When cast in a relationship with another player, — meaning any kind of relationship, such as family, friendship, enmity etc., as well as romantic/sexual relationships — it is customary (but usually not mandatory) to reach out and calibrate before the larp. At times like these, there are a few questions I usually ask my co-player. A friend recently mentioned that she found my questions very helpful, and always used them when calibrating. At first I thought that they were nothing special, probably everyone used questions more or less the same? But, pre-game calibration definitely is a skill that can be developed and refined, just like most other parts of larp. So, perhaps in this text you can find some tool that will help you in your pre-game calibrations.
These questions are based on a larp designed with a Nordic, collaborative playstyle, prewritten characters and prewritten relationships. Usually, characters are available for all players to read, and it is common to read at least parts of your co-players’ character descriptions. The questions work for other design choices as well, but may have to be adapted accordingly.
It is of course not necessary or expected that you always ask all of these questions every time you do pre-game calibrations with someone. They are to be considered as a tool-box, and you yourself will notice which ones will seem most useful, depending what larp you are going to, what kind of relationship you have been cast in, and what you know about your co-player beforehand.
Question: How much time and energy do you have for calibration, and what methods of communicating work best for you?
Why it is useful to ask: Some people have very busy lives, and many larps lined up. Others have a lot of time, and want to spend weeks or months planning and discussing play. Calibrate this first, and try to find what works for both of you. If there is less time and energy, you might have to focus on only the most important questions.
Question: What are your hopes and wishes for this larp?
Why it is useful to ask: This will give you the chance to understand your co-player better: their playstyle, why they signed up for this particular larp and what kinds of scenes they enjoy. It may also offer insights into how you can create rewarding play for them within the character relationship.
Question: What is your understanding of the relationship between our characters?
Why it is useful to ask: An important early step is to have a shared idea of what kind of relationship you are going to be portraying. This is especially relevant if you have not been reading the same texts (e.g. if you have only been reading your own character descriptions, and the relationship described from their point of view). But even reading exactly the same texts, interpretations may vary. If you do not have the same idea about what the characters’ relationship is (at least at the start of the larp), it may make things much more frustrating, both to calibrate and play.
Question: What themes and aspects of this relationship are most interesting to you?
Why it is useful to ask: Partially, this question allows you to delve deeper into the relationship, to analyse it deeper. But, more importantly, it is how you start to make the relationship your own, focusing on the things that appeal to you both. Hopefully, you have shared interests, and want the same things – but if not, this is also a good time in the discussion to politely tell your co-player if you are uninterested or uncomfortable with certain areas of the relationship. This can be hard, but hopefully you will be able to create something that appeals to you both, and fits in the framework of the larp and relationship.
Question: What are your worries and fears going into this larp?
Why it is useful to ask: Playing together is also taking a level of responsibility for one another. If you know what your co-player worries about, you might help make sure that their fears do not come true – especially if this relates to the relationship between your characters. And, if doing anything about them is out of your power, then it can sometimes be good to just share your fears with someone.
Question: Do you have any triggers, or anything else I should be mindful of?
Why it is useful to ask: This one is self-explanatory. We do not want to distress our co-players off-game, if it can be avoided.
Question: What level of physical play are you generally comfortable with?
Why it is useful to ask: If there is a possibility that we might play scenes with violence, romantic/sexual intimacy or platonic closeness, having a rough idea of what to expect is a good thing. However, this reply is not about how you will be playing (see below).
Why it is good to ask in this particular way: We usually know what level of physical play we are normally comfortable with, and if we have any boundaries that we never cross. However, I do not think it is good practice to decide beforehand, days or weeks before the larp and with someone you have not played with before, what is ok and what is not. What might have felt good when planning, might not seem at all good when the larp is about to start. It might be due to how you are feeling on the day, how it feels when you actually meet your co-player, or some other reason. I therefore think it is best to not commit to anything, but rather talk about what usually works, and then do more calibration on the day of the larp.
How not to respond: If your co-player says ”I don’t have any boundaries, you can do anything!”, I think it is fully reasonable to say ”Oh, okay, so can I break your arm?” We all have boundaries of some sort. Some people who do not state boundaries simply have not considered things that might happen at the larp. Personally, I only feel safe with co-players who state some sort of boundaries – at the very least, ”Don’t do anything that leaves lasting damage on my body”. You might think, ”But this is obvious, you shouldn’t have to say that!”, but that’s just the thing. There are very different cultures and norms in different larp communities. To some, it may be just as ”obvious” that you would never play out a realistic-looking sex-scene, or do things that are actually painful to others; those are common elements of some larps. So, try to be explicit, think about what your boundaries are, and be comfortable communicating them.
Question: What level of emotional intensity do you generally prefer?
Why it is useful to ask: Some larpers want to feel deeply when larping, and feel that larp is best when it breaks their heart, and they can immerse deeply into feelings for the entire larp. Others have a playstyle focused more on cool scenes, interesting plots, or simulating an alternate reality, and are not very interested in having their hearts roughed up in the process. Although it can be difficult to specify what is a high or low level of emotional intensity, it might be relevant to calibrate if you are unsure.
Why it is good to ask in this particular way: Just as with physical play, we can never know for certain what we want or need during an upcoming larp. It is also not always possible to plan how intensely you are going to feel during the larp.
Question: What is your preference when it comes to transparency?
Why it is useful to ask: Transparency refers tolearning the other characters’ thoughts and motivations, or possible things that might happen at the larp. Since it is part of the tradition I larp in, I think transparency is a very good thing. Lack of transparency usually just makes it more difficult to pick up on things. The transparency of reading others’ characters is generally very useful. However, I do love a good curveball from time to time. If my co-player springs an unexpected scene on me, or reveals a hidden corner of their character’s mind, it can be a very impactful experience. However, not everyone enjoys this. So, discuss with your co-player what level of transparency you prefer.
When to ask: This question might be one you want to ask very early in the conversation, or it might only feel relevant later on. This, of course, depends on how many non-transparent secrets there are that might become relevant, and you should be able to assess this based on the information you have. Ask before disclosing in-game information that is most likely unknown to your co-player!
Question: What are your preferences on if/when/how to be off-game?
Why it is useful to ask: We have very different needs in this regard. Some players want to be in-game all through a larp, while others have a need for little breaks to decompress, laugh a bit, or rest. If larping in very close proximity with someone (for example, sharing a room) and having very different styles, this can prove problematic – especially if unaware of your different needs beforehand. If you find that you have differing needs, discuss how to deal with this.
There are of course countless more questions that can be asked, focusing on the specifics of the characters and how they relate to each other, and it is probably neither possible nor useful to try to list them all here. These questions usually tend to arise as the conversation continues, and your shared understanding deepens.
Why do pre-game calibrations?
Do you have to do pre-game calibrations? No, you don’t. Some people do not have any need or desire for it – others simply don’t have time. Usually, it works out alright. However, pre-game calibrations have many potential benefits.
Building trust: Having talked to someone, getting an idea of them as a player and person before diving into the larp and your characters, makes it easier to feel comfortable and trust them. You have an idea about the person behind the character, and have established an atmosphere of wanting to collaborate for a good experience.
Being careful: It happens from time to time that one is cast in a relationship with a person we don’t click with, or whose style of communicating, larping, or similar is incompatible with our own. Sad as it is, it happens, and it is better to notice this before the larp, than in the middle of it. You can then decide how to work around it, or if you need help dealing with it.
Less stumbling in the dark: Without calibration, the risk is greater that we spend valuable larp time not quite feeling like we’re getting our money’s worth. We might spend time doing small-talk, not quite knowing where the scene is going, or be brought out of immersion because we are confused about important parts of the characters’ shared story. Good calibration means that we are more likely to know how to engage with the relationship from the beginning, and what to focus on for an enjoyable and impactful experience.
Get to know your own character: Talking about the relationship isn’t only about the relationship. It also gives you plenty of opportunity to think about your own character – how they think and feel, how they behave in various situations, and so on. Getting to know and understand your character makes it more likely that you will feel connected to it during the larp.
A final word on responsibility (and feminism)
Many women larpers of my acquaintance mention that they are usually the ones who initiate calibrations with male co-players, and that they are the ones that take responsibility for asking questions and directing the conversation. This is an experience I definitely share. Although there are of course many great and responsible male larpers, the trend is there. I would like to encourage men to take on more of the responsibility, to take initiative and to be the ones asking questions. With the toolbox provided in this text, perhaps it might be slightly easier.
Cover photo: Players at Fairweather Manor: The Titanic Prelude (2024). Photo by Nadina Dobrowolska.
In 2018, I brought a friend to A Nice Evening with the Family (Sweden 2018). I was concerned, because he had very little experience with role-playing games, let alone with a very emotionally intense game. Despite my efforts to discourage him, he insisted that he wanted to join. The morning after the larp finished, he was a crying mess and it took him quite some effort to convince me that he would be fine and that I should not regret having brought him over. The next time we spoke, he told me that several friends had confronted him about this new hobby that left him shaken for several days.
It was his first larp. Since then, he has chosen to become a crying mess several times. It does not look like he will stop any time soon. What might look reckless from the outside is actually a well planned process: he knows his limits, but when he ventures to cross them, he is aware of the scars he may bring back, and prepares as well as he can to alleviate the consequences. This is the same process he goes through when he goes rock-climbing, an activity arguably more dangerous, which does not raise such concerns.
As larp has evolved, pushing for new limits of intense play, we have developed a wealth of expertise to larp more safely. However, this is not limited to larp: as humankind’s ability to cause catastrophes has increased, so has our ability to avoid causing them. Pharmaceutical companies, nuclear power plants, financial institutions, airplane manufacturers all have had to change their ways of working (enforced by legislation, obviously) not to bring about tragedy. The most critical part of it is the object of this article: how to come to terms with the fact that risks cannot be eliminated, and how to manage them instead.
In practice, there is nothing revolutionary about risk management. It is just a systematization of common sense. This article will hardly reveal anything new. However, I will hopefully provide a new perspective that will help to view larp safety in a new way, and shine light on how powerful the tools are that we already have at our disposal.
Risk
Attempting to find a definition of “safe” that everyone will agree on is futile. Any communication relying on the word “safe” will be misleadingly dangerous. Any financial adviser, surgeon, engineer, or martial arts or scuba diving instructor worth their salt will never claim that something is safe. Instead, they will try to clearly explain what the negative consequences might be, and let their client make an informed decision. Similarly, a larp organizer that promises that their larp is safe, implying that no harm will happen to any participant, is promising something that they have no control over.
Risk, on the other hand, is a word most people can agree on. There may be disagreement if a certain risk is worth worrying over or not, but if somebody says “This rusty nail is a risk” or “There is a risk that we will run out of money”, everybody understands it the same way: something bad may happen.
Risk means that harm, more or less severe, has a certain likelihood of happening.
Harm
Harm is something that we do not wish to happen. Harm is the ultimate negative consequence of a series of events. Falling off a cliff is not harm, but getting injured as a consequence of a fall is. Being yelled at is not harm, but becoming emotionally distressed is. Hazards are the direct sources of harm: fire, physical impact, toxic chemicals, and verbal abuse are examples of hazards.
In larp, there are many things that we do not wish to happen: trauma (physical or mental) and property damage are the first that come to mind, but other things can be also regarded as harm: damage to reputation, loss of friendship, or even boredom. From a risk-management perspective, they are all the same, and you must decide what to focus on.
In Nordic larp, the focus has been centred on psychological harm. Psychological harm is a slippery concept, and to my knowledge there is no conclusive source to refer to. Because of that, most of the examples I will use throughout this article will be about physical harm, which is much easier to agree on. Hopefully, it will become clear that the same techniques that can be used to manage one can be applied to manage the other.
Severity
Harm presents itself in varying degrees of severity. We think of a bruise as less serious than a broken rib, which is itself less serious than the loss of a limb. Often though things are not so clear-cut, and determining the severity of harm is context-dependent, subjective, and hence challenging.
Generally speaking, severity should correlate to how longer-term prospects are negatively impacted. For example, in a medical context, severity is assigned depending on the consequences to patients, from a minor nuisance to permanent disability or death; broken bones are usually considered minor injuries, since the prognosis for total recovery is often excellent. Financial risk could be quantified not just in terms of how much money might be lost, but how likely it is to be able to recover from such loss; structural risks could be related to the ease of repairing a building; environmental risk measured by how likely it is that the previous situation can be recovered, etc.
As many have experienced, larp can cause serious emotional harm. However, let us admit that larp is, by definition, a simulation, and hence the severity of emotional harm is going to be always lower that being exposed to the real situation: a larp about prisoners at the Guantánamo Bay detention camp, as harrowing as it may be, will hardly ever be an experience as horrifying as being imprisoned at the actual camp. In a way, larp is an exercise in risk management, eliminating most sources of harm when mimicking extreme real-life situations.
Likelihood
Severity is not the only thing that matters about harm. A meteorite crashing on your larp location would certainly be catastrophic, but it is so unlikely that it is not worth considering. On the other hand, a mosquito is normally considered a minor source of harm, but it becomes a concern if it happens constantly: having a bunch of larpers going back home covered in bites after spending a weekend by an infested swamp is something that everyone would want to avoid.
The likelihood of harm can be understood either in terms of how probable it is or how frequently it will happen. Such probabilities are difficult to estimate accurately. In any case, knowing that the probability of falling off the staircase at your larp is 1.3% is not very useful compared to “I would be surprised if no one trips here over the weekend”. As with severity, organizations normally simply assign terms in a scale, corresponding to qualitative likelihoods. One common example is to have five levels of likelihood: improbable (not expected to ever happen), remote (it would be very exceptional if it happens, but it is not impossible), occasional (rare, but given enough time, it will happen), probable (nobody will be surprised if it happens), and frequent (it would be surprising if it did not happen).
A quick introduction to risk management
Risk management, as daunting as it may sound, is a fairly straightforward process which consists of three steps: analysing the risks, deciding whether to accept the risks or not, and mitigating the risks.
Analysing risk
The starting point to manage risks is to analyse them: finding as many things as possible that can go wrong and figuring out how severe and likely they are.
Risk analysis requires honesty to be useful. It is hard to admit that we are putting people in danger, but dismissing a risk without careful consideration is a recipe for disaster. Airplanes rarely crash because of saboteurs, and drug dealers are not planning to hurt their customers when they cut their product with rat poison: behind all these cases, there is somebody who believes everything will be fine. Crooks are a piece of cake to catch and stop in time compared to reckless optimists who take everyone down with them.
In any case, identifying risks is never easy. Reality always finds ways to surprise us, no matter how thorough our analysis was. So, how much effort should you spend analysing risks? The unsatisfactory answer is “as much as reasonably possible”. One way to evaluate your analysis is to think about how you would view it in the future if something goes wrong. Was it reasonable not to reach out for an expert? Was it reasonable that you did not check out your larp location in advance? Was it reasonable to conclude that no serious mental distress could be expected? All of this is context dependent. If you have doubts, maybe you can try to run your analysis by somebody else.
Analysing the risks that lie beyond the limits may seem impossible, but it is not: we may not know how things may go wrong, but at least we know what wrong means. In other words, we know the severity, but not the likelihood. The safest approach is to assume that the likelihood is higher than you expect.
Accepting risk (or not)
After identifying and determining the severity and likelihood of a risk, a natural question arises: can we live with it? Some risks are obviously intolerable, and some are so trivial that it is even hard to consider them as risks. But quite often this is not clear at all.
Deciding when we can accept a risk is a tricky question. Even after bad things have already happened, people often disagree on whether the risk was worth taking. Even the same person might have doubts about it. So, how to decide about something that may not even happen?
The methods used in risk management (risk matrices being the primary example) help us very little here: they have been designed to leave a paper trail which can be used as evidence. They are too bureaucratic to use in larps, but most importantly they are not much of a moral reference we can adhere to. Sadly, nobody can give you any easy answers here.
Whatever you consider as your criteria, they should fulfil two conditions. First, a criterion has to be systematic: if you find yourself adding exceptions one after the other, it is probably not a very good criterion. Secondly, it must be easy for anybody to understand the criteria and agree that they are reasonable.
One criterion that you could use is the following: a risk is acceptable if, even when harm happens, we expect nobody to regret having been part of the larp.
This implies that the organization did everything within reason to analyse and mitigate the risks, all participants understood and accepted those risks, and whatever harm happened was either predicted and handled as well as possible, and nobody can be blamed for having been reckless. In reality, this goal is not achievable: but since it is clear, and the absolute best one can hope for, it is a good target to aim at.
If we decide that a given risk is acceptable, we can move on to the next one. But if we conclude that it is not, then it must be mitigated.
Mitigating risk
Mitigating a risk means reducing its likelihood, its severity, or both. Risk mitigation (also referred to as risk control) must be continued until we decide that the risk is acceptable. Let us review several strategies.
If you encounter a risk which you have tried mitigating by all means possible, but it is still unacceptable, there is one way to completely remove the risk: just do not do what you were planning. If it looks like in your larp something horrible might happen which you have no control over, and you have no idea on how to fix the problem without it becoming a different larp, the best idea is to cancel the larp.
The second approach is to change the design, that is, adding, removing, or modifying elements of your original plan. Moving to a different location, locking doors, removing game content, forcing off-game breaks, adding non-diegetic safety elements (such as mattresses), or changing your player selection process can all be used to mitigate risks. If you are lucky, your larp may be unaffected – possibly even improved! However, it is more likely that the changes will impact your larp, possibly even to the point that you feel it is not worth organizing.
If there is nothing you can change, the next thing you can attempt is to affect how people will behave. You can instruct them not to enter an area under any circumstance, or remind them to stay hydrated under the scorching Tunisian sun. Since this relies on participants’ efforts and attention, you may want to go through these procedures during a workshop. Do not hesitate to make participation compulsory, if absence would lead to risks that you cannot accept. Of these behavioural mitigations (called administrative controls), the weakest form is what we can call, in general, labelling, which is any kind of passive, static visual information, such as signs, warning messages in manuals, pop-up windows, safety brochures, and actual labels found in packages, control panels, etc. If the only thing between a player and disaster is a paragraph somewhere on your website, or a danger sign that looks perfectly diegetic, get ready for disaster.
The final option is protective equipment. Unfortunately, as effective as they may be for other purposes, helmets and hazmat suits will do very little to protect your participants from emotional harm.
The Nordic larper’s risk management toolkit
By now, you hopefully have a good idea about what risk management is. In this section, we will zone in into the peculiarities of emotionally intense larp.
In emotionally intense larp, like in combat sports, enjoyment is inextricably linked to the potentially harmful things that players do to each other. Somewhat counterintuitively, risk management in both cases revolves around the same key concepts: the restrictions to what participants can do, the measures to ensure that participants will follow such restrictions, and the contingency plans to be used if something goes wrong. In other words, rules, trust, and care.
Rules
If you run or design larps, you should appreciate that you have a huge control over players: if you can convince them that they are capable of throwing fireballs by extending both index fingers, you can surely convince them that they cannot touch each other at all, thereby creating a world where the risk of hurting other people is non-existent. This is what rules are for.
By “rules” I refer to all the constraints on the things that can possibly happen during a larp. From a risk management perspective, rules are control measures which either reduce the likelihood of risks – or remove the risks altogether – or replace hazards with different ones. Rules define what may or may not happen in- and off-game. Sometimes larp rules are introduced for other purposes than risk mitigation, and in some cases, rules may control risks at the same time as they contribute to a more interesting game experience.
Perhaps the most representative rules of larp are those used to represent violence: I have never heard of any larp with WYSIWYG violence, that is where violence between characters is not governed by restrictions of some kind. Requiring padded weapons, using rules systems similar to table-top role-playing games, theatrical representation – where the outcomes are either pre-planned or improvised during play using some signalling mechanic, or even removing violence altogether from the game, are all different ways of reducing the severity or likelihood of harm, or even eliminating it altogether.
Sex seems to be the other major perceived source of risk. In this case, the hazards are not so clear-cut as getting a broken nose, but it is generally accepted that sex requires a state of vulnerability which opens the gates for extremely severe psychological harm. Again, the forms in which sex appears in a game are restricted, from total avoidance to “dry-humping”, including more abstract mechanics, such as the Phallus technique used in Just a Little Lovin’ (Norway 2011), or Ars Amandi which, after its introduction in Mellan himmel och hav (Sweden 2003, Eng. Between Heaven and Sea), has been used in numerous larps of many different genres.
In the daring type of play of many Nordic larps, characters are often exposed to many other sources of emotional harm, which are often a central part of the game: family abuse, workplace harassment, discrimination, slavery, imprisonment, political repression, torture, manipulation, etc. Harm happens when these emotions exceed the level the player is willing to experience. This may lead to emotional distress, and even trauma. These, in their turn, may be worsened because of triggering past traumatic experiences.
Interestingly, it is rare to find rules to handle emotional risks arising from something other than physical violence or sex in a specific manner: and these other elements are usually supposed to be represented realistically. For example, players playing prison guards are expected to shout at other players’ faces, and to represent mental torture scenes as they would think would happen in reality.
Instead, emotional risks are managed generically by check-in, de-escalation, and game interruption mechanics. These mechanics are forms of inter-player communication to avoid harmful situations. Check-in mechanics are used to verify, during or after a risky scene, that players are doing fine. A popular one is using the OK hand sign to silently ask a co-player if they are OK when it is difficult to tell if a negative display of emotions (grief, anger) is a sign of an emotional distress that the player cannot handle. De-escalation and interruption techniques function in the opposite way, providing signals (like safe words or taps) to ask co-players to not escalate further or to lower the intensity of the scene, or to stop the game altogether.
These techniques have become standard. If you decide not to include any of them in your larp, it is a good idea to explain your alternative risk management plan before players sign up.
It is important that safety rules are, in the first place, clear. But it is equally important that you, as an organizer, as well as every other participant, get a clear picture that everyone has understood them.. I strongly recommended practising them explicitly in a workshop before runtime, particularly in case of subtle diegetic mechanics, which may be easily missed. The number of safety mechanics should be kept to a minimum to prevent confusion. Well-meaning players may spontaneously suggest adding their favourite mechanics to your game: it is preferable to firmly – but kindly – not allow this. An overabundance of mechanics may have the same effect as too many warning signs: none of them are meaningful in the end.
Trust
Trust is the degree of the certainty we have in our predictions that no harm will happen to us. Trust is critical in daring larp, because participants will compensate for lack of trust by acting as if risks were worse (either more probable or more harmful) than in reality, refraining from fully engaging with the content.
When we trust someone, we know that they will not hurt us, neither by directly causing us harm, nor by neglecting doing their part in keeping us safe. When we do not trust someone, it is because we suspect they may fail at the moment of truth, or because they actively seek to hurt us. Trust has two components: a cognitive one and a primal one. Having enough information to make predictions is critical, but so is having the “gut feeling” that we are right. These two aspects need to be considered all the time.
The first step is building trust. In other words, convincing every participant that nobody will hurt them. Easier said than done.
For starters, participants must be on the same page about the possible risks. Make sure that you provide enough information during the sign-up process so that everyone has an understanding of risks as similar to yours as possible.
Another important aspect is the player selection process. A player may wish not to play with another player, for a variety of reasons. It is reasonable to publish a list of players and offer a channel for players to give feedback. Flagging, which consists of assigning a colour to other players to indicate the level of trust (from “will not share scenes” to “will not attend same larp”), is a popular approach. It may put you in the difficult position of leaving people out. In such a case, remember that your goal is to ensure a less risky game, and not to act as a moral judge. If you believe that your larp may present such risks that it requires that you completely trust all the players – trust that they can care for themselves and others – then you may need to do something more drastic, such as hand-pick your players or have an invite-only run.
Once your players have arrived at the larp location, the most effective way to create trust is pre-game workshops. On the cognitive side, you should cover all your rules and mechanics thoroughly, and rehearse them as necessary, until players are convinced that everybody can play their part. Safety-critical workshops should be compulsory, not just opt-in. A bit like how beginners are required to show that they can do an 8-figure knot before they are allowed to start top-rope climbing. Finally, do not rush through safety workshops: besides failing to communicate critical information, players may get the impression that you do not care enough about safety, and that you included the safety workshop as a nuisance that must be there.
On the primal side, you need to tickle the brains of participants to convince them that they are of the same tribe. Things like physical contact, or locking eyes and smiling, may help. Baphomet (Denmark 2017) used a simple and powerful technique where participants hug each other randomly in silence for a very long time. This had a profound effect in creating a trusting atmosphere. These exercises are not a replacement for the safety rehearsals discussed above, and can be counterproductive if they create a sense of false security.
When someone causes us harm, either directly or indirectly, we immediately lose trust, to a larger or smaller degree: our predictions that they would not hurt us failed, which means that they may hurt us again. Our brain will then activate the alarm and deploy its defences. Suddenly we will dislike, fear, or lose respect for those people. This defence mechanism is quite clever: even if our feelings for those people are unfair (for example, they tried to protect us and failed), our brain will override our reasoning, tricking us into being convinced we are absolutely right, pushing us to avoid that person.
Restoring trust is not easy. At a cognitive level, we need to know that the other person is sensitive to our pain – that’s the purpose of a (real) apology —, and that we can accept that something bad happened exceptionally, that is, that either the other person didn’t know something important or simply made a mistake, or that there was actually a very good reason we did not know about. The primal level also needs to be readjusted to lift the defences after they are not needed. For example, a hug or a smile can have a magical effect after a fight. However, be careful when using this approach: I can tell from my own experience that a forced hug from a perceived aggressor has the opposite effect, and can cause even more harm. In case of doubt, do not push it and simply try to figure out a way for the larp to continue with everyone feeling safe. This, in extreme cases, may require removing players from the game.
Care
Care is a particularly versatile tool, because it can reduce the severity of harm which we had not even predicted could happen. In our quest for pushing the limits of daring larp, it is very valuable to deploy a solid care infrastructure, in the same way that a campaign hospital will help dealing with all kinds of physical harm, without needing to predict its exact nature. Making participants part of a care infrastructure is similar to demanding that everybody must take first-aid training before joining an expedition.
Similar to trust, it is possible to enforce care using rules. Off-game rooms and dedicated staff to support players are very common; although it may not look like such, giving players the option to walk out of the game into guaranteed support is just a larp rule. In many larps, each character has a connection with whom they have a positive relationship. This connection can be used to seek in-game support, which translates into support for the player. This could be further exploited by means of explicit rules, for example adding a hand sign directed at the support connection which forces them to go play a blackbox scene reminiscing of happier times. A larp designed around one-on-one abusive scenes could impose that after every such scene the players must go off-game together to provide mandatory after-care.
Care rules could take many forms: the key is that larp designers should not be afraid to impose such seemingly awkward game elements, because the fact is that this can be much more effective than leaving care to the skill and initiative of the participants.
Conclusion
Nobody – including, first of all, me – expects that larp organizations will start conducting formal risk review meetings, performing external audits, filling risk matrices, and writing down risk mitigation plans.
Let’s be daring! But daring does not mean reckless. Let’s learn from the lessons of the past and, for those disasters yet to come, let them be the kind that, despite the pain they cause, leave us with the feeling that it was worth trying.
Take home messages:
Be brave! At least as much as you want to.
Be honest. Do not fool participants, but most of all do not fool yourself.
Be open. Your level of risk is not the same as most people’s. You do not want to drag anyone into something they will regret.
Be kind. If other people fail, and they honestly tried their very best to avoid disaster, be thankful that they discovered for all of us where the hard limits are.
Be creative. Pushing the limits will demand of you to come up with new techniques to go where no larper has gone before, and come back in one piece. Hopefully, you know now that you have more tools at your disposal than you thought before.
Bibliography
Anneli Friedner. 2019. “The Brave Space: Some Thoughts on Safety in Larps“. https://nordiclarp.org/2019/10/07/the-brave-space-some-thoughts-on-safety-in-larps/ , ref. Dec 12th, 2023.
Ludography
Anna Westerling & Anders Hultman. 2018. A Nice Evening With the Family. Sweden. (Originally En stilla middag med familjen (2007): Sweden. Anna Westerling, Anders Hultman & al.)
Eliot Wieslander & Katarina Björk. 2003. Mellan himmel och hav. Sweden.
Linda Udby & Bjarke Pedersen. 2016. Baphomet. Denmark.
Tor Kjetil Edland & Hanne Grasmo. 2011. Just a Little Lovin’. Norway.
This article has been reprinted with permission from the Solmukohta 2024 book. Please cite as:
Losilla, Sergio. 2024. “Rules, Trust, and Care: the Nordic Larper’s Risk Management Toolkit.” In Liminal Encounters: Evolving Discourse in Nordic and Nordic Inspired Larp, edited by Kaisa Kangas, Jonne Arjoranta, and Ruska Kevätkoski. Helsinki, Finland: Ropecon ry.
Cover photo: Photo by Eamon up North on Pexels.com. Photo has been cropped.
This article was prompted by the recent republication on Nordiclarp.org of the article ‘Flagging is Flawed’ (Brown and Teerilahti 2024) from the Solmukohta 2024 book Liminal Encounters.
In the article, the authors describe the practice of circulating a list of names of participants prior to a larp event, and inviting ‘flagging’ – the indication of safety concerns about fellow-participants, privately to the organizers. They discuss problems that they perceive with the tool.
Our perception is that the article itself is flawed, because it doesn’t discuss the commonest flagging practices that are actually widely used in contemporary Nordic and international larp (in those cases when flagging is used at all).
The authors seem to assume that the only flagging indication possible is a ‘red flag’, meaning that the named person should be considered unsafe and should be prevented from attending the event. They go on to suggest that this is misapplied, with participants flagging for reasons other than serious and absolute safety concerns meriting a ban from the event.
That would indeed be a problem – which is why larp organizers don’t, in general, ask solely for red flags. Instead, they usually ask for a range of different indications of concern, with only the most severe meriting a red flag and hence exclusion.
For example, a ‘yellow flag’ is commonly used to indicate that one wishes to avoid playing closely with another person, but does not consider them a general danger. Brown and Teerilahti seem to be unfamiliar with this practice, or have chosen to ignore it for the sake of their thesis. Either way, it invalidates a large part of their argument, because in their article they seem to assume that flagging because of a wish not to play closely will necessarily lead to automatic removal of the flagged person from the larp. But in practice, larp organizers for the most part do not act in such a way: a yellow flag simply means that the flagger and the flagged person will be cast in roles that are not closely connected.
Some of the difficulties of communicating about flagging relate to its dual purpose. Red flags are intended as a safety tool – we want to keep people who have hurt others out of our larps. This is a method of mitigating risk at the events we run.
But organizers may also feel the need to offer a comfort tool. Casting two players who dislike each other in an intense relationship is likely to result in a poor larp experience for them, and perhaps for everyone else, too. Therefore it’s useful to have methods for participants to indicate those people who they will be uncomfortable if cast closely with. It is important that the difference between this and a red flag is communicated clearly.
The authors, larping together in safety and comfort. Photo by Oliver Facey.
Flagging in Practice
Flagging as a system has evolved and developed over the last ten years or so, and we feel that it’s valuable to share details of practice, so that organizers can learn from one another, and participants can understand how the system can work.
Here is the default flagging system that we use at Larps on Location. This is a work in progress, which has been refined and tweaked, added to and taken away from, over the years. Other organizers use similar systems, and we feel that overall there is a general coalescence around certain practices.
The gist of it is that people should only be excluded for absolute safety concerns. For serious interpersonal disputes not related to general safety, one or other party will self-exclude; for lesser differences, the parties will be cast apart where practical.
“The names of everyone who has signed up to the larp will be circulated to everyone who has signed up. You will have the option to:
Red-flag – means ‘I believe that this person is unsafe to larp with.’ Examples of behaviour that might deserve a red flag include bullying, harassment, or abuse. Someone who has been red-flagged will not be allowed to attend the larp. We will not tell them who red-flagged them, or why. We will not tell them that they’ve been red-flagged without the consent of the person who flagged them.
Orange-flag – means ‘I’m unable to attend if this person is participating.’ Choose this if you don’t believe that that person is unsafe, but for personal reasons you are unable to attend an event that they’re at. In this case, whichever of you or them is allocated a place first will be prioritized.
Yellow-flag – means ‘I don’t want to play in a close relationship with this person.’ Choose this if you don’t believe that the person is unsafe, but for personal reasons you are unable to play closely with them. (An example might be a difficult personality clash.) In this case, we will prioritize not casting you and them together in relationships; even if that means that as a result of this one or both of you aren’t cast. We will not tell someone that they have been yellow-flagged. If someone receives several yellow flags, it may be impossible to place them in the larp, especially if it’s a small one.
You don’t have to tell us your reason for giving a flag (although you may do so, if you wish to).
IMPORTANT: Don’t use a yellow flag when it would be more appropriate to:
Request not to play closely with a specific person – this is for when you prefer to play away from someone perhaps because you often play closely together, or you are real-life partners, or because you want to explore play with different participants, or because of a clash in play styles, etc. We will do our best to honour these requests, but they won’t be prioritized. We will not tell them that you have made this request.”
Our practice is to circulate the signup list, before asking about flags – rather than, as some organizers do, asking during the signup process if there are any people who the prospective participant wishes to indicate in advance as unsafe. We operate in this way because we feel that it creates an emotional burden on a prospective participant to name the people that they find dangerous – perhaps, their abuser(s) – each time they sign up to a larp, just on the basis of a possibility that those people might try to take part in that event.
The details of what ‘request not to play closely’ involves will differ from larp to larp, as there’s a wide variation around what kinds of close play the design requires. For example, in a pair larp, play might be extremely close with one other person, not especially close with others. It’s important that these expectations are spelt out to participants when inviting them to submit such requests.
Inviting requests of this type can also allow participants to introduce nuance, if that will be helpful – for example, there might be someone who they are happy to play some forms of close relationship, but not others (e.g. romance). The details will depend on the needs of the larp – but in general, it will always be the case that the more participants understand about what will be involved in play, the more they can help organizers to help them in return.
We would be very glad to see the practices of other organizers shared in this way, to prompt further discussion.
Weaponization
The other substantive point that Brown and Teerilahti make in their article is that a flagging tool can be misused maliciously, to deliberately exclude others from larps for reasons that are not related to safety concerns. They consider this bad-faith flagging to be such a widespread and pervasive practice that it causes unacknowledged damage to the community.
We have not seen evidence of such ‘weaponization’ of flagging in our own limited experience (we have organized about a dozen international weekend larps of various sizes, plus five large larp festivals, that have used some sort of flagging tool) – and other, larger, organizers of Nordic and international larps have indicated that they also have had few or no encounters with it. And that they, like us, have in general received very few red flags, and none that seemed unjustified.
This is not to dismiss the authors’ concerns – no doubt, malicious flagging may be more common in some areas of larp, and in some communities, than others. But our overall impression is that it is a minor issue compared against the value of being able to flag up genuine malefactors – who have previously taken advantage of modern larp’s internationalism to move to operate in new areas where the organizers may be unfamiliar with their records.
Critiques such as these seem to argue that the benefits of flagging are not worth the risk of potentially ostracizing flagged people undeservedly. To set against that, flagging may have saved larger numbers of people from being harassed or worse at larps – but those accounts are quiet and invisible, as the threat has been avoided thanks to flagging.
Additionally, concerns have been expressed, including at a panel on this subject at Solmukohta 2024, that flags could be abused to create systemic prejudice in the community. An example discussed was that of a neurodivergent person being excluded because another participant misunderstood their communication style. We feel that this can be addressed by giving clear examples of what does or does not constitute cause for a flag, and by emphasising that a red flag should only be raised if the flagger believes that the other person is unsafe to larp with.
There are many people in our community who identify as neurodivergent in a variety of ways – including one of the authors of this article – and, as noted above, we ourselves have not seen evidence of red-flagging being used as a weapon against them.
Anonymity and Emotional Labour
There has been considerable discussion about the responsibilities of organizers towards those who have been flagged against, and those who have submitted flags. (This is particularly important for red flags, which result in the exclusion of the flagged person. But, it may also be relevant to orange flags, if organizers have a policy that involves choosing which of the people involved to exclude.)
We feel that the highest of these responsibilities relates to protecting participants at the event – including those who have raised flags as part of the process. They are to be protected by not sharing their identity with those who have been flagged against. It’s of the utmost importance to protect people from experiencing further serious harm.
It is possible to also consider a responsibility towards those who have been flagged against. If they have done something wrong, for they deserve to be given a chance to mend their ways? Or if they feel they have been unjustly flagged, do they deserve a chance to clear their name?
Then, is there a responsibility to the larp community as a whole, to provide the opportunity for offenders to be rehabilitated; or at least to provide them with the information that they may need to be able to take that journey?
Our feeling is that these aims will be hard to accomplish without risking breaching the anonymity of the flagger. And they will involve organizers in emotional labour that they may be reluctant to take on in addition to all the other burdens involved in making larp events happen – or that they may find difficult to handle objectively, if personal friends are involved. For these reasons, at our own events we do not undertake such work. If other organizers are able to do so successfully, then we applaud them. But we feel that it needs to be made clear in advance, if this kind of engagement with flagged parties will be taking place: because participants who have been victims of malefactors may seek to avoid such a situation.
We need to bear in mind that attending a larp, or even being part of a community, is not a human right guaranteed to participants. Larps are private events, usually run by volunteers in their spare time. There is absolutely no onus on larp organizers to make their events available to those who they feel are unsafe to attend – and there is also no right to have such decisions explained or justified.
Flagging is clearly not a suitable tool for rehabilitation of people who have unintentionally caused harm. Is there a better method, in which everyone involved consents to the emotional labour, and to any potential risk? Possibly. But we feel that rehabilitation needs to be considered as separate from the issue of finding optimal ways to keep participants safe. Restorative justice is a big topic in its own right – but it is better managed by friends of the abuser than by random larp organizers. And it is definitely not something that victims should get caught up in when they thought they were just signing up for a larp.
Communication in Advance
And this leads to a more general point – which is that all policy and practice around flagging must be communicated clearly to all prospective participants, in advance of seeking signups. Otherwise, no-one can be confident of what they will be encountering. Like any other aspect of safety, a flagging system is only as good as the culture around it – and clear and direct communication is essential to this.
Evolution
Brown and Teerilahti (2024) end by stating:
We recognize that there is no easy answer to the important issue of protecting player safety, and that this is a difficult conversation. Sadly, bad actors will learn to weaponize any safety system put in place, so the system must evolve in order to stay relevant and continue to do the greatest good possible.
There is no question that we should continue changing and evolving our practices, as we find ways to improve them. And we do understand that flagging is an uncomfortable topic, which brings up fears around exclusion and ostracism whenever discussed. However, it is vital to keep in mind what the main goal for the system is: and to ensure that sight of that is not lost, as we look at ways of addressing other associated harms. Flagging systems were introduced as a way of addressing manifest and persistent abusive behaviour from predatory individuals within the increasingly internationalizing larp community. Any suggestion of removing them must be accompanied by tools that are at least as effective at this.
References
Brown, Maury, and Nina Teerilahti. 2024. “Flagging is Flawed.” In Liminal Encounters: Evolving Discourse in Nordic and Nordic Inspired Larp, edited by Kaisa Kangas, Jonne Arjoranta, and Ruska Kevätkoski. Helsinki, Finland: Ropecon ry.
In the narrow hall of an old county hospital building, two rows of people stand facing each other. The Open Heart organisation has sent out an invitation to the general public to meet and stay with the people in their care. To foster empathy, they say. To become compassionate. The people in the hospital’s care stand in one line; The Sufferers, they are called. People on the fringes of society. Drug addicts, homeless people, criminals. Every single sufferer is a tragic tale of how life can beat you down. In the other line, the Compassionates stand, looking around with mixed emotions; curiosity, pity, regret. The sufferers will each choose compassionates to live their lives. Wear their clothes, sleep in their bunk, and become them for the evening and night to come.
This is the opening scene of the performance installation Det Åbne Hjerte (Eng. The Open Heart), created by the artist collective SIGNA in Aarhus, Denmark 2019. The sufferers are paid actors and the compassionates are their audience. You might, like me, see the similarities this performance piece bears to larp. The experience requires active participation from everyone, which eliminates the border between actor and audience that is usually found in theatre. If I replace the term “actor” with “non-player character” and “audience” with “players”, it would look like a larp. Both groups exist fully within the fiction, but while the audience are there to experience it, the actors are there to facilitate and steer the experience.
In this article, I aim to look into the overlap between larp and theatre, with SIGNA’s performance installations, that bear resemblance to both practices, serving to guide my exploration of this liminal space. In addition I aim to tease out approaches SIGNA use, that might be gainful for our development of larp. To gain insight into the methods and intentions of how SIGNA creates what they term performance installations, which I will introduce in the upcoming chapter, I asked them for an interview, which they generously granted.
The Performance Installation
When I experienced Det Åbne Hjerte in 2019, I was chosen by a young, too-skinny man with bleached hair and pale skin, named Blondie. While I was being dressed in his clothes, he told me about himself, and his life. He was open, brutally honest and believable. I quickly forgot that Blondie was a fictional character.
”Our point of departure is to create universes that are a sort of reality simulation. Not necessarily copies of reality, but simulations of hermetically sealed universes […] These universes are then populated by characters who improvise with the audience in processes that, depending on the given work, are more or less planned. However, what they say is up to the individual participant in accordance with the framework.”
This is how Signa Köstler describes the artform of performance installations, a concept of her own devising. With her background as an art historian, she had previously worked with the concepts of performance and installation, and the combination of these seemed to encapsulate what she did.
The power of performance installations, according to the Köstlers, lies in the heightened engagement they elicit. This emerges from three factors: participants navigate labyrinthine spaces, experience sensorial stimuli, and build relationships with characters. In Det Åbne Hjerte, the old county hospital had doors open into washing rooms, offices, cantinas, bedrooms and so on, and it was full of smells, sounds and actions. These were tied together through the relationships. As my sufferer, Blondie, chugged a whole beer, puked all over the floor, mopped it up with his shirt and led us through the tunnels of the hospital to the washing rooms, all senses were stimulated. The unique quality of these interactions allows for genuine emotional connections, akin to the impact of cinema or theatre but with the added dimension of direct engagement from the audience.
These real emotions and feelings, created by deep immersion and interaction with a fictional universe, begin to sound exactly like what we argue for, when we talk about the value of larp. In fact, when Simo Järvelä (2019) describes the magic circle and alibi in the article “How real is larp?”, he writes:
”Designing a larp is about constructing an artificial situation that is completely real. The players treat it as fictional – which it is – but it is also something fully embodied by the players” (Järvelä 2019).
That these two descriptions line up so well, gives us a look into the landscape where theatre and larp can meet. It is interesting to look at how the audience’s relationship to the characters are formed. Is it passive, as with traditional film and theatre, where an audience relates to the situation happening on stage, or is it active, as with larp and performance installations, where the audience builds relationships based on the actions they personally take in the fake reality?
There isn’t a clear cut between these two categories. In the more experimental forms of theatre, the audience often has an active role that comes near to larp or performance installations. For example, in Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More (London 2003), the audience is allowed to move about freely in a six-storey building transformed into a set for Shakespeare’s Macbeth, though they are separated from that reality by plastic masks. Although the audience members have little actual power to influence the experience, they are not just passively sitting and observing. This illustrates how temporal media – that is media which we experience live – can range from traditional theatre to sandbox larps.
Three performers from the SIGNA performance installation “Det Åbne Hjerte”. The performers depicted from left to right: Arthur Köstler, Larysa Venediktova, Stine Korsgaard. Photo by Erich Goldmann.
Manipulation of the audience
After arriving in the afternoon and moving among the sufferers, learning about their pain, it is time for bed. We compassionates share bunk beds with our sufferers. It quickly becomes clear that this will be no easy night. Many of the sufferers have difficulties, mental or otherwise, that trigger at night. The worst comes in the middle of the night, as one of the sufferers starts screaming. It startles me awake and as staff rush past, my curiosity battles with tiredness. As the screaming continues, curiosity wins and I drag myself out of bed to find the source.
SIGNA employs diverse strategies to guide the audience through specific scenes and emotions. The masterplan is a carefully orchestrated framework that serves as a roadmap for performers to interact with participants. SIGNA has different approaches to the masterplan depending on the performance installation. Sometimes the masterplan includes instructions for sending the audience between performers in predetermined patterns, other times it is almost like an itinerary that the performers follow, while the audience are free to move around in the spaces where the performance happens, as was the case with Det Åbne Hjerte. Interestingly, Signa Köstler notes that more recent plays have proven that the most optimal format is for the audience to be attached to specific performers:
”… Audience members are attached to one or two characters, whom they will always gravitate towards. When this attachment has been created, either of loyalty, security or the like, they [the audience member] will always come back to it. Then they can be set free a little, and they can be with others, but you can always pull them back in again pretty quickly. Then you can move about with an invisible masterplan, while they are satellites you can pull along with you.”
The Köstlers say that the actors need to be in a “hyper-aware” mindset when they follow these master plans. Their focus is split between ensuring the picture of the scene stays in place, that the acoustics of the installation are balanced, and that the minds of the audience are engaged with the fiction. In other words, the actors need to keep in mind how the audience sees a scene and hears a scene, and to be aware of how engaged they currently are. Reading the body language of the audience becomes a crucial skill to balancing the experience, as this is a core tool in understanding what the audience currently experiences emotionally. As Signa puts it, the constant mindset is ”What can I contribute with? What needs do the audience members I am responsible for have, right now?”
This relates interestingly to another scale of variances between larp and traditional theatre. The performers don’t need to improvise reactions to audience responses unless the audience actually has a certain degree of freedom to respond to the stimuli. In traditional theatre, the audience is expected to sit still, and clapping or crying out are the strongest responses the audience is expected to have to the events on the stage. The smaller, more nuanced reactions are usually visible only to other audience members. While they may create liveness in the room, they do not directly affect the action on stage.
Experimental theatre and performance installations have a higher degree of audience freedom, which introduces an element of uncertainty into the artwork. Most larps fall into the opposite end of the scale compared to traditional theatre. In larp, audience interaction is expected and needed for the artwork to progress at all. Det Åbne Hjerte performance installation is slightly more towards the larp extreme on the empathic response scale, as the audience participates actively in the action. However, it is slightly more towards the traditional theatre extreme on the audience influence scale, as the plot is made for the audience to explore it, rather than to influence it. An audience member might try to influence a cast member’s actions, but usually the cast member will still be at the next spot on their master plan itinerary.
Performer from the SIGNA performance installation “Det Åbne Hjerte” sits on the floor. Depicted performer: Arthur Köstler. Photo by Erich Goldmann.
Character handling
One of the sufferers sits in a hallway, with a blanket with random low-quality goods spread out before her. Plastic toy dinosaurs, old DVDs and lighters. I strike up a conversation with her. She wishes to sell the goods, not to profit from it herself, but because she is at the bottom of a pecking order that The Open Heart has allowed to persist amongst the sufferers. The meagre profits she gets from selling her wares go to another sufferer. Seeing this suffering, upheld by the system of The Open Heart, I get angry. I storm into the manager’s office to tell him off.
In SIGNA’s universes, there is a rule we rarely see in larp: no-one ever breaks character. I first assumed there were exceptions, but there aren’t any. The rule can be upheld, because the performers have a lot of practice before stepping into character, and because safety is mapped out in advance. In fact, I asked the Köstlers if they could give one tip to the roleplaying community, based on their experiences. Their answer was to try this out. There are two parts to safely upholding this rule. Allow the characters to be fallible and take responsibility for any action you take: and have an order of command in the fiction, that allows for safe response to real-life emergencies.
First of all, the character is seen as a whole, and should be made to withstand any emotion, action, and the like. The situation they wish to avoid, as Signa puts it, is to ”feel that the character only exists when you have everything under control”. The character should be allowed to have any response you could have, from being tired or overwhelmed, to having a headache or an upset stomach. If the character can take responsibility for those situations – that is, if it can still be the character who feels them and acts upon them – it allows for a flexibility that can ensure that the fiction is a whole, simulated world. Or, as Signa puts it:
”And maybe it’s also about, when working with these forms, being prepared to let go of control and let go of perfectionism.”
Secondly, SIGNA has procedures that allow staying in fiction when an emergency strikes, for example if someone breaks a leg or the building catches fire. They have carefully planned these in advance. In any given universe, accidents like broken bones or fires can occur. Creating a chain of command that is ready to handle these kinds of problems, just as they would in real life, makes it a natural part of the story being told. If there are hospitals in the storyworld, an injured participant’s character will be taken there within the fictional world of the performance installation. If the installation is set in the front lines of a war, the performers would speak about the hospital as a lazaret. As a part of the administrative preparation, SIGNA makes sure to keep all the health insurance certificates alphabetized in a box, along with money enough for taxis and lists of relevant phone numbers, so that the character who is responsible in the fiction can access and efficiently handle the out-of-character parts required without breaking the fiction. This also extends to audience emergencies.
“When it happens to the audience, we have experienced that it is worse to go out of character for them. When they, for example, have an emotional breakdown or the like, it is much better to take care of them in-character. We have a room, where you can sit down with them and make them a cup of tea.”
When someone gets aggressive, they meet them with an equal measure of calm, to de-escalate the feelings. Arthur Köstler especially promoted the concept of being prepared to nip any breakdowns in the bud – reading up on communication theories and learning about body language to see potential breakdowns coming.
When I heard this, it felt like a very high bar to aim for, but SIGNA noted that they do have a significant advantage to most larps. They have five weeks to practice up to the performance installation itself. When talking about it, I explained that we often do workshops before a demanding larp. Using the Sigridsdotter 2018 run in Denmark as an example, I explained the day-before workshopping for internalizing the gender-norms we were to play, as well as for introducing the storyworld and setting common boundaries for the larp. The Köstlers noted that their practice corresponds to five weeks of constant workshops, attending to all the potential need-to-knows of the performers and forming the installation together.
The interview left me inspired to see how I could work all that I had learned into my larp praxis. With time, we will hopefully be able to find more points of connection between artforms, to explore how the borderlands and liminal spaces are formed and how we can use them to create unique, creative experiences.
As I barge into the manager’s office, he meets me with a calm expression and tone of voice. I yell about how fucked up the system is, how unfair it is to allow the discrepancy in power to persist among the sufferers and how The Open Heart should take responsibility for the people they are claiming to help. In a slow, measured cadence, the manager answers all my worries with corporate speak. It only makes me more angry. But his tone of voice, and the cup of tea he offers me, gets the edge off and at some point I sink into the futility of trying to convince these people that they are doing anything wrong.
Later, I talk to the sufferer who chose me and express interest in helping. He gives me his phone number. He texts me once, after the performance installation is over, but nothing comes out of it. Weeks after the final performance, I hear from another audience member, that a blonde sufferer had dropped out of the program and died from a drug overdose. I text to hear if Blondie is okay, but in the end he never responds.
Bibliography
Järvelä, Simo. 2019. “How real is larp?”. In Larp Design – Creating Role-Play Experiences. Edited by Johanna Koljonen, Jakko Steenros, Anne Serup Grove, Aina D. Skjønsfjell and Elin Nilsen. Landsforeningen Bifrost.
Ludography
Barrett, Felix & Maxine Doyle. 2003, 2009, 2011–2024. Sleep No More. New York.
Köstler, Signa & Arthur Köstler. 2019. Det Åbne Hjerte. Denmark.
Renklint, Lukas, Kaya Toft Thejls & Anna Emilie Groth. 2018. Sigridsdotter. Denmark.
This article has been reprinted with permission from the Solmukohta 2024 book. Please cite as:
Lyngkjær, Rasmus. 2024. “SIGNA’s Performance Installations: Walking the Liminal Border Between Larp and Theatre.” In Liminal Encounters: Evolving Discourse in Nordic and Nordic Inspired Larp, edited by Kaisa Kangas, Jonne Arjoranta, and Ruska Kevätkoski. Helsinki, Finland: Ropecon ry.
There has been said a lot regarding safety mechanics, tools and the safety mindset on nordiclarp.org over the last ten to fifteen years: Design discussions have taken place, talks and workshops have been held at Knutepunkt/Solmukohta, publications in the respective books have been published, and discussions between people who are volunteering — meaning working — in safety, have raised awareness about the need for safety at larps.
One topic that has not been talked or written about much is the work and visibility of a Larp Safety person.
Articles from 2017 give very good insight into the work. Problems and techniques of working as a Safety person have been addressed, such as giving players the space to express their feelings without being judged, when overwhelmed or anxious, offering them empathy, and validating their experiences and emotions. We have discussed how it fits into the community work as a whole, such as advising organizers on safety concerns and designing workshops or debriefs.
One thing that remains ironically obscure for many players is the invisibility of the person and their investment itself. With this invisibility also comes missing appreciation and the risk of creating a lack of people willing to engage in this important community work.
It seems the requirements to work as a Safety person are not widely known. Also, most players and even some organizers might not know what a Safety person actually does and what the experiences before, during and after a larp are like for them. We often know about the strains and stresses of organizer’s work, know about burnout risks and talk about what players struggle with, but what about the people in Safety teams?
What I experienced at an international larp I was doing Safety for, was players asking me after the game if I had a good time, or how my game was. I was a bit baffled to be honest. Of course, they meant well and maybe intended it as a conversation opener. But then a realization hit me: while the Safety people are often recognized in their role, their actual work and the individuals behind the role stay mostly invisible. Players rarely ask themselves if this job is easy or not, enjoyable or not?
Why Is Safety Hard?
As a Safety person, you’re skipping out on a perfectly fantastic larp you’re not actually participating in. You actively invest your time, vacation days, sometimes travel costs and energy to care for others. For this, you put other people’s needs first, making their well-being your priority.
People usually don’t come to the safety person when the larp runs “well” for them and they are happy, proud of something, or want to talk about how great everything is. Players usually also don’t interact with the Safety person if they do not have a specific safety need. Thus, the Safety person might be invisible to those who didn’t need them, during the game or even at the after-larp party.
To make sure everybody is emotionally safe, Safety people use various techniques, including: validating people’s experiences, being compassionate, being empathic, and offering space to the players who might need exactly that — a safe space to feel and deal with their emotions without being shamed, judged, or left alone.
Effective Safety people try actively not to give in to very human impulses like the need to “fix things” for other people that have a problem before they are ready. Often the “fixing” comes only after a player feels heard and having their concerns taken seriously before looking forward and being able to focus on getting their game or larp experience back on track. They also try not to quickly get out of an uncomfortable situation, even if it would be easier for them.
Another aspect of Safety that might pose difficulties is that you often have to keep things said or experienced anonymous and/or confidential — depending on what the person affected wants — as much as you might like to vent or share your “burden” afterwards. A player with a safety issue needs to trust the Safety working in their best interest as well as they are not seen as a “problem player” afterwards. This means you have to be as careful with what you communicate – similar to a lawyer or priest, just without the vows and training. Sometimes it is not possible to maintain confidentiality even if the person wants that, for example if a crime has been committed, or other kinds of situations. Anonymity yes, but confidentiality, not always. Similarly, a safety person should make the main organizers aware if there is a problematic person in the group. Also with the wrong information going out you and /or the affected player might face retaliation from other players or the community.
One strenuous factor is the “on-call” or “standby” situation that Safety people are in most of the time. People who have ever experienced on-call service or standby duty in work life know that this can be exhausting, creating internal tension as one can always expect to be called to action.
An important ability to have is self-regulation skills, because sometimes, even a Safety person can’t help with a problem. This means having to endure the helplessness of not being able to “do” something about a problem. Or there are situations where their own insecurities or past traumas are triggered, they become emotional themselves and they still have to try and focus to not get distracted with their own thoughts or bodily reactions – which is a strong argument for having a Safety person instead of loading that responsibility onto the shoulders of a single person. This, and the work that comes before (designing Safety mechanics and workshops, being involved in the flagging process if there is one, holding workshops) and after (doing debriefs, taking care of issues that might come up, after the actual event is over) takes a lot of energy out of many Safety people I have seen working on larps.
Additionally, people frequently underestimate the role of Safety. Sometimes, organizers, writers, and designers also do the Safety job — and in most cases they are usually pretty much detached from the larp (which is sometimes their own!) As an organizer or writer, they suddenly stop sharing player’s or even organizer’s overall experiences, seeing and hearing mostly the negative experiences that people had with content, scenes, other players, or even themselves.
The Gender Factor?
One factor weighing into the invisibility is that many people acting as safety people — in my experience — are socialized as women. Care work, putting the emotional wellbeing of others into the center of their work, being empathetic and trustworthy – these jobs are often taken on by people with female socialization and are mostly also silent and invisible. Women organizers can struggle with invisibility. And maybe this care work often done by people socialized as women is taken for granted as well. People socialized as men might be afraid of being called out themselves, which might make them behave in ways that are dismissive and even hostile to safety people (especially in public conversations, but also in defense of their friends, critiquing safety culture, etc.). Furthermore some participants may not feel comfortable talking about safety problems with a man Safety member — particularly if the problem is a gendered one, as they often can be.
At one larp event in the past, two other people and me, who were doing Safety on top of other tasks like writing and designing the larp — all socialized as women — experienced complete invisibility, not even being invited to team meetings or being credited after the game by the main organizers.
This is frustrating, demotivating and creates the opposite of the will to encourage community service, especially if the nature of that work aims to be discreet and low-key to protect the involved players which in turn can lead people who are not involved to assume there weren’t any issues at all. To keep larps safe for all people involved, this problem also reflects our communal societal need for change.
Visibility-Enhancing Checklist for Your Next Larp
Taking over the function as a Safety person is important and meaningful. Many larps need a Safety person to support players especially in conflict-heavy games, but also in games that may be light-hearted on the surface. And to be able to support someone, helping people to feel understood is its own valuable experience.
The following recommendations and behaviors are meant as tips and ideas, targeted at all parts of the community. They might make it easier for safety people who are spending their time to help us feel more empowered, safer and braver. And maybe they help encourage other people to become active in the community.
Safety People
Prioritize your own well-being, practice setting boundaries, and state your needs bravely.
Talk more about your work! Demand visibility even if your instinct is to be a “silent supporter.”
Connect and share knowledge with each other and maybe even with like-minded / interested people.
Design workshops / trainings to teach Safety techniques to others and support each other as peers.
Find players or people from the organizing team who check up on you regularly.
When and where possible, work in a team to support each other, not feel alone and also be able to take sufficient breaks or tap out yourself if need be.
Don’t do Safety at your own larp – beside from the potential disconnect with the joy of seeing how your work turned out, players may be reluctant to voice a problem to the safety person, if it’s an issue with the organization or with the design – for fear that it will be seen as criticism.
Organizers
Introduce Safety people as well as how to contact and where to find them thoroughly before the larp.
Inform yourself about what your Safety people are doing.
When possible, make sure your safety people are not responsible for other runtime logistics and especially do not have them play any important role in the game to not confuse their responsibilities / loyalties.
Care for your Safety team member as a person with needs and emotions.
Check-in with them every now and then.
Involve the Safety people throughout the process as safety is important at all points of design and implementation.
Put together an Internal Procedures document (Stavropoulos et al. 2024) to establish clear courses of action in crisis situations.
If there are decisions to be made about issuing bans and the like, please separate this from Safety. It should be the main organizers who issue warnings and bans, not the safety people themselves. Safety people can make a recommendation that someone be expelled from the larp, but in the end it is the organizers of the event who have responsibility to take that decision. Also it decreases the risk of being targeted for enacting consequences or for not doing enough.
To make them feel included and part of the team, ask if they want to join GM meetings or other team meetings. (It can also be helpful as Safety, to know how the game is running).
Ask if they’re interested in having updates about the game.
Credit & thank them after the event (as you would your fellow organizers, kitchen crew, tech support, etc.)
Players
Remember the name(s) of the people in the Safety team and show them (especially at the afterparty) that you care for them as individual people.
Learn to identify and communicate your needs so that a Safety person knows how and what to offer.
Safety people are not in a therapeutic relationship with players. They can provide support in times of overwhelm or crisis, but they should defer to external help, such as ambulances with mental health professionals, if the crisis continues and longer term support is needed. It is also not their job to mediate disputes within the community.
Take reflection and self-regulation seriously and practice identifying your emotions and setting boundaries outside of larp.
Be mindful of what you are asking for – don’t use the Safety room or the Safety person as entertainment for a couple of hours, just because you don’t want to play or be alone.
If you don’t know what to do to make people feel safer but are interested in learning: Read up on those skills (like “validation”) and ask Safety people you know if you have questions. Most are open and happy to help you and share their knowledge and skills.
Take responsibility for your well-being, do your own risk- assessment of whether a larp is for you, and plan how to respond beforehand if troubles come up.
If you know about your triggers, medicational needs, or even what helps you in moments of emotional flooding or overwhelm: Communicate that to the Safety people before the larp so they can better support you individually.
Let’s make this community even more competent and safe for everyone – including the Safety people who try to make sure everybody feels safe at a larp. Let’s be mindful of how we’re treating them, so that we have more people in the future interested in doing this work.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to acknowledge the editorial team at Nordiclarp.org for their comments: Mo Holkar, Elina Gouliou, Kaya Toft Thejls, and Sarah Lynne Bowman.
Lindve, Petra, and Rebel Rehbinder. 2023. “We Organized These Larps Too!” Presentation at Knudepunkt, Sweden, May 19.
Kocabaş, Ezgi Özek, and Meltem Üstündağ-Budak. 2017. “Validation Skills in Counselling and Psychotherapy.” International Journal of Scientific Study 5, no. 8: 319-322.
Rather, Jill H., and Alec L. Miller. 2015. DBT Skills Manual for Adolescents. Guilford Press.
In my opinion, one of the most important things in being a good larper is to have self-awareness. This means knowing one’s strengths and weaknesses and being able to provide play for other players – but also knowing what one wants out of a larp and how it aligns with the vision and themes of the larp.
After larping for some years, I thought I had a good perception of my strengths and weaknesses. For example, I knew that I was lousy with directions, so I should not try to play Aragorn. However, I knew that I was really good at organizing things and playing a leader, so I thought I should actually try to play Aragorn.
It all came down to balance and knowing that I could play most of the characters I wanted to as long as I tweaked them, had trusted friends around, and communicated well with the organizers. In addition, I was very good at making sure that my body was strong enough to carry heavy things at a larp if a character demanded it and letting the organizers know if there was something that needed to be adjusted or not played on. For example, I could tell them that I am really bad when it comes to close combat since I am short and lazy.
Over the years, I learned more about what kinds of characters I could give the most for and what characters I could grow into. But while I was great at communicating about my practical skills and all my larp needs related to them, I was not up to par with being transparent about my health. Or rather, my mental health.
As all people, I had ups and downs. But to tell it bluntly, there were some years when I was in a downward spiral. While I had been very outspoken to my friends about my mental health and the importance of self care, I was adamant that it would not impact my larping.
The author at the larp House of Cravings (2023). Photo by Martin Østlie Lindelien.
Mental health issues can range from depression and PTSD to anxiety, self harm, and eating disorders (to only mention a few examples). All of these should be taken seriously and treated as reasons to get help. It does not matter what my mental health issues were. What is important is how they impacted my larping. The biggest thing they brought to me was shame over feeling the way I did and having the issues I had.
I wanted to play pretend in my hobby and to be strong without letting my issues bleed over to my co-larpers. And I was hesitant to communicate what I needed to my co-larpers since I did not fully know what I needed. Was it sympathy? Maybe concrete hands-on help if I would not be able to play out a scene? Understanding if I needed to break the game for a time? Underneath these thoughts there was a fear of being rejected. What if people thought I was too broken to play with?
With that, I made a promise to myself to basically take care of myself, to be a great larper and be open in every way – but not when it came to what I needed from my co-larpers and organizers with my trauma and mental health issues.
Of course, in retrospect, that was a horrible idea.
When things got hard or triggered something in me, I had to hide it. I rather pushed it down than caused trouble. I pushed myself to the breaking point when it came to organizing and being available to my co-players – just to prove that I was not broken. I did not cancel a single larp, but in the end, I played for my co-players, not for myself. I tried to make sure that they had fun but ended up having less fun myself.
On the other hand, I was adamant in advising my friends and co-larpers to do the opposite of what I was doing. I always encouraged them to be open with all their needs and health issues. I was the one who took people aside to sit down and have a chat. I was the one who offered a shoulder to cry on during larps.
Then something happened a couple of years ago. It was a standard larp with no hard themes — and played with trusted friends. I was responsible for a small group and all was well. Apart from that it was not. Around this time in life, I was struggling more than ever. I wanted to stay at home all the time and the only thing that pushed me to the larp was the knowledge that I had people relying on me.
There was a scene, some larp fight – and suddenly I blacked out with over ten minutes of which I have no memory of. People told me that I did a great scene with screaming and fighting, and that they were surprised over seeing me get that physical.
I have no memory of this. The next thing I remember is sitting in the darkness by a lake and silently crying my eyes out. I felt so ashamed and broken. Most of all, I did not know how to handle this or how to reach out to friends. So I cried a bit more and then went back into the tent and took care of my group.
The big change came only recently. I had gotten used to hiding how I felt at larps or conferences and just faking it all the way. Always smiling, always acting like I did not care, doing my best to be the steady port for others.
I thought I had a great system for handling myself in the larp community. And then came a larp when it just did not work anymore. I had, again, the responsibility for a small group. I should have been able to keep it together, so I just ignored the feeling of terror. But for the first time, I could not push myself anymore.
I contacted my group. I told them that I had limited energy and told them to make sure to steer their larp away from relying on only me. I told them that I would need breaks but that I could handle it.
Then I contacted the organizers. I told them everything. On how I was at my limit but that I really wanted to give the larp a try. I told them what could be done, both for me and my group. They were wonderful in assuring that things were ok and that I was welcome with limited energy and all my brokenness.
The larp was a bit of a blur. I was really tired and had to rest a lot. I cried off-game in an organizer’s arms. I was sitting and resting on a friend’s lap and had her pat my hair until I could breathe again. But I had the energy to give my everything and to feel into myself. I created magic for my co-larpers and for myself. And for the first time in years I felt I was larping for myself.
I went home from that larp with a sense of sadness and peace. Sadness over how easy it had been and how many years I had robbed from myself. Peace in knowing that it would be so much easier from now on.
That experience changed larping for me. I no longer take on responsibilities for groups alone. I put myself first when it comes to how I travel to, sleep, and eat during larps. I share my needs before and after a larp, both with organizers and with my friends. I try to be open with my co-players if things are hard. When they ask how they can support me, I answer their questions honestly.
The author in Viking garb (2021).
During any larp, I take the time to rest, and I step off-game when I need to. If I feel I don’t have the energy for something, I cancel it and try to do it in good time. After a larp, I take the time to land. I might not always succeed in it but I do my best. And I give myself that time.
A while ago, I went to a very challenging larp. Even before the larp, my sleep pattern was non-existent and I had mental health issues that were acting up. I opened up to a co-larper when she asked if I needed anything and that helped a lot. Then after the first part of the larp, I just crashed. There were no triggers or bad things involved. I had just pushed myself too hard and too much.
The main takeaway was that I could accept the help from organizers who just sat together with me in a dark room while I cried. I managed to explain my needs and reached out to a loved one who came and held me. And with those small means of accepting help, speaking about my needs and just being honest, I could breathe and pick myself up for the rest of the larp. Looking back, I have come very far in how I handle myself, and I try to make sure to take care of my needs. Does it make me feel better? Absolutely not. I feel more vulnerable than in years and so broken. But I hope that it will pass in time. I will rather do this than go through another 20 years faking it.
This article has been reprinted with permission from the Solmukohta 2024 book. Please cite as:
Erlandsson, Anna. 2024. “How I Learned to Stop Faking It and Be Real.” In Liminal Encounters: Evolving Discourse in Nordic and Nordic Inspired Larp, edited by Kaisa Kangas, Jonne Arjoranta, and Ruska Kevätkoski. Helsinki, Finland: Ropecon ry.
Cover photo: Photo by jaygeorge on Pixabay. Image has been cropped.
From the Heliconian Muses let us begin to sing, who hold the great and holy mount of Helicon, and dance on soft feet about the deep-blue spring and the altar of the almighty son of Cronos… — Hesiod’s Theogony
Helicon is a larp by Katrine Wind and Maria Pettersson. The first run was held January 5-7, 2024 in Broholm Castle, Denmark, with a second run scheduled for February 16-18. The larp focuses upon a group of artists, leaders, and scientists in the early twentieth century with various specialties who have discovered and enacted an occult ritual in their university years together. This ritual enables them to call forth the Muses of Greek antiquity, children of Zeus and Mnemosyne, goddess of Memory. The artists ensnare the Muses into servitude such that the Muses are spiritually bound into conferring their Inspiration to the artist who summoned them (their “Inspired”) and are not allowed to Inspire others without a direct order. They are also no longer free to leave the vicinity in which their Inspired has ordered them to stay; through the course of the larp, this vicinity was Helicon Manor, a far cry from the Mount Helicon of antiquity where they normally go for replenishment. Helicon deals explicitly with themes of artistic inspiration, addiction, emotional turmoil, power, restrictions on freedom, and dysfunctional relationship dynamics.
If you are planning to play a future run, please be mindful that this article will share spoilers about the details of the design and the ending.
Thalia, the Muse of Comedy. Photo by Bjørn-Morten Gundersen.
Urania, the Muse of Philosophy. Photo by Bjørn-Morten Gundersen.
Physical and Spiritual Subjugation
And, when they have washed their tender bodies in Permessus or in the Horse’s Spring or Olmeius, make their fair, lovely dances upon highest Helicon and move with vigorous feet…
— Hesiod’s Theogony
In Helicon, each Muse has a specific theme that infuses their Inspiration and guides play: Comedy, Dance, Epic poetry, History, Love poetry, Music, Painting, Philosophy, Politics, Psychology, Sculpture, Song, Spiritual inspiration, and Tragedy. While the power dynamics within the dyads (and in one case, triad) are complex, the Muses are essentially enslaved to their Inspired. They can be drained dry of Inspiration, which the Inspired can use to fuel great deeds or waste as they wish. They can be separated from their siblings: the only beings who can truly understand their divine nature and the millennia of memories they share. They can be physically, emotionally, and spiritually abused by their captors. Even in the kindest of pairings, they must endure the renewal ritual of binding every year, witnessing all of their siblings undergo the process of losing their free will once more. Muses are required to wear only white and gold, with their clothing chosen by their Inspired.
Omorfia and Philip Frost, Muse and Inspired of Painting. Photo by Bjørn-Morten Gundersen.
The Muses can also exert influence over their human captors. When their captors experience their Inspiration, whether given consensually or forcibly taken by the Inspired, the experience is akin to being high on drugs and vulnerable to the Muse emotionally such that promises can be extracted. However, whether or not the Inspired chooses to honor those promises depends entirely on their own integrity: not a common trait written within these characters. While the Inspired have different attitudes toward the binding ritual and its problematic ethics, they still willingly or grudgingly participate in subjugating the Muses each year for their own gain.
This subjugation is particularly painful within the context of the epic setting. Because the Muses are forced to give Inspiration only to one (or two) humans, the rest of the world is starving and wasting away. For millennia, the Muses were deities that evoked worship and vulnerable surrender in order to receive their blessings. They could freely give Inspiration and leave at will as befits their nature; now, they were forced into servitude. At the center of this dynamic is the frailty of the human ego: how even the “best” in the world still struggle with needing to feel recognized and important, and how such insecurities lead people to cause brutal harm to others in order to extract their vital energy and love.
The larp is a mixture of the mundane and the extraordinary, with the interactions taking on a significance not only within these interpersonal dynamics, but upon the world stage and even within the realm of gods. For this reason, I classify the experience as epic play, not only because of the context of Greek epic poetry from which it emerges, but also due to the heightened significance of these actions and the strong emphasis on great artistic production arising out of pain. To subjugate a person in order to extract their vital energy is tragic; to subjugate the Muse of Tragedy is tragic on an epic level.
Melpomene (standing), Taylor Montgomery (left), and Thomas Montgomery (right), Muse and Inspired of Tragedy. Photo by Bjørn-Morten Gundersen.
The white and gold attire worn by the Muses gave them an ethereal, otherworldly quality that contrasted sharply with the Vintage Era clothing of the artists. The website describes the Vintage Era as encompassing “any time from the late 19th century to the middle of the 20th century” (Wind and Pettersson 2023). In contrast to this vaguely modern era, diegetically, the Muses have existed for millennia. Despite this eternal quality, however, the Muses tend to “live in the present.” This meant in practice that we may have fragments of memories from bygone eras of having inspiring historical or legendary mythic figures at will, but such memories would be less important than the present moment experience. For me, this awareness led to a strange contrast between being trapped in a mundane human experience of time and its day-to-day concerns, while also mentally leaping to other times and places, adding to the eerie and unnatural nature of the Muses’ servitude. Such elements added a sense of epicness to play.
The concept of epic play is not intended to reduce the importance of larps focusing on oppression, intimacy, and other dynamics occurring amongst “mere” humans, but rather to describe an aesthetic quality about the larp that sets it apart from larps about the mundane world. To be captured as a Muse meant we could not Inspire others, such that our lack of involvement due to our enslavement was creating ripples in reality not only inside Helicon Manor, but outside of it. The Inspired could trade or even gamble away the Muses’ Inspiration, which can be seen as a mixture of their vital essence and their labor the Muses no longer had liberty to use as they wished.
This epic aesthetic quality can also be ascribed to certain storylines within fantasy larps and themes in other games that feature a supernatural component. Epicness relies upon the ensemble of players committing to underscore the epic significance of the actions performed within play. I have had epic play experiences in other settings, such as at the Vampire: the Masquerade (1991) larp Convention of Thorns (2017) as well as within chamber larps and tabletop RPGs of various genres; indeed, this epic quality is likely what draws many people again and again to Dungeons & Dragons (1974-), which is still the most popular tabletop setting in the world.
What made Helicon exemplary in this respect was the care put into the communication, design, structure, and safety surrounding the experience such that this epic quality — and the tragic predicament within which these characters were ensnared — was emphasized. This article will focus on these design and implementation practices, providing theoretical context from my perspective as a player-researcher enacting a Muse character where appropriate.
Calliope and Edmund Wright, Inspired and Muse of Epic Poetry. Photo by Bjørn-Morten Gundersen.
Lawrence Black and Erato, Inspired and Muse of Love Poetry. Photo by Bjørn-Morten Gundersen.
Circles of Trust and Betrayal
Thence they arise and go abroad by night, veiled in thick mist, and utter their song with lovely voice, praising…
— Hesiod’s Theogony
The larp designers fostered trust among the player base in a variety of ways. The website clearly communicated not only the themes of the larp, but also its structure and which sorts of experiences the players were encouraged and discouraged to enact. Players were not expected to demonstrate expertise in their respective arts or to perform during the larp, which lowered the perceived barrier to entry of performance anxiety. Despite the intimate nature of many of the relationships, the designers detailed that this larp is not intended to be an erotic larp in which public displays of sexuality are encouraged and are often a central design feature (Grasmo and Stenros 2022). While such larps can be experienced as liberating for participants (Juhana Pettersson 2021b), explicit sexuality can distract from the more subtle relationship dynamics and interactions that this larp sought to foster. Regardless of the chosen themes, expectation setting is important in creating a shared culture before signup even begins (Koljonen 2016a), provided of course that the players adhere to this established social contract.
Similarly, the website described the structure of scenes that would occur, which included a form of fateplay (Fatland 2000) of certain scenes framing each act. It described the pre-larp scene of the Muses attempting and failing at escape, only to be dragged back to Helicon Manor: in achingly strong contrast to the real Mount Helicon, where they would gather for connection and renewal as siblings before their enslavement.
Stella Wilson, Inspired of Spiritual Inspiration, led the rituals. Photo by Bjørn-Morten Gundersen.
The larp was framed with a beautifully epic theme song composed by Anni Tolvanen, which ushered us in and out of play. Tolvanen also curated a soundscape of dramatic music that echoed through the halls during the larp. The first Act began with a ritualized Punishment scene while standing in a circle, in which the Inspired enacted consequences on their Muses for their escape attempt, also forcing the Muses to punish each other. I have also utilized this technique of starting the larp by dropping characters directly into ritual space when co-designing Immerton (2017) and Epiphany (2018). I find it a particularly helpful practice to emphasize the core themes of the game, help players quickly get past the awkwardness of the first hour of the larp, and create intensely meaningful role-play moments from the beginning that can feed play later. (For further reading on these larps, see Jones 2017; Brown et al. 2018; Kim, Nuncio, and Wong 2018).
In our discussions after the larp, Wind referred to this design technique as part of a concept she calls frontloading, which she will further describe in an upcoming article. For Katrine, this term referred to the structure and pacing in terms of intensity, which puts a lot of structured and tense content earlier in the larp. This term also resonated with Maria, who described frontloading as designing extensive and complex character relations with focus on high playability in the larp itself, a common strategy in Finnish design. Wind explained:
This combination gives players something to immediately play on and react to that has specific relevance for their character and gives them “something to talk about immediately.” It also provides alibi to jump right into relations that might take a lot of time to ramp up and cause everything in the larp to culminate at the same time in the last few hours. . .
If there is one or more crescendos in the beginning of the larp itself, culminations and intensity [are] spread out over the whole playtime because you can be sure that some things will only culminate in the last hours of the larp anyway.
In the next group scene, we were then instructed to go to the dining hall. The multi-course dinners and lunches were catered and high quality. What made these dining scenes particularly epic were the statues and bas reliefs decorating the room that portrayed scenes from Greek mythology. The metatechnique that guided play in these scenes was dinner warfare, also featured in Wind’s larp Daemon (2021-). Unlike the intensely visible brutality in the Punishment ritual, we sat in circles masterminded by assigned seating to maximize drama. We pretended to be members of polite society while delivering passive aggressive verbal barbs, whether about art, the Muses’ confinement, class, or any number of other dynamics. (Gender, sexuality, and race/ethnic discrimination was explicitly forbidden in the larp, but class was very much embedded in the character design). This juxtaposition of high boiling intensity in the beginning directly to a low simmer punctuated the themes of the larp quite sharply: the epic alongside the banal, the fragility of human egos, the need to control in order to feel important, the subtle bids for freedom within enforced servitude, etc. According to the designers, traditions such as arranged seating were diegetically upheld as necessary, both due to affiliation to the Inspired’s prestigious university and the necessity to keep the ritual intact. Wind told me,
Alibi for the seats being like this was provided by the diegetic fact that the Inspired needed the repetition to make sure they could renew the Binding year after year, so they didn’t dare change the seating. It was simply, and naturally, a tradition. This meant that divorced couples and former friends were awkwardly seated close to each other for hours.
Danielle Lafontaine, Inspired of Dance, and Christian Schönburg, Inspired of Comedy, engaged in dinner warfare. Photo by Bjørn-Morten Gundersen.
The first Act ended for Muses with a touching final circle: a purification ritual. Diegetically, the Muses would return to Mount Helicon every 15 years to reconnect through this ritual; since we were not permitted to return to Mount Helicon or see one another at will for the last 15 years, we made do in the Manor with these stolen moments. We huddled for warmth in the dark attic, gently comforting one another through touch as we did throughout the larp. We each took water from a bowl and cleansing the Muse next to us, which felt like a ritual blessing. Then, we each shared a Secret — some revealed shameful feelings or actions, such as taking someone else’s Inspired as a lover or alerting one’s Inspired of the escape plans. While we all witnessed these admissions, the purification ritual added an element of forgiveness to the circle. At least for my character, the understanding that we were taking action under complicated situations of duress made it easy to let such admissions go, although others did hold resentments.
The Inspired awaiting the arrival of the Muses in the first Binding, the beginning of Act 2. Photo by Bjørn-Morten Gundersen. Image has been cropped.
The second Act began with a flashback scene in which we enacted the initial binding ritual. This ritual also occurred in a circle within the same room, imbuing the physical space with a certain repeated significance. This scene was particularly effective because we already had the experience of being subjugated by these relationships the night before. We then began play with a brief experience of freedom, worship, and a pure desire to Inspire outside of such subjugation, only to be bound and betrayed. This worship was especially desired by the Muses because of its unusualness in the modern world, where few still prayed to the old gods; thus the pain of betrayal was manifold.
At the end of Act 2, the characters engaged in another important informal ritual called the Party, which was also upheld every year due to tradition. In the Party, the artists drained their Muses of all Inspiration in a moment of selfish gluttonous intoxication, doing absolutely nothing of worth with these gifts. The Muses were expected to participate in the Party as celebrants as well, which we interpreted in various ways. This sort of peer pressure to maintain appearances was present in all of the rituals, with Inspired and Muse characters alike having various degrees of internal and external conflict around these traditions.
Henry Wilson and Clio, Inspired and Muse of History. Photo by Bjørn-Morten Gundersen.
Close to the end of Act 3 was the yearly renewal of the binding ritual, with a twist: the ritual was disrupted afterward by a scroll that contained a sort of counter spell, in which the Muses were offered the opportunity to make a “Choice.” The Muses could choose to stay with their captors in servitude, or leave, which would entail them to become mortal, losing their supernatural abilities, and eventually dying. The design allowed for us to spend quite a bit of in-game time focused on this Choice and its ramifications. The power dynamics were suddenly flipped: the Muses could now decide to freely go (albeit with twisted ramifications and not at all prepared for human life), or stay within the dysfunctional dynamic of enslavement, lending to the air of tragedy.
I was cast as Clio, the Muse of History, who had a comparatively consensual dynamic with her Inspired, historian Henry Wilson, in part due to intense Stockholm Syndrome. Though Clio’s entrapment was relatively kind, she was appalled at the indignities forced upon her siblings. During the Choice, Henry wanted Clio to stay to help him uncover lost cities like Troy, which had earned him great fame with her Inspiration as an impetus. However, he had chosen to marry another human Inspired, which reinforced to Clio this sense of indignity.
The other dyads and triad had similarly complex interpersonal dynamics, which led to the Choice being difficult to make; certain characters, who experienced some of the worst oppression in the larp chose to remain enslaved. This choice mirrors human dysfunctional relationships, but was intensified by the epic quality of the larp; the Choice had far-reaching ramifications, not only to the characters present, but the world at large. In Henry and Clio’s case, they chose a third option, presented to them by Erato, the Muse of Love Poetry, and her Inspired: the artists would publicly release us from our binding, assert our independence to leave at will, and permit us to Inspire others. The questions then became: Would Clio return of her own free will to Inspire Henry, even though he was now engaged to a mortal woman? Could Henry retract this declaration at will, leaving her to be bound again? Thus, even this “easier” third option was still riddled with emotional complexity.
The Choice. Photo by Bjørn-Morten Gundersen.
Circles of Safety and Calibration
Come thou, let us begin with the Muses who gladden the great spirit of their father Zeus in Olympus with their songs, telling of things that are and that shall be and that were aforetime with consenting voice…
— Hesiod’s Theogony
The larp featured a pre-game call a month before the larp and extensive workshopping before the game in which we were briefed on aspects of the world and practiced specific play techniques. Most of us signed up in pairs (or triads), meaning that we likely already had developed a certain degree of trust with our main co-player(s) in the Inspired/Muse dynamic. We were instructed that we must calibrate with these co-players at least before the game, and ideally also the other relations mentioned in our character sheets. We were also instructed to check-in with our dyad or triad players after the larp. These instructions emphasized the need for emotional care for co-players, acknowledging the intensity of the experience and making it part of the shared culture of the game to tend to one another. On the other hand, we were also reminded that we are responsible for our own experience, meaning we should communicate if needs arrive and do what is necessary to care for ourselves.
Calliope, Muse of Epic Poetry, and Thalia, Muse of Comedy. Photo by Bjørn-Morten Gundersen.
Pre-game workshops are often quite awkward experiences, especially whenpreparing to play larps of this nature. Players often feel a certain degree of social anxiety about their own role-playing abilities and their skills at interpersonal interaction (Algayres 2019). They may feel worried about costuming, physical touch, their own attractiveness, or any other number of insecurities and uncertainties. To establish trust early on, we were instructed to sit closely with our dyad or triad and touch in some way during the briefing, such as a casual touch on the arm, cuddling, holding hands, etc. Physical touch can release oxytocin (Zak 2011) and provide an experience of trust between players, although it can also backfire for participants who feel hypervigilant or triggered when touched. The website communicated that players needed to be willing to experience casual touch: “A good baseline of what you should be okay with could be a stranger touching your arm, shouting at you, holding your hand or kissing you on the cheek” (Helicon website, n.d). We also workshopped eye gazing between Muses and Inspired, which deepened the connection and helped relieve a bit of the awkwardness. Eye gazing is a simple, yet quick and effective technique for people to see others beyond the masks each of us wear in social life, as well as to feel truly seen in a short amount of time.
We also had times within the workshop to calibrate with many of our written relationships, which from my perspective provided a solid groundwork of a “home base” between player-characters within play. In my view, creating time for such calibration is critical to the success of such larps. Many players do not have the time or inclination to reach out before the larp and find it difficult to remember names, faces, and the specifics of written dynamics during play. Creating contact before the game and encouraging players to discuss what each person wants (and doesn’t want) from the dynamic is very helpful.
Danielle Lafontaine after draining Terpsichore at the Party (Inspired and Muse of Dancing). Photo by Bjørn-Morten Gundersen.
We also workshopped a scene involving the drawing of Inspiration. The metatechnique involved a white and gold sash with the Muse’s name written upon it, which we would use in some way to signify giving Inspiration. The sash could be used in many ways ranging from gentle and consensual to violent and non-consensual. We were instructed to hand over one of our three precious Inspiration ribbons placed on our name tags and transfer them to the Inspired’s name tag. The ribbons were a non-diegetic way to communicate how full or empty of Inspiration each character was, as well as who had drawn Inspiration from whom, as each Muse had different colored ribbons. We could decide to act upon this extra-diegetic information as a form of steering (Montola, Stenros, and Saitta 2015). The designers explained that they did not want Inspiration to turn into a statistic like in other role-playing games, but it still influenced play for some of the larpers.
Another workshop emphasized playing to lift (Vejdemo 2018), meaning we took turns boosting the importance of the other characters in terms of their personality or accomplishments using “Yes, And” to build upon what others were improvising. For example, a character could say, “My recent art work has received quite a lot of positive reviews…” which we would then reinforce with added comments. Since the larp also dealt with the fragility of artists’ egos, we also practiced playing each other down, which would be initiated by the person wanting that sort of play, for example, “Lately, I’ve really been struggling to get critics to care about my work…” The co-players would then “Yes, And” to make the character feel even worse about their artistic block or lack of public recognition. This metatechnique was particularly interesting as it provided an impetus for drawing Inspiration and seeking validation from others through dysfunctional means.
We were instructed to use “off-game” in order to quickly calibrate and negotiate consent during play or leave the space for more extensive discussion. We went off-game between acts and the default for sleeping quarters was off-game as well. Right before the larp began, we workshopped violence, including tapping out when we wanted a certain interaction to slow down or stop, as well as escalating slowly through bullet-time consent (Koljonen 2016b) to give other players a chance to opt-in or out. This practice ended up important for the first Punishment scene that we were soon to play.
Omorfia and Philip Frost, Muse and Inspired of Painting in the first Binding. Photo by Bjørn-Morten Gundersen.
Maximillian Stern worshipping Euterpe at the first Binding. Photo by Bjørn-Morten Gundersen.
Christian Schönburg binding Thalia, the Muse of Comedy. Photo by Bjørn-Morten Gundersen.
Calibration was also emphasized in the workshops between acts in effective ways. We were given time for one-on-one discussions, but we also circled up with each player sharing a short sentence of what they would like to experience within this Act. Then, other players could raise their hand and volunteer to deliver that sort of play, which added an element of accountability to one another. Following Juhana Pettersson’s (2021a) assertion that players are engines of desire, being able to openly express one’s wishes in a group without shame is a powerful experience. For example, I tend to prefer subtle scenes and was drawn to the larp due to the emphasis on discussions of art and the creative process; through this process, I was able to ask others to approach me with those kinds of discussions if desired. It was remarkable to me the way a briefly stated request could redirect the flow of play for individual players, and thus the ensemble: a form of group steering.
Epic Dyadic Play as a Genre
Unwearying flows the sweet sound from their lips, and the house of their father Zeus the loud-thunderer is glad at the lily-like voice of the goddesses as it spreads abroad, and the peaks of snowy Olympus resound, and the homes of the immortals…
— Hesiod’s Theogony
At times in Helicon, I felt like I was experiencing something quite new, but I could not put my finger on why. Oppression dynamics and dysfunctional relationships are hardly new themes; indeed they are the bread and butter of many Nordic or Nordic-inspired larps. Epic storylines and supernatural abilities are hardly new either, as RPGs as a medium have featured those elements from their inception.
Euterpe and Maximillian Stern, Muse and Inspired of Music, attempting to compose. Photo by Bjørn-Morten Gundersen.
At one point, I looked around the room during dinner warfare, surveying the artists with their Muses, thinking, “Oh! We are in a really good Toreador larp” — the Toreador being the artistic clan in Vampire: the Masquerade. In Vampire, the undead take “retainers” who are bloodbound to them, meaning supernaturally addicted to their blood and compelled to obey. Retainers bound by Toreador are often highly talented in their own right, ensnared by the vampire’s wish to keep their retainer’s talents for themselves — an especially potent theme considering many vampires lose the potency of their own talents when turned to the undead. This larp was different in many ways, of course, especially considering the retainers were mystical eternal beings. The emphasis on artistic creation as an important theme of the larp led to a depth of discussion that I often craved as a long-time Toreador player, enhanced by the setting of the beautiful castle and its art.
The initial binding ritual was initiated by Henry Wilson, Inspired of History, and Stella Wilson, Inspired of Spiritual Inspiration. Photo by Bjørn-Morten Gundersen.
At another point, I saw characters huddled in corners trying to solve various plots related to the occult rituals: the Inspired were trying to figure out ways to stop the Muses from being able to flee, whereas the Muses were trying to figure out a way for the Escape ritual to work. I thought to myself, “Oh, we’re in a Call of Cthulhu larp and those are the occult researcher characters.” As with Cthulhu (1981), Helicon’s setting is clearly playing to lose on some level; whether freedom is attained or the Muses continue to be bound, loss is embedded. But the sense of supernatural horror that pervades Cthulhu was not the emphasis here; instead, we focused on the interpersonal dramas inherent to these characters being locked in this non-consensual pact. Indeed, the occult components felt like an aberration, while the “natural” state would be to let the Muses free to choose who to Inspire. The occult components did not seem to be a goal to attain or a puzzle to solve. Rather, they were elements calling to mind the Spiritualism of the early twentieth century, as well as storytelling devices providing alibi to engage in intense rituals, which tend to amplify play. From my perspective, these spells were more of a conceit than a quest, although I steered away from play involving them so cannot speak for other players.
The final Binding ritual. Photo by Bjørn-Morten Gundersen.
I keep returning to this emphasis on dyadic (or triadic) play, which is also not new. The Nordic larp Delirium (2010), about oppression within a mental institution, relied on players signing up as couples and used dyadic play to explore themes of love and failed attempts at resistance (Pedersen 2010; Andreasen 2011). Personally, I have had particularly strong experiences playing Here is My Power Button (2017), an American freeform about users purchasing an android from a company as part of a scientific experiment. What made Power Button potent was a toggling back and forth between one-on-one user/android scenes in the same room and group scenes, in which all users would interact in one room and all androids in the other. Helicon had a similar structure: we had large group scenes that were also one-on-one scenes, giving a sense of collective experience along with intimacy. We also had activities such as the Muse ritual in which we were all together and able to share about our paired experience.
Phren, Muse of Psychology, and Athanasia, Muse of Sculpture. Photo by Bjørn-Morten Gundersen.
This epic dyadic structure is also present in Linda Udby and Bjarke Pedersen’s PAN (2013-) and BAPHOMET (2015-), which feature occult storylines and supernatural content in the form of possession from godlike entities (Pedersen and Udby 2017; Nordic Larp Wiki 2019). Another dyadic larp is Wind’s Daemon (2021-), which is based upon Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials (1995-2000) series. In Daemon, characters have animal entities attached to them that represent their souls enacted by other players. I have not yet played Daemon, but have read many play accounts that have emphasized the powerful nature of this dyadic setup. In practice, the structure at Daemon meant that characters are instructed to stay physically close to one another at all times (Wind 2021): not exactly the same as our experience in Helicon, but was a clear inspiration.
Melpomene and Taylor Montgomery, Muse and Inspired of Tragedy. Photo by Bjørn-Morten Gundersen.
In reflecting upon the larp, I am now considering the combination of epic play and a dyadic (or triadic) structure as a particularly potent combination: perhaps an emerging genre of play as more and more larps are produced in this format. Helicon required a strong degree of trust between players in dyads (and triads), as well as a degree of commitment: we were expected to continue to role-play and check-in with our co-players and not abandon them, even if we wanted to steer the story into a new direction. Most characters had several other interesting and playable character relations, which helped interweave the larp into more of an ensemble (Tolvanen and MacDonald 2020), rather than incentivizing isolated play between groups of 2-3. While players may have differing experiences of the larp, my perception is that this dyadic epic play combined with emphasis on the ensemble led to a special magic of interconnectedness not always present at larps.
I finally settled on, “Oh, we’re in a Neil Gaiman larp,” at least thematically; we were epically-infused characters with all-to-human quirks engaged in interpersonally meaningful play tinged with sadness about humanity’s flaws. Gaiman’s (2018) words describe his work well:
A world in which there are monsters, and ghosts, and things that want to steal your heart is a world in which there are angels, and dreams and a world in which there is hope.
However, from discussions of the designers, “Calliope” was not a primary inspiration, so to speak, and the character relations were meant to be far more nuanced, which I definitely experienced. I look forward to seeing what larps are spawned as this type of design and experimentation continues to evolve.
Polyhymnia, Muse of Spiritual Inspiration, and Helica, Muse of Architecture (Wind). Photo by Bjørn-Morten Gundersen.
Acknowledgements
My deepest gratitude to Katrine Wind, Maria Pettersson, Elina Gouliou, Mo Holkar, and Mike Pohjola for giving feedback on this article.
Helicon
Designers: Katrine Wind and Maria Pettersson, Narrators, Inc.
Participation Fee: €630
Players: 29
First Run: January 5-7, 2024
Second Run: February 16-18, 2024 (upcoming)
Location: Broholm Castle, Gudme, Denmark
Music: Anni Tolvanen
Photography: Bjørn-Morten Vang Gundersen
Safety: Anna Werge Bønnelycke (Jan. 5-7) and Klara Rotvig (Feb. 16-18)
Website: Katrine Kavli
Graphics: Maria Manner
Sparring and Ideas: Emil Greve, Elina Gouliou, and Markus Montola
Brown, Maury, Sarah Lynne Bowman, Quinn D, Kat Jones and Orli Nativ. 2018. “Immerton: A Society of Women.” In Shuffling the Deck: The Knutpunkt 2018 Color Printed Companion, edited by Annika Waern and Johannes Axner, 41-52. ETC Press.
Davis, G., et al., 1991. Vampire: the Masquerade. Stone Mountain, GA: White Wolf.
Montola, Markus, Jaakko Stenros, and Eleanor Saitta. 2015. “The Art of Steering: Bringing the Player and the Character Back Together.” Nordiclarp.org, March 29.
Nordic Larp Wiki. 2019. “Playing to Lose.” Nordic Larp Wiki, September 3.
Nordic Larp Wiki. 2019. “Pan.” Nordic Larp Wiki, April 2.
Pedersen, Bjarke. 2010. “Delirium: Insanity and Love Bleeding from Larp to Life.” In Nordic Larp, edited by Jaakko Stenros and Markus Montola, 288-297.
Pettersson, Juhana. 2021b. “Terror and Warmth.” In Book of Magic: Vibrant Fragments of Larp Practices, edited by Kari Kvittingen Djukastein, Marcus Irgens, Nadja Lipsyc, and Lars Kristian Løveng Sunde Oslo, Norway: Knutepunkt.
Pullman, Philip. 2000. His Dark Materials Complete Trilogy. Ted Smart.
Tolvanen, Anni, and James Lórien MacDonald. 2020. “Ensemble Play.” In What Do We Do When We Play?, edited by edited by Eleanor Saitta, Johanna Koljonen, Jukka Särkijärvi, Anne Serup Grove, Pauliina Männistö, and Mia Makkonen. Helsinki: Solmukohta.
Vejdemo, Susanne. 2018. “Play to Lift, not Just to Lose.” In Shuffling the Deck: The Knutpunkt 2018 Color Printed Companion, edited by Annika Waern and Johannes Axner, 143-146. Pittsburgh, PA: Carnegie Mellon University: ETC Press.
So Karin Edman published a wishlist from the ladies of the Swedish Larp Women Unite (LWU), who wished more men would be interested in playing romantic relationships with them, which has spawned a lot of interesting discussion in the larposphere on Facebook.
I’ve had a lot of fun out of romantic storylines in a lot of different larps, it’s a really powerful area to explore. There’s so many possibilities for intense emotions and meaningful stories:
I’ve played Romeo and Juliet in a prison camp, a can’t-live-with-you-can’t-live-without-you story in utopia, been set up in an arranged marriage doomed to tragedy and been magically drawn back to life by my true love.
I’d like to share my observations on what I think makes for good romantic play (or any intense interpersonal drama, really).
Just to be catchy and bloggy, I’m basing it on four pillars: Context, Consent, Communication and Chemistry.
Context
No man is an island; neither does two make an archipelago. So if you are making the romance from scratch, explore the context of the whole larp to see what relationships are possible and encouraged. Find an angle that supports the intended experience of the larp; don’t just go for fulfilling your personal fantasies.
Also make sure the play has room in between the other stuff you’re doing, I’ve seen so many romances neglected by players too busy to focus on them and an equal amount of players stuck with only the romance to play on and no one at the other end.
Find someone to play with who has a genuine desire to be the other half, who has the possibility to prioritize the play with you, so you don’t end up disappointed.
Oftentimes your character comes with a romantic story attached and you just have to make the best of it. Here the best approach is to try and see what function the plot has in the larp and where you get to decide yourself in the relationship.
The players around you are also an important part of the relationship. Find ways for your relationship play to contribute to their experience as well, and see that they have meaningful positions in regards to the relationship. Romeo and Juliet are boring without the Capulets and Montagues.
Consent
I have this thing where I cannot engage with play if the other person is not actually into it – call it neurotic. If I sense they are not enjoying themselves, my body has ways of shutting it all down.
Seriously though, consent is a basic requirement for me. If I don’t feel that the other person is excited about playing romantically with me, I steer clear of that play. I don’t just want a lukewarm “okay, that sounds fine.” I need enthusiastic consent and shared ownership if I am to play it at all.
I’m also aware of giving my own enthusiastic consent early and often; I’d rather be overbearing than not get the conversation started. You should at least have a vague idea about your personal lines. Saying “I’m not sure exactly where my lines are with physical play” is a good start; “I don’t have any lines” shows that you are an idiot.
Personally I have used the last many larps to develop an elevator pitch about my personal limits, to get started:
I really enjoy bringing physicality and touching into play, so I’m good with most normal stuff as long as you stay away from groping the swimsuit area. You can give me a slap or light physical molestation if that becomes relevant. I have a weak immune system, so anything with mucus membranes and bodily fluids is out, that means actual kissing, spitting, fingers in the mouth and such. But Ars Amandi works wonderfully for me, so I suggest that for intimacy, but if you prefer something else, I’m sure we can make that work too.
I also need to have consent reaffirmed during play. Especially when thing get heavier. If I can’t tell that you are enjoying play, I’m not going to take it further. This means we go off-game and check in, and preferably also talk about where we want play to go. Blackbox scenes are a good excuse.
If you fail to build the relationship on mutual off-game consent, you’re bound to end up in territory where you or someone else feels violated or unsafe. The stuff we play with in romantic scenes is the natural habitat of trauma, so we need the extra care not to trigger old scars or create new injuries. Sometimes we do so by accident, in which case it is going to be a lot less horrible to work out, if you have already shown that you care about consent.
Communication
Talk. With. Each. Other. A lot. You can’t really consent if you don’t know what is going on. Also there’s a lot of layers and meanings we might miss when it comes to intense relations, so it’s good to know what the other side is focusing on and what is making them excited. Talk about the type of scenes you’d be into. Talk about the kinds of stories you love. Talk about the kinds of affection that work for you. Talk about your characters. Talk about what you want to go wrong. Talk about which songs you could have as theme song for the relationship. Make up pointless bits of backstory.
And once play starts, you keep the lines open. You take time to listen to each other and sense what works for the other. You go off-game and check in. You tell how you feel as a player.
I’ve enjoyed using meta room or blackbox play to calibrate with my partner, we’ve done abstract scenes with stuff like inner monologues and free association to communicate our thoughts and feelings in ways that open up for new and more nuanced play afterwards.
I nearly always follow the basic model of mutual escalation in order to keep it feeling safe all the way through. Make a move, wait for the other to respond and reciprocate before moving on. If you get positive feedback, move up the intensity, if not you step back to a safe place and try something else.
If you want to be discreet, you can do things in-game and then check if the other player plays into the move or around and get useful info. If someone isn’t actively playing reactions to your play, you’re better off going for something else. You can tell a lot from the level of engagement.
Chemistry
This is actually the most important bit: You need personal chemistry to play love. Without chemistry, play becomes a sucky chore. You need at least a spark of connection. And it better be mutual. Also, it has infinitely less to do with what makes your pants tingle, than it does with subconscious trust and genuine interest in the other person.
You can’t force it. But you can grow it, if both of you are willing to open up – it takes a little work and communication to build up mutual trust and connection.
Chemistry is also awfully fragile. So many things can ruin it, so you have to put in the work, to be someone people can connect with. A lot of the points in the list from LWU is personal deal breakers that ruin the chemistry. You can’t guarantee that it works, but you can start it up.
Also, chemistry is impossible to detect without meeting in person. You might have great fun on skype before play, but once you meet a wrong pheromone can break the spell. Likewise, sometimes you build up an incredibly meaningful thing out of 15 minutes at a workshop. It’s a bit of a lottery really, so you just go to try an up your odds and hope for the best.
If you’re stuck larping a romance without any chemistry, you’re gonna want to minimize the damage. A good place to start is to acknowledge the awkward with your partner and talk about what to do about it. If possible, simply play the relationship to a breaking point and end it. Go your separate ways. Otherwise see if you can transform the relationship into something you’re both comfortable with. Going through the motions should be a last resort.
How to Get Started
You ask. Ask out aloud in the Facebook group of the larp, if anyone is up for a romance. Suggest it to someone personally. Be prepared for rejection, so don’t just aim for one perfect relationship – that is a losing strategy. Be open to whatever comes up and be prepared to shape it yourself.
The big problem is that for a lot of us, asking someone to play out romantic stuff is pretty much the same terrifying prospect as asking someone on a date in real life. The rejection is very much the same punch in the gut. There’s no big trick here, but to make it start out as low stakes for everyone involved. I’d suggest starting out talking about play in general, move onto your characters relationship potential in general, before asking about adding a romantic layer. Worse case scenario is you might get a rejection, but still an interesting potential for play.
Be honest about what you want. Don’t just go along with what you get offered, take ownership of your half of the play. It’s a lot more attractive when it comes to building the intense stuff we all want. Romance is really not that different from most other play, at the end of the day.
And my pet peeve:
Don’t you dare hook up with the other player. You’re failing to larp if you do. You’re putting your own base needs ahead of community safety.
I can’t count the number of times I’ve had to give up on opening romantic play, because the other person assumed I was only into if to get into their pants. I usually make a point of mentioning my off-game partner during introductory talks, to discreetly position myself.
The reason I’ve managed to get to some insanely intense levels of intimacy in larp, is the simple fact that off-game there is nothing but friendship awaiting us. Even if we feel like we connect on soul-level or hormones rage during Ars Amandi. Off-game we’re not going to pursue this further. That’s part of the contract and the magic circle.
At least keep your pants on through play and the after party, if you can’t wait that long, you are not grown up enough to larp.
There are monsters under my bed. When I was a child, I could sense them in every half-seen shadow, feel their breath on my neck. I knew monsters were imaginary. But I was still afraid.
I am a non-binary larper. Time and again, I find that larps are framed to create those shadowy spaces and summon monsters. Monsters hiding under the bed and in the closet, but much more real and able to harm me.
Most of my fellow larpers are lovely people who don’t intend their games to include monsters. They are happy to fight the big and dangerous monsters. But many of the monsters I fight are sneakier; they keep themselves invisible to well-meaning allies.
This is a guide to some of the monsters that non-binary adventurers encounter when they larp. If you are non-binary, you might recognise them and know you are not alone in your fight. If you are not, then I hope you can use this as a spotter’s guide to help you check your games to see if you might be creating fertile ground for monsters to spawn.
Basilisk, illustration by Marcus Irgens
Basilisk: This snake-like creature can petrify or kill with a glance. It is common in larps to find that a Basilisk has wiped all non-binary people from the game world. Non-binary adventurers risk petrification from the discomfort and dysphoria of being forced to play a binary gender. Even the reflection of a Basilisk’s gaze can kill: larps based on highly gendered media often mimic source material and exclude non-binary characters, unintentionally perpetuating a problem. The danger can be reduced to a painful skin condition by allowing non-binary characters who are perceived as binary, but beware; this opens you up to a Bogeyman attack.
Kelpie: These river spirits take the shape of a horse, trying to entice would-be riders up onto their back. At larp events, they appeal to players by offering the promise that people can sign up as their own gender – because that’s important to many people. When the non-binary adventurer mounts the Kelpie, it becomes clear that this was a ploy; the Kelpie attempts to drown them in the river by forcing them to sign up as Male or Female. Kelpies can also attack adventurers of sexual or romantic minorities, manifesting as a promise of romance plots that turn out to only be compatible with the sexuality of straight players.
Goblin: These monsters taunt and harry writers, whispering in their ears until they are afraid to include non-binary characters in their game “in case they get it wrong” – even though their larp contains no plots about the characters’ internal sense of gender. Gripped by fear, the writer does not notice that they have written many characters outside their experience, such as androids, giant insects, and humans with a binary gender not their own. While the Goblin’s attack seems subtle, the results are indistinguishable from the attack of a Basilisk. Fooled by the Goblin, the writer does not even think to consult a non-binary adventurer for advice.
Bogeyman, illustration by Marcus Irgens
Bogeyman: This monster lurks in the closet, ready to pull adventurers inside at any sign of gender-transgressing ‘bad behaviour’. If you attend a gendered game and decide to play in a gender non-conforming outfit, such as a woman in trousers – a common armour against dysphoria and often an adventurer’s only clothing – then watch out for this monster causing in-character hostility. This monster exists in larps, but also in many other contexts, and fighting too many becomes exhausting. It is often necessary to make a choice: hide from this monster and suffer the wounds in silence, or face it for yet another painful battle?
Dragon: Like Goblins, Dragons attack imaginations, destroying even the idea of better alternatives. There are numerous types; the non-binary and sexism Dragons like to team up, setting fire to whole cities of imagination so writers see only barren ground. Bereft of inspiration, the writer uses their own world and again chooses gender as the basis for the division of character roles and social dynamics. The resulting highly-gendered game harms AFAB people, but causes extra damage to a non-binary adventurer. The Dragon’s work also causes the GM to almost always cast non-binary adventurers as the gender they were assigned at birth, even when there is a better fitting character in another gender.
Changeling: This monster exists in disguise, often using words like ‘inclusivity’ and ‘feminism’ to create what seems like a welcoming space. Once inside their lair, they reveal their fangs and attack any trans person who enters. These monsters are so insidious because any enticing larp could be a Changeling lair; as a result, their very existence ensures that many an adventurer must distrust any game unless they clearly display support of transgender and non-binary inclusion, behaviour that Changelings usually struggle to mimic.
Minotaur, illustration by Marcus Irgens
Minotaur: These monsters like to hide inside a labyrinth. These can be subtle constructions, taking a while for an adventurer to realise they have been drawn in. While the game contains nothing openly problematic, it also contains no non-binary characters or suggestions for replacement gender dynamics written into the background. This allows the Minotaur to gradually fill in the gaps with its labyrinth, reproducing existing social dynamics and player biases. The adventurer experiences a gradual realisation that they are becoming more lost with every turn, as the distant roaring sound grows ever closer.
Ghost: An adventurer possessed by this monster, becomes invisible. They can wear pronoun badges, deliberately mix gendered clothing and other markers, and correct people’s misuse of their pronouns, but it won’t help – they are treated as binary despite all evidence to the contrary. The more this happens, the tighter the grip of the Ghost. If you are haunted by a Ghost, your only hope is that there are enough psychic players in the game to affirm your characters’ gender until the influence of this monster has been overcome.
Zombie: Zombies are slow and would not be very threatening on their own, but they can destroy an adventurer through sheer relentless numbers. Phrases like ‘ladies and gentlemen’, ‘he or she’, ‘this is a game for women but men are also welcome’, lack of gender-neutral toilets at a venue – these things permeate out of character interactions and they build up until the adventurer becomes worn down from a thousand small wounds.
Nessie, illustration by Marcus Irgens
Nessie: Nessies are mysterious beasts that lurk under the surface of your game. They manifest as social pressure not to make a fuss or drop out of a game, taking advantage of people’s reasonable desire for commitment and natural wish not to spoil things for others. When a Nessie emerges, a person suffering other monster attacks finds their escape cut off by sinewy scales, causing them social damage and increased exclusion if they try to flee. Nessies do not limit their prey; they often attack disabled adventurers or those with mental health conditions to manage.
Counterspells
There are monsters under my bed. When I was a child, I learned to use magic to fire lightning and create a shield. I reasoned this should work because the monsters were also imaginary.
Larps are spells. Larp is where we take our own stories and build new cultures and visions for how the world might be. Through this ritual we take them one step closer to reality.
This is a guide to some counterspells that can arm non-binary adventurers. If you are non-binary, I hope this gives you light and hope. If you are not, I hope you can use this guide to help you write, play, and run larps in ways that help combat the monsters we face daily.
Horn of Plenty, illustration by Marcus Irgens
Horn of Plenty: Just as some monsters team up, so can different adventurers, generating a nurturing feedback loop. Including other queer characters, having non-normative relationships, and combating sexism monsters in larps can invoke the Horn of Plenty, causing a feast of nourishment to flow for all. This effect is enhanced by placing these characters in positions of power; write non-binary heads of house, trans woman ruler in a polyamorous triad, and a pansexual and aromantic Grand Vizier.
Circle of Protection: An adventurer equipped with this spell possesses a magic shield that encircles them and holds back monsters. The Circle of Protection is invoked on the spot using safety words or prior to an adventure by writing a list of lines, and its use empowers an adventurer by offering them control over participating in certain themes and topics.
As Above, So Below: Sympathetic magic makes use of the way that ‘like produces like’, enacting changes in a representation that will also affect the real thing. In a larp, this can be invoked by writing explicitly non-binary or gender non-conforming characters into setting and character backgrounds in ways that deliberately offer new social dynamics and non-gendered roles. This spell can be boosted with subtle details in set dressing: costumes that mess with traditional gendered clothing, feminine motifs in the warrior enclave, masculine motifs at the woolmaking hearth, background music from queer subcultures.
Walking the Ways: An experienced adventurer can learn to slip between the cracks and into the Wild Ways, allowing them to traverse large distances quickly and avoid the monsters lurking there. You can enable this in a larp by calling down some essence of the Ways into your game. Write a game where gender neutrality is the norm; where queerness and gender fluidity is the default assumption; where gender weirdness is celebrated; where characters have different genders or no genders or extra genders.
Talisman of Sky, illustration by Marcus Irgens
Talisman of Sky: Air is a powerful element, one which fuels our breath and is associated with the mind and communication. Allow players to commune with their characters in whatever way their breath and connection takes them. You can invoke this in a larp by writing all characters as gender neutral and allowing players to choose their gender and pronouns. Many writers find this spell difficult to invoke; their minds want to impose their own gender habits, which hampers the Talisman. Think carefully before you gender a character, as almost no plots really require a specific gender identity.
Sigil of Earth: This element of growth and strength can be invoked if Sky is not possible. When writing a larp with pre-set character genders, plant the seeds for this spell by deliberately writing against cultural gender roles and including explicitly non-binary or intersex characters. Gender roles are very ingrained, and writers tend to use their culture’s ideas if they let their feet carry them without conscious intervention. (Try rolling a die after writing each character: 1-4, female; 5, intersex; 6, non-binary; 7-10, male.) When you cast, allow for players willing to play any gender, and do your first pass without knowing their identity and thus name or presentation.
Shadow Dancing: An adventurer can use movement mirroring a monster’s symbolic representation to form a spell that will strip them of their power. At your event, you can dance this by ensuring that procedures are the same for all genders: if game writers must specify the number of male or female characters, also ask how many characters are explicitly non-binary. If players can sign-up as male or female, allow them to sign-up explicitly as non-binary. If your venue has toilets that are provided specifically for men and for women, select one set and make them gender neutral (labelled with urinals or with sanitary bins).
Ritual of Transmutation: No adventurer steps out with immediate mastery of monster hunting skills. This ritual is best reinforced frequently, gradually allowing your powers to grow. This spell is invoked by using non-binary inclusive phrases at least three times in the mirror, with increasing intensity until you feel the spell begin to settle in your bones. Practice turns of phrase, pronouns, and forms of address. Check your writing, and if you’re not sure the spell is working, ask a friendly non-binary adventurer if they have time to look over your work – though adventurers may need to conserve energy for fighting monsters.
True Naming: Knowing someone’s true name grants power – knowing your own, more so. In a larp, you invoke this spell by building norms to always check pronouns, either visually (if there are badges) or verbally. When players sign up, don’t ask what their gender is; ask them instead what gender they would like to play and what pronouns their character should have. In your game, specify that the default pronoun is ‘they’ unless you have checked on a particular character’s pronouns. Use a clear and simple pronoun correction procedure, and have players practice it in a game workshop as they would any other mechanics.
Healing potion, illustration by Marcus Irgens
Healing Potion: This spell is created in advance, combining sacred herbs and hidden fruit in a potion to restore lost vitality. You can create one by taking the time to include Queer histories and media in your source material, supporting non-binary and transgender writers, uplifting LGBTQIA+ players in your community and giving them a voice – and importantly, listening to what they say. Sometimes people feel a shadow of the pain when they encounter a wounded adventurer speaking of their battles, and can unknowingly lash out at the adventurer instead of helping to fight the monster. The best response for you both is to offer the wounded adventurer a healing potion instead
Adventuring
There will always be monsters under the bed. Some of these will be of my own making.
I write and run games. I, too, inadvertently create monsters. As a wizard, I must research the side effects of my choices and try to modify my spellmaking accordingly. If we make an effort, we can perhaps band together as fellow adventurers of all kinds. We can share our spells and our vitality, and create a better fantasy land for all of us.
Will you come adventuring with me, and fight them together?
This article is published in the companion book Book of Magic: Vibrant Fragments of Larp Practices and is published here with permission. Please cite this text as:
England, Rei. “Magic To Fight Monsters: Larp as a spell for claiming my spaces.” In Book of Magic: Vibrant Fragments of Larp Practices, edited by Kari Kvittingen Djukastein, Marcus Irgens, Nadja Lipsyc, and Lars Kristian Løveng Sunde. Oslo, Norway: Knutepunkt, 2021.
This article is going to discuss a workshop tool: the use of short in-character larped scenes. These are scenes involving larp participants, in which they play their character. They take place during the pre-larp workshop, as a structured activity designed-in by the organizers, before the actual larp has started. They are being referred to here as ‘preparatory scenes’.
What are preparatory scenes like?
A small number of characters are in the scene, often just two.
A scene usually lasts for maybe five or ten minutes.
Each participant might play just one such scene, or a series of them.
(If a series of scenes, then those might be with the same other participant(s), or with a mix of different people.)
The other participants might be watching, or they might be involved in scenes of their own, in parallel.
Usually these scenes don’t involve the scenography, and other immersive material, that will be used during the larp itself: maybe not even costume.
Usually they will happen towards the end of the workshop, so that their factual and emotional content is fresh in the minds of the participants as they start the larp.
Note, this is considered as separate from ‘preplay’ – which is in-character activity that participants undertake together without direct supervision from organizers, usually according to their own preferred structure or in an open-ended way, often quite some time before the larp. While preplay may have some of the same purposes and effects as preparatory scenes, it’s not being covered here: Kyhn((Mia Kyhn, “Preplay,” What Do We Do When We Play? (2020). )) has a discussion.
What types of preparatory scenes can be used?
Backstory – participants can play out part of their characters’ shared backstory together. Perhaps a key point, such as ‘our first date’, or ‘the time A saved B’s life’ – to establish exactly what happened, and who said what to who.((For example, at On Location, character relationships are outlined in their briefings in terms of events from the past. During the workshop, the players will play through these scenes, to find out and agree together what exactly happened.))
Relationship – participants can establish the details of how their characters are when with each other – this can be illustrative, such as ‘this is how we spend a typical day/meal/mission/murder together’.((At Just a Little Lovin’, the in-character ‘social groups’ eat a meal together, during the workshop. This helps them explore how they relate to each other as a group during a regular day-to-day activity.)) Or it might be exploratory: the characters meet in a cafe – what might they start chatting about?
Group dynamics – how does a group of linked characters function together? What are their dynamics of communication, of sharing space, of hierarchy, etc?((At De la Bête, characters live together in social groups of mixed status. During the workshop each group of participants designed and played out, with the other participants as audience, an extended scene that showed the group’s internal hierarchy and social dynamics.))
Reaction – how do the characters react (individually, and together) when placed into a particular situation? For example: if the two characters were seated together in a bus that came under gunfire, what would they say/do? When one of them finds a letter that the other has received from an ex-lover, what might happen? (This would usually be an imaginary episode; not drawn from their actual backstory – because its purpose is to explore ‘what if?’.)
And they could be:
Emotional – intended to get into the insides of the relationship: how these characters feel about each other, and how those feelings are expressed. ((At Dawnstone, participants were encouraged to together identify and play out a backstory scene that explored or established a key emotional dynamic between them: that set the tone for how they would relate to each other emotionally during the larp.))
Physical – getting the feeling of interactions within the relationship into the participants’ bodies. How do the characters use touch, distance, height, movement?
Factual – making sure that the characters’ memories of the details of the event being depicted match each other.
Different ways of doing things – trying out a scene a few times in succession, with variations in content or expression – or varying the character portrayal from one part of the scene to the next.
What’s the point of this?
Calibration! Preparatory scenes are a great tool for developing a shared understanding among participants. Nielsen((Martin Nielsen. “Culture Calibration.” In Pre-Larp Workshops (2014). )) explains why calibration is such an important task prior to larping together. And this can be a very effective way to help achieve it.
Calibration via preparatory scenes can be particularly valuable when participants themselves have had some responsibility for character (and even, world) creation.((In Brudpris, during the workshop the players determine the details of the culture that their characters inhabit, around a skeleton design: its rituals, behaviours, and the key ways in which families interact. It’s then valuable to play through some of these in pre-larp scenes)) They can show each other what they have created/added; and they can explore together what they have jointly decided.
What might participants get from it?
The chance to try out different ways of playing their character, before having to commit to it in the actual larp.
The chance to agree key details of backstory with the other participants who are involved.
Feeling the backstory as lived, rather than just as text that they’ve read.
The chance to explore relationship dynamics, and tweak them if necessary, in collaboration with the players of the counterpart characters.
(Potentially, the chance to discuss with those people how the relationship might evolve, and what might happen between the two characters, during the larp – if the larp design permits this, and time hasn’t been allocated for it elsewhere in the workshop.)
The chance to develop trust and shared understanding with fellow-participants – particularly important with those with whom they’ll be playing closely.
A step towards emotional safety – from having had a ‘dry run’ of the relationship, and having set and tested boundaries.
What might organizers get from it?
Participants on the same page – ensuring that they have covered the key things that are needed to be covered.
Participants sharing in creation of material – giving them the chance to bring their own creativity to the larp preparations as well as the larp itself, even when the characters are fully predesigned.
Participants energized – larping a scene is the best way of preparing minds and bodies for larping a larp. If preparatory scenes take place shortly before the start of the larp proper, they can help participants hit the ground running. (This is good for the participants themselves, too, of course.)
Participants feeling safer and more able to trust – because they have been able to explore their behaviour together in a much lower-pressure and lower-stakes framework than within the larp itself.
There might also be other reasons or functions to use preparatory scenes. For instance, some participants might value having a ‘lived experience’ of the backstory, rather than it just being written in the character sheet. Or they might find that it helps them to physically embed memories as though they were their characters’. These psychological angles are beyond the scope of this article, but might repay some study.
How are they organized?
Organizers may just leave a time window for participants to decide and run their own preparatory scenes, but more usually there will be some sort of plan. Most efficiently, this will be a rota arrangement, telling each participant with whom they are to play a scene, when, and also where to do it (to save time trying to find an empty room/corner while everyone else is doing so too). The idea will generally be to play at least one scene with each of your character’s most important relationships: what kind of scene will depend upon the details of the backstory and of the connection that they have together. The Spanish organization Not Only Larp call this ‘speed-larping’, by analogy with speed-dating. One of their larps that used it is No Middle Ground.
A participant’s schedule might look something like this:
Timeslot 1: with character A, in location X, play out the scene when you first met and became friends.
Timeslot 2: with characters B and C, in location Y, play out your drinks together last night that decided you to join this mission.
Timeslot 3: take a break.
Timeslot 4: with character D, in location Y, play a typical family holiday from your childhood together.
Timeslot 5: with characters A and D, and player Q acting as an NPC, play the scene of your parent dying in hospital.
… with more details given for what’s expected to happen in each scene, as required.
(Breaks are sometimes needed if it’s not possible to occupy everyone in every timeslot, because of some scenes involving different numbers of people.)
The transitions between timeslots will usually be signalled by ringing a bell, or something like that. That tells everyone to end the current scene, and move to the location where their next one will be happening.
One approach used in Harem Son Saat was to use preparatory scenes as a transition into play: as the very last phase of the pre-larp workshop. It started with one-on-one and small-group scenes (from backstory), then progressed into three large groups segregated by gender (this segregation was an important aspect of play in the larp) containing the whole set of participants – and then the larp itself started. The larp designer, Muriel Algayres,((Muriel Algayres. Personal communication with the author. (2020). )) explains that the intention is to progress throughout the workshops to being more and more in-character, and then to move from in-character scenes directly into play so as to have the participants as ‘warm’ as possible.
Of course, for this to work, everyone had to already be in costume, and the usual final-briefing notes had to have already been given. It won’t be appropriate for all larps, or for all participant groups. But it was effective at supporting Harem Son Saat’s theme of a community whose present is overshadowed by its history (open and secret) and by its customs and patterns of behaviour.
So where does the magic part come in?
Think of the traditional ‘magic circle’ model of play.((Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman, Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals. (2004). )) In this model, preparation for the larp and other para-larp((‘Para-larp’ is that activity around the larp that is not the larp itself. See Johanna Koljonen, ‘Designing Your Thing, Their Experience and Our Culture’ (2016).)) activities take place outside the circle: then at the start of the larp, participants cross into the circle, and start play under the different rules of reality, etc, that apply there.
Preparatory scenes are a way of bringing some of the magic out of the circle, into the pre-larp. They allow calibration activities to take place in-character, with all the benefits for remembering and feeling that can bring. They allow participants to try out ways of relating their characters to one another, without the commitment to consistency that will be required in-play.
By using preparatory scenes, you can make the magic of larp fresher, stronger, and just all-round generally magicker.
References
Algayres, Muriel. Personal communication with the author. 2020.
Koljonen, Johanna. “Designing your thing, their experience and our culture.” Nordic Larp Talks 2016, Oslo. YouTube, https://youtu.be/yKZAeVAVfoE?t=422
Salen, Katie, and Eric Zimmerman. Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004.
Cover photo: Image by Natalia Y on Pixabay. Photo has been cropped.
This article is published in the companion book Book of Magic: Vibrant Fragments of Larp Practices and is published here with permission. Please cite this text as:
Holkar, Mo. “Larping Before the Larp: The Magic of Preparatory Scenes.” In Book of Magic: Vibrant Fragments of Larp Practices, edited by Kari Kvittingen Djukastein, Marcus Irgens, Nadja Lipsyc, and Lars Kristian Løveng Sunde. Oslo, Norway: Knutepunkt, 2021.
