Tag: Nordic Larp Yearbook

  • Last Will – Make Us Your Slaves, but Feed Us

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    Last Will – Make Us Your Slaves, but Feed Us

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    In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet, and say to us, “ Make us your slaves, but feed us.

    Last Will is a larp on the subject of a fading human dignity in a world run by money and consumption in which people can be bought and sold as commodities. The larp is set in a future where debt and poverty breeds slavery and slavery perpetuates poverty.

    Routine security line-up and inspection of all inhabitants in Jericho. (Play, Lisa H. Ekbom)The larp was run by the organization Ursula, and the story was set in the gladiator-stable Jericho, with six fighter-teams as well as an administrative staff running it all. The larp depicts some twenty hours in Jericho. The trainers and the coach prepare the fighters for gladiator fights, the doctor and psychiatrist evaluate the fighters and other team members, the pleasers perform their duties towards the fighters, as do the physiotherapists while the guards make sure everyone does what they should do and only the right people slips in the showers.

    All the while lives and relationships go on. Some of the people in Jericho are free workers, having contracts that allow them a salary and a little more freedom but also the risk of being let off with no further notice.

    Others have signed a life contract, which gives them the security of food and a roof over their heads, but no say on almost everything else. It is the day before the national election to parliament, but only the free workers needs to decide if they should take the risk to sign up to vote or not. The lifers need not worry; they no longer have the right to vote.

    Last Will revolves around hope in a hopeless situation, where the desire to create a future battle with constant fighting against fear and hunger. In a time when freedom is weighed against security and survival every day the question echoes – What is my value?

    Inspiration: “I Owe My Soul to the Company Store”

    Slavery – the word makes us think about chains and whips, blood and colonialism. But the system of humans as commodities is even more widespread today, wrapped in inhuman working contracts and debt that is passed down from generation to generation. We wanted to show what losing self determination does to a person and that it can be done with a piece of paper just as much as with chains of iron.

    The fixer Lyric cleaning up blood in the fighting ring. (Play, Sofia Stenler)

    India: The forced labour of women and girls has become known as the “Sumangali system”. It affects unmarried girls and women aged between 13 and 18 years old who work on three-year contracts, often in mills that operate 24 hours a day, using three shifts. The workers are not only required to work any shift but also to carry out unpaid overtime. The girls are confined to the mills, sleeping in hostels, during their contract period and are rarely, if ever, allowed out during that time.

    Slavery on the High Street, 2012

    We wanted to create this larp to look at modern slavery through the lens of a fictional future. We can not claim to give a true portrait of a sweatshop in China or a mine in Africa, but by taking bits and pieces from different places and putting them together in Jericho, we can give our participants a feel for what life is like when agency has been taken from you, and what it does to you when you feel that you have no value. And what it makes you do to other people. We hope that experiencing something with your whole body will make you take something home from it.

    The setting of a gladiator-stable was a design choice we made to incorporate play on the loss of bodily integrity. We wanted people to sell their bodies to be used by others, for pleasure, entertainment or profit, but we didn’t want to portray a brothel.

    Reactions: “Now I Know What It Is Worth.”

    As you read this, Last Will will have been run two times, and as we write this, we are preparing for the second run. We decided on doing a second run after the preliminary sign-up for the then only run had over a hundred people sign up in less than a week. The larp was massively hyped, and the first run sold out in only eight (8) minutes.

    For the second run we used a different sign-up system than first-come-first-serve, and a hundred people signed up to let us draw lots for the 44 spots on the game. It is strange to arrange a larp with such a hype. Thrilling, but scary.

    Fighter Kari, Jerichos only free worker fighter. (Play, Annica Strand)Will we be able to deliver what all these people fervently wants us to?

    What exactly was it that they thought they would experience? Had they really all read the participation contract? And if so, why were they surprised when we told them that they would not get eight solid hours of sleep? The sleeping schedule was a big issue, and something we will re-design for the second run. Having two runs and an extensive questionnaire after the first run gives us this chance of re-evaluating our design choices.

    Based on the questionnaire and our own evaluation, we have decided to change some things in the pre-larp workshops and post-game debrief and the above mentioned sleeping schedule, as well as little things as the amount of in-game drugs already present on the game floor at the start of the larp.

    In all, we wanted people to get a feeling of how poverty deprives you of your agency. Participants telling us things like this makes us believe we came quite close to our goal:

    You felt like an animal, in your head. Everything but the here and now disappeared. You were stripped of your agency and told to shut up when you had opinions. Zero discretion, zero authority. All actions were reactions. Your initiatives were very few and usually caused by something that happened in the past and had the purpose of keeping up appearances.

    Player

    A team consists of five: physiotherapist, trainer, fighter, fixer and pleaser. (Post-game, Ylva Bergman)

    It was overwhelming, overpowering and scary; my first reaction was that I never wanted to expose myself to anything like that again, but when the experience settled with me a bit, I realized that it had developed me – I realized that I was actually grateful that I am free and I have a healthy and loving family. This is how Ursula really succeeded: rarely have I been so submerged in dystopia. Every little thing played its part, from the crowded gym that served as venue for the event to a clogged drain, the violence, the horrible vacuum-packed food. I felt hopelessness, like a serf and completely lost.

    Player

    Perspective: “You Used Larp to Tell an Important Story.”

    We have been asked why we think this larp got so hyped, and while we can think of several possible explanations for it; we had a very nice presentation package, the setting and roles intrigued many people, and we offered an intense experience without an overwhelming amount of preparations or money needed – we also got another explanation from a friend:

    It was the Hardcore larp of the year, and there was a demand to fill.

    To be honest we hadn’t really thought about it as hardcore ourselves when we designed it. We focused on the story we wanted to tell. We wanted our players to live and feel the horror, frustration and degradation of their roles. We did not see this as a game for everyone, nor an experience that anyone would want to have.

    We did have some players that were fairly new to larping. That was not a problem, though. Like in most games of this type we put a lot of effort into introducing the players to the world, making them feel safe with each other and providing a safe space in which they could indulge in some horrible play.

    What we worked for, and hope we succeed with – at least for some – was to leave an impression on our players that would help them see and think about slavery and poverty from a new perspective.

    Fighter Sol with her trainer Zion. The collars distinguish them as lifers. (Post-game, Ylva Bergman)

    Stories: “The Cruelty and the Pressure Hit Me Hard and My Eyes Start to Water.”

    These are some snapshot images from Last Will, told by participants of the first run:

    The player of Jericho’s Coach gives us a snapshot from the darktime:

    I open my eyes and stare out into the darkness with eyes hurting with the lack of sleep. At the same time thoughts grind and grate. They are always the same thoughts. I am thinking about how it would be if I wasn’t in this sour sweat-musk of Jericho. I am thinking about what I would have done if I had not signed that lifetime-contract.

    As always I cannot form a picture in my mind of a different kind of life and I come to the conclusion that I can’t because I have been here for so long that I have forgotten what it is like out there, in freedom. At least I am not hungry. /…/ When the lights come on and the morning buzzer sounds I am nauseous from having gotten too little sleep. The Lifer collar has made an indent into my neck and I casually scratch it as I pack away my sleeping gear.

    The player of the fighter Eli tells us this story from not long after she and her teammate have been in the pit fights:

    The doctors came by the Team 2 sleeping area and injected Eli and Milo with pain relieving drugs to make them able to impress during the owners’ visit, despite them having been badly beaten up and injured in the arena just hours before.The words with which this was done made it perfectly clear that Eli and Milo were regarded as no more than animals: “There’s going to be hell to pay for this later, but they’ll be fine during the visit.

    Another fighter gives us a snapshot from her game:

    The time before my fight was quite extraordinary, and coming back from the fight, too.You really felt like a broken star.” /…/ ”The second time the lights went out, when Mitsuki’d been walking back and forth outside the toilets to wait for the painkillers to set in, and finally went to sleep, and just lay there and stared into the ceiling, and felt that this was her entire world, her entire life. It was breathtakingly horrifying.

    The player of one of the psychiatrists tells us about a memorable moment:

    The rape of Ataru was incredibly strong. As I imagine a real rape in war or a concentration camp. It was so deliberate, so well planned. Not in any way about sex, just power. Ataru sat there, extremely passive, eyes staring straight down at the floor. Never said “no” or “stop” but just sat there. Silent. Motionless.

    The player of Team 6’s pleaser tells us about an impression from the game:

    Cleaning the shower room from blood after love interest JT6FIL’s suicide. It was horrible but also became a very private way of saying goodbye.

    Lovers in hell; physiotherapist Ryan and trainer Hayden. (Post-game,Ylva Bergman)


    Last Will

    Credits: Frida Gamero, Annica Strand and Sofia Stenler
    Date: August 15 – 17, 2014 and January 2 – 4, 2015
    Location: Stockholm, Sweden
    Length: 23 hours game time, 3 days total
    Players: 44
    Budget: ~€3,000 per run
    Participation Fee: €73 regular price, €37 subsidized price
    Game Mechanics: Not described.
    Website: http://lastwilllarp.com/


    This article was initially published in The Nordic Larp Yearbook 2014 which was edited by Charles Bo Nielsen & Claus Raasted, published by Rollespilsakademiet and released as part of documentation for the Knudepunkt 2015 conference.

    Cover photo: A lifer collar with the Jericho id-code. (Post-game, Ylva Bergman). Other photos by Lisa H. Ekbom, Sofia Stenler and Annica Strand.

  • KoiKoi – Drums! Rituals! Inaction!

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    KoiKoi – Drums! Rituals! Inaction!

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    In July of 2014 we invited 75 players from around the Nordic countries to a wilderness camp in Finnskogen, Norway, in order to give life to a fictive hunter-gatherer society. For four days and three nights they sang, slept, woke, wept, ate, drank, drummed, flirted, chanted, and performed the ceremonies as men, women and nuk of the Ankoi. They each have their own stories to tell – some contradictory, but all true. This is a designer’s story – a story about the why and the how of the larp “KoiKoi”.

    The Ankoi

    The Ankoi are a band society. Each band, (called a “Fam”) consists of 10-20 people, who move from camp to camp through a vast northern forest. Their life is nothing like ours. Their “fathers” are the brothers of their “mothers”, who in turn are the women who nursed them as children. They are surrounded by gods/spirits/presences called kwath, living in the stones and the forest and the winds. Their children have no gender, while their adults have three: women, men and nuknuk. A woman always gives birth alone in the wild, and a man cannot light fires, lest they draw the ire of angry kwath. They have no laws, no judges, and no prisons, regularly fighting each other over perceived insults. They kill strangers on sight.

    Every two years, the whole people gather in the valley of Koi, center of their cultural life, to celebrate the feast of KoiKoi. The central rituals of the culture are performed here: rites of passage where children are accepted into a gender and adulthood, FamRit, where a person becomes a member of a different band, the rite of passing into old age, the rites that keep the sun shining and the winds blowing.

    The Human Condition

    This was not a fantasy larp. Neither was it historical. It was an attempt, for our part, to deal with the central events of human life: Cradle and grave. Relationship and separation. Growing old. Growing young. Being and belonging.

    The great lodge of Koi was used for drumming, dancing and storytelling. (Play, Li Xin)To provide a vantage point on these themes we constructed the Ankoi as a mashup of traditions and ideas as alien from our own culture as possible, but still “authentic”: documented in history and anthropology. The result was a society far more complex than can be described here, but not one representative of any real hunter-gatherer society. These are quite diverse – the Inuit of the Arctic have less in common with the Umanikaina of New Guinea than Denmark has with North Korea.

    A hunter-gatherer society opened aesthetic possibilities – facial painting, masks, rituals, storytelling, drums – that had been prominent in some Norwegian larps in the 90s, and that we wanted to bring back for a new generation of players to enjoy. When asked what K oiK oi would be about, our one-word answer was “Rituals!”.

    Low Conflict, Slow Play

    Our modern culture is steeped in a sense of urgency that infests even historical and fantasy larps with a relentless focus on Action! Conflict! Now! With K oiK oi our aim was different: Serenity. Reflection. Rythm. The joy of being alive.

    Player feedback – generally ranging from the moderately positive to the euphoric – was not without critical points. But despite the lack of major conflicts and goals to drive the larp, none of the players seem to have been bored. As one player commented on the forum:

    As no-one wore watches, and we were encouraged to play slowly, our experience of time changed. It felt like we had an ocean of time available. When was the last time I felt that way? Time was no longer fragmented into small chunks, but became a steady flow of change.

    Another concluded: “The calm I found at KoiKoi will be with me for a long time.”

    A Systemic Design

    KoiKoi was a systemic larp design: we neither wrote individual characters and plots, nor did we spend time negotiating with players. A character was defined by two standard types, e.g. “The Best Lover” and “Afraid of the Dark”. In the sign-up form, players were asked which of the 40 types they were interested in playing. No two characters had the same combination of types.

    Preparations for dødrit, a ceremony of death. (Play, Li Xin)We encouraged players to sign up together, as fams. These groups, and the enthusiasts who initiated them, did a lot of work to coordinate practical and creative preparations, filling in the gaps between our types and real humans.

    The culture served as the dramaturgical engine, designed to offer up meaningful play opportunities – transitions, relationships and choices – for every character. For young adults to find one or more lovers, and be accepted as members of the same fam. For older adults: to consider whether it was time to settle down at Koi as an Ald, an elder. For the elders: to consider whether your path was near its end. And for the children: to seek adulthood as a woman, a man, or a nuk.

    Teaching through Language

    We communicated all this by defining how the Ankoi talked about their world, hoping that players would internalize the culture that spoke this language and told these stories. We, obviously, could not make up and teach an entirely new language. Instead, we modified Norwegian (and Swedish and Danish) to create Språk, the Ankoi Language.

    In Norwegian a woman is called a “Kvinne”. In Språk she is called “Kvinn”. In Norwegian, the plural – women – is “Kvinner”. In Språk, it is “KvinnKvinn”. Common words were reduced to their first syllable, and repeated to make a plural or an emphasis.

    We thereby provided an easy-to-learn illusion of speaking a different language. It also meant that non-larpers overhearing statements like “meeting the nuknuk for some foodfood” thought the players had lost their marbles.

    Here is a sample chapter of the main text – the Kulturkompendium – titled “Murder”:

    Humans do not kill humans. Only beasts, and strangers.

    I have heard that long ago,
    a man killed a man in his own fam.
    Then all understood that he was not a man. The man was dead.
    And he who killed
    was a wroth and jealous kwath.
    This was difficult.
    For the kwath continued to live with the fam
    as if it was a man.
    And fam asked an aldnuk for advice.
    And the advice they were given, they followed. They shared no food with kwath
    and told no stories to kwath.
    And when kwath-that-pretended-to-be-a-man wanted to tell stories
    no-one listened.
    And so it walked away
    over the river to the land of the strangers
    and since then, no-one has heard of it.

    Players and groups developed their own aesthetic.The black face-paint identifies this woman as belonging to Ravnfam. (Play, Li Xin)These texts were also distributed an audiobook, earning us accolades from busy, text-weary and reading-impaired larpers. Every larp should have an audiobook.

    No KoiKoi text has a single author – we wrote collaboratively, online, constantly revising and adding to each others work. We also wrote some 30 myths and stories, and gave each player one, encouraging them to tell it at the larp. That wish was granted: not only did the players tell stories, they also invented new ones. By the end of K oiK oi, the Ankoi Literary Canon contained some 100-150 stories.

    Our language-based approach worked very well for most things: The characters spoke Språk. They believed, intuitively, in signs and portents and taboos and kwath. Their social structure followed the intended “primal anarchism”, though with perhaps a bit too much attention given to the symbolic roles of Great Man and Great Woman in each fam, and the future-telling rites of the nuknuk.

    Gender was tougher. Players easily picked up the notion of gender as (mostly) divorced from biological sex. One female-bodied character went from being a child to being a man at the larp, and was unambiguously accepted as such. But pairings tended towards monogamy and jokes were told based on the premise of “man who always hunts for the beautiful woman”, in direct contradiction of the cultur compendium. While the nuk’s social role (caretakers and shamans) was clear, their gender identity – their sense of self – was not. If you want to tinker with gender, we conclude, you’ll need plenty of workshop time.

    A Ritual Dramaturgy

    But this was a larp about rituals, right? Yes. Yes, it was. We had pre-scripted it to contain 1-2 major rituals (“Rit) each day, as well as innumerable smaller ones. Each rit was described through a minimalistic ritual “recipe”. Had the Christian Mass been described the same way, it would have been : “The priest distributes bread and wine, saying ‘this is the body of Christ, this is the blood of Christ’”. All the singing, prayers and cermons would have been left to improvisation.

    Participants invented and told an estimated 50-100 new myths and legends of the 57 Ankoi people. (Play, Li Xin)We used the workshops to practice such improvisation. The main element of ritual improv – a set of practices that have evolved over the years in the Oslo larp scene – is to cultivate an awareness of the people around you : to listen, sense, feel, and then to act in harmony. Rhythm, movement and chanting all contribute to synchronising people. On top of this, we introduced a system of hand-signs that would allow people to take, use and distribute leadership in the rituals.

    The ritual improv approach was also used when improvising music, of which there was plenty, and in our sex simulation technique.

    Ankoi storytelling was both ritual-like and larp-like: the “audience” would chant along with the storyteller, and the storyteller could use hand-signs to call others to act as the characters of the story. This, we feel, was one of the most successful aspects of the larp design: storytelling became a constant activity, the thing you did when you had nothing else to do, and something some players wanted to continue doing after the larp had ended. Some of the pivotal moments of the larp occurred in the midst of improvised storytelling, as the stories told resonated with the lives of multiple characters and players.

    Practical Production

    One does not simply walk into Finnskogen. It is a vast wilderness – cold and wet, populated by swarms of meat-eating insects, far removed from the nearest hospital. Our pre-larp planning included contingency plans for bear attacks and the purchase of a defibrillator. Neither bear nor heart attacks occurred, but we waged constant war against the meat- eating insects. The location did not have enough buildings for all the fams, so a gang of heroic larpers volunteered to build additional buildings before the larp.

    The Ankoi believes that the mask is wearing the human during a rit. (Play, Li Xin)The main hall, Koi, was transformed into a tribal gathering space by 20 meters of rough tapestry. The three ritual places posed a bigger challenge. We were helped by the large boulders giant kwath had thrown around the area. By decorating them in a mixture of clay and paint, and clearing the bush around, random forest locations were turned into sacred spaces. Each fam was responsible for outfitting their own camp and for most of the food they would need during the game. Observing players in their great costumes, their scenic campsites, preparing elaborate meals, singing, drumming and chanting, being Ankoi – this was our reward as organizers.

    Altogether, KoiKoi was – by the standards of Norwegian larp – a major production, nearly perfectly executed. Had it not been, these other stories could not have been told.

    A Night of Death and Laughter

    We close this organizers’ story by sharing a moment from another, a player’s story. Latter was an aldnuk, an elder nuk and shaman. In the ceremony of Dødrit, Latter was responsible for killing those deemed useless to society and ready to become forkwath, ancestor spirits:

    Dødrit had finally come to an end.As always it had been a night filled with one feeling after another. Ebbe and Dugg had stopped being. Latter had strangled them. They were now forkwath. Walking with the other aldnuk towards Koi, Latter was still holding on to the two white ribbons. They heard singing from Koi. When they arrived Bris threw open the doors and they entered. As others danced around the bonfire in the centre of Koi, Latter sat down on the knees.

    Sometimes bursting into sorrowful moans.The song in the room continued, but changed character.After a while the circle (on its own?) began chanting the names of the deceased: Ebbe, Dugg, Ebbe, Dugg, Ebbe, Dugg… The names of the two aldmen became a melody. Latter, the only ankoi who takes human lives, crept towards the fire on all fours. Screamed, and left.

    Later that night, they sat by the fire at Boarfam. Told lighter stories. Were comforted by their old friend and lover, Wave. Joked. Laughed. Their face still painted with the death mask…

    The three previous days had seen meditation, song, dance, love and birth. By this ritual murder, this final act of loss and cruelty, our tableau of the human condition was complete.


    KoiKoi

    Credits: Margrete Raaum (main organizer + producer), Eirik Fatland and Tor Kjetil Edland (main organizers). Trine Lise Lindahl (writing/concept), Martin Knutsen (production/scenography), Elin Nilsen and Jørn Slemdal (writers). Extended team: Fabe Dalen (costume), Ståle Johansen and Anders Ohlsson (practical), Gaffa Express, (building and derigging), Frode Pettersen and Ørnefam (building), Li Xin (props & photography).
    Date: July 1-5, 2014
    Location: Finnskogen, Norway
    Length: 5 days (4 in-character)
    Players: 75
    Budget: €10,000
    Participation Fee: €90 (€70 under 26)
    Game Mechanics: Minimalist.
    Website: http://koikoilaiv.org/


    This article was initially published in The Nordic Larp Yearbook 2014 which was edited by Charles Bo Nielsen & Claus Raasted, published by Rollespilsakademiet and released as part of documentation for the Knudepunkt 2015 conference.

    Cover photo: Forkwath (ancestral spirits) gathered around one of the sacred boulders. Each clay mask weighed 5kg. (Play, Li Xin). All other photos by Li Xin.

  • Exit 3: The Bunker – Claustro-drama

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    Exit 3: The Bunker – Claustro-drama

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    In July 2014, 30 players in the Netherlands split into two groups of 15 and allowed themselves to be all but locked up during two of the hottest days of the week. They were playing a larp game called Exit, the third installment in a series exploring interpersonal tension in enclosed spaces. This game was situated in the early sixties, in a cold war bomb shelter.

    Like in the previous installments there were no game masters present at all during the run time: all communications to influence the game direction and pacing were given per phone, speaker and a period-like machine made out of a receipt printer. The organizers kept track of the game through cameras and microphones. This way the illusion of being disconnected from the outside world was preserved.

    We were lucky to have two large, separate rooms with facilities. The first Exit was only playable for about 15 participants, with many more regretting not being there. In the second game we tried to fix this by doing two runs back-to-back in one weekend, but that significantly reduced the playtime of each run. This time we decided to do a parallel run of two games, which was challenging, but worked out really well.

    Characters

    Some characters alleviated stress by dancing (Play, Eline S.)The story started when the players awoke on Saturday morning and lasted until late in the afternoon on Sunday, after which there was some time for debriefing. Friday evening was spent socializing and doing some workshops, both for fleshing out character quirks and relationships and for communicating out of game fears and limits, since we know from experience these games can get pretty heated.

    In the previous games we had players send in three one-line concepts, and we would pick the ones that we thought best contributed to the overall drama and let them flesh those out.

    This time the characters would not meet for the first time when the game started; they were already part of a close-knit community. That called for a somewhat different approach.

    We did again not have pre-written characters, but we did have pre-written roles in the cast: there was an upper class family, a working class family, a childless couple, an outsider couple (players could choose why those two did not fit in), a lone weirdo in the house on the corner and three coincidental passers-by, who were the most unrestricted in making their concept.

    We cast everybody in one of these roles while allowing for their preferences, and then had them make online connections with the players of their families and neighbors on their own. To make sure that people had intersecting secrets we gave all the players two Dread-style questions, like „what are you hiding in the attic?“, thus establishing the existence of secrets without deciding on the nature of those secrets.

    Setting

    Making sure the tech works smoothly is important in the Exit series (Play, Evolution Events)The comparison with the Nordic larp Ground Zero is pretty easy to make, but apart from the setting the games are probably pretty different in intention and feel.

    In Exit, it was pretty clear from the beginning that there was no massive nuclear attack going on outside. Instead of that we opted for an apparent virus outbreak: the players could just wait for it to be over. The reason is that we did not want to explore the narrative of coming to terms with one’s imminent death and the loss of civilization. Instead, the Exit series has so far always been pretty Sartrian: the overarching theme is how the dynamics of a group of people are affected by a stressful situation. The answer, it turns out, is that those groups become pretty dysfunctional after a while.

    Mind you, we would of course never dare claim that the Exit series provides actual insights in that regard. There are not many full-weekend one-shot events in the Netherlands, so most people take their chance to try the concepts they always wanted to try but think unworkable for an ongoing series.

    That means the cast usually consists of an over-average amount of characters in extreme situations or with extreme opinions in terms of status, religion, sexuality etc. This is in no way discouraged by us, and it does contribute to a more volatile situation and thus, more drama. On top of that people of course aim to escalate instead of subdue their conflicts. They know that a secret that is still a secret at the end of the game is a missed chance.

    There was plenty of time for small player-made storylines like these two men pursuing the same young lady (Play, Eline S.)This time the players really went all out in including typical Sixties themes like the communist scare, emerging feminism and the American Dream. But there was also a lot of emphasis on more personal stories of addiction, betrayal, missed chances and shattered dreams. Some people had secrets as a family, others had deliberately kept things from their loved ones, like the mother in an upper class family who dabbled in witchcraft, or the young woman who had an affair with the man next door.

    Sometimes small props and gestures add a lot to the atmosphere: propaganda posters, flags, and food that added to the feeling of being in a shelter: boxes of canned food (including the rather dreaded canned bread) that the players of course had to prepare themselves. We played the Star Spangled Banner multiple times over the radio, and put the text on the wall of the bunker so everyone could sing along. The players couldn’t get it out of their heads for days afterwards.

    Player Input

    Characters discussing an inventory list: a small task to create tension (Play, Ork de Rooij)The few points for improvement that were mentioned by player reviews were mainly about the fact that we had no planned moments for escalation, no specific moments for the players to take the spotlight. Some of them would have liked something to encourage them to find the right moment.

    We deliberately chose not to do that. The reason is that we like to keep Exit easy to organize so we can create an episode every year alongside our other organizational duties, and writing a plot instead of just inciting incidents would increase this workload. But also because of the fact, that for every one of the three Exits we have decreased the amount of organizer input and have exchanged it with encouraging players to create conflict and play through their characters. We are curious to see what happens as we do that.

    The first Exit actually had a plot of sorts, the second one had challenges for the players, and both worked with a system where they had to collect, or fight over, tokens that seemed essential to their characters’ success. This Exit had none of that, there were only some radio fragments and a protocol for the bunker with things like physical exercises and other drills that the characters could perform.

    The content that we provided was very well received, especially the radio speeches by the president (some nice amalgams of actual Kennedy quotes), but there was not much of it and most of the time the players were left to their own devices.We were happy to notice that it still worked.

    The dimmed lights and concrete gave the room a bunker-like feel (Play, Eline S.)We are still looking for the perfect way to challenge players towards making great secrets and connections, and to make sure they do not leave this step until the last few days.

    Maybe more and better workshops are the answer, or those workshops might even provide an alternative character creation process.

    We did workshopping for the first time for this Exit. This is another possible point of improvement. The organizers were not very familiar with workshops outside of the usual improv exercises to get warmed up for playing. Something that didn’t help is that one of the organizers who dug into the workshopping aspect has the most unfortunate habit of not writing stuff down, and got sick so she could not be there for the game.

    Overall the players were positive about workshops on Friday, but the nature of the workshops could use some improvements.

    Reflections

    The many camera’s allowed the storytellers to see whether players followed instructions (Play, Evolution Events)The previous two installments of Exit took place in a medical research centre and a Big Brother style camera house, respectively. In each one we tweaked different aspects of the game. We plan to keep doing this for a long time to come, after all there are many more interesting closed settings, from prisons to space stations.

    Exit 3 was the first (but possibly not the last) installment exploring an actual historical period. The fact that Exit attracts mature players who expect drama makes it an easy try-out space for new ideas.

    Another thing that was different this time, as mentioned before, is the fact that most characters already knew each other. This worked really well to immediately create tension. On the other hand there is something to say for being in a tough situation with strangers as well. We may have to alternate in the future.

    A few weeks after the game I was discussing it with a player. I expressed my surprise at the fact that there are not more people in the Netherlands who run concepts like Exit, since it can create good, original games without too much organizing hassle. He said he could imagine that other people wouldn’t want to do all the hard work of matching and tweaking all those characters together so that the drama would maximize. He found it hard to imagine we didn’t.

    And it made me proud to have inspired such a talented cast of players to create such an intense experience amongst themselves. We told them to create their own backgrounds, their own secrets to be exposed and just go nuts. And nuts they went.


    Exit 3: The Bunker

    Credits: Evolution Events, René van den Berg, Karijn van der Heij, Brenda Hellenthal, Matthijs Kooijman, Cora Korsman (shared responsibility for game design, character creation assistance and game logistics)
    Date: July 25 – 27, 2014
    Location: Hunsel, The Netherlands
    Length: 3 days
    Players: 30 in total (two groups of 15 playing simultaneously)
    Budget: €1,800
    Participation Fee: €55
    Game Mechanics: Freeform larp with almost no game mechanics
    Website: http://evolution-events.nl/algemeen


    This article was initially published in The Nordic Larp Yearbook 2015 published by Rollespilsakademiet and edited by Charles Bo Nielsen, Erik Sonne Georg, et al.

    Cover photo: Sometimes a room needs little more dressing than a flag and player costumes will do the rest (Play, Ork de Rooij)

    Other photos by Evolution Events and Eline S.

  • De la Bête – An Expensive Beast

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    De la Bête – An Expensive Beast

    The beast I saw resembled a leopard, but had feet like those of a bear and a mouth like that of a lion. The dragon gave the beast his power and his throne and great authority.

    Revelations, 13:2, the Bible (New International Version)

    De la Bête (About the Beast) was a larp for 95 players, running over 48 hours, with 12 hours workshops before and some extra three hours post-larp workshops.

    It was probably the most expensive game in the history of Czech larps. We will go more into detail about size and realizations about using gender specific characters in the end. But first: What was the larp all about?

    Background and Theme

    For a Czech person, old France, the ‘Ancien Régime’, is always a place of great books and great stories. Dumas ́s brave Three musketeers, de La Fontaine ́s social critique and wisdom transformed into fables, and Balzac ́s fervent drive to describe all aspects of life in his novels, intrigue and romance of de Laclos ́s Dangerous liaisons. And of course Moliére ́s drama and the great works of Rousseau and Voltaire.

    Our imagination is maybe even more fired up by real-life events: the legend of Joan of Arc, countless stories of endless rivalry between France and Britain and the horrifying difference between the splendor of Versailles and the poverty of the common man.

    We feel that all those stories describe the human condition from really interesting angles – and we found the one story that enabled us to pull all that together in one story.

    The story of the Beast.

    Setting

    Huguenot service, viewed from the roof of the chapel. (Play, Ondra Pěnička)The game is not set in a specific year, but rather it attempts to depict the height of the French Ancien Régime in the second half of the 18th century as a historical phenomenon.

    That means that the absolutist and infallible King of France is Louis, without a given number. Technical innovations progress only very slowly, the Church plays a very important role in matters of the world, and volunteers are returning from the war in America.

    The key theme of the game is a conflict between different ways of thought. We see the collision between rationality and sensitivity, scientific and superstitious views, Catholics and Huguenots.

    These and other lines reflect one of the game’s features – it has several layers of interpretation, which are, from a strictly positivist point of view, mutually exclusive.

    Most events in the game can therefore be viewed from several different angles – and all of them can be right. After adding the element of character themes to the game, this feature proved to be very valuable, and the varying interpretations stimulated the game, rather than killing it.

    The setting also clearly showed how the advantage of having weapons which the characters could use in conflicts that turned bloody; these being blank firing pistols and steel weapons – mostly different kinds of knives, swords and rapiers, provided by us.

    Story

    While the rest of the town is feasting, there is a secret mass in the church... (Play, Ondra Pěnička)The game does not have one story that unifies all the players. It takes place in a region suffering under the attacks of the Beast, and although many plots are linked to the hunt for the Beast, many others, based on religious conflicts, witchcraft or schemes at the court, are just as important to the game.

    The game begins and ends with symbolic moments (return of the veterans from the war, a speech by the baron de Morsange, followed by individual epilogues, which we will discuss later in more detail). It is divided into acts which outline the game’s framework, both from the point of view of rules (increasing use of violence) and the story. The game works not only with natural escalation of the stories and their setting by us, but also with explicit meta-game information – some of the conflicts, decisions etc. are limited by “You have to solve this before XY”.

    This timing allows for quite sophisticated work with the game’s dramaturgy, and very accurate use of plot twists, fakes, double climaxes, etc. In the third run, we also solved the dramaturgic problem of many dramatic games: too many plots reaching their peak in the same time almost leads to comedy, where a tragic love story reaches its climax right next to a young scientist turning mad, while only a few meters away, an unjustly sentenced convict decides to take his revenge.

    To players who do not know their plots this naturally seems like random groups of people who are suddenly making dramatic gestures and dying in various ways, without any reason. Our solution used more significant stratification of the content, which caused some plots to reach their climax sooner than others.

    The fact that one character always had a role in more than one plot meant that even after the end of one plot the players still had enough content to keep their game going, because they could engage in another plot. We have also changed our approach to scenography and attempted to use the space as effectively as possible, offering various spaces for various uses to the players.

    We actively promoted suitable locations for different types of scenes, and from the beginning the players were informed of that: “This romantic pond can be used for a rendezvous, this courtyard for a duel and this table for an argument.” We also tried to support the story’s progress using musical intermezzos between acts, which moved from period tunes (introductory cheerful military march, deliberately used to create contrast with the destitute unit) to unsettling modern ambient.

    The lack of a central story served to untie our hands in many aspects, and we were able to work with three levels of plots (according to the number of characters involved):

    1. Mass plots, concerning tens of characters, based on a specific feature – for example a problem concerning all local Huguenots. These plots provided more of a framework and points of reference: in reality, the players did not spend that much time with them, and the emphasis was on the other two categories.
    2. Group plots, which were meant for groups of 4 to 8 players, from obvious and official (families, hunting groups), to unofficial ones (gambling societies, collectives of veterans) and secret ones (conspiratorial organizations). The goal was to have every character involved in at least 3 – 5 such plots (depending on their intensity – being a member of the Freemasons generated a lot of content in itself). Various private groups were meant to provide sufficient interconnection between character groups and create a believable, and above all interesting network of relationships, which allowed the player to see different parts of the game and play out scenes in different contexts.
    3. Personal plots, which included a small number of characters. This category included personal goals and motivations of the characters, which correspond to the characters’ themes if possible, and support them. The theme of a character was the most significant game design element of De la Bête.

    The market gave a chance to swap goods, information and favors. (Play, Ondra Pěnička)

    The Character As a Novel

    Each character has its theme, problem, and main question that is usually phrased in a rather general way: “What boundaries does scientific knowledge have?”, “What does it mean to become an adult?”. These are reflected in concrete situations in the game: “Is it morally tolerable to carry out an autopsy, though the relatives are against it?”, “Can I steal to provide for my siblings?”.

    The theme also provides the main interpretative angle of the game: everything the players encounter in the game can be integrated in their theme, or overlooked because it does not support their story.

    An important creative shift for us was to explicitly acknowledge the theme on a meta-level, right in the character text. The text of the role, which the player received, contained a brief summary of the character’s life story, clearly stated goals, relationships, and values, and an explicitly described theme of the character.

    Apart from that we also added a song to each character, which served as an inspiration and which we thought depicted some aspect of the role (we used a great variety of songs and tunes, from classical music, to Stairway to Heaven, to Polish and French mutations of Still Alive from Portal).

    This approach to the characters also significantly influenced the ways the game was played. Inclusion of individual scenes into one’s own story led to a situation when emotional scenes are not perceived as the pinnacle of the game, but rather the scene submits to the general storyline, which conforms to a general message and meaning.

    The game style, which presented individual scenes as means to piece together the story and let the whole game be interpreted through the prism of a character theme, was completely new in the Czech Republic. We will later present a more detailed explanation of how it was created in a specialized article, The cure for the stuffed Beast. But for now, the key factor for the game was that this style of gameplay did not require any kind of sophisticated training – only an outline of the general direction for the players during the workshops.

    During the game itself, there was a specially designated room in the pub in which the players had the possibility to consult with organizers. The organizers were trained for this purpose, had a complex overview of the game, and also performed basic evaluations of the players’ mental state and problems (we assign great importance to mental hygiene).

    The players were openly instructed to visit them at least once every act, to talk about their plans and options, or at least to reflect on how they had progressed in the game using the available information, additional texts and such. The idea was to get detached from the role for a short time, in order to come back to the game with a better idea how to advance and perhaps even a new perspective.

    The epilogues, which concluded the game, have the form of one clearly phrased question which the player answers not from the point of view of their character, but rather the author of a novel. These questions were not necessarily the same as in the original text of the theme in the character sheet, but they could address the theme from an unexpected angle.

    It is answering these questions that really ends the game. A secondary goal of this system of game conclusion is to support an important design plan: we tried to write the characters without using classical archetypes or dramatically functional division to good and bad, or one-dimensional. We used the system of varying groups and plots to show different sides of the characters’ personalities, and a void one-sided archetypes, such as “mother”, “mistress”, “murderer”, etc.

    Realization

    Nothing says "intrigue" like soldiers holding a lantern. (Play, Ondra Pěnička)We spent quite a long time deciding whether it would be reasonable to write a game from a period, where costumes would create a challenge for most players. In the end we decided to avoid the problem by providing all costumes, weapons and other props for the game.

    Despite the non-simulationist nature of the game, we decided to invest as much effort as possible into the setting, props and scenery. The logical result was to create three organizer teams, connected by two main organizers and other links.

    The PR team was involved in communicating with the players, promotion, photographers, managing payments and so on.

    The realization team had four permanent members, who worked together with the creative team throughout the whole year. Their responsibilities included creating props, coordinating volunteers, logistics and production. At times, there were over fifty volunteers participating on the production of the event.

    For maximal optimization, we had ten people dedicated to scene setting, cooking and packing up the game throughout the whole weekend, and a number of others, who were involved only for some time (players, working before and after the game for a discount on the fee, stagehands, who went off to play a short-term role for a while, and vice versa).

    From the point of view of total costs, it was probably the most expensive game in the history of Czech larps, with the total costs slightly exceeding one million crowns. The only game with higher costs is the forthcoming larp The Legion: A Siberian Story. But it was well received, though costly, and we plan to run the game again in 2015.

    We are considering translating it into English, and if there are enough players interested in participating, we would start working on it in March.

    The game uses a vast amount of texts, and requires high-quality literary translation.

    Size

    The time for the game itself is 48 hours, adding approximately 12 hours for pre-game workshops and half an hour for the compulsory after-game workshops, and potentially also 2 hours for facultative after-game workshops.

    The game is for 95 players, with 57 male characters and 38 female ones. Our choice to use strictly set gender of roles was quite instinctive: it is completely traditional in the Czech Republic, and during the first phases of creating the game, the thought of the possibility of using gender unspecified or cross-gender roles didn’t even occur to us.

    Reasons for gender specification of roles:

    We still believe that dividing the characters into clearly male and female ones and lack of cross-gender playing is important for the game and for us, for reasons concerning not only the historical setting and costumes that we provide for the game.

    There are many multigenerational family plots in the game, and we aim to present stories of people who go beyond the place traditionally assigned to them by society.

    Uncovering of a conspiracy results in public trial. (Play, Ondra Pěnička)These themes are especially strong with women, who for instance take a strong stance against their family and the demands that it places on them (e.g. an illegitimate daughter de Portefaix, hardly tolerated at the court), become significant moral authorities (e.g. Claire Gravois, a saint), or disturb the order of the society in general (e.g. the galley prisoners – it should be mentioned here, that the inner social order of the galleys includes two male prisoners, who are, however, at the bottom of the prison hierarchy).

    We see these kinds of stories as substantially more interesting and natural in the game when the roles are clearly identified as male or female. We have dismissed the option of casting female players for roles of men and vice versa for the above mentioned reasons, and in order to maintain the visual illusion of a historical world.

    Conclusion

    De la Bête is a game, which tries to connect classic larp elements (including action, shooting, fencing and running around) with novels (including romance, mystery stories and huge family sagas) and philosophy (attempting to depict a great number of contemporary schools of thought, which we see as interesting and topical even in the present).

    And we think that when the Beast howls in the forest, even we, the authors, will shiver for a long time to come…


    De la Bête

    Credits: Adam Pešta (chief of production); David František Wagner (chief of game design and writing); Kamil Buchtík, Ondřej Hartvich, Lucie Chlumská, Mikuláš Pešta, Petr Turoň (game design and writing); Alice Ďurčatová, Slaven Elčić, Iva Vávrová (PR); Tomáš Bazala, Eva Mlejnková (costumes); Vít Filipovský (website); Alena Kučerová (accounting); Michal Olbert (pre-game photos); Rosenthal o.s., Rolling and another 30 people.
    Location: Valeč castle, Czech republic
    Length: 2 days + 1 day of pre-larp
    Players: 95 per game
    Budget: €12,000 per run
    Participation Fee: €65 – €95
    Game Mechanics: Pre-scripted characters, pre game workshops, rules for combat, act structure
    Website: http://delabete.cz/


    This article was initially published in The Nordic Larp Yearbook 2014 which was edited by Charles Bo Nielsen & Claus Raasted, published by Rollespilsakademiet and released as part of documentation for the Knudepunkt 2015 conference.

    Cover photo: Philosopher stands trial (Play, Ondra Pěnička).

  • Brudpris

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    Brudpris

    Honor. Love. Patriarchy

    The Game

    Rune family, Katrin, Hilda, Rune, Terje (Post-game, Anna-Karin Linder Krauklis)Brudpris (Bridal Price) is set in Berge, a rural village in the fictional Mo culture. The culture of Mo is inspired by Nordic rural 19th century aesthetics. They live isolated from the outside world according to their strict patriarchal honor culture.

    The culture of Mo requires every adult person to show control and restriction. Mo believe women carry a potentially dangerous force inside them – the Force of Life. If harnessed, this power will grant them children and allow the Mo people to live on. However, if women are not controlled by the men of Mo, the Mo people believe this power will destroy their land in a blaze of fire and chaos. The chaos within every woman can be stronger or weaker, but it is always there. Therefore, every woman must be the responsibility of an adult man, who will make sure her behaviour doesn’t endanger Mo.

    The story in Brudpris revolves around the young boys and girls who are ready to leave the relative freedom of childhood behind and step into their respective roles as adults. Their fathers will find suitable partners for them, and every young woman will be married to a man who, from then onwards will be responsible for her. For the girls, this means an end to freedom; for the boys, the beginning of a crushing responsibility.

    Design Note

    The men, eating breakfast, separate from the women (Play, Simon Svensson)The original idea for Brudpris was to ‘turn up the volume’ on real world gender roles to make visible social norms and cultural practices we rarely notice in our real lives or would attribute to our own culture.

    We chose the Nordic historical inspired setting to avoid creating an ‘otherfication’ effect. Had we, for example, chosen to set the larp in a setting close to what we as westerners consider to be ‘typical honor culture’ countries, we would not only have had severe problems navigating some cultural appropriation dilemmas, but also risked making it look like “these people are not like us” – which was the opposite of what we wanted.

    Katrin is shaking after the forgiving-ritual. Hilda leads her beloved little sister into their tent where Katrin breaks down and starts crying. Hilda holds her and feels her own tears burning behind her eyelids, but she does not cry, just comforts her sister and dries her tears.

    You did so well says Hilda, You did not cry out there where others could have seen! She corrects her sister’s head scarf and gives her a smile before they exit the tent again. Hilda walks with a straight back. She is a woman of Mo.

    Siri Sandqvist, player

    The meal is finished. The wife, Runa, says: Tonight is the last night we dine together as a family. The sky, the moon and the heavens fall on Lars. But instead of showing this, he asks: Does anybody want some more water? Each member of his family replies with a nod. No words. No tears. It simply isn’t done in public in this family. They seek each other’s eyes, giving hints of their true feelings behind the facade. Still, the time they have left together isn’t enough. Not even close. Lars remembers he must get more water: Empty glasses look bad. He rises and imagines how his heart is left on the floor when he walks away. To feel and not allow yourself to show it. To love and not be allowed to say it.

    Anders Ohlson, player

    For the people of Mo, living a respectable and good life is about control and order. The patriarchs of the families are the carriers of both their own and their family’s honor. Everything their family members do will reflect on them. Most families have a little more leeway in private, away from the eyes of others. Internal struggles are common, but no family would willingly expose these problems to others.

    Design Note

    Another design challenge was explaining and using honor as a design feature. Although most are familiar with the term honor culture, we knew that the full meaning of honor, and the impact it has, would be hard to communicate to the players. For this reason we chose to create a religious explanation as to why women had to be controlled and why men had to take responsibility for them. This was the Force of Life. It gave a reason why it was important to control women’s behaviour. As a natural consequence, women in this culture had the sexual initiative, since men were expected to control both their own and their wife’s sexual drive.

    We also wanted to make clear that the honor culture of Mo was not a matter of personal choice or preference for the characters. It was integrated in every aspect of life, and going against the cultural norm would ha ve severe social consequences. Brudpris is chamber drama where the family unit is the focus of everyone’s play. Every family has secrets that can cause a public scandal if they are revealed. The feeling of constant pressure is kept by making public outbursts costly for everyone involved. Public scandals always have severe consequences. And if it is a woman who shames her husband, father or brother, she might be beaten publicly. Or in the worst case even killed.

    The men watched each other, or they believed the other men watched them. At no point could a man show his true feelings or show any sign of weakness without losing face in front of his peers. For me, this was one of the hardest parts: To be forced to do terrible things, while not being allowed to share it with anyone in Mo. In the game setting, this was normal and part of the responsibility of being a man.

    Mads Dehlholm Holst, player

    The Keips are the third gender of the Mo culture, recruited from boys who either fails the manhood test, or who don’t want to become men. The Keips are the only ones who can talk freely to anyone they wish; they play a key part in making the Mo culture function as a whole, crossing the social and cultural firewalls between men and women.

    This culture makes for a slow and quiet gameplay. Players rarely show ‘big’ emotions; the drama is played out with discreet gestures instead of obvious ones. Things are said with gazes, a discreet touch, a mumbled word of comfort, a quiet tear that is quickly wiped away.

    All the women beg forgiveness for their behaviour the night before. (Ritual) (Play, Simon Svensson)

    It was a terrible experience on many levels, this was really the quintessential nordic larp self-traumatizing emotional masochism that we all love and celebrate. But not a gratuitous one, like many strong games it had a basis in reality, that crept up on you afterwards and made you realize new things about people in the world.

    Oliver Nøglebæk, player: excerpt from Play report

    Forgive us. You had no way of changing your life. For your sake – and mine – I will make my own life different.
    You are just 34 years old and have many more years to live. I’m also 34, but my life is vastly different from yours and I will not let it go to waste.

    The only thing I want to keep with me from your life, is how your lust was so simple and powerful. It was probably the only positive thing about Mo. I will not be ashamed or let the culture – my culture, in the real world – turn me into a sexual object.

    Sofia Stenler, player: excerpt from Letter to Dina

    Some larp experiences you carry with you as not just a memory, but physically in your body. For me that is what happened after Brudpris. My character Hilda was a young woman. She was mature for her age and perfectly adapted to the violent honor culture she had grown up in.

    It was easy, comfortable even, to slip into her subdued body language and thought patterns. It was like an amplified version of my own teenage insecurities. And after the larp I felt that it was hard to move quickly and act out; my mind had also been partly absorbed by her. I still can’t feel hatred towards the men who mistreated her, I just feel love.

    Love because the violence was proof that she was loved and cared for. A Stockholm Syndrome so strong, it still lingers long after the larp is over.

    Siri Sandqvist, player

    And yet, that alluring lack of responsibility for my choices, that wish to be carried, that fear of talking and laughing too much, all resurfaced in you and moved you to give up everything.

    I wish it all had come from you (Beatrice) – because I certainly didn’t want to find that in me. I’m sorry.

    Annika Waern, player: excerpt from Letter to Beatrice

    Design Note

    Grownups in the Gere family: Dina, Gere, Aina (Post-game, Anna-Karin Linder Krauklis)We can’t be sure if this is the first game designed with honor as its main design feature, but we can tell that we sure didn’t have many examples to look at. We wondered at several instances if this larp was playable at all, or if the extreme imbalance in player agency would make it entirely dysfunctional. Regardless, we knew the game would put pressure on both the male and female cast.

    We wanted the (players who played) men to be powerful, and the (players who played) women to be close to powerless. Still, one must not believe we designed this game only for misery. We wanted to balance the horror and injustice by adding love, desire, affection, music and dancing. We wanted characters and families to feel relatable, like real people.

    Brudpris is a game that will stay with us a long time. Seen from our eyes as organizers, it was both gut-wrenchingly sorrowful and soberly beautiful, horribly cruel and heartwarmingly human. And although we put as much dedication as we could into the game design and preparations, it is the players who made the vision come to life.Their dedication to this game, their characters and each other have been complete. It is by far the best reward a larp organizer can get.

    Anna-Karin Linder Krauklis and Carolina Dahlberg, organizers and writers

    Brudpris

    Credits: Anna-Karin, Carolina Dahl- berg, Tor Kjetil Edland (producer) and Trine Lise Lindahl (producer)
    Date: September 17 – 21, 2014
    Location: Vestmarka, Norway
    Length: 3 days
    Players: 50
    Budget: €6,000
    Participation Fee: €110 (normal) €75 (youth)
    Game Mechanics: Minimal. In-game cultural rules.
    Website: http://brudpris.wordpress.com


    This article was initially published in The Nordic Larp Yearbook 2014 which was edited by Charles Bo Nielsen & Claus Raasted, published by Rollespilsakademiet and released as part of documentation for the Knudepunkt 2015 conference.

    Cover photo: Jan and Eskil in a conversation (Play, Simon Svensson). Other photos by Simon Svensson and Anna-Karin Linder Krauklis.

  • Baltic Warriors: Helsinki

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    Baltic Warriors: Helsinki

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    Saving the Environment with Zombies

    Characters listening during the debate. (Play, Sarita Sharma)Tourists are standing in the queue for the Ferris wheel. Some are eating ice cream. Suddenly two viking zombies, covered in seaweed, shamble from behind the ticket booth. They stumble and crawl to reach the higher platform of the popup cafe. The zombies ignore the tourists and other bystanders, because they’re not players.

    There’s a public discussion of the state of the Baltic Sea going on in the cafe. There are politicians, activists and lobbyists arguing what should be done to save the Baltic Sea from an imminent ecological catastrophe, and who should do it. This is the larp.

    At first, the characters look at the zombies in confusion, but after the first couple are infected, panic ensues. As one of the organizers, I scramble around picking up purses, shoes and other items the players drop during their impressive zombification scenes. The zombie victims are rushed into makeup so they too can join the undead horde, and I take personal items to the back room of the cafe for safekeeping.

    Baltic Warriors: Helsinki was the first in a hopefully longer series of political larps about environmental issues related to the Baltic Sea, and especially to the way oxygen depletion in the water can lead to “dead zones” in which nothing lives. These are caused by many different things, but one culprit is industrial agriculture.

    This and future larps are part of the wider Baltic Warriors transmedia project. The creative outline of the project is by Mike Pohjola. He was also the principal designer for this larp, with some help from me. The Baltic Warriors project is a complicated international co-production, steered by the German film company Kinomaton.

    Baltic Warriors: Helsinki was played at the Allas popup cafe on the Helsinki waterfront on the 30th of August, 2014.

    Zombies

    Viking zombie design by Julius Sepponen (left) of Make Up For Ever Academy Finland. (Play, Juhana Pettersson)In 2011, I published an article called The Necessary Zombie in one of that year’s Knudepunkt books, Talk Larp. I argued that even an experimental larp must have some elements that are familiar to the participants, and that they are comfortable with. It’s hard to be creative if all the elements of the game feel foreign and opaque. I called this familiar element the Necessary Zombie because zombies are one example of an element familiar to most. We all know what to do in a zombie game.

    I never really expected to end up actually making a game with zombies, necessary or otherwise, but in the spring of 2014, I was asked to join the organizing team of Baltic Warriors. My job was to act as a larp producer in the context of the wider transmedia work.

    The Necessary Zombie has more to do with Baltic Warriors than just the zombies. Baltic Warriors is a political creative project, and that means it’s supposed to reach people. As transmedia projects tend to do, it consists of many different kinds of media operating on different levels. Some are national or international, and others, such as larp, are local.

    In Pohjola’s larp design, the zombie is meant to liven up an otherwise dry subject, and to make the game easier to approach for the participants. It also acts as a blunt metaphor. In our fiction, the Dead Zones forming and growing in the Baltic Sea would make long-dead viking warriors rise from their watery graves as terrifying undead monsters seeking to attack the living. In the game, the political debate was cut short by the attack of the viking zombies.

    This went into the heart of the political analysis underlying our game: Everyone agrees that something should be done to help the Baltic Sea.

    Yet very little is happening. If this continues, soon it will be too late. Too much talk, too little action, and the viking zombies will get you. Or the damage to the sea will be so severe, it can’t be fixed.

    Risks

    The Finnish Minister of the Environment in the post-game panel discussion. (Post-game, Miia Laine)In its first game, the Baltic Warriors project was following ideas about rapid prototyping and iterative game design championed by Eirik Fatland and Bjarke Pedersen, as well as following my own experiences in the use of a test game to help with the design of the larp Halat hisar. The basic idea is pretty simple: Since larp is relatively cheap and easy to produce, why not try out ideas in smaller games before committing resources and time?

    This attitude also encourages taking creative risks. Will it work? We’ll see! It’s a test game. We also had a reason to run a test game that went beyond the demands of the game itself. The transmedia nature of the wider Baltic Warriors project demands that we document the larps thoroughly. In the test game, our documentary crew would get valuable experience with how to shoot larp.

    The location was provided by one of the partners, the Korjaamo cultural center. As a larp space, the open-air cafe was pretty much the opposite of private: In addition to our documentation team and reporters and photographers from various media, there were tourists and random passersby. Indeed, this was part of the design. You could jump into the game after a brief talk with an organizer.

    It was supposed to work so that you’d get a short instant-character, a couple of pointers about what you could do, and you’d be ready to start playing. You were a citizen, a version of yourself, who had come to the meeting to air some of your own concerns about the state of the Baltic Sea.

    Unfortunately, this was one of the parts of the game that didn’t really work. We only had two people who did this. One of them managed to become part of the game, the other didn’t until the zombie attack, which had a democratizing effect.

    Baltic Warriors is the second political larp project I’ve been involved in, after Halat hisar. In both cases, using the game to get media attention for the issues has been a part of the overall strategy of the project. Getting media interest for a game is really about how good a story it makes. Halat hisar was easy to publicize: Palestinian larp in Finland is a good story. Baltic Warriors was not especially difficult, but definitely harder than Halat hisar had been. It didn’t have an exceptional hook, which meant it had to compete with all other newsworthy events and cultural happenings going on at the same time.

    We got a few mentions on radio and local news, and one really nice article and video in Helsingin Sanomat, the biggest newspaper in Helsinki. I only later found out how this had come to be: through relentless badgering of the paper, by many different people in our organizing group.

    Organizer Mike Pohjola being interviewed by Helsingin Sanomat during the larp. (Play, Juhana Pettersson)

    The Participants

    During the production we joked that we had more partner organizations than we had players. The punchline was that this was literally true. Of course, this was because our small game was the pilot for a big project. It had the support structure of a much more ambitious production.

    Our system for who played in the game was somewhat chaotic. We had a public sign up, we invited players, we had people just show up, and at the very last minute, many of the people from the organizations we worked with decided to play. This proved to be a very good thing: Larp is hard to grasp if you don’t try, but when you do try, its power becomes manifest. In complicated transmedia projects, it’s good that the people who are involved understand and appreciate the form.

    As a result, we had a strange player base: Some were larpers who knew how to make game but didn’t have a lot of personal experience with environmental politics. Others were professional activists who were new to larp but knew the subject of the game very well.

    At least in my estimation, this combination worked well, with larpers helping to make the game work and the newcomers giving it some authenticity.

    In practice, we tried to cast characters so that there would be mixed groups. For example, a larper could play a politician and an activist could play her assistant. We planned the characters so that the politician in this scenario would be more of a “face” character, and the assistant more of an “action” character.

    Some of the participants were given characters who were the opposite of who they were in real life. For example, one activist player had a business lobbyist character. A participant who was a real business lobbyist got a character who was an environmental activist.

    I believe that most people can larp pretty well on their first try, especially in a game with experienced players. That’s how it went this time too. It was fun especially because some of the players from the partner organizations were of an older generation. It gave the game verisimilitude. After the game, we held a public discussion about the issues raised in the game. The idea was that it would be good to show how things were in the real world: What was fiction, and what was true. In the panel discussion, one of the participants was the Finnish Minister of the Environment at that time, Ville Niinistö.

    Unfortunately, we couldn’t get him to play in the larp itself.

    The Attack

    Organizer Juhana Pettersson (left) and a participant during the debrief. (Post-game, Miia Laine)The political debates of the game ended in a pre-designed non sequitur: The zombie attack. We had briefed players about this beforehand. Practicing the rules had doubled as a warm-up exercise before the game started. What had until that point been a very social, discussion-oriented game suddenly turned into everyone running around the place trying to complete the ritual to banish the zombies.

    If the players managed to carry enough clean water in their hands to the ritual location, they would win. If not, the zombies would win.

    Trying to care for clean water was a game mechanic, and according to player feedback, it worked on a conceptual level.

    The zombies were a structural choice I had been a little worried about, because on a story level, it was kind of random. It proved to work in practice, though, probably because it gave the game an action- oriented, fun ending. The characters could only survive by working together to achieve a common goal. That was a good thing to finish with.


    Baltic Warriors: Helsinki

    Credits: Mike Pohjola (Design), Juhana Pettersson (Additional design and production), Sarita Sharma (Production), Harmke Heezen & Miia Laine (Production Assistance), Julius Sepponen & Make Up For Ever Academy Finland (Zombie Effects), (Film documentation), Kinomaton Berlin & Made Partners: Goethe Institute, Baltic Sea Action Group, Korjaamo, Helsingin kaupunki, Finnland-istitut in Deutschland, AVEK, Medienboard, Berlin-Brandenburg, Media, Filmförderung Hamburg Schleswig- Holstein, Nipkow Programm, EsoDoc (Production)
    Date: August 30, 2014
    Location: Helsinki, Finland
    Length: 3 hours
    Players: 20
    Budget: €1,000
    Participation Fee: none
    Game Mechanics: First minimal, then light zombie mechanics
    Website: http://balticwarriors.net


    This article was initially published in The Nordic Larp Yearbook 2014 which was edited by Charles Bo Nielsen & Claus Raasted, published by Rollespilsakademiet and released as part of documentation for the Knudepunkt 2015 conference.

    Cover photo: Participants discuss the game while a member of our film crew records sound (Pre-game, Juhana Pettersson). Other photos by Miia Laiene and Juhana Pettersson.