Nordic larp is taking France by slow-motion storm. After experiencing the awesomeness, people are setting up re-runs of classics such as Mad about the Boy and Just a Little Lovin’. The next logical step was to make our own stuff, and NEXUS-6 was one of the first humble attempts.
The Inspiration
Ever since I played Monitor Celestra I have been convinced that Blade Runner’s ‘replicants’ are dramatic gold (for those who didn’t get the reference, Nexus-6 are the newest model of replicants in Blade Runner). I’m also fascinated by totalitarian regimes and the insane things they make people do. Then, for some reason, I thought it would be nice to give airsoft a try.
The result was a retro-future “Battlestar Galactica meets the battle of Stalingrad”, where soldiers fighting a losing war for a North Korea-like state gradually realize that some of them might be replicants planted by the enemy.
The Mechanics
Most techniques I stole from other larps (who probably stole them from other productions themselves): shadows from Monitor Celestra, letters from Last Will, colored lanyards from Life is Cheap, monologues from Just a Little Lovin’ and many more, including of course safe-words from just about all Nordic larps. Most of these techniques are not particularly novel but had barely been used in France before, making the game a bit of an experiment.
The Experience
I wanted a hardcore game, because that’s one of the things I love playing myself. The players got very little sleep, little food, some action and a lot of psychological pressure. They could tune the pressure level to their taste using the safe-words, lanyards and an off-game area.
The location was also pretty uncomfortable and haunting: An abandoned 1920s hospital, used as a prisoner camp during the Second World War and surrounded by woods. The place is often used by local airsofters who were very helpful in showing us how to use our rented airsoft weapons (almost none of the participants had ever handled one before).
To make things extra interesting, there was of course no water or electricity. Much of the experience was recorded by photo- and video cameras (handled by organizers, NPCs or the players themselves, both diegetically and not) – a good thing, especially for the busy organizers who did not get to see much of the actual game!
The Feedback
Players and organizers were very much overwhelmed by the intense experience. The larp was physically and emotionally exhausting, and very different from what most participants were used to (this was precisely why most of them signed up in the first place). The “get out of character” workshops and debriefing were well received, and it took days (in some cases weeks) for participants to stop singing the game’s “national anthem” (adapted from a Soviet war-song – another idea I stole from a previous larp; in this case Robota). Some players recorded feedback videos, to be used for the benefit of future players.
What made this larp a success for me was the balance between hardcore in-game conditions and the safety of the rules and off-game environment.
Participant who played Soldier DA-X-746
The Problems
Everything did not run smoothly, of course. Luckily, the obvious things did not happen: thanks, in part, to a very heavy focus on safety, no one got shot in the eye without their glasses on, and no one broke their neck falling down stairs in the dark. Some airsoft guns did malfunction, though, the local fire brigade had to come back and put out the fire they had started on-site earlier as an exercise, and an unsanctioned airsoft team even turned up in the middle of the night (they were kind enough to leave once they realized what was going on)… Among other miscellaneous mishaps.
The Airsoft
Airsoft and larp have been moving closer together for a while in France, and this larp certainly confirmed the potential. First off, the airsoft guns look pretty realistic. Knowing that it will sting if you get shot and hearing BBs hitting the wall right next to you also contribute to the experience. It might seem obvious to some, but we discovered that, handled carefully, airsoft guns are just the same as latex swords for larping purposes. Better yet: Just like latex swords, they fit in just fine with a narrativist approach, since you can simply decide how bad the injury is when you get shot (from a scratch to instant death). As already mentioned, airsofters helped out during the larp, and they were very much impressed by the passion we larpers put into what we do. I would not be surprised if a few of them turn up for a larp in the future!
The Conclusion
I humbly feel NEXUS-6 has contributed towards making Nordic larp better known in France. The next step is to organize it again in the summer of 2016, this time in English, to allow more French larpers to interact with foreigners. The road ahead is exciting!
How was the larp? It was… It was… It was real.
Participant who played Commissar DC- X-811 Squad singing the anthem. (Photo: Philippe Carrère)
NEXUS-6
Credits: Hoog (design and production), Baptiste Cazes (additional design and production), Matthieu Nicolas (production), Aurélien Duchatelle (video documentation), Rémi Dorbais & Philippe Carrère (photo documentation), eXpérience (logistics support), ARCAN (airsoft support)
Date: July 24-26, 2015; July 30 – August 2, 2015 (two runs)
Location: Aincourt, France
Duration: 24 hours + workshops
Participants: 10 players per run (20 in total)
Budget: €1,500 for two runs
Participation Fee: €70
Game Mechanics: Text-message voting to determine replicants, airsoft weapons, shadows, playing to lose, no character death before last act
Helsinki in the 1920’s: urbanization, the admiring gaze towards Europe; jazz and lipstick, daring women entering the public sphere; a country divided by the bitter civil war in 1918; prohibition and the tsunami of illegal alcohol and booze-related crimes. The perfect setting for a larp, and as Niina had published two novels set in the same milieu a reasonable amount of research was already done.
Helsinki as a city and a state of mind was a central theme in Tonnin stiflat (Thousand Mark Shoes). Therefore we decided to make the most of it and play in the streets. Helsinki has, of course, changed in 100 years, but especially in the city center plenty of old architecture, cafés, restaurants and parks still remain or have the same atmosphere as in the twenties. The omnipresent modernity cannot be avoided, though, so we focused the game to areas with the most suitable architecture and atmosphere. However, playing in Tonnin stiflat certainly demanded selective attention and active disregarding of a lot of surrounding anachronisms.
Stories
One of the main stories was, of course, bootlegging. Two leagues competed over clients and deals, and the plot thickened in the first game as the other boss was arrested and her right hand woman accidentally shot by a police officer.
This was pre-planned to create a power vacuum for other characters to fill. The arrest and the death also launched several smaller plots.
The civil war fought soon after the declaration of independence from Russia has effects even now, let alone only ten years later. Consequently, politics were present also in Tonnin stiflat and many characters had conflicts dating back to the civil war.
The stain of communism sat hard on the defeated – those who survived prison camps, diseases and hunger. The communist workers in Tonnin stiflat were hard working, sick and poor, but strong in their ideology. Their actions crossed with the security police, which resulted in one of the most violent scenes in the game.
The twenties can also be seen as a stage for art, obliquities and the decadent. Paris, for a few characters, glittered as a paradise full of drugs, luxury, art and love. This kind of life also had its reverse side of addiction, abuse, venereal disease and general not-being-in-the-paradise, a constant longing for something better. The young painter gave herself to her godfather’s use in exchange for money and art education, and sat finally by his bed when syphilis devoured him into painful death. The conservative teacher struggled with hopeless love and a death in his past, and the only escape was suicide.
Murder is part of the noir genre, and where there is murder, there is revenge. As death in larp easily becomes a short term curiosity and is soon forgotten, every death in the game was initiated or authorised by us. An apothecary found dead, triggered the detective’s game, and the death of the bootlegger caused her sweetheart and friends to seek revenge. Both cases were solved in their own way in the last game.
Characters
The 18 characters were written iteratively in collaboration. After the casting, the core concepts of the characters were written into full characters by us, and after the pregame workshop and players’ own additions and changes, the final version of the character was written. The players had a big responsibility in fleshing out their character and in specifying relations to other characters. In-depth personal histories etc. were also up to the players to develop, while we focused on the functional core of the character.
The players were chosen from the roughly 70 registrants. The casting was made on the basis of mainly two things: player’s enrolment info including her (or his) wishes and capabilities, and our aim to avoid conservative gender stereotypes.
The core character concepts were gender neutral, and players could also choose their character’s sex. Our principle – and our only explicit anachronism – was that gender should not limit the characters’ actions or possibilities in any way. To name a few, the cynical private detective was female and the luxury-yearning prostitute male, the heroic bootlegger was male but as smuggling bosses we had powerful queens, not kings. In the end, we were quite happy with the casting as players’ wishes and our vision aligned nicely.
It was also possible to enroll as supporting cast. The supporting cast of roughly 40 was the most central and multifaceted tool used in the game. Their task was to create preplanned scenes, enliven character histories, bring in new plots, surprises and information, be found dead or die in the hands of the characters, perform music and dance, etc. A supporting role could last the whole season and develop in different ways, or it could be a ten-minute scene with only one player in it. The supporting cast were instructed carefully for each scene they appeared in so they knew their purpose and the aim of the scene. They acted as instructed or improvised to the desired direction.
Design
The design in Tonnin stiflat aimed towards high precision experience design. The idea was to provide individually tailored experience for each player. This required a different set of tools than e.g. larps relying on brute force designed sandbox or 360-illusion. The small number of players enabled us to do precision work that would not have been possible in a larger larp without significant increase in resources.
The central design goal of S tifl at was high resolution social interaction between dramatically interesting yet realistically portrayed characters. For this we wanted a strong emphasis on power structures and relations between characters. It was essential that all plots and storylines would somehow concretely materialize during the game-play. The characters were forced to make choices that had consequences inside the game, and those choices would ultimately form a unique story arc for each character and climax in the third episode.
Most of the design tools used were tools that increase control over the larp. However it was of utmost importance that they were utilized in a manner that does not sacrifice what we consider the essence of roleplaying – immersion, action in character, high definition social interaction between characters and meaningful decision making that has consequences in the larp. Indeed, by increasing control and stepping away from purely open sandbox playing, we aimed at enabling those features and providing solid structures to support them.
Tools
Tonnin stiflat utilized a selected set of tools to enable gameplay that elicits the type of player experience we were after. Our toolset included pre-game workshopping, iterative character creation, supporting cast, pre-planned scenes, meta instructions, custom debriefing methods, reporting and multi directional feedback, etc. Preplanned and scheduled scenes were one of the defining design features of Stiflat.
In their written briefs before the game the players had a schedule for the game and typically from two to five different pre-planned scenes. The scenes varied significantly in duration, the amount preparations and supporting cast involved, and the degree of fateplay involved. These were designed in order to guide the storylines, dramatic structures and geographic locations of the players so that all players would have game that is meaningful, full but not too full – of action, where their wishes are fulfilled, and that would provide maximum support for character interaction and dynamics.
We also tried to schedule sufficient time for free flowing playing so that the prescheduled scenes would not dominate the larp entirely and that the players wouldn’t feel that they have no agency in the game.
Different types of meta instructions were also used in directing the players to act in a desired manner, to explicate interaction possibilities, and to enable interimmersion and the support of other players’ character concepts. These were always given well in advance so that the required steering would feel more natural. All characters had a weakness and a strength that was known to all players (“X is willing to do anything for money and luxury”, or “It is very easy to open up and discuss private matters with Y”). Also from episode to episode, we had varying meta instructions to direct the play and encourage certain interactions (e.g. “Accuse X of apothecary’s murder”, “Pay attention to Y’s mood”, “Recount how tough it is to be a private detective to the bartender”). We designed all meta instructions to activate, enable, and drive things forward instead of disabling or blocking anything.
In Retrospect
…this really was one of the best games I ever been to, and I don’t how to thank you so that it would convey the message.Technically this was very well conducted: railroading, scenes, the use of supporting cast and the whole structure of the game was all fantastic – I have never been in a game that would have been so much built for my character and that had such a clear story arc and still have so much everything else going on around you at the same time.
Player
This game showed me I can feel uncertainty, anxiety, guilt, comradeship, desperation and love in a refreshing way when larping. Not many games elicit these feelings.
Player
Looking back at Tonnin stiflat: Season One, we can say that we succeeded in what we set out to achieve. Not everything went 100% as planned and there is always room to improve, but overall we are very satisfied. We managed to share our vision with players, and players took it as their own and played in a terrific ensemble.
We are especially happy that the character interaction was as nuanced, immersive, powerful, and multi-faceted as we hoped it would be. We managed to build structures that gave meaning to different twists in the story and to the decisions characters had to make.
Also most storylines manifested as concrete action in the game, and they were brought to conclusion at the end of the season. All this was made possible by the smooth collaboration between all participants.
In retrospect, three games in three months was too tight schedule. The original idea was to design all three games before the start of the season, but it was soon clear that if we wanted players to contribute and decide what their characters do between the games, we can’t really design beyond the first game that much.
We also somewhat failed at communicating what is useful and actionable input regarding character’s actions and plans between the games. Yet, especially in the second game where we had the most input from the players, we ended up putting up too much content in the game and in result too little time for free play was left.
Among lessons learned are also how it is nearly impossible to arrange “coincidences” in street larp with any degree of certainty, how violence tends to escalate to rather extreme despite all efforts to the contrary, and how having both players and supporting cast can backfire when utilizing team spirit enhancing techniques.
Now that season one is finished, we are left with the option to stop here or to continue in one way or another. All the main storylines are finished, so whatever season two will be about, it will be something new and different.
Tonnin stiflat: Season One
Credits: Niina Niskanen (setting, background materials, characters, storylines, drama and interaction design, workshops, props), Simo Järvelä (characters, storylines, drama and interaction design, game mechanics, workshops, props), Tuomas Puikkonen (photography) Date: 16 August, 11 October & 22 November, 2014 Location: Helsinki, Finland Length: 8-9 hours each Players: 16 players, and 40 supporting cast Budget: €2,500 Participation Fee: €50 per game Game Mechanics: Supporting cast, meta instructions, preplanned scenes, workshops Website:http://tonninstiflatlarp.wordpress.com/
Atlantis is a small town in Washington, USA. It’s surrounded by woods, has no phone line, and the mail service works poorly. The only way to come there is by the railway, and the train is the only way to leave. The ticket office is closed, and the quizzical Conductor (somewhat resembling O. G. Grant) won’t let you on the train without a golden ticket. Sometimes a swirling mist comes from the forest, people not hasty enough to hide in their homes and caught by the mist on the streets get ill, or die. But that is not a problem – as everybody who comes to Atlantis is already dead.
Characters of our larp didn’t notice their death, and all of them decided to board a train to Atlantis for some reason. Some were escaping something, others were looking for a place to start a new life. Some were just traveling without a particular destination. They thought they got a shiny golden ticket to Atlantis in the moment when they actually died. We asked players to fabulate how their characters got their tickets. Their choices varied from trivial; “bought at the ticket office” to strange; “found in a dead man’s belongings” or unlikely; “someone forgot it on a cafe table”. We wrote how the character really died based on these stories. For example, the man who thought he had won the ticket playing poker was actually shot by the loser in a poker game.
Our players didn’t know that their characters actually died in “reality”. Their characters thought they just moved to a new place, having decided to change something in their life. Having come to Atlantis at the beginning of the larp, they did what any of us would do if we were them – looked for accommodation and jobs, got settled, talked, danced, drank…
Participants still had to find out that their characters were already dead – either by dying in-game, or after the game from game masters.
Inspiration
Ticket to Atlantis was a synergy of music, electronics, Stephen King’s despairing nostalgia about the lost 60’s and the question of what is death and what lies beyond.
Using music as a meta-technique, as a building block of a larp in one way or another, has been a trend in Russian larps for the last five years.
Our design team gathered three years ago to create a fully music-based larp House where the world sounds… (2012) based on a Russian bestseller novel House where… (2009) by Mariam Petrosyan. We were so fascinated with how our “musical engine” worked, that we decided to definitely do something more with it.
In House portable MP3 players were used, and the participants had to switch their musical tracks manually, according to specific rules. But in the following year Moscow electronics-for-larp engineers from Ostranna CG made a step forward, so for Ticket to Atlantis we were able to use custom made electronic devices that could switch music tracks automatically, depending on where the player was and what other players were around.
We read Hearts in Atlantis and are fond of this book. Music is extremely important for its characters, for the atmosphere, and for the book as a whole. Having our experience in creating and participating in music-based larps the idea of making Atlantis into a larp was pretty obvious.
In the team, we are all in our 20’s or 30’s. We heard about the 60’s, Stephen King’s Atlantis, we read about the epoch, we watched movies, we felt that anguish at the 60’s King writes about, and we regret we weren’t there. We are afraid of the 60’s because we know what they did to people.
Inspirational pieces: Stephen King’s Hearts inAtlantis (mostly second half), Interstate 60 (2002), Twin Peaks (1990), Across the Universe (2007), Hair (1979), Platoon (1986)
Hearts in Atlantis is not about the 60’s, it’s about people who survived the 60’s, and are still somehow connected to them. And so was our larp.
Ultimately, we wanted to talk about death. Death is a thing that’s frightening yet marvelous; marvelously frightening. One is afraid to die, and to deal with that fear, to live with that fear, one has to talk about it. That was our idea. But such talk is not easy, and not many people are ready for this talk right away. So we decided to talk about death without naming it. We decided to ask some questions and find some answers before saying what we were talking about out loud.
Afterdeath
We wanted the players to find out what was going on during the larp. It was possible when they died – from a knife, or bullet, sudden illness or a touch of mist. So in-game death was the major instrument here.
Those who died went out-of-character to a special designated place just outside the playground. What they found there was a room with walls covered with 1970 newspapers from all corners of the USA, with obituaries in them of all the characters with circumstances of their death; photos and short biographical accounts. In that moment they understood at least that what just happened was definitely not death in the usual sense.
After taking one’s time in the newspaper room, overwhelmed players went to another room representing a train car, and an NPC representing a random, semi-real fellow passenger, almost an inner voice, talked to them for some time while the wheels rattled, helping to sort out what happened and to embrace the new state of mind.
In most cases it wasn’t a fully in-game talk, but rather a conversation of two people (each of them just slightly covered by their roles) about life and death.
We tried to make it as comfortable for players as possible and used this communication, besides other, to find out if the player wanted to play on. And to play on was not so easy – as the train was heading back to Atlantis, and player stepped off the train on the same station, in the same role, with all the character’s memory intact.
The only thing that changed was character’s name, confusing and arousing suspicions in fellow citizens. Special Dark Secret rules prevented the returning characters from discussing the fact that everybody in town were already dead, and forcing them to deny the idea that they had been in the town before and not just recently arrived by train.
We never considered Atlantis as Hell, or Heaven, or Purgatory, and avoided religious rhetoric altogether. We thought of it as of a place where some people went after they died, just because that was the place they needed to go to sort out what they really needed to sort out, but hadn’t had a chance to while living.
We refused to judge characters in any manner on purpose. According to our idea, Atlantis consisted of common beliefs of people who came there. They thought it was normal for money to exist and to be dollars – and hence there were dollars.
They wanted to have a lot of money – and hence the salary for one hour’s work was a thousand dollars. They had subconscious fears – and hence there was the fearful mist (represented by NPCs in silver gowns and masks, bearing smoke flares).
They had an inner demand for order and the habit of having a job – and hence the town had a Selective Service System office, paying good money for sorting the forms of draftees (with their name, age, color, family, children, job, education etc.) to decide who would go to Vietnam and who would stay in the rear. Grave ethical disputes sometimes arose over these essentially faceless papers.
We tried hard to create the fundamentals; the core of each player’s game, not of some events but of their character, and insisted on players creating characters as elaborate and interesting as possible. Besides other issues we asked players to take note of Important People who changed their character’s life in the past or just sunk deep in their minds, and of an Important Item that once meant a lot to a character (like a handgun that misfired at a suicide attempt), but were lost long ago.
For each character we looked for similarities, “reflections” of their important people in other characters and used the “music engine” to suggest feelings similar to those they had had towards their Important People to occur when they met the corresponding characters.
One could leave Atlantis – by finding the right person who could give them a ticket to a departing train and saying the right words to him – essentially stating that one had had enough of this town and was ready to move on. The train would take them away – ending the larp for the player and taking the character… who knows where, but definitely to some place where they needed to be.
The Music Engine
In larps designed using a technique that we call “the music engine” music mostly doesn’t exist for the character. It serves like a personal soundtrack to the player’s experience, and suggests character’s emotional state.
While creating the characters, players sent us a number of musical tracks, and specified for each track what emotions this music evoked in them. Or, in other words, what music should play when the character was in that particular emotional state.
We used such emotions as happiness, sadness, joy, fear, interest, anticipation, despair and so on. For Ticket to Atlantis, we created a list of 80 emotions that thus could be provided with special soundtracks, and the number of music tracks players sent us varied from 50 (when a participant used just one track for some of the emotions) to 500 (multiple tracks for each supported emotion).
All the player’s music and information on emotions was put into an electronic device we call Armlet, that players wore on their wrist. This device played music like a portable MP3 player into the participant’s ears via earphones so a player had a continuous soundtrack for their larp.
The earphones had to be picked and adjusted carefully beforehand so that player’s ears could endure many hours of continuous use and players could listen to the music and perceive the surrounding sounds in the same time.
Armlet is an STM32-micro controller (the same kind that is used in modern “smart watches”) based device with a screen, some buttons, digital audio playback chip, standard earphones jack and digital radio chip for data exchange in range of up to 30 meters. Other devices of similar design but simpler, with no screen, etc. (we call them Beacons) were placed around the playground marking specific in-game locations.
All the devices were constantly exchanging data packets, and thus each player’s Armlet knew where the player was (by receiving data packets from Beacons) and what other players were around (by receiving data packets from other Armlets), and who was closer (judging by radio signal strength). Using this information and information on emotion-to-music relations specified by the player, Armlet chose what music to play. Reacting on characters that were reflections of one’s Important People was the most notable case.
The critical point that makes this approach completely different from every other way the music is used in Russian larps is:
Organizers didn’t choose music for the larp and didn’t have to rely on if it would trigger the desirable emotions in the players. Instead, the music is chosen by players for themselves according to their own musical taste and emotional reactions. The electronic device maps the emotions (specified by organizers for different situations) to the particular player’s music, thus creating for players their own, special, unique soundtrack that pulls exactly the right strings in the right moments.
In some situations instead of music a player could hear a voice describing their feelings or giving them imperative instructions. It was used for drug effects and in case of a character’s in-game death. Drugs were represented by tiny electronic “pills” connected to Armlet, and lack of a pill in case of addiction caused continuous playing of a special addiction track that forced out all other music for hours, until a new pill was obtained.
The player’s ability to influence the device directly was very limited and rarely needed, thus most of the time player could just listen to the music. A player could only specify (using Armlet keypad) a limited number of intentions (like going to kill someone), and Armlet reacted, for example, waiting for some time (representing the character psyching herself) and then playing a special music track (that a player specifically chose for killing), and while the music was playing the character could actually kill – hence the combat rules.
Passing one of the earphones to another player was treated as empathy, a desire to share one’s feelings with another person. However, different people naturally feel different emotions while listening to the same music. This pretty well represented the chasm of human misunderstanding. Sex was represented by taking some of the clothes off and dancing while sharing earphones and listening to one of the players’ special sex music.
Most other rules of the larp (like rules for representing brawls) was also based on some special tracks that could be played by Armlet at some particular time or as a result of player’s interaction with Armlet.
The Forest
Atlantis is surrounded by woods and we made the forest a mystical place, accessible at night only, much similar to the Black/ White Lodge in Twin Peaks. There were gazebos there, depicting typical locations in a typical American expression of that epoch – boy scout tent, movie theatre, perfect housewife’s living room, Vietnam bush trench and so on.
In those places there were Important Items of the characters. Having another character’s Important Item could give you enormous (and definitely not kind) power over that character, but you could bring only one object from the woods so you had to choose whether to take your own item or someone else’s.
The woods had a special soundtrack, and gazebos were connected by trails made of LEDs (essentially Beacons) that reacted to Armlet presence by lighting up before a character, and going off behind them, and one only could walk from one LED to another. Different trails reacted to different characters, so each character had to find their own way in the woods.
Perspectives
Though created in Russia with little to no awareness about Nordic larps, the game seems to follow the Nordic tradition pretty closely. It lasted without interruption for 38 hours, and it used some meta-techniques like music as an instrument for influencing player to affect characters. Of course, Armlets and earphones didn’t exist in-game, a train car was symbolically represented by a room with properly arranged chairs, and NPCs in gray were only representations of swirls of mist, but mostly what you saw in the game was what your character saw. Moreover the larp was psychologically challenging and made participants face some existential issues.
It was our second larp using the Music Engine. In general, it used the same paradigm as our House where the World Sounds… (2012) though the technique was almost fully automated, creating a personal context-based soundtrack for each player, reducing player’s interference to minimum.
There have been something like 5 – 10 music-based larps in Russia, the trend appeared around the beginning of 2010’s, though games besides the two mentioned above used completely different approaches to using music.
Another important game that must be mentioned here is Saint Summer (Moscow region, June 2014). Based on Hair, Jesus Christ Superstar, Across the Universe and The Wall and created by our friends completely independently of Ticket to Atlantis, that rock-musical larp explored the 60’s at their peak – with sex, drugs, rock’n’roll and Vietnam war.
From a musical point of view, it was a complete opposite to Ticket to Atlantis – it used a stage, loudspeakers and hit music to set the pitch and drive the action of the whole game from one extreme to another. Set a few years before Ticket to Atlantis and held three months before, it served as a prequel for a number of players who participated in both projects, some of them playing the same characters.
Reactions
We were doing what we called “a kind larp about the good”, though it was neither simple to do nor easy to play. It appeared to be a larp about realizing some simple yet important things. One of our players, talking to an NPC on a “train” after his character died, said that besides his own death, he was much more disappointed with the fact that all other the nice and wonderful people he met in Atlantis were in fact dead.
The fact that they were dead made them less valuable to him. Well, we tried to convey the idea that death is a choice. Some people die by their own choice long before their actual death, and some continue living even after they die. Our characters had no real cause to consider themselves dead except the fact itself, presented to them in the way of obituary. They could live on, the only thing they needed was the courage to live on. Death has no power over those not afraid to live.
We should say that in the end, after a larp that definitely was not easy; even really difficult, after some reconciliation with themselves, most players came to feel what they called “warm aftertaste”. And we felt a lot of joy after reading reports about the larp settling down in heads and hearts, people giving up pain and struggle and moving on with joy. It was very warming to hear something like “It wasn’t a larp about death. It was a game about life and about the absence of death”. We are very thankful to our players for saying that and helping us to believe it’s true. We end with some quotes from reports:
Atlantis was a larp about life that looks like death to those who gave way to fear. I don’t know if I overcame my fear. But I know that this larp made me touch the most frightful fear in my life, fear that pursues me all my life.
Oleg ‘Luterian’ Lutin, player
During the larp I faced all my hidden fears: the fear of loneliness, the fear of losing the sense of living, loosing the anchor, losing my place in the world. Sometimes this fear raised up to panic, when the Mist appeared and my head was full of Toccata and Fugue in D minor that scared me in my childhood. When my character was killed in the middle of the larp I suffered from the character’s death much less than from my inner player’s fears.
Olga ‘Vorobeyka’ Vorobyeva, player
For me it was a larp of life and one’s place in it. It was about you really can put off the question of whether you should get back to depressing past or start something new, over and over again. Or you can admit there’s no longer you for that past and change your life. Hopefully, to the better.
Alexander ‘Eden’ Raev
For me it was a larp, like someone said, about death that becomes life when you feel love. It was a larp about love and loved ones. I recalled why it is so important to love, why is it pleasing and what does it mean to have someone important by your side. And I recalled that there’s no death.
The door shut and he was gone. At that moment, Evžénie forgot his rank. But she would never forget his short moustache waving over her, how the lips under it were feverishly mumbling something in that repulsive language. How he snorted when he humped. She slid down to the floor. Her back against the wall, she lighted a cigarette and again read the letter with a brief and clear instruction. She spilled the powder from the little vial to the General’s glass. Was he the same man with whom she slept that night? Evžénie did not know that. Everything blurred together, she saw everything through a fog…
Salon Moravia was the first larp in Czechia organised for women only. A total of 40 players attended, and according to their ratings on the Czech and Slovak larp database, it was the best chamber larp in the Czechia and Slovakia.
It was a scripted narrative dramatic game set during World War II. The players could experience the ambiance of an exclusive brothel, the difficult role of women, and the burden of that historic era. Each player could influence the story by a series of decisions.
Salon Moravia had a detective plot which was the primary focus in the first two runs, but we gradually de-emphasized it. Starting from the third run, we included more political, national and social plots. We also emphasized the terror of inhumane actions. The conflicts among the players characters and between the characters and NPCs were expanded, concentrated and more strongly intertwined wherever player feedback showed us any weak spots.
In six (seven in case of the last two runs) approximately one-hour-long chapters, we followed the characters through six years of the duration of World War II in Czechoslovakia, and we gradually transformed the mood in the brothel using inputs (from NPCs and letters to characters).
We started out with an impression of luxury, carelessness and light flirting mood of the 1930’s and gradually tightened the mood by the gradual disappearance of Jewish and Czech characters and the appearance of German soldiers during the occupation, and by messages from the characters’ relatives about events in the country.
The diversity of Salon Moravia‘s employees reflected the diversity of the inhabitants of the Czechoslovak Republic at that time, including their nationalities (Czech, German, Slovak, Jewish), education (from illiterate to higher education and even business experience), social position (poor village girls as well as ladies originating from upstanding urban families), and even political ideas (from complete disinterest to excitement for the ideas of national socialism or communism).
I really thought that their killing of one of us would be the worst that could happen… And then I saw another girl on the verge of collapsing to the ground… her face… I came to her and asked what was wrong. She handed me the letter and the attached yellow Jewish star. My mouth went dry. No. Not again. I cannot bear to lose another girl. I cannot let it happen. I quickly wiped her tears, took the letter, and told her: “Come with me. It won’t happen again. We won’t hear another shot from behind a closed door spelling death. This time, it will be different.
Before the Game
The format was inspired by the lack of similar games around us and the apparent shallowness of female characters in various games we had played. We wanted to challenge ourselves to create believable, interesting and strong female characters.
We assigned the prepared roles according to a questionnaire wherein the players marked preferred types of experience, their comfort limits concerning intimacy and violence. They also prioritised preferred characters, marked interest in key game topics (romantics, violence, rape, betrayal, collaboration, death). According to feedback it would be preferable to update the comfort limits just before the game.
After selecting our players we would actively continue to work with them online. We had a dedicated Facebook group for each run and in the months and weeks before the game we would discuss any issues concerning the game itself, their clothing (which they had to arrange themselves), make-up, hair styling, etc. A useful technique for verifying the players’ engagedness in the pre-game online activities was asking them to “like” it to confirm that they had read and acknowledged it.
In the entire game we strived to create a 360° illusion of authenticity, but we did not maintain historic accuracy; our aim was only to represent the ambiance of the era. We therefore focused on selecting the right location and supplied a lot of material to the game: paper money, uniforms, handwritten letters, photos, and various other items. In all possible extent we also modified the locations to minimise modern features (although we were obviously limited to reversible changes).
We decided not to use Ars Amandi or any other representation of eroticism to keep our game as technique-less as possible.
Our solution was simple and relied on our NPC players’ responsibility. As a player would approach her intimacy limit, she could use the safe word “decadence” (selected so that it would not disturb the game). One could also encourage her partner to be more courageous using another key word. We used a similar technique for alcohol – when ordering a drink the players could order “as usual” to get water. This technique was inspired by the Skoro Rassvet larp.
After the second run we also modified and expanded most characters focusing on their political and nationalist ideas. Before each run we expanded the NPC team from the original six to the final thirteen people who represented more than twenty characters. We also added a new expendable player character to further tighten the mood in the game by killing her off after about a third of the game. This deeply impacted the other players as this “cuckoo” player would register, engage in pre-game activities and played the first third as one them.
The players much appreciated our selection and management of the NPC players. We always chose people people we knew personally to be responsible, which was necessary to make sure that no NPC would surpass any player’s comfort level. Most of them were even willing to shave mid-game to better separate the different NPCs they portrayed.
We designed the conclusion by escalating all plots before the arrival of looting revolutionary militia and Soviet soldiers who punished virtually the entire staff of the brothel for collaboration with the Germans. This punishment was deliberately inadequate and unfair to drive forward the point of injustice and randomness of certain historic events. The game ended with us turning off the lights mid-scene, and one of us would read aloud the outros for all the player characters and major NPCs, reflecting the players’ choices.
Tears… tears everywhere. How many girls did I have to console? How many trickles flowing down their cheeks did I have to wipe? I had to pretend everything was alright and that it would end soon… But it won’t. I realised that after that Kraut led me downstairs, humiliated me and took me roughly and violently. We are all collaborant whores. Nothing more, our pride, honour and conscience, everything gone.
I see his face in front of me, feel his hands taking me and hear his voice talking to me. Does it make it any better that I did it for her so that she has enough money for her baby girl? I doubt it. I fall to the floor, pulling my hair with one hand and helplessly slapping the wall with the other. One of the girls appears. She pushed a glass in my hand and she said precisely what I always said.”It’s going to be alright.” Does she know that it never will?
The post-game responses were generally very favourable, while providing us with useful feedback especially in the first two runs. We realised that people were expecting a more mature and terrifying game than we initially envisioned. Some of the players were also very creative and provided us with post-game stories from the characters’ perspective, initiated an after-party a few weeks later and even filmed video confessions. We would like to provide some space for the players’ own comments from the Czech and Slovak larp database.
The game is very well thought-out. For the entire time I felt my decisions are my own, that I can choose and that nothing in the organisation manipulates me, and even so they could steer my story where they needed. As much as I can tell each player’s story was full and intensive, everyone was a main character with enough to do, and each experienced their own burdens.
The NPCs were crucial for this, there were more of them than players, and most played several roles over time, which was expressed by very different costumes and roleplaying. Most conflicts in game therefore were not between the players, but occurred due to the need to respond to external inputs (speeches in the radio, letters and NPC plots) which nevertheless felt very natural.
Katerina Midori, player
…I salute the organisers because in this topic I am quite sensitive to excessive tear-jerking and historic lapses, and I encountered none of that here. In contrast, most big topics in the game were presented in a very believable manner and not black-and-white, which I appreciated a lot. For me was tense, dramatic, well-escalated and full of strong emotions. I would like to give extra praise to the NPCs – the gentlemen were awesome and perfect…
Mivka, player
Before the first run I was a little worried about characters designed without prepared relations and clearly defined goals, but it was a pleasant surprise how such “incomplete” characters developed directly in-game under the pressure of external inputs. Each character has scenes prepared just for her which I really appreciated.
Lujza, player
Salon Moravia
Credits: Radim Bondy, Veronika Bondyová, Jan Fiala, Blanka Hanzlová, Sära Komasová, Anežka Müller Date: November 17, 2012; February 02, 2013; November 16, 2013 and November 22, 2014 Location: Brno, Czech Republic (and Slavkov u Brna for the last run) Length: 6 – 7 hours + one hour pre-game workshop Players: 10 players, 6-13 NPCs Budget: €1,000 Participation Fee: €17 per player (average) Game Mechanics: Minimal, only safe words for intimity, violence and alcohol. Website:http://www.pojd.name/salon
Cover photo: “If you don’t tell, take a good look in the mirror so you remember what you looked like.” (Play, Michal Kovář). Other photos by Michal Kovář, Jiří Dukát and Michal Kára.
Genre: Rock opera
Theme: Utopia and its Fall
Setting: Rock’n’Roll festival in the late 1960’s, US
Sources: Aldous Huxley ‘The Island’, Jesus Christ Superstar, Platoon, Hair.
The Messiah has been gone for two millennia. The times of rock star messiahs ended half a century ago. We have mass communication galore, but the same questions still stand. In this larp we hoped to find some answers. Many say Jesus Christ Superstar is the best rock opera ever written. Perhaps that’s because the USA of the 1960’s was very much like Judea of the 0’s. In both, the paradigm of the System, the Society, the ‘You are what you do’, the Leader, was being replaced by the paradigm of the Individuum, the Human, the ‘I Do What I Am’, the Messiah. Both approaches have their pros and cons, and Russia nowadays is a battleground for the two (again).
In JCS, the story of Christ is rewritten as a story of the individual; a story of a idealistic madman who dies, not for idea(l)s but because of other people. By his death he declares his ideals, becoming the iconic representation of these ideals in the minds of people. His personality and deeds are erased, replaced by him as a personification of his ideals. Incidentally, this is as true of Judas as it is of Christ. That story of sacrifice and ascension has been retold in innumerable stories: Hair, Platoon, One flew over the cuckoo’s nest, etc. and played out in many larps. In our larp, we wanted to create a rare opportunity to “strip away th e myth from the man”, experience them in their full complexity, play their stories, and see how myths are created.
Visions of Utopia
In a sense, the game was set in the USA of the end of the 1960’s and the start of the 1970’s, at a hippie festival; at the same time, it was also set in biblical Judea, and, in more than one sense, in modern day Russia.
The game space was centered on The Stage. Before the Stage the Saint Summer community radiated out in a rainbow of seven groups. Behind the Stage stood the Wall, beyond which was the System. Between the Stage and the Rainbow, there was a large open space. Completely by accident, in the middle of that space stood a single apple tree, which became, more or less by itself, the Tree of Eden. We placed a toy snake in it. The players then put a haystack under it, and it became the place of much merrymaking.
There were seven character groups, representing the colors of the rainbow. Each group was historically accurate as to 1960s USA, and each strove towards a different ideal of Utopia.
This, on one hand, created the conflict, and drove the game forward. On the other, all these teams fit together and, between them, fulfilled every need a society could have.
Red was the New Left and Socialists. For them, Utopia was social justice, freedom and human rights.
Orange was Brahmins. They sought Utopia through personal transformation, enlightenment through study, meditation and the teachings of gurus.
Yellow, the Diggers, were the smallest group. They saw Utopia as the absence of suffering and hunger, and they fed, clothed, and cured everyone.
Green, the largest group, were the Free Communes, the Flower Children, the iconic hippies: Utopia as eternal childhood, Never-Never land.
Cyan were gonzo journalists. Utopia was the Truth, and all the truth. For everybody.
Blue. Bikers. Utopia as freedom. Urban nomads.
Purple were the followers of Timothy Leary and Ken Keasy, they called themselves the Brotherhood of Happiness. They saw Utopia as a transcendence, and the freedom to do whatever you desire with your consciousness.
This rainbow was opposed by the Grays and Blacks of The System, a grotesque, cynical, and very efficient instrument of oppression: Police, Army, State Propaganda, and The Asylum. They, of course, had their own vision of Utopia: order, conformism, stability, sanity, victory.
Tools and Rules: Sex, Drugs and Rock-n-Roll
After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
Our game, as many Russian larps, was relatively rules heavy. Still, all the rules were carefully tailored to produce the theme and style of play we wanted. Without going into all the details, we’d like to outline the central game design elements that, in our eyes, ‘made the game’:
Sex, Drugs and the Space Beyond the Wall.
Music was the central medium of the game: everything, all the game rules, from sex to fighting to drugs, involved music. In contrast to other games with a musical engine, e.g. Дом в котором Мир звучит/Dom v Kotorommir Zvuchit/The House where the World Sounds… (2012), where every character was enclosed in their own soundtrack, we made music a uniting experience. It was loud, coming from The Stage, as well as being created by the players, and it was as ”Woodstocky” as we could make it.
Free love was of course an indispensable part of Saint Summer. Russian larpers are quite shy, and most larp restrict diegetic sex or make it taboo. But not here.J
To express the pervasive nature of free love, the rules defined that anything creative done with music could be considered as having sex, if the participants so decided.
To express love as sharing, after the deed the players were told to exchange tokens of affection. These depended on the character’s group: hippies gave bead bracelets, leftists pin buttons with slogans, bikers tattoos, etc.
Drugs came in three types of in-game drugs (we did not count the other stuff). The simplest, weed, was simulated by incense sticks, and it was everywhere. To ‘light up’, one put some appropriate music on, and lit the incense, and anyone could join if they wanted. The players were expected to behave more emotionally and be more emphatic when high, but also to react more emotionally if things went bad. Personal chemical hallucinogens were modeled using play buttons; small MP3 players that looked like pin-buttons with the game logo. Each play button contained a 10-30 minute story that guided the player down the rabbit hole.
About a dozen such tracks were recorded: a combination of music, sound effects, descriptions of what a character sees, as well as direct orders to do something, and a ”post/after” effect. Everyone could get a button from a Purple group dealer.
Lastly, every night a shared trip on the Stage, led by the GM’s and joined by everyone, set the atmosphere and, in some sense, agenda for the next day. The first night’s trip, “Celebration of Misbehaving”, was all about breaking free from The System.
It started as a humiliating lesson in a boarding school, and then morphed into a concert, where four deities: Jesus (accidentally female but it worked perfectly), Shiva, Bacchus, and a native American spirit, led the crowd in a Beatles singalong, sharing wine and chocolates.
The second shared trip, “Armageddon” focused on the fears of the 1970’s. It started with everyone playing a competitive game of tag, with loud, somewhat aggressive music playing.
Gradually the game changed: the ones tagged were told to play dead, and increasingly violent clips were projected onto the Wall: Disney cartoons, then 1970’s street riots, then Vietnam war, and lastly nuclear explosions. At the end everyone dropped dead, the video showed the aftermaths of nuclear war, and the theme song from the Requiem for the Dream was playing.
Whenever a character crossed the Wall, they momentarily left the game and went into a meta-game ‘limbo’ where player, as an actor, decided with the GMs, as scriptwriters, where to take the character.
That was done because, in our experience, when the game changes drastically to the worse, many players either drop out of character or lose their motivation to play, and we wanted to give the players a moment to stand back, reset, and look at their character from a narrativist, not simulationist, perspective. We think it worked, because there was very intense game-play beyond the Wall. Some players, however, hated this ‘limbo’, partially because a similar system was used in the larp Стоимость Жизни / Stoimost’ Jizni / The Value of Life (2011), a powerful art-house larp about consumerist society that left many players with a very bad aftertaste.
Prison, Asylum and Vietnam, locations beyond the Wall, were run by the GM team, providing “Passions”; hard moral choices for the character, pushing them to become either a Messiah or a Traitor (or, in one rare case, both). Those who chose sacrifice got a white rose and died; those who chose betrayal got a red rose and returned to Saint Summer. Players who did not choose at all returned as well, telling stories.
Of those, especially Vietnam was successful. We invited a dedicated group of players who, for the last seven years, have run a Vietnam war larp. They brought with them full Vietnam war kit, but more importantly, they brought the right atmosphere; the war mentality, the disgust of the hippies. From the start in the ‘Fort Summer’ boot camp, heavy use of obscenity in marching songs stressed the harsh, masculine, polarized world of the war as opposed to the soft and inclusive Saint Summer.
Endspiel
At the end of the third day, the police raided and razed Saint Summer; the bulldozers mowed the Wall and the ‘art installation’ barricades. Many left before that. Most groups had traitors. Others stayed. The overt message of the larp was that Utopia is impossible because humans are made to fall. But the victory of the Utopia starts from its ruin. Messiah crucified, paradise lost, Woodstock ended, but in their destruction they create the dream, and the seed of hope.
To make the players feel this victory from the ruins, to feel this faith that is stronger than facts, we made the ending ambiguous: in-game, in the finale the police laid down their weapons, while the last news flash, released after the game, said that the police shot down everyone who stayed in Saint Summer. Many players did not believe the news flash, and argued passionately. That is exactly the moment we were driving for. The moment of belief that there is no death, that Jim Morrison still sings, that once in history, the Summer is forever.
Святое Лето/Sviatoe Leto/ Saint Summer
Credits: Olga ‘Shaggy’ Shovman, Ekaterina ‘Freexie’ Godneva, Elena ‘Mirish’ Khanpira, Anna ‘Shakty’ Shekhova, Maria ‘Lotta’ Grubaya, Dmitry ‘Mityaj’ Gruby, Xenia ‘Xenyaka’ Kuznetsova, Seraphima ‘Arnaksha’ Melnikova, Mark ‘Qwerty’ Shovman. Date: June 13-15, 2014 Location: Empty field in the Moscow Region. Length: 3 days Players: 97 Budget: ~€2,000 Participation Fee: ~€25
Cover photo: “Roses are blue, violets are green / where will you be when the acid kicks in?” (music drugs) (Play, Roman Vorontsov). Other photos by Roman Vorontsov and Dalia Kochneva.
Since 1995, the Danish non-profit organization Einherjerne has made one large fantasy larp in the summer with 100-300 participants. Every larp has built on the experiences of the earlier years, with core elements of the larp being a village surrounded by a magical forest inhabited by mythical creatures. This is the Nemefrego larp series, that is continuously being rewritten with each new instalment, and which functions as a melting point between organizers striving to renew and participants trying to replay the previous game. An organiser using the brands “Einherjerne” or “Nemefrego” sets certain expectations. This can be a two-edged sword. The story of Nemefrego 2014 is about four of those edges.
Nemefrego 2014 Overview
The Nemefrego 2014 storyline was centered around the election of a king from five great families. Nemefrego larps happen in roughly the same setting and family names are often reused, but just about everything else changes. The reason for this is to make new players feel that they’re entering a brand new larp instead of “the middle of a series”. Some of the larps aren’t even called Nemefrego, though they are part of the tradition. This time, the players were divided into two distinct geographical locations. Most players lived in the town and the tents near it, while a portion of the players were in the forest portraying various mythic creatures. And when we say town, we actually mean something quite close.
A Pre-fabricated Village
The people in Einherjerne have built pre- fabricated larp houses, that can be stored in large ship containers since the early 00’s. These can be stored in containers and then quickly be assembled when needed for a larp. This has been perfected to a point where a whole village, including a two-story building and several buildings the size of dining halls are neatly fitted into 40’ ship containers, packed tight from floor to ceiling.
The containers can be moved by truck and sometimes they are leased or lent to other projects such as Aarhus Medieval Festival or other larps. A mobile medieval town is quite a resource, and several other larp organisations – including the Danish boarding school Østerskov – ha ve copied the Einherjerne idea and now have their own pre-fab buildings.
Intrigue Play vs. Status Play
One of the central pieces of Nemefrego 2014 had to do with getting conflicts and plots out in the open, where they would include as many people as possible. This could include gift spending, intimidating, great speeches and the like. The goal was simple: steering the characters towards slowly escalating conflicts and tension, while avoiding resolve until the final hours of the game where conflicts would play out and conclude as publicly as possible.
We call this play style; “status play”. The opposite, which we call; “intrigue play”, is a style where problems are resolved as quickly and discreetly as possible.
I empty my mug and placed my purse on the table. “How about a game of dice?” My fellow soldiers encourage the closest prey to participate. A man is about to stand but we all look at him with piercing eyes.“So you think our game is not good enough for you?”. He hesitates and then replies: “but I have no dice”. I smile: “No problem, I have dice you can borrow.”. He sits down, and I extend my arm around his shoulders: “by the way, there are a few special rules concerning the borrowing-dice. Nothing much…”. He stiffens but notices I have a hand on my dagger, and lets go of a sigh.
Player
We had many great examples of status play that worked and players who enjoyed it. One thing we experienced however, was that without a central town square, we saw status play reduced to only include small segments of the participants, rather than the majority. A town crier was implemented at some point in the game and made a big difference, since this brought information of various conflicts to many more people. Utilizing a central square seems optimal for this type of play, though. And however much we tried to get conflicts out into the open, we still encountered an old friend of a problem; sleeping bag murders.
The Sleeping Bag Murder Paradox
In Danish larps where conflicts are sometimes resolved with violence, and in which the players sleep on location, there is a risk of characters being killed during their sleep. This is a time-honoured (but despised) tradition in Danish larps known as “sleeping bag murders”, due to the fact that most players sleep in sleeping bags. At Nemefrego 2014 it was explicitly stated in the written game material that this was forbidden, but one player did it anyway – bringing several other characters down with him in the vendetta that followed.
I remember slowly becoming aware of my surroundings. I heard steps and instantly knew someone was in the tent. I also knew I slept with an in-game dagger just out of old habit. But just before I opened my eyes I hesitated. I thought this is stupid. The rules were specific; no sleeping bag murders. Then someone shakes me and I open my eyes and see the weapon in his hand. Seconds later the whole family including us guards were slaughtered.
Player
Organizers and participants, whose roles were dead, had a constructive dialogue afterwards and players were reinstated where it was a agreed the story needed it the most. When play styles and rules/ participants clash, having a short break followed by open dialogue including all sides can prove fruitful, as it did in this case. The optimal thing is if things don’t happen when they’re not supposed to, but sometimes it’s also good to have a “what if” plan if going up against tradition.
A Mythic Forest
Surrounding the town, in which the majority of roles lived, was a magical forest, inspired by dark mythological folklore. It was meant to spawn stories of gloomy tragedy as well as heroic deeds. Unlike many other Danish larps, which utilize an organizer controlled NPC group – the creatures inhabiting this forest were portrayed by a group of players, with great freedom to incorporate magic and mythic creatures in their stories and roles (some even played multiple roles).
There were no rule restrictions on the group, and the forest group would continue playing in the forest whether town players would come out or not. Forest creatures would not always agree amongst themselves and they had many power struggles – something town players often ended up being pawns in.
The forest group’s goal was simple; the creation of great stories featuring a small selection of the other players: Namely those who would understand the genre and play along with the terms set by the forest. The majority of players did not interact directly with the forest- but only hear rumors – creating a mythic feeling of insecurity and a lack of knowledge of what actually happened in the woods.
Some players were frustrated by this and felt left out because the forest play was not easily available to everyone, but many liked the uncertainty and enjoyed not directly interacting with the magical elements of the forest. Those who entered the forest and actively contributed to the mythic storytelling had a wonderful experience. The town and the forest were in effect two play zones with different visions, rules and narrative styles, even though they were very much part of the same larp.
Trade in the forest would be conducted in magical promises rather than in coin. Receiving help from the forest meant that you would be bound by a magical promise – something the characters were not always aware they had accepted, even though the players knew it. These could be small actions; accepting a gift could mean you had also accepted a price, even if nobody had you informed of the “cost” of the gift. The price would always be high (relative to the one having to pay it) and the forest would make sure you never forgot your promise. The consequences for breaking a promise were devastating.
The forest witch and I stared intensely at each other while one of her kin played a flute to keep the faun enthralled in it’s trancelike state. The witch drew a knife (a really nice one, one from this swiss army knife list) from her pocket and offered it to me. I broke eye contact and looked at the metal knife. She asked me if I needed it for my first knight trial. I hesitated but knew she was right.
I had to bring some of the fauns beard to pass the first test. I took the knife and gazed at the blade reflecting the playful light from the nearby bonfire. The witch cracked a gruesome mocking laughter and only then I realized that by taking the knife – I had also accepted a bargain. She could ask whatever she wanted since I had already accepted. My first born was now promised to the forest…
Player
The forest was primarily active at night and most creatures did not go near the town. This enhanced the mystery surrounding the forest. There were certain unwritten rules when entering the forest. The most prominent was that you should not bring metal into the woods since many otherwise peaceful creatures would react aggressively to weapons – and some of these creatures were beings of pure magic and thus immune to mundane steel.
Ironically one type of creatures would always be hostile – and could only be handled with weapons. This greatly supported the vision of the forest being a dangerous place far outside any town character’s comfort zone.
This was especially the case for members of the five great families who had to leave their status symbols – swords, which they were the only ones who were allowed to carry – behind. The end effect was of a seducing, intriguing and mystical forest, and those characters who went there never came back unchanged.
Nemefrego 2014
Credits: Einherjerne Date: July 17 – 20, 2014 Location: Forlev Spejdercenter, Skyggelundsvej 3, 8660 Skanderborg, Denmark Length: Afternoon Thursday to evening Saturday. Players: 112 Budget: €13,000 Participation Fee: €110 Game Mechanics: Status play, simple combat rules, Website:http://nemefrego.dk/
Cover photo: Bakker-Hviide, one of the great families plotting to seize the crown. (Play, Mai Isager Nielsen). Other photos by Mai Isager Nielsen and Christian Niclas.
Morgenrøde (Morning Red) was our take on the Danish hippie movement. Through three acts, 31 players portrayed the peak of the Danish hippie community and their endeavors to establish Denmark’s first grand commune: Morgenrøde – the utopia of their dreams.
Spanning the late 60’es and the early 70’es, the game showed the communes rise and fall. From an initial summer of love to the grinding frustrations of clashing ways of life to a final collapse, when the distance between Marxist revolutionary and flower power protagonist became too great.
Our aim was never to re-enact the heyday of the Hippie, or give the players an experience of actually being there. Rather, Morgenrøde was focused on the overarching story. We tried to sketch out a social movement and – more importantly – the consequences for the people who lived that movement.
A Dialogue with Parents and Traditions – Making Morgenrøde
We had many reasons for making Morgenrøde. First and foremost, we shared a fascination of the time. Most of our parents were young when the rebellion against everything established was driving the counter culture forward. Some were a part of the struggle. Others watched from the outside.
But none of them can escape the influence stretching from The Summer of Love over the hazy days of Woodstock and all the way to the present. In all their handicraftiness, the hippies made a permanent mark on our culture, which we wanted to explore with equal parts love and critique. We love living in a world of freedoms won by the pioneers of past generations, but we do not agree with all their ways of changing the world. In that way, Morgenrøde was a personal game for all of us.
Furthermore, we were very much inspired by both recent larps from the Nordic scene – such as Just a Little Lovin’ – and by the Danish free-form tradition, as it is seen at the convention Fastaval. We did not start with the intention of making a hybrid between the two scenes, but that is more or less what we ended up with. The game was split into acts with workshops before, after and in-between, something that has been seen many times before in the Nordic scene.
We started two of the acts with a free-form scene, meant to capture the vibe of a joint meeting in the commune, where every minute detail of daily life was discussed and voted on. These scenes were run by an organizer who assumed the role of a game master not present in the fiction of the game. By mixing and matching the two traditions, we sought to make a game with the narrative focus of a Fastaval free-form game and the immersive and physical qualities of a Nordic larp.
Morgenrøde was thus created as a dialogue between both the world of our parents and the present, and between different schools of larp and role-playing.
Love, Liberation and Revolution – The Themes of Morgenrøde
The more we dug into the time period and the counterculture the more we realized that the hippies were far from one group. It was a far-ranging movement of everything from Marxist revolutionaries over flower-power spiritualists to bra burning feminists fighting for women’s right to equal opportunity.
Most spoke about a revolution, but what that meant ranged from the violent seizure of the means of production to the dawning of the Age of Aquarius and New Age of spirituality. We chose to limit the themes of the story to love, liberation and revolution, which still gave a number of different interpretations of the purpose of Morgenrøde. The characters were all pre-written and the themes – and clashes between them – were thus worked into the very core of the game. In the end, it was these differences that tore the commune apart.
One Pill Makes You Larger… – The Mechanics and Design of Morgenrøde
We tried to make our triad of themes as pervasive as possible. We kept love, liberation and revolution as the guiding principles for all design decisions. In our game design, this led us to designing a series of mechanics, which should enable the players to act out the three themes.
One common thread with these mechanics was a high degree of voluntarism. The players could choose which mechanics to use when, which in turn helped them steer their game experience towards one of the three themes.
For the political theme we applied house rules for Morgenrøde which the political characters could enforce, mostly via self-criticism, inspired by a quite vicious form of social control, practiced by the Maoists of the time.
We tried to give the die-hard political a micro society to shape and manipulate. The rules were modified during the free-form scenes of the joint meetings and applied to the inhabitants of Morgenrøde as guidelines on how to live their lives. The three basic rules, which we wrote pregame, were:
Love your fellow inhabitants of the commune.
Fight capitalism in all its forms, together with your comrades.
Expand your mind, and always be ready to experience new things, together with the rest of the commune.
Seeing as hallucinogenic drugs became somewhat popular among the hippies, we chose these as the game mechanic backbone for the spiritual theme. In our experience, pretending to use drugs during a larp, whether it is snorting powdered sugar or eating candy that symbolizes pills, and trying to fake the high afterwards, never really works all too well. Thus we needed a way for the characters to take LSD without the players having to fake the following high. This became the Drug Box.
We decided that marijuana and anything like that was recreational and as such would have no effect on the characters, just as drinking a beer (which was nonalcoholic). All other substances were equal to LSD, symbolized by small squares of eatable paper with a white rabbit print on it. Taking LSD was never done alone and affected the relationship between the two or more characters taking part.
The trips themselves were played out in the Drug Box – a black-box with a white sheet wall which had psychedelic visuals projected on to it and a matching soundscape. An organizer played a spirit guide and game mastered the session.
The essential thought was that a trip could be good or bad, and that the nature of the trip would decide how the personal relation which the players brought into the trip, would be affected. The art for the spirit guide was to match the psychedelic story of the trip to the changing relationships. This ended up including, but far from limiting itself to: Deer grassing in a grove, two souls trapped in a cellar being flooded, a mother-of-the-revolution carrying her child across the ocean in a train and some forty-odd trippier scenes.
For the theme of personal liberation we implemented two game mechanics. One was the option for the players to be undressed during the game (with some limitations). This was very optional and not treated as a game mechanic as such. Rather, we tried to create a safe atmosphere, where it was possible for those who wanted to explore that part of the movement. Then there was the “love room” where characters could always go to have sex.
Many of the original hippie communes actually had these love rooms and as such it seemed like the obvious choice, but it also provided a way for the players to play out sex scenes in relative public, without it being frowned upon. As such we hoped for the sexual liberation to add to the stories.
Three Things We Learned from Morgenrøde
To us, Morgenrøde was a success. We were happy with the outcome and loved the look and feel. But that, we suppose, is what most organizers would say. So instead of the usual anniversary speech-style finale, here are three things we learned as game designers:
Continue to explore the crossovers. The free-form and Nordic larp-scenes have been merging for some years now. Find the interesting interactions and try the impossible. For us, this meant free-form scenes with thirty players and a highly specialized (and we dare say awesome) way of simulating drugs.
Remember that history is also last year. Historical games are hard and demanding when it comes to gear and accuracy. Games about contemporary cultural history are easier and the players’ knowledge can be a lot more nuanced than is the case with most of the medieval counterparts. We are certainly not the first, but more and more games are exploring recent history. It’s worth it.
Clash of playing culture should concern you. Perhaps the Nordic larp scene is becoming so homogeneous, that we’ve stopped to consider it. But a lesson is that you should always be very clear about how a game is played, the characters should be read and what can be expected when combining players from different national and/or international scenes.
Morgenrøde
Credits: Anders Lyng Ebbehøj, Astrid Andersen, Silas Boje Sørensen, Troels Barkholt-Spangsbo, Søren Lyng Ebbehøj, Klaus Meier Olsen and Jonas Trier-Knudsen. Date: August 12-15, 2014 Location: Græsrodsgården, Kalundborg, Denmark Length: 2 days Players: 31 Budget: €6,900 Participation Fee: €110 Website:http://morgenrode.dk/
Cover photo: One of the joint meetings where everyone was present to discuss everything from buying a saw to taking away the right of individuals to their own body (Play, Jonas Trier-Knudsen). Other photos by Jonas Trier-Knudsen and Bjarke Pedersen.
How we created a Firefly larp, not exactly about Firefly
One day the world became too small for all of us. Then we started to settle other planets. Terraformation begun. Things changed. Lot of us became adventures, seeking freedom and independence. But with great power comes great responsibility… None of us had an idea of what the “Alliance” would be capable of…
Take my home, take my land,
take me where I cannot stand.
I don’t care, I’m still free,
you can’t take the sky from me…
Words from The Ballad of Serenity, the Firefly theme song.
What is Moon?
Moon is a chamber larp (3 hours + 1 hour debrief) for 10 players, situated in the Firefly universe. But the essence of the game lies in something else than in a cool sci-fi/western setting, and knowledge of Firefly is not necessary for playing the game.
After nearly four years of running Moon, we have decided that it’s time to capture moments from the life of this game. From the first idea that came to mind, to the last weekend when we put our grown-up child in the hands of other teams. This will not be a complete walk-through of the game, but an outline of useful tools for other game designers. We’ll try to describe features in enough detail that anyone can copy them.
Game Design & Tricks
First of all, we wanted to write a game not only to entertain people but also to make them think about a certain topic. That is why the whole Firefly setting is just scenery for our metaphor. Beyond a cool surface there is a very-much-discussed topic; the decision made by the Czechoslovakian president Edvard Beneš after the Munich Conference in 1938 (where he decided not to fight against Hitler and to let the country be occupied).
We wanted to show this difficult decision- making process as it applies to everyday life (“Would I risk the life of my spouse?”) at macro-level political circumstances. Players were not aware of the parallel before playing the game.
This is also the backbone storyline of the larp which drives the flow of the game and makes it cohesive, but it is followed by a number of smaller relationship-based plots. There were also three time points in the game which served as bottleneck for the players.
All of these were speeches, which redefined the situation and focused characters back on the main story plot. In the last one, the governor could choose one of the pre- written texts to decide whether the Moon colony would go to war or accept the occupants. That is the way we ensured a dramatic ending of the larp.
To make the game more authentic all the speeches were based on real historical materials (the Munich Agreement for example). It was a kind of easter egg for players, just like the names of the characters, which referred mainly to important Czechoslovak politicians or characters from well known books of the given period. This was surprisingly highly appreciated by a number of players afterwards.
The second interesting game design aspect is the storyline itself.
The whole scenario contains five smaller compact chapters linked together mainly by interpersonal stories and the history of the Moon colony itself.
Each character took part in 4 of 5 chapters. From the game designers’ perspective it worked well. It was easier to indicate if a certain character had enough content to deal with during the game, and the plot lines were logically coherent.
We accomplished coherence by a quite simple trick. There was a rule for adding any object or person to the plot: It has to be connected to as many characters as possible. So, for example there were messengers who were carrying important medicine and some message was given to them. But they were killed by another character, who stole both: the message and the medicine.
There were also someone ́s friends, who were furious about their death. Finally, the fate of the messengers was important for every character. And this brought to the game a sort of complexity where unintended conflicts and links between characters emerged (we used this technique in a more developed way in our newer games).
However, the chapters and connections were used only as a game design tool; for the players they were invisible. We wrote all the characters in the form of a story. As they were quite long (about 5 – 10 pages), each storyline or important information was repeated at the end of the text.
Meta-techniques in Moon
Our intention wasn’t to have a game full of rules, but some game tricks were necessary. After some discussion we picked three (four, after few reruns) of them.
First of all, there was an “intro” made of three scenes, which were written by us, and so became more like coordinated drama scenes. The reason, why we have decided to use this was in our experience of slow booting of chamber larps in that period and we didn’t want to have a game with a slow beginning.
This sadly proved that we probably weren’t able to manage them in the right way anyway, because in almost every run of the game, there was someone, who failed to do what was asked. It is possible that just writing a set of non-specific instructions on a piece paper and leaving the rest to the players wasn’t such good idea. The basic problem was probably in the strong chain of specified actions spread among different players.
A second meta-technique was special costume props. Aside from flags, hats, and so on, we had grey berets and brown pelerins. According to the Firefly universe (and our intention) there are two opposing sides of the conflict, and we needed players to have the possibility to show their affinity to the Browncoats or the Alliance explicitly. Anyone, who was wearing one or another, was for that moment publicly declaring “I am on side of…” This was also used to escalate conflicts between players subconsciously (and was also pretty and cool).
A third special rule was using a bit of music. For the whole runtime, there was music playing in the background (we’ve spent a significant amount of time picking music that would be fitting – surprisingly using the “shuffle” mode during the first few runs came up with mind-blowing scenes combining tough situations with precise lyrics). And when we wanted to intervene in the game (like radio broadcasts and booting scenes) we’d just turn the volume up, which intuitively made the players listen up for what would come next.
A fourth added technique was the rule of non-specific informations. It turned out, that players were forced by the large amount of information we had given them to investigate issues in detail. But that wasn’t our intention. So we added a simple rule of “the character who is the expert in a certain field is always right in discussions about that field”. So when the players were talking about something we did not write into the game, it was up to them. We wanted a dramatic game, not an investigation of specific actions in an exact time and space.
The last specific thing was running a beta test of Moon. We weren’t sure, if everything would go right or not, so we needed feedback to improve the game.
We picked a group of selected players we knew and ran it in small clubhouse. These players were chosen to fit the characters we’d written and also by their ability to give us the feedback we needed. Thus we were able to improve the game after the beta test.
Reflection / Feedback
The structured feedback was divided into two parts. The first was rather quick. Each player got a chance to briefly summarize their current impressions and emotional state. This simple step helped the players to concentrate themselves on the next parts, as they were given space to express what was close to their hearts.
This step also served as the first psychological safety check for organizers. More detailed questions followed. We focused on the highlights of the game:
”What was the most interesting scene that they did not take part in?”, “When did the character reach the final decision?”, “What was the key argument?”.
The second part reflected the topic of the game. We created a line, where the ends represented the two poles of a decision: war against a much stronger enemy or acceptance of occupation. Participants were at first asked to choose their character’s place and then their own. Usually it was followed by a spontaneous (but mediated) discussion where a lot of arguments and points of view were mentioned. The last activity was a structured discussion in couples to ensure everyone got time to formulate his or her opinion.
Afterwards the participants responded that this experience was far away from the prevalent rational historical discussions about what Edvard Beneš should have done at that grave moment of Czech history. It brought before them a completely new perspective to the problem, as they were forced to make a decision themselves in the context of arguments which were all around them. We ha ve never mentioned it explicitly, but as you could see above we implemented a number of indices into the game.
Moon Release Session
After approximately 30 runs of Moon we came up with an idea of releasing the game to the public. When we started out, we had decided not to, but time changes things.
We had been enthusiastic about doing more and more re-runs of the game. But at some point the next year this enthusiasm left us. So we decided, that we’d send it into the world, but not just by uploading it online. That was the birth of the “Moon release session”.
The idea was to get some fans and capable promoters together and teach them how to work with Moon. We had written an article about what we were up to, and published it on the website larp.cz (and of course pushed it through Facebook).
We had enough applicants to choose from. Finally, there were 12 people from across the whole of the Czech Republic who learned how to promote Moon. The whole thing took place in a cottage, where we had prepared several activities. From learning the story background, to diving into the game mechanics; both game design and technical stuff. And partying, of course!
We did not have any proper timetable for running the game, so the participants also had to make their own notes about timing, and how to do it all (the fact that there was no timing for the game was one of the reasons, why we did the weekend session, since none of us wanted to write that terribly long instruction manual).
Costumes were discussed, and now there is more than one set of the props in existence in the republic. After this session, there have already been several re-runs of Moon not done by us. Which means we’ve reached our goal – the game lives on.
Conclusion
We are proud that Moon is still able to compete with newer chamber larps, because the Czech chamber larp scene is evolving a lot and dozens of chamber larps have been written in the last four years. So far, more than forty runs have been done.
And it’s still flying.
Moon
Credits: Martin “Pirosh” Buchtík, Jindřích “Estanor” Mašek, Petr “Drrak” Platil, Filip Kábrt and Roman “Gordhart” Čech. Date: February 2011 – till now (more than 40 runs in total) Location: Various Length: Game 3 hours, debriefing 1 hour Players: 10 per run Budget: ~€6,500 Participation Fee: €2 – €7 Website:http://moon.madfairy.cz/
Cover photo: Despair and frustration. That’s the impact of those situations. (Play, Martin Buchtík). Other photos by Kristýna Nováková and Martin Buchtík.
Our story took place aboard the M/S Lyckan, a former German navy freighter with a horrific history of atrocities. A research expedition to Kirkenes in Norway had unearthed a strange statuette, which was brought on board during M/S Lyckan’s last journey out of Kirkenes for the winter. Aboard were the expedition, the crew and captain, a group of workers, a doctor and nurse, a group of dilettantes and adventurers and a few others.
Mare Incognitum was a larp set in Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos, aboard the decommissioned destroyer HMS Småland. We wanted to create a claustrophobic horror larp that relied more on atmosphere and “slow pressure” than shock and jump scares; more on subtle, personal horror than on monsters and gore. We chose, unconventionally, to do a 1950’s Lovecraft larp rather than the classic 1920’s setting, both because it fit the actual ship better, but also to be able to use the Second World War as a tapestry for much of the background, something we think worked out very well.
We realized early on that we were going to have to do multiple runs of the larp in order to be able to finance it properly, and we decided on doing three runs of the larp for 26 players each game. Wise from the experiences of our last Mythos larp Terra Incognita we tried our best to have a fifty-fifty ratio of women to men, and to let chance dictate who got the spots for the larp (with a few exceptions).
This strategy proved to be successful, both in terms of equal representation and in terms of players we didn’t personally know – you can get comfortable as an organizer and mostly cast people already known to you. Most of the final participants were from Sweden, but we also had participants from Denmark, Norway, Finland, Estonia, Great Britain, the US and Spain.
We also tried to have at least 20 percent beginners at the larp. However, quite a few of the beginners dropped out before the larp, so the 20 percent was not fully realized.
Creating a Horror Story
The location, the ship, made many decisions about the story for us, which is how we like to work – do something within a set of limitations. It was going to be claustrophobic and dark, and the players were going to be cut off from the outside world; all great components for creating horror. We first decided on the basic outline of the story: first some normality onboard the ship, followed by the ship getting stuck in the ice, then taking away comforts like lights and food, a slow escalation of weirdness, clues, handouts and events leading up to a crescendo in which the players are confronted with their doom.
It was quite a challenge writing twenty-seven interesting, multifaceted characters and fitting them all together in the story, making sure to give all the players both agency and internal logic. It was important to us that we created characters that would be fun to play even if we completely removed the horror and supernatural elements. We had utilized skjebner (fate-play) before, and for Mare Incognitum we gave all the characters several fates and triggers (“if x happens, do this/react in this way”) in order to create hooks for the players nudging towards insanity or to create potential for scenes or conflict. Once we had assigned players to the characters we tweaked those characters who were not Swedes (different background texts).
Characters were divided into groups; an expedition of scientists, a group of workers, a group of dilettantes and adventurers and their servants, etc. A big help here was a drawing board, where you could connect the different characters and how they related to each other in order to visualize possible plots, twists and subgroups.
As we said earlier, we used the Second World War as a background for many of the characters, and the war itself was used as an underlying subplot; the ship had previously been the stage of some atrocities during the war, and many documents, letters and signs produced for the larp and spread around the ship contained info on this backstory which we think added another layer of horror underneath the Mythos horror.
This also offered us the opportunity to treat the ship itself as a character in the drama and the ship’s history was lent physical form as shadows from the past via odd messages on the radio but also as actual Shadows (NPCs giving suggestions or insights to the players, but being invisible to the characters).
Producing Horror
Early on, we decided to aim for a creeping, slow horror rather than “in-your-face” jump-scares. As is the key to most Mythos horror, the horror is ancient, does not care at all about humanity, and is more or less impossible to understand – and there can be no defeating the horror, only a short respite.
The key things that made this larp were, we think, the ship itself (i.e “the stage”), the handouts (handwritten diaries, letters, photos, documents, etc) that gave background and increased the sense of horror onboard, the characters (pre-written and designed for drama, conflict and a slow descent into madness) and a combination of creative NPCs and on-the-spot game-mastering.
The sound system used onboard greatly helped in creating mood and atmosphere. Having great players also helped a lot.
Creating horror, we believe, is a very delicate and sensitive thing.
Pace it too slow or too fast and you burn out the players or destroy the narrative, show too much of the horror and you risk it losing it’s power. Give the players too much to do – like reading handouts and completing tasks – and they can become too focused on doing and not feeling.
But on the other hand, if you give the players too little to do the sense of “developing” story or of getting anywhere might be lost and the players may become tired or bored.
Our larp had its fair share of pacing issues (which we tried correcting during subsequent runs), and as an organizer you have a hard time gauging what the players are feeling or currently doing, and you might panic, thinking the players are bored, and start doing things that screws up what might be an excellent atmosphere for the players.
We had a radio room, where the players diegetically could speak to other ships in the area as well as the coast guard, and we think it worked out better than we had imagined.
At first it functioned as a source of information and safety for the players (there was always an “external party” they could talk to), but as the game progressed the voices on the radio increased the feeling of isolation and the problematic situation the passengers were now in – coastal stations reporting that the storm was gaining in intensity, ships reporting that they could not reach them to help, etc.
Players in the radio room could also experience semi-meta gameplay; strange voices from the past, weird monster sounds, voices speaking to them from beyond the grave etc, which worked really well – especially so since the room was rigged with a night vision camera so we could identify players and simultaneously read up on their back-stories as we spoke to them.
Lessons Learned
Gender Roles and Equality
We put some effort into making sure all the characters for the larp were as gender neutral as possible. Any character should be playable by anyone without any (or very little) modification. We were also very strict in keeping the ratio 50/50 between (self-identified) males and females. We realize that we need to actively work more to create a game with actual equality in regards to gender, and this is something we’ll have to keep discussing and working on.
Tech
Tech never works flawlessly. It will break, or you’ll have great problems getting it to work right. Always plan for that if you intend to have a tech-enhanced larp. Keep an “analog” option for your players. Also make sure tech is dead simple to understand, then dumb it down even further. Test the tech in extreme conditions. Try everything beforehand, multiple times, to find the glitches. Our sound system gave us extreme headaches until we managed to get it working right.
Railroading
We railroaded the end too much, which felt weird and out of place. This is bad design. Try to avoid that unless you have a kick-ass ending that you feel works no matter what state the players are in.
New Blood
Bring in new players, and people you’ve never worked with before. Don’t be afraid. You might just be amazed (like when the new blood don the wellingtons, and take on the monumental task of cleaning out the poop floating all over the kitchen). Make sure you have a great team of NPCs and functionaries to back you up when you get tired or busy.
Don’t Be Afraid to Break the Diegesis
We are somewhat stuck in the 360 design model, and we were sometimes hesitant to break the diegesis in order to spook players or use meta techniques to further the game, but once we did it was universally well received and really worked out well. We need to stop being afraid of breaking the 360 illusion.
Information
Keeping players up to date is very hard, even if you just choose one single channel for that information (email for instance). Do NOT rely on Facebook at all, but also keep in mind that players will miss emails and will not read all your text. Be very, very clear in writing, and repeat everything that is important several times.
The Verdict
In the end we’re happy to have created the larp together with the kick ass participants and our excellent crew, to have run three fairly different runs. The participants humble us with relevant feedback, making us wanting to continue, and also letting others learn from our mistakes (and successes). It was a great larp for most, but it could have been better, and we’ll work on that until next time!
Mare Incognitum
Credits: Olle Nyman, Sara Pertmann, Sebastian Utbult, Andreas Sjöberg and Simon Svensson. Crewed by 15 additional NPCs and deckhands. Date: November 28-30, 2014 Location: HMS Småland, Gothenburg, Sweden Length: 10 hours Players: 78 (26 per run) Budget: ~€6,500 Participation Fee: €65 – €110 (depending on income) Game Mechanics Diegetic Game Mastering, Honour System, Slow take- off, Slow Landing, Soundtrack, Pre- written characters,Shadows, Narrative Voice-Over, Playing to lose, Brems, Kutt, Pre-larp Workshop Website:http://iäiä.se/
Livsgäld, translated roughly as “the price you pay for your life”, was a low-fantasy larp held in November, 2014, in Halmstad, Sweden. The larp was played in Swedish, had 40 participants, three non-player characters and four organizers. The spots for the players were given out through a lottery process, where participants first signed up over the span of a week after which a draw was made to see whom among the players would receive spots. The larp used two criteria to divide the various players into different pools – we first divided the player group into self identified men, women and non-binary individuals, with a goal of as many self identified men as women in the player group. After this division was made, we went on to divide by age. Ten spots were reserved for the 25% who were youngest of the player group, twenty spots were reserved for the 50% in the middle and ten spots for the oldest 25% of players.
Despite our efforts to achieve this balance, when drop-outs were taken into account, we did not have enough reserve players among men in the latter stages of the process and the actual game ended up with a skewed ratio, with more women than men attending.
Setting
The setting for the larp was a world known as Xaos, constructed by organizer Simon Svensson.
The larp itself was centered around an isolated culture that had been existing on its own for hundreds of years in a single village. The culture entirely lacked a social sex-based gender, the focus was instead on four elements that were seen as part of your biological entity in the same way as gender is for us today. The concepts ‘man’ or ‘woman’ did not exist, even if the members of the culture were physically identical to us.
Story
The story played with themes of survival, both literal in avoiding starvation, but also cultural survival when the old ways did not work as they used to. The food stores were low and for many years, the fields had gotten more barren, the hunting had diminished and tensions were on the rise. During the larp, the People, as they were called, had to confront whether they would rely on the extremely conservative foundations of their entire people, the cultural values they held sacred, or brave the dangers of the unknown.
The unknown also held the mythological threat from a civilization that once held the people as slaves and were said to roam the wilderness in search for them.
The culture was one of shame and guilt, where the personality traits that are often seen as good today were considered destructive and bad (bravery, creativity, being outspoken, self-confidence), while atypical leader abilities – intuition, empathy, carefulness and cowardice – were seen as positive and constructive traits. Conflicts were solved by smoothing over and handling the fallout rather than the cause.
If the main storyline was the food crisis, the actual focus of play was the social pressure that was a natural part of such an isolated society; a society where the equilibrium rests on shame and the silencing of dissenting voices. When the crisis became more outspoken, all the tension that was stored in the various dynamics between the collectives (the family units of the game), individuals and between element-genders rose up to the surface. Love was lost, forbidden love was uncovered and the young members of the village were initiated into their collectives, to live with them for the rest of their lives.
During the larp, three unknown spirits also appeared, brought into the village by some of the fire-gendered, the most oppressed of the four elements. These spirits turned out to have different agendas that they tried to pursue through affecting the people and their ways.
In the end, a choice was made. Their existence doomed, they refused to go quiet into the night and fade away. The village abandoned their ancestral home to face the unknown on a great exodus, knowing well that most of them would not make it.
Designing Livsgäld
Calm gazes with the power to silence loud voices. Tears that are swallowed, hidden away to uphold the illusion of well-being. A collective where everyone is included. Yet, some are still left outside, isolated. Love filled with demands exists side by side with the search for acceptance. To be loved, not for the person who I am but despite of it. Livsgäld. One larp, many emotions followed by important insights. I was not poor when I went there but I left richer than I was before. My new found riches are thoughts and a new way to view the world.
Player, Air-gendered
These thoughts by one of the players include some of our core design elements. When we created Livsgäld, we had three major design goals. They were:
A gender-equal larp
Reversing fantasy stereotypes
Narrow focus
The first point was one of the first that we decided on and our philosophy towards gender was based around the thought that, in order to achieve gender equality in a larp, you could not simply remove gender inequalities and otherwise keep the same traditional fantasy or modern setting. We would still have hidden patterns and behavior that were modelled on inequality. Instead, you have to remove them and replace them with something else that could take their place. This philosophy guided us as we created the Livsgäld world.
The second idea was based on the observation that fantasy worlds are often inherently conservative. They are worlds where uprisings are bad, where feudalism works, where power is rightfully inherited and where loyalty to authority is something noble.
They are worlds where individual bravery and vigilantism is held as the norm of heroic behavior. We wanted to challenge these concepts and show a world that worked differently from how we expected a fantasy world to work. We knew this would be a challenge for our players since we had already removed so many other familiar points from the players’ horizon of expectations and recognition, but we did not want to create a gender-equal world only to reproduce the normative, traditionally masculine traits as superior.
The third point, narrow focus, was something we’d learned from the countless fantasy games that exist out there in the more mainstream fantasy genre. Many of them present a whole fictional world for the prospective larper with nations, maps, cultures and religions all presented in short written format, easily overwhelming their players. We wanted Livsgäld to exclusively present relevant information for the players, where every piece of information was something that had an impact for the People and the experience at the larp.
Inspirations from the Nordic larp tradition were games such as Mellan himmel och hav, for a different way to construct gender and personality traits, Hemligheten, for the way it portrayed a low-key fantasy setting, and Brudpris for handling a culture of shame and invisible barriers.
Reactions
There were many things that did not happen as planned or expected and there were many story elements that were identified as flawed or working in an unintended way. Even as the game came to a close, we had already learnt a lot. After the game, the players were asked to give the organizers a week of stories, a week where feedback and criticism could wait.
When this week had passed, a document was published with our the organizers’ design thoughts, containing thoughts on what had gone wrong and what could be improved, along with a feedback form for the players. We felt that this approach helped players focus on areas that we had not already reflected over.
The feedback form received answers from roughly half of the participants. The most widespread reaction which was echoed by nearly every feedback form, was that the participants had experienced a sense of leaving their own social gender behind. No longer did they feel the internal or external pressure to act their gender.
Despite of this, several individuals noted that actual behavioral patterns still conformed to those they had been taught all their lives. It is not surprising that players did not adapt entirely new patterns of behavior simply from two days gametime and a day of workshop.
However, it is noteworthy that the expectations to behave in the same ways were perceived as lacking. It was more out of comfort and habit that the players acted out their off-game gender identity, rather than a feeling of pressure or expectation.
Another common point of feedback was that the elements had felt like castes, rather than gender. There had been a lack of sexualization or the tension that exists between genders attracted to each other and they had felt like ‘roles’ in society, rather than something natural you were born to.
Many felt that a workshop for translating typically gendered behavior, like flirting, sex and attractive stereotypes, into the Livsgäld world, would have been a boon to the larp. That was, according to the players, the most difficult part of the setting.
The biggest lesson we learned was to trust in the setting and the characters to provide the content. An element was introduced early on that was meant to be kept low-key: the three foreign spirits. However, their occult nature and mystery quickly spiraled it up to the top and it became a major plot. Many players reacted as if they had to solve it, rather than use it as background material. Had we informed everyone about the element beforehand and kept its function transparent, we feel that it would have filled its function more properly.
We are glad that we created Livsgäld and in many ways, it felt like a success. However, it also felt like a game that explored relatively unknown territories and in doing that, left a lot of room for improvement.
Closing Thoughts
Everything points to the fact that Livsgäld changed the way people thought about gender, if only for a little while. In this, we hope that Livsgäld can be an inspiration to others and that we will see more games exploring similar themes.
As a closing statement, here are some thoughts from one of the participants, taken from their blog post about the larp:
It was scary, in a way, to see how effectively we changed our way of thinking and behaving over a mere weekend. It showed me how easy it is to create oppression on completely arbitrary grounds, and how real those feelings provoked can be even though you know it’s just play-pretend. But most of all it gave me hope. If we could change our way of thinking and behaving so easily over such a short period of time I have no doubts about that it can be done on a much larger scale. All it takes is that most of us play along.
Player
Livsgäld
Credits: Kajsa Seinegård (main organizer), Simon Lindman Svensson (co-organizer), Carl Nordblom (co-organizer) and Jennie Nyberg (co-organizer) Date: October 30 November 2, 2014 Location: Primus Vicus medieval village, outside Halmstad, Sweden Length: 60 hours in-game, 16 hours pre-game workshop Players: 40 Budget: ~€5,000 Participation Fee: €70 standard fee, €50 for low income participants and €90 for high income participants Website:http://projekt-xaos.zaramis.se/