There were some really interesting things about the larp. It was insanely ambitious, especially for the times, it had a really really big budget, due to being heavily funded, beyond the player tickets of 130 euroes, which back in 2006 was considered quite the sum for going to a larp.
From my point of view it ended up really grumbling under its own hype, the organizers ended up promising everything and certainly not delivering everything.
In Denmark spinoff larps were run, continuing the story of the dragontamers.
The village that was built was robbed soon after the larp, and then left in the woods to decay. Later on, the local municipality burned it down.
Essi Santala, who worked with Fýr on the dragon, wrote: “I would not be who I am today without Dragonbane. I know it was a devastating project for some people but for me it meant major friendships, togetherness, overcoming obstacles and a sense of awe over what we accomplished over the course of the project. I spent two years part of Dragonbane. It was awesome. Was it a good larp? The question, to me, is irrelevant.”
I would still stay in contact with Christopher, and a year after Dragonbane we would found a company together. Fýr is studying filmmaking in Prague. Mikko has produced many other big events including Solmukohtas.
In 2015, T was sentenced to two years and eight months in prison for statutory rape and sexual abuse, and he quit the larp scene.
It is bittersweet to think back on Dragonbane now. Thanks to those who worked for and took part in our visions. Apologies to those that were hurt or broken. I hope young organizers and designers of today are more aware of toxic environments and what to do about them.
I would invite everyone who has memories or questions of Dragonbane to discuss the topic further with me and others.
The term organizer burnout is once again making the rounds. In essence, it means that the demands on the people who organize larps, often in their free time as a hobby project, are so high that people are burning out and are being discouraged from organizing again. To prevent this, I have put together a handy list on how players can take care of their organizers and help to prevent burnout. This list doesn’t apply to all larps and organizers, but it can hopefully apply to several situations.
Before the Larp
When signing up for a larp, read through the information available. If you already know that there will be design decisions and policies you do not agree with, it doesn’t give you the right to criticize them after the fact and try to change the organizer’s mind about them. Often, an organizer has a reason for making a decision. You can inquire about the reason, but the organizer is not under any obligation to defend them-self to you. If the policy or decision really irks you, consider if you really want to attend this larp, or if you want to attend your own version of this larp. Respect that the organizer has their own vision for this larp.
Leading up to the larp, use the official channels that the organizers of the larp have asked you to use. If they have asked you to email questions, don’t write to them through social media channels or personal messages. Respect that some people need to compartmentalize information and that they don’t always have to be available.
Read the information provided before asking questions, especially in the days leading up to the larp. If you struggle with finding information because it is spread out in different places, then you can point this out to the organizers in a nice, unpressurring way. This for example could be asking for a document with links or a thread that collects all information.
If you stumble upon things you really like that the organizer is responsible for, tell them. Make them feel valued.
Preparing for the larp, check the packing list and bring the things listed on it. Make sure that you bring snacks if you know you will need additional food. Read all the information once more.
Consider bringing a present for your organizer if you know them well, like candy or their favorite drink. Otherwise bring hugs, but remember to ask if they want to be hugged first.
During the Larp / Workshops
Be on time.
Don’t hog the organizer’s time. Remember, there are a thousand things to do just before a larp starts. Always give the organizer a way out of a situation and respect that they have things to do, even if you want to hang out with them.
If you arrive at the event before the specified time, ask if you can help with anything and try to be mindful not to be in the way. The organizer has no obligation to keep you company if you’ve chosen to arrive before the set time.
During the workshops, refrain from making jokes to lighten up the mood. If the organizer asks you to pose questions at the end of a segment instead of when you think of them, write down any questions and do that, instead of thinking that asking your question can’t hurt the flow or timing of the workshop.
Don’t hog the organizer’s time during breaks or in workshops. They have a million things to do. If it is a dear friend, consider saying that you are there and ready to hang out and support them, but only if that’s what they want. Anything other than an enthusiastic yes is a no.
Don’t ask the organizer for special privileges just because they’re your friend (unless they are for health and safety reasons).
Listen during the workshops to understand what function the organizer will have during the game. If they say you can larp with them (for example if they have an NPC function), then you can, but remember to always give them an opportunity to opt out. If they are present only in an off-game capacity, then respect that.
After the Larp
After the game, thank the organizer either at the larp or afterwards online. Give them appreciation and tell them about things you enjoyed that they were responsible for.
Allow the organizers some time to recover before providing negative comments about the larp. If you want to rant about the game in a way that includes criticism of some sort, check to see if the organizer is nearby. If they are, don’t do it. For an organizer, that sort of criticism is not what they need to hear in that moment. Your criticism during the larp may make it difficult for them to perform their other tasks effectively.
Check in with the organizer after the game, repeat positive things, and wait for them to ask about constructive criticism before giving it. Some organizers request a Week of Stories, in which players should only share their positive stories from the event for the first week after the larp before issuing criticisms. Respect that wish.
If there is a feedback form, fill it in. When filling in longer comments, remember to nuance your answers. Often organizers will clump together the data and the comments separately, which means that even if your data reflects that you have had a good larp, your comments may make it seem like a bad experience.
Remember, you might not have all the information about a design decision. Even if something seems objectively bad to you, there might be reasons for it. Try not to word things as absolutes, but as things you perceived as flaws. Sometimes your own expectations or other outside influences are the reasons you haven’t had a good game. Sometimes it’s the design. Rarely is it because the organizer is a horrible human being.
If you don’t organize on a regular basis, or if you have never organized a larp like the one you attended, have some humility. Remember that this is a person that has put themselves out there in trying to create something. Be nice.
This is a living document that may be updated to include more tips. I don’t claim to have thought of everything, or that my tips work for everyone, but this is, in my opinion, a baseline with which to start. If you want to add something, including rewording, nuancing, or disagreeing, feel free to use the comment section and expand upon your suggestion.
A classic program item at Knutepunkt is the “All the mistakes I’ve done” session. At Knutpunkt 2014 we once more got larp designer and producers to tell some of their dark secrets.
Sharing mistakes this round was Juhana Pettersson, Anna-Karin Linder, Troels Barkholt-Spangsbo & Hanne Grasmo.
The session was hosted by Rasmus Høgdall.
Once again four wonderful guest speakers will present, all the mistakes they have done in the name of making great or not so great larps. The premise is; that by sharing our mistakes we all learn a little bit, but most importantly we learn that failing is not the same as being a faliure, it’s part of doing, learning and bettering yourself.
Nevermore: Family Issues (2023). Photo by Anna Posetselska.
